SpaceRodent Posts

I finished The Saboteur today. What a wonderful game. It makes me sad it didn’t do better than it did. Pandemic studios who was did the awesome Mercenaries (and the crappy Mercenaries 2) did The Saboteur in 2009. I was able to pick it up during a Direct2Drive sale before Gamefly took over for them. I played for about 40 hours. After then end of the story you can still play the free play missions and collect the rest of the perks. I like that. So if you get a chance check it out!

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Beth and I had Popeye’s takeout and watched the whole event live! It was really fun.

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Over a year since my last post. I go back and read my earlier entries and wonder why I always stop. I guess because I don’t feel I have really anything important to say. I have decided though to pick it up again and use this as an outlet for me and me alone. If other folks stumble across it then so be it.

Well my two posts dealt with my decision to stop using Apple products and leaving Pelago for PopCap Games. On the former I am still 100% Apple-free On the later I am still at PopCap Games though now they are owned by EA.

The only thing I miss from Apple is OmniGraffle. There is no program that comes close to it. When I got rid of my iPhone I went to Android. I started with a Samsung Captivate then a Motorola Atrix then a HTC Titan (Windows Phone) and currently I am using the HTC One X (white one). Through it all I have stayed with AT&T. I was a pretty big supporter of the Windows phone until Microsoft announced WP8 and made every currently shipping Windows phone obsolete.

Regarding Pelago. I left because I didn’t want to work for GroupOn. I thought back then that they were a slimey company and I still think so. I don’t understand why Jeff Holden wanted to go there. Now they didn’t want me so it didn’t matter but I made my decision to leave before I knew they didn’t want me. Jeff could have easily let me go without another word but he gave me a huge chunk of money for my four years of time there and I was ever so happy. My wife got to go to Europe for five weeks because of it. I miss working for Jeff and Jeff (Ayars my old boss).

Pelago was great and I sometimes really miss it. PopCap is the best job I have ever had however. I get all the technical freedom I had at Pelago with none of the crazy hours.

I would like to talk about three of the biggest mistakes I made at Pelago which cost the company money which it could have used later on.

The first mistake was listening to initial projections on growth and buying equipment upfront for 10 million users. That was just so stupid. Lesson learned: Launch lean. Wait till the site falls over before spending money. Cost to Pelago: $500,000.

The second mistake was buying a pair of BigIP 6400s. Seriously we could have gotten by with 1500 LTMs. Again I was convinced that those 10 million users were right around the corner. Cost to Pelago: $80,000 to $120,000.

The third mistake was not putting my foot down when I got there and getting us off of Microsoft Exchange. We spent money on hardware and software for an upgrade that never came nor could have because of initial decisions to put us on the Microsoft Small business platform. Instead of biting the bullet and just killing it early on it just festered over three years until finally I moved the company to Google Apps for Domains. There is just no reason to run Microsoft Exchange at a company with less than 100 people. Don’t do it. Cost to Pelago: $25,000.

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I have been playing games during my blog post hiatus. I really never stop. I love video games.

Games I have played and fully finished are:

• Bulletstorm
• Deus Ex Human Revolution
• F.E.A.R. 3
• Mass Effect 2
• Rage
• Saints Row The Third
• The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim
• The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

Games I started playing but haven’t finished:

• Barman Arkham City
• Crysis 2
• Dark Souls
• Dead Island
• Dead Space 2
• Gears of War 3
• L.A. Noire
• Orcs Must Die!
• Portal 2
• Serious Same 3: BFE
• SOCOM 4: US Navy Seals
• Trine 2
• Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

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I am leaving Pelago after four years. I have accepted a position at Popcap games! I am very sad and excited. Sad to leave Pelago who has been so good to me but very excited for a new chapter in life.

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You have probably heard some word of Minecraft, the indie emergent sandbox game, sweeping the interwebs. I have been playing it quite a bit but more surprisingly is my wife has been playing it! The last game she played was Warcraft III.

So why is the game so addictive? In a word: Legos.

Yup this game is basically an electronic version of Legos.

Check it out at http://www.minecraft.net/ – you won’t be disappointed!

