Erik Novales

Having constructed the Potemkin villages that are game environments, game developers just don’t see games the same way that the general public sees them. Every game developer I know has, at some point (and usually, often) sat around with co-workers, playing the latest and greatest game and critically ripping it apart for problems that are [...]

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Rock Band is awesome. I got it this morning and have been playing the drums for most of the day, driven by the desire to crack the top 1000 in the drum career mode, if only fleetingly. (I finally managed to do so a few minutes ago, peaking at #997. It’s tough, because there are [...]

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It can be found here. The biggest new features include integration with all SKUs of Visual Studio 2005, and support for Live on both Windows and the 360. The Visual Studio integration is huge, in my opinion, if only because it enables source control and add-in support for developers. I guess now you’re also able [...]

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I rented Guitar Hero III the other day, figuring that I should play it, form an opinion of it, and get it out of the way before Rock Band shows up. After playing for a bit, I have to agree with a lot of the criticisms that I have seen leveled at the game: The [...]

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After writing about “luck manipulation” in tool-assisted speed runs, I got to thinking about the subject of pseudo-random number generation. This is a topic that comes up, briefly yet inevitably, on every game engine project in existence, and I think it’s a good example of a situation where implementation choices are not always as cut [...]

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Puzzle Quest recently joined the elite ranks of “games that I have played to completion more than once.” Months ago, I had played and finished the Nintendo DS version of the game — I enjoyed it so much that when the Xbox Live Arcade version was released in October, I bought it again and replayed [...]

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A few weeks ago, me and Sandy went to see The King of Kong, which I can wholeheartedly recommend to just about anyone. As reviews have noted, it’s really more a movie about the people involved rather than the focus of their competition. In the movie, there is a segment that is an interview with [...]

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There has been quite the deluge of FPS releases and demo releases lately, and it’s been hard to keep up with all of them. I noticed that the single-player demo for Crysis had been released, so after a lengthy download, I sat down to give it a shot. To give a frame of reference for [...]

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I read an e-mail thread recently on the sweng-gamedev mailing list which jogged my memory about one of my most hated development clichés — “proven technology.” Why do I hate this phrase so much? The phrase implies a certain obvious correctness — nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, right? It conveniently ignores any facts [...]

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I was at Target the other day, buying some household goods, when I decided to detour into the games section. What I found on the PC racks amazed me: That’s right — almost four years after it came out, I found three copies of the PC version of Secret Weapons Over Normandy on the shelf. [...]

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