Look Here Fantasy Game Developers

Champions of Norrath's time to first Giant Spider: 4-5 hours (my 3rd play session. And oh goody - it's an entire level full of the damn things. Hey if all the game designers could get together and publish of a list of their phobias, I'll see if I can work them into every game I ever work on as well. Then we'd be even. Hopefully there will be an even more disturbing giant spider boss. Gosh, that will be SWELL! Other amusing note - I popped online to make sure I didn't need to futz with the firewall and also to see if you could import a single player character (you can). It gave me five suggested games - one was called "headsets only" and the description was "only use headsets. Don't be a fag." The next game on the list was hosted by the delightful username of AHornyGirl. Tip there for you, even if you WERE a girl - you'll find no one to help you out on a Friday night in an online Everquest spinoff. I'd imagine the Horny part is truth in advertising, so at least they are half right!
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Spring is Sneaking In!

(Sorry about the relative lack of posts lately. There was the whole issue with the new computer desk and then I bought three new games this week (Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, Champions of Norrath, and Culdcept) - so it's been a busy week. More on many of those topics soon.) This week has been positively springlike for the Bay Area. I've had the sunroof open on my car several times this week, I switched back to short sleeved shirts, and there's sunlight on BOTH ends of my commute these days. In a related note the pedestrian footbridge to downtown Palo Alto reopened this week. It had been closed since September - but it's again possible to take a post-lunch stroll downtown and hit the Starbucks. Very nice. Anyway, this morning I was taking out the trash and caught those few moments when the clouds are all orangy-pinkish. I had my Treo with me, so I snapped a couple of quick pics. Picture035_13Feb04.jpg Picture036_13Feb04.jpg
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RSS Fun

That got way more complex than I thought, and I'm not done yet. But the RSS feeds got munged about a bit. The old "full text and comments" feed that used to be called comments.xml is now fulltext.xml. comments.xml is now an RSS feed with just comments. The nice thing about this feed is each new comment is a new entry in it. comments.xml is clean, according to the RSS Validator. The other feeds aren't and fulltext.xml in particular has some issues with it. But honestly, I'm tired and I don't have any more time today to futz with it. Besides, it's working in BottomFeeder, and as far as I know in any aggregator. (It wasn't clean before I started in on it - and I hadn't heard any complaints.) Anyway, I've learned a lot about XML, RSS, and Movable Type in the last couple of hours, and I'll try to publish some of it later this week. :-) For now, please enjoy the shiny new comments feed. If you're not sure you have the right feed for you, please select from the pleasing menu on the right or bottom of the entry.
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More on the iPod Mini

Arc Technica weighs in with a solid argument that iPod Mini does make sense. Super-short condensed argument: the Mini is not the new low-end iPod, and doesn't make price sense against other hard drive players. But the Mini is positioned against flash RAM based players, where your same $250 buys you 512 Meg of storage. In that sense, the 4 Gig iPod Mini is a steal. It seems like a good argument to me. That then shifts the argument to discussions about whether the flash player market is after size, battery life, or solid state electronics. If your average flash player consumer wants shockproof droppability, or a longer battery life then the Mini doesn't hunt. But if the average consumer buys based mainly on size then the Mini is a hell of a deal. Since I'm not a flash consumer (my iPod has 3200+ songs on it and I'm still rolling on CD ripping :-)) this argument hadn't occurred to me. But it seems sound. Anybody want Kool-Aid in any of five fruitalicious colors?
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