It's just like the four stages of death, but in a different order.
1) Anger. "Those ^%$#ers! I wanted to make that game."
2) Depression. "Sigh. I guess there's nothing I can do about it."
3) Acceptance. "On the bright side, at least now I get to play it and I don't have to develop it myself."
4) Denial. (Once you actually get to play it.) "Hey, this isn't the game I wanted to make at all!"
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I didn't have as much free time over Thanksgiving as I thought, and only made it a little way into an article on my new pet "Drag" theory. So now I don't know when I'll have it up. On the bright side, Sofi loved Sea World and the beach.
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And the IGDA Leadership Forum. If you haven't signed up