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Today marks the day I start purging Apple from my life. My music has been moved to my Windows system, my MacMini has been shutdown. Soon I will upgrade all my DRM tracks from iTunes to the unprotected ones so I can move all the music to my Linux system. My AT&T contract is up in February and I will be getting either a Nokia N900 or some Android phone and after that I will be Apple free.

The deprecation of Java is the last straw for me. My Anti-Apple sentiments has been building over the last two years but the Lion announcement and the Java blurb is enough.

When OSX first came out I remember them talking about Open systems. A first class Java platform, kernel and user land that was open source (Darwin). Safari was based on the khtml engine and became webkit.

Of course they did some nasty things back then as well:

• Anybody remember Watson? Then Apple’s Sherlock? You know the complete rip off of an indie developer?
• Anybody remember Konfabulator? Then Apple’s Dashboard? You know the complete rip off of an indie developer?
• Anybody remember Delicious Library? Then Apple’s iBooks? You know the complete rip off of an indie developer?

Just a few examples of when I should have left Apple before but let it slide.

Then came the iPhone and it has been downhill ever since. Now don’t get me wrong the iPhone is a wondrous piece of engineering but it comes at a high price: completely closed development and walled garden.

This is a post I made on Reddit six months ago: [deleted] and I was almost ready then to ditch Apple but I thought maybe there was a chance of things changing.

Lion and the new MacApp store shows that Apple is tightening the reigns more and more.

One more thing that really pissed me off. I have an original Apple TV and when Apple decided to not port the Netflix app to the old version I lost it. I just couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t been a victim of this before now and I wasn’t happy at all. There is NO reason to not upgrade the older Apple TVs other than to kill them off.

Apple is the new Microsoft, Google is the new IBM and Oracle is worst of both put together!

So I am putting my trust in Canonical (makers of Ubuntu)

What a strange time we live in.

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So I recently picked up Modern Warfare 1 & 2 off of Steam. I had played them on the Xbox 360 previously and wanted to play them again on my PC.

I haven’t played even two hours before I am so fed up with the games I am ready to delete them. Somehow I forgot about the utter frustration that is Infinity Ward.

Basically it comes down to their stupid ass scripting system.

Picture this. I am on a rooftop supposed to be heading to an extraction point. I kill every enemy in sight. I then take one step forward and trigger some event and next thing I know there are 20 guys coming out of the woodwork.

For one it really pulls you out of the moment because if feels fake. The other thing is until I get to the next magical scripting point these guys just keep coming…

Wave after wave of them. I could literally kill 500 guys but once I cross the “line” there isn’t a baddie in sight.

It really sucks.I know most people buy the games for multiplayer where this wouldn’t be an issue at all but I don’t play multiplayer. I crave the awesome single player experience.

I won’t really delete them but I doubt I will play them ever again.

UPDATE (12/11/16): Can confirm I never played them again.

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When I first mentioned Borderlands I was pretty hard on it and ended up returning it.

Recently I bought it off of Steam for $10 dollars and what a difference it makes.

For $10 dollars it is an incredible game. I recently finished my first play through that clocked in around 40 hours and ended up at level 38.

I don’t think I gave it enough the first time since I never got out of the first area.

After exploring the game and all the DLC I am having a lot of fun and have even started a second play through so I can get bigger, better weapons.

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I recently finished Metro 2033 and Singularity. Both are Russian games set in alternate realities. They were both really short I completed both of them in less than 10 hours each.

Of the two I had more fun with Singularity but I liked the atmosphere and weapons of Metro 2033 more.

I played both of them on my PC. Metro 2033 ran pretty well and looked good but Singularity had horrible “Unreal Engine 3” texture pop-in problems and sometimes the textures never popped in making the game look really ugly. This didn’t distract from the fun though.

The guns in Metro 2033 were varied and fun and each had its own purpose, in contrast the guns in Singularity are your standard run-of-the-mill FPS guns and I mostly used the machine gun and shotgun.

The time elements in Singularity were a neat gimmick but the fluid shooting and boss battles were excellent. I was also scared a couple of times.

The shooting in Metro 2033 wasn’t as fluid but I loved how each mission could be full on run-and-gun or stealth. If I felt like fighting I could but if I wanted to sneak around that was always an option. Singularity was completely linear and there was only one way to do things but it was fun.

I would recommend both games.

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