Viridian Games

What? Could it be? A new Name That Game!? Yes!

This one shouldn’t be hard at all. This game was all the rage back when I was at Origin. It started off as a free game and…kind of died when it became a pay game, probably because it was darn fun, but didn’t have enough depth to justify X dollars a month.

Name and developer, please! If you win, I promise that next time I’ve got you in my sights, I won’t shoot you down no matter how much juicy cargo you’re carrying.

I miss Left 4 Dead.

I must say, the Mac Mini is a nice little machine. In the end, the thing that infuriates me most about Apple isn’t their hardware; their hardware is well put together.

It’s that they charge double the normal profit margins on their devices and then get people to buy into their “cult of personality” to justify paying that much.

And their “Mac vs. PC” commercials absolutely infuriate me because they use a debating tactic called “scripting your opposition”. What PC says in those commercials isn’t written by Microsoft or Dell or HP. It’s written by Apple.

The potential computer buyer says, “I want a computer that just works, without thousands of bugs and viruses and crashes.”

(Let’s not even mention that the biggest problems facing computer users today aren’t viruses or bugs, but browser-based phishing, malicious tracking cookies or snooping of private data, all of which a Mac is just as susceptible to as a PC.)

PC should then say “Microsoft operating systems have been inherently stable since Windows NT 4, and the most rudimentary virus/malware protection like AVG Free will ensure that you never have those problems.”

But no, he acts like an idiot and says “Every PC is going to have those problems.” Which is a bald-faced lie. Why? Because he’s scripted by Apple, the opposition.

(This was why I eventually gave up on the TV show The West Wing. Despite the likable characters, snappy dialog and interesting plots, in the end the show was written by Democrats. And the writers would always, always, always misrepresent non-Democrat views in order to easily dismiss them.)

So I hereby present the “Mac vs. PC” commercial I’d most like to see. I must admit I didn’t come up with this, I saw it in someone’s sig.

Mac: “Hi, I’m a Mac!”
PC: “And I’m a PC.”
Mac: “Hey, whatcha doin’ over there, PC?”
PC: “Playing a game.”
Mac: “Oh yeah? Which one?”
PC: “All of them.”

And then PC slugs Mac in the stomach.

I may have added that last part myself.

Ryan (he of the inestimable fame) Clark suggested that since my professional and my hobby projects were on the iPhone, that I make the Mac Mini my “home” computer for a while.

So I did it. This is how they get you, you know.

The Mac Mini felt sluggish to me in development, and I knew it probably wasn’t because of the processor – it was probably due to the fact that the poor thing only had one gig of RAM.

I also must must MUST have two monitors when developing. (I’m now spoiled and cannot go back.) The video ports on the back of the mini are tiny and they are both different, requiring not only one adapter to run a monitor but a second, completely different adapter to run a second monitor. I only had one of the magic adapters and so could only run one monitor.

So the job this morning was to run out and get another gig of RAM and another video adapter for the Mac Mini.

This little sojourn began with me taking the thing apart. The Mac Mini is basically the guts of a laptop crammed into a cute little box. But unlike a lot of laptops, the thing is not designed to be user-expandable. You’re supposed to take it to an Apple Store (c) and let a Certified Apple Genius (c) work on your Mac Mini (c).

So the day started with me taking the thing apart. I’d already done it once when David shoved two DVDs into the drive at the same time, causing it to do nothing but attempt to read the discs over and over and over forever. To the device’s credit, after I removed the top of the DVD drive and took the discs out, it worked fine again.

But this was different. I was venturing into the dark heart of the machine, where no end-user is meant to go. The RAM sits on the very bottom level of the machine, underneath the drives and other guts, on the motherboard itself.

The thing about doing this type of disassembly is that there are lots of clips and pins holding the top half of the machine onto the bottom. So when you unhook the Airport antenna and take out the screws holding the top half of the computer to the bottom, it’s easy to unhook something and not realize it. Fortunately, I was looking very closely at what was happening as I opened the computer up and saw that I’d unhooked two pins from their clips.

But the bottom of the computer was finally exposed and I could fish out the single RAM chip. I took it with me to Best Buy to make sure I got absolutely the right memory (I think I’ve already established how with Apple, you play by their rules or you get kicked in the nuts).

So I go up to Best Buy. They don’t have Mac Mini RAM but it’s obvious that the MacBook uses exactly the same RAM, so I buy a two gig stick (all they have). I also get the second display adapter.

Got back and installed both RAM chips back into the computer – so yes, this computer now has three gigs of RAM in it. Got the clips put very carefully back into place, and boy are they finicky little suckers. Got everything reassembled and the machine works fine.

