NPCT

Our downstairs neighbors, who are our very very good friends are moving away. They’re huge karaoke addicts and so we got them a fun parting gift: Rock Band for the PS2. This game is so much fun, it’s painful. Obviously, I know people have liked it, and Guitar Hero has been a [...]

I have this fairly nice setup for my home office, since I work from home more or less exclusively. I like to play the occasional PC game, so I have a reasonable video card setup. I had two eVGA 7600GT video cards in an SLI configuration. Well, this all turned sour last [...]

In my previous post, I complained a lot about trying to get XML stream parsing working. Ultimately, I just decided to rip the guts out of ejabberd, rather than reinvent the wheel. The relevant files are xml_stream.erl, xml.erl, and expat_erl.c. You can see how to use it in ejabberd_receiver.erl. Frankly, these [...]

There’s a lively debate out there about how one should communicate with clients in a game, in particular UDP vs TCP. I won’t go into details about it, but you can read a lively debate here. The choice for my ridiculous game is TCP+UDP. I want to use TCP for various communications [...]

Per my previous post, I’m going to start a little Erlang project. I’ll call it “North Zulch,” or “NZ” in reference to the tiny little place where the family ranch is located.
There are three things that I’ve had to solve over and over (or at least cut and paste over and over), in [...]

I have decided for some reason that it would be fun to play with massively scalable systems. In particular, I thought it would be a hilarious waste of time to work on an MMO engine. I’m not sure why this seems like a good idea, given that I have more than enough on [...]

We got our Wii primarily as a party-game machine. I certainly enjoy my games, but tend to prefer the PC. We figured the Wii would be fun for when we’re hanging out with friends and family. This has certainly been the case, and we’ve enjoyed hours of Wii Sports at Thanksgiving and [...]

Over the past several months, I’ve found myself enjoying a good bit of Half Life 2 Deathmatch. It’s nothing complicated, just good fun running around getting as many frags as you can. Most maps give you access to the majority of the HL2 weapons, including the gravity gun. It’s quite fun to [...]

When I bought our Wii a couple of weeks ago, I immediately bought Wii Play, because friends had told me that while the game is not worth $50, you effectively get the game for $10 if you were going to buy another remote anyway. This pretty much sums things up. The games are [...]

I just got a Wii for my birthday! It was a little early, but I convinced Brenda that if we didn’t get one now, it would be impossible to get one closer to the holidays. In fact, WiiTracker almost never reports any in stock. The local Target, Wal-Mart, Circuit City and Best [...]

I have only played one other game in the series, Railroad Tycoon II, but I am a really big fan of that game and I continue to play it today even though it is quite old now. When I heard that there was to be a new version out, Sid Meier’s Railroads!, I was [...]

Wednesday’s Penny Arcade is freaking hilarious.

Slate has a discussion between two thirtysomethings as they take on XBox Live. They pinpoint something that really rings true regarding the transient agegroup for gaming:

I’m right at the fulcrum point of gaming popularity. Almost everyone five years older than me doesn’t really “get” video games and has little interest in playing them. Almost [...]

I know I am really behind the times here, just now writing a review of Half Life 2, but with all the buzz right now about the upcoming additional level Lost Coast and the expansion pack this fall Aftermath, it seemed like as good a time as any to talk about why I am so [...]

I’m getting ansy to put my desktop back together. I brought a bunch of pieces back with me from the US – basically everything but a case. I haven’t been motivated to put it together because my laptop is faster in almost every area. However, I’m tempted to get a case and an [...]

If World War Two had been an online Real Time Strategy game, the chat room traffic would have gone something like this.

I know I’m way behind the curve here to go and post a review of a game that came out in, like, spring of 2004, but what the hell. Far Cry is a first-person shooter game where you play the role of Jack Carver, a former “special forces” guy who is now a charter [...]

So, Senator Clinton has gone off and attacked the game industry, spurred on by the revelation of a mini-game within Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The mini-game 1) requires a fair amount of work to find and 2) involves sex. Never mind the rampant violence of the game, Sen. Clinton has chosen this [...]