Author Archives: TheUser

Squadcast Revelations

I’ve been behind on Squadcast, a podcast that I’ve enjoyed for a long time. Because I’m behind, I know that the show eventually dies because Scott and Bryan, the two main creators, need to put more time into Level Up, their Sirius radio video game show. When they first started it, they included some episodes in the Squadcast feed. I just caught up to that and was surprised to find out that Larry from Squadcast, a regular and someone I really liked, is actually Major Nelson of Xbox fame (Xbox Live Director of Programming)! Very cool!
Level Up also had Patrick Seybold, a PR guy for the PS3 and according to Wikipedia, Director of Corporate Communications & Social Media for SCE, as a guest. He said that Blu-Ray are the highest quality DVDs. Hate to break it to you idiot, but BRDs are not DVDs. He also went on to say that the PS3 can rip and burn our CDs to its HDD. Burn to the HDD? Then he said that you could play that music while playing PS3 games. Again, is this guy an idiot? You can now, but this episode is from December 2006. What the hell? Then he said that the PS3 has a build in wireless router. Wireless router? I don’t think so. The PS3 apparently also has incremental improvements over the PS2. Incremental improvements, eh?
This guy doesn’t know his own product!

Who Reads This

I’d like to know who actually visits my site and reads WebPageless. If you’re reading this message, could you let me know as soon as you can? You can tell me in person or shoot off a letter to any address at webpageless.net. The faster you can let me know, the better. It’ll allow me to know how long it takes posts to get read.

Exceptions

Server Error… Exception… Server Error… Exception… Server Error… Exception… Server Error… Exception… Server Error… Exception… Server Error… Exception… Server Error… Exception… Server Error… Exception… Server Error… Exception… *dies*

iPhone Apps

Along with the launch of iPhone 3G, the iPhone App Store launched last week. There were some interesting things but nothing killer.
The first thing I noticed is that after the iPhone update that’s required to use the App Store, the iPhone is a bit more buggy. It lags more, and programs exit on their own sometimes. I’m hoping this gets fixed soon.
One of the first things I looked for and tried was Super Monkey Ball. At first I thought the controls were horrible, but after some practice I grew to think of the controls as simply “not very good.” It seems my calibration is a little off because I always roll the the left, even when my iPhone is perfectly even. Also, rather than the default forward/back position is neither perfectly vertical or lying down. It’s at something close to a 45 degree angle. I understand they wanted it to be at the normal angle you’d hold it, but it’s hard to know exactly what angle that is. There are about eight worlds, and at the beginning only world one is available. There was an easy and hard. I finished easy and it didn’t unlock world two so I probably need to finish hard mode to continue. Although I wish the controls were a bit better, after some practice it wasn’t too bad. I’ve enjoyed this so far and will continue to play this. Despite the problems, I think it’s worth the $10 to have the cool little game on my iPhone.
The second thing I looked into was Bomberman Touch: The Legend of Mystic Bomb. After playing Bomberman Live, I grew to really like the games. The controls were odd but kind of cool. Of course the iPhone doesn’t have a directional pad, but instead of simulating a d-pad with onscreen buttons, you touch the screen anywhere and then slide in the direction you want to go. Rather than the center of the “d-pad” being placed wherever you first touch, there is no center. If I place my finger on the screen and slide up, Bomberman will run up. Then if I slide my finger to the left without raising it, Bomberman will move left. Basically, every time your finger stops, the game re-centers the d-pad at your fingers location. The only problem is that if you move too fast, your finger never stops and it never re-centers. The game was fun, and the last zone was really hard, but it still took between two and three hours to finish the entire game. Overall I’m pleased with my $10 purchase, but it’s more because it’s cool to have a fun game on the iPhone. Had this been on Live Arcade or Steam, I don’t think I would have paid so much for it.
Next I decided to try some applications! First, I downloaded Facebook. When I first downloaded, all features weren’t implemented yet, but quickly the applications caught up. It’s nice to have the app and not need to go through the web browser. Also, being free, the app is priced well! The application doesn’t have everything that Facebook itself has of course, but it’s still just as complete as the mobile site and much faster than both. I’d definitely recommend using this application. I also tried using the MySpace app but didn’t do much after logging in and taking a quick glance. What I liked it about it is something you’d expect – it doesn’t look all crazy and stupid like MySpace normally does. No stupid profile songs either! And like the Facebook app, this one’s free.
After that I tried some music applications. I tried Pandora and Last.fm. Pandora is very easy to use and cool. You specify a song or artist you like, and it will play music that it considers similar. You can then rate a song positive or negative depending on whether or not you liked it. It works very well over wifi, but without it songs have to continually stop to buffer. It also won’t play in the background, which is disappointing. Pandora was free, and while I wish it would work anywhere, I’m still happy to use it in wifi range.
Last.fm is also free and works very similarly to Pandora. You specify a song or artist, and it plays music that is similar. It has some extra features that probably are supposed to set it apart such as band bios, a “similar artists” list, and a list of events coming up per band. However, the UI seems more cluttered. Also, like Pandora, this can’t be played in the background. I don’t really care about its features and would prefer Pandora. Given the space on the iPhone though, I’ll keep both of these around.
AIM was a complete let down. It worked alright as an AIM client except that like the music players, it stops working in the background. What good is AIM if it only works when it’s actually up and open on the iPhone? Not much. It was also free.
The last program I tried was SplashID. SplashID is made by SplashData and is a program I liked a lot on the Palm. It was one of the biggest reasons against switching from Palms to the iPhone. It’s back, and I love it. SplashID is simply an encrypted database of whatever information you want to store in it, although its intended to store passwords, bank information, and similar information. The iPhone version does everything I remember from the Palm version yet still uses an interface that blends in well with the iPhone. SplashID is $10 and worth it completely! The desktop application it syncs with is $20, but I didn’t feel the need to get it. Doing a normal iPhone sync will backup your data; you just can’t access or manipulate the data via your PC without the desktop software.
While the App store has been hit and miss, it’s delivered the App I wanted most. The games were interesting but overpriced for what they delivered. However, the promise of a Warfare Incorporated, an RTS I enjoyed tremendously on the Palm, version for iPhone coming soon, I’m definitely excited about iPhone games as well.