Time to get the second monitor hooked up. What the – the adapter goes right on the end of the VGA cable, which plugs right into the port on the Mac mini and starts working with no problems?! That’s not how things are supposed to work with Macs! I guess I got lucky.

So now I’ve got an upgraded Mac Mini with two monitors, a machine that is probably at least as good as my PC. World of Warcraft runs fine, and WoW is pretty much my benchmark for whether a machine is usable or not.

And hopefully I’ll be posting a progress report on Inaria soon.

Today is the tenth anniversary of the release of the Sega Dreamcast in the United States.

In the end, I think there was one thing and one thing only that killed the Dreamcast: it didn’t play DVDs. Sony’s hype machine for the PS2 was absolutely incredible. If the Dreamcast had played DVDs it would have probably lasted until Sony’s hype wore off and people realized that the PS2’s “Emotion Engine” didn’t produce graphics significantly better than the Dreamcast’s. (Plus Shenmue II wouldn’t have had to come on four CDs.)

A lot of people don’t recall that the Dreamcast offered the first real console online multiplayer experience…unfortunately using 56k modems. Now, it’s not impossible to write online mulitplayer games that can run over a 56k modem…but it is hard, and “lag” wasn’t something console players back then were used to. Xbox Live’s success came from their willingness to explicitly state, “If you don’t have broadband, go away.”

So the poor thing was simultaneously ahead and behind its time. If it had played DVDs and been easily upgradeable to use broadband, we might still be playing it (or a backwards-compatible successor) today.

And now I’m off to play Jet Set Radio all day.

I moved some recent posts over to GameDevDad, since they seemed to be more appropriate there.

Yes, once again, I’m coming to this very late. But just in case anyone hasn’t tried it…

Short review: It looks like Vista, but it doesn’t hurt like Vista.

Shorter review: Awesome.

Longer review: I downloaded a copy of Windows 7 Release Candidate version 7600 off of Bittorrent (which is perfectly legal; while Microsoft is no longer providing downloads, they do still want people trying the software and are still handing out free activation keys). I burned the ISO to a DVD with no problems, then restarted and booted from the DVD.

It’s nice that you no longer have to deal with a text screen at all when installing Windows now, but you’re still doing the same thing – waiting for Windows to scan your computer’s hardware and copy the compressed files it’s going to need to install from the DVD to your hard drive. A couple times I thought the install had wedged but it hadn’t; a particular step was just taking a while. When installing Windows, patience is still your watchword.

I figured this was going to be a better experience when Windows 7 detected and installed appropriate drivers for my network card, my sound card and my video card automatically – my computer was fully capable as soon as the setup was finished. This was especially impressive since my network and sound hardware are built into my ABIT motherboard.

So I immediately started installing the most critical programs: Visual C++ Express, TortoiseSVN, Paint.Net, Google Chrome and Google Talk…and World of Warcraft and Left 4 Dead. I also had to get my SVN server linked to a folder on my local computer so I could do an initial pull-down of my repository. All of this went great, I had no problems downloading, installing, updating, etc (though of course it took forever; World of Warcraft is now about a seven gig download).

If you’ve looked at any screenshots of my XP desktop, you may have noticed that I like to keep my taskbar on the left side of the screen. I like lots of vertical space both to view web pages and to view source code. You’ll also notice that I’ve got lots of quicklaunch icons – basically everything I actually use on the computer on a regular basis. Also notice below the quicklaunch toolbar that there are icons for every program I’ve currently got open.

As I mentioned in my Mac post, the Mac doesn’t do this – all the programs on the dock simply get dots next to them when they are running. Microsoft has implemented their own version of this: there’s only one taskbar. You “pin” programs to it that you want quick access to. And when you run one, it gets a box around it. Hovering over the box shows you a small preview of what that program is doing and clicking the box (of course) switches to that program. Because of this I haven’t felt the need to move my taskbar from its default position.

One other thing is that the default ZIP extractor works well…and automatically opens an Explorer window showing you the extracted files when its done (this is another thing the Mac was already doing). This is going to make it much easier for people who sell software over the internet to support it (see the “Behind the Dumb” videos on this channel for an instructive example).

And this may sound stupid, but I like the name. Windows 7. Why? Because it’s the seventh major version of Windows. I’m getting kind of sick of companies naming their software in such a way that you can’t tell which version is more recent than which (and Apple is quite guilty of this). And don’t try to tell me what I’m supposed to think (or worse, feel) when I use the software, just tell me what goddamn version it is.

Things I don’t like? The Search function is too much like Vista’s for my liking, but I can live with it. Um…let’s see…anything else…uh…I can’t think of anything else right now. That’s how good it is – I’ve got exactly one minor gripe so far.

So (sigh) I guess I’ll be upgrading when it comes out.