Erik Novales

While I was cleaning out and throwing away some old junk, I came across some old promotional stuff for iSmell scent technology which I guess I picked up at the 2000 GDC. I saved it for humor value. The company (Digiscents) met its demise in June 2001, to no one’s surprise. I thought I picked [...]

[Read more →]

We recently bought Culdcept Saga for the Xbox 360, and have been having a lot of fun with it. It’s essentially a cross between Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering — you roll a die and move your piece around the board, claiming (or contesting) territory with monsters that you cast out of your hand of [...]

[Read more →]

I saw on Rock Paper Shotgun that Capcom has released a free Flash demo of the upcoming Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney game. As someone who recently played Phoenix Wright: Justice for All (my introduction to the series — I haven’t yet played the other two installments), I find this demo interesting for a few reasons: [...]

[Read more →]

Through a rather convoluted (but interesting) path, I came upon an Escapist article from earlier this year which trashes one of the whipping boys of game design, the escort mission. While I certainly wouldn’t disagree that there are tons of terrible escort missions in games, I think that escort missions don’t have to be terrible. [...]

[Read more →]

“Size is the Enemy” is a Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) article that has made the rounds lately. It’s a response to a rambling rant by Steve Yegge about how large code bases are unwieldy, and how language choice affects the viability of software projects beyond a certain size. Early on, Jeff calls out a quote [...]

[Read more →]

There has been a bit of a brouhaha lately with regards to guitar compatibility between Rock Band and Guitar Hero III on the PS3. As of now, you can’t use the Les Paul guitar that comes with Guitar Hero III when playing Rock Band (on the PS3). Why? It’s not like they’re very different — [...]

[Read more →]

The gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently ran an article mentioning the next project of the developers of the 2005 PC game Boiling Point. That upcoming game, however, is not the real focus of the article (nor of this one). There’s a bit of pointing and snickering at part of a bug fix list for [...]

[Read more →]

In furtherance of my recent Gamerscore binge, I decided to branch out a little bit and explore a new game genre for me — hunting games. I rented Cabela’s Big Game Hunter for the 360, and just got done getting all 1000 Gamerscore a little while ago. I have to say that I was fairly [...]

[Read more →]

Continuing my Gamerscore binge, I rented Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie, another (mouthful of a) title that is somewhat infamous in the 360 world for being a relatively easy 1000 points. I picked it up last night, but didn’t get a chance to play it until today. With the help [...]

[Read more →]

With Sandy out of town for a few more days, I decided to do something silly…namely, binge on Gamerscore points by getting a Blockbuster Game Pass and renting as many easy 1000-pointers as possible. The goal is to see how much I can pump up my score in a short period of time. In preparation, [...]

[Read more →]