Epic Spoon

Paul Zero

I’ve upgraded Epic Spoon to WordPress 2.7.  It seems to have worked.  The admin interface has changed significantly, which is cool for us but doesn’t do much for you.  As always, let me know if something doesn’t work anymore.  But honestly, a well-trained house cat could manage their upgrade process.  Of course, now that I’ve done it, I see you can use SVN to upgrade WordPress.  I don’t particularly want to convert our existing setup to an SVN check-out of it (and we’d have to install SVN).  But man, that would be convenient.  I love SVN.

Paul Zero

I’m basically done playing The Sims 2 (website) not because I’ve stopped liking it (I could never stop liking it) but because I have a lot to do lately and I’m taking a break from this type of game until the release of The Sims 3 (website).  But just as I was preparing to quit the game and shut down Windows for a while, I found the strangest bug yet: virgin birth.

When I decided my sims were ready to reproduce and continue a very long legacy, the “Try for Baby” action got interrupted.  But I heard the chimes that always indicate a sim just got pregnant, while the sim-wife stood confused in her bedroom.  Her husband was in the garage painting.

Read more »

Paul Zero

A while back I wrote about how to get unlimited money in The Sims 2 (website).  It was an experiment I started because, as a computer programmer, I was curious how the developers of that game handled large amounts of money.  I found two interesting things at the end of the experiment, and I should warn you that if you’re going to try this at home, you need to save your game often once you pass a billion simoleans.

Thing 1: There is only enough room in the user interface to show values of money under a billion.  Once you pass that, the dollar sign (or simolean sign, or whatever) disappears off the left side, and the final digit disappears off the right.  This isn’t really a problem, since neither of those matter when you’re a sim-billionaire.

Thing 2: The game uses a signed integer to store money.  This data type has a maximum value of 2,147,483,647.  When it passes that, it actually becomes negative.  This probably doesn’t make much sense to non-programmers, but the reason has to do with how computers store numbers.

Read more »

Paul Zero

When I started playing Prince of Persia (website), it was amazing.  Shiny, pretty, happy, fun.  It was everything I wanted in a title from this series.  I was blown away by the ceiling running and the magic plates that launch you into the air.  Even the boss fights were captivating.  Then I got to the half-way point and I realized – that’s all there is to this game.  And there’s a lot of it.  I’ll start with issues that are not spoilers, and go on from there.  But my biggest complaint is going to be the ending.  If you’ve beaten the game, you already know where I’m going with this.

Final score: C-

Read more »

Paul Zero

 Penny Arcade has had its second annual Dickerdoodle contest.  I’m not sure my entry qualifies because entrants are asked to submit pictures of people making and enjoying Dickerdoodles.  But I favor the abstract, so I made a giant cookie (my hand is in the picture for scale) spraying out the seeds of life.  Or, in this case, dinosaurs.

Everyone loves dinosaurs.

Dickerdoodle: The Seeds of Life

Paul Zero

I’ve been playing Prince of Persia (website) since release day.  I wish there were more hours in the day for this, and sometimes I look for new hours just to play it.  My normal day goes like this:

• 7:00 – Wake up, feed the cat, eat a bowl of cereal, play Prince of Persia
• 7:45 – Shower, get dressed, play Prince of Persia
• 8:45 – Leave for work
• 1:16 – Home for lunch, eat a sandwich, play Prince of Persia
• 1:50 – Drive back to work
• 5:15 – Home from work, feed the cat, play Prince of Persia
• 6:30 – Hang out with friends, make dinner, possibly Prince of Persia
• 11:30 – Friends are gone, play Prince of Persia
• … ? – Sleep?

Read more »

Pinkkis

The Sega Mega Drive, or Genesis in the US, celebrates it’s 20th anniversary this year. Originally out on the 29th of October 1988 in Japan, I’m writing this to be released on the European launch date, November 30th 1990.

The Mega Drive was my first ever console. I did have a Commodore 128 before it and I was well versed in the forays of the video games by that time. I mean I was eight, what did you expect. This console has kept my love for Sega alive for all these years while every one else had their Marios and Metroids and and then later they had their Playstations and jaguars and all that, I had my Mega Drive and Dreamcast by my side.

Read more »

Pinkkis

This week I ‘av been mostly playing.. Lich King. That’s not a big surprise, 2.8 million sold in the first 24 hours.

But I don’t want to talk about wow, I have a few items I want to get off my chest.

Read more »

Paul Zero

Ok, so I tried out the New Xbox Experience (NXE) and there are good things and bad things.  But let me start by saying: unless you check your friends’ stats frequently, download it right away.  It’s good.  It’s very good.

The one serious thing it’s missing from the original Dashboard is, as Gabe from Penny Arcade points out, is its inability to work the friends list without crashing.  When you look at details about one of your friends by selecting him or her in your friends list, everything is fine.  But when you exit the details screen and return to your friends list, a sort of time bomb is activated and soon after, the whole thing locks up.

Read more »

Paul Zero

I initially wrote that one of Fable II’s (website) core flaws was that it only allowed one character per profile.  The good news is: that turns out not to be true.  When I finished Achievement-hunting with my first character, I made a new one to go for another end-game Achievement.  The first time I re-loaded the game, I found that the main menu’s “Continue” button brings up a character select.  But it’s not a great one.

Read more »