Flagship Studios

According to Joystiq, all of Flagship Studios’ staff has been fired, and their IPs have been sold. Hopefully Hellgate: London servers will stay up.
I know the game had its problems, but I’m a bit sad by this. The Hellgate: London universe was cool even if the game was flawed.

E3 Regurgitation

Allow me to regurgitate some information from Joystiq!
I really wasn’t expecting much from Microsoft or EA. My 360 is great, but it’s hard to really froth for the games when the legacy games all belong to Nintendo. I mean, Nintendo already has me excited for Wario Land: Shake It! and Mega Man 9, but I was still wondering if we’d hear about some other old franchises like Star Fox, Pilot Wings, or Animal Crossing. However, Microsoft surprised me today.

 

  • Netflix is now partnering to offer streaming content over the 360 to subscribers.
  • NBC and Universal are offering movies on XBL.
  • Geometry Wars 2 comes out next week.
  • The original Banjo-Kazooie will be on XBLA for this holiday season
  • The 360 will have exclusive Fallout 3 DLC
  • Final Fantasy XIII is now multi-platform
  • Avatars
  • “Party” system for group chatting
  • New UI featuring XBL Primetime, a sort of interactive TV channel in which there will be network-wide game shows with real prizes

And the best news?
Portal: Still Alive, sequel to the greatest game to ever be created, will be a 2008 exclusive to XBLA. I’m assuming “2008 exclusive” means timed exclusive. That kind of sucks because I’ll have to play a console version before the most likely superior PC version, but it’s not like I’m willing to wait to play another Portal game!
As for EA?
They’re still releasing Spore.
I didn’t really hear anything else of interest from them.

C# Attributes, Using statement, and Properties

More adventures in C#!
There are a few new concepts I learned recently while working. As the title of this entry suggests, they are attributes, the using statement, and properties. While all three were new to me, they’re very logical (as one would expect with anything dealing with programming).
Attributes allow you to assign metadata to your code. An attribute goes directly before the data it describes. It’s encased in square brackets and is of the form Key(Value). For instance, if I want to describe who wrote a particular class and when, I could put // Peter Anargirou, 7/9/2008. However, that isn’t very structured. Instead I could put [Author(“Peter Anargirou”),Date(“7/9/2008”)] directly preceding the class declarations. Attributes can be programmatically referenced by the program in which they exist, making them very useful for code reflection.
The using statement is also very interesting. It’s of the format using ( object declarations here ) { …code…}. Anything declared in the using declaration is deallocated at the end of the using block. For example, you can open a file in the using declaration and not have to worry about closing it. When execution leaves the using block, the file is closed automatically. It’s similar to a try/catch/finally.
Lastly, properties are something new I recently discovered. They’re similar to accessor methods in other languages. Normally, if I have an int that I want to be able to access from outside the class it’s in, MyClass, I make it public. If I do that, then I might accidentally overwrite it when I that’s not what I intend to do. Also, there’s no way to check what I’m doing with it. For instance, I might not want it to store a value of 0, but with a public int, I have no way of enforcing that. Instead, I could make a private int and have accessor methods. I might have private int count, public int getCount(), and public void updateCount(int newCount). This is definitely the preferred way of doing things, but now when I want to retrieve the count from outside, I always have to say MyClass myClass = new MyClass(); int x = myClass.getCount();. To update the count, I have to use myClass.updateCount(42);. With properties, you can create accessor methods that invoke automatically while you treat the property like a public variable. For example, I now write

private int myCount;
public int count
{
get { return myCount; }
set { if ( value != 0) myCount = value; }
}

Now from outside I can simply write x = myClass.count to retrieve the value and myClass.count = 42 to update the value. Of course, it’s also checking that I’m not updating with 0. If I try to update with 0, it won’t actually update myCount. It’s clean and simple yet still provides the more complex checking that can be done with accessor methods. Very handy!

Completing Games

This year I’ve completed 1.15 games per week. Sadly, I’ve only completed 0.679 games in my catalog for each game I add to it.
Number of games completed this year through June not counting different versions, different modes, or remakes: 30
Number of weeks this year through June: 26
Games completed per week: 1.15

Number of games completed this year through June that are in my catalog, including each physical version: 19
Number of games added to my catalog: 32
Number of games added to my catalog not counting two free games or two games solely for my girlfriend: 28
Number of games completed in my catalog per game added to my catalog: 0.633
Number of games completed in my catalog per game willingly added to my catalog for my own playing: 0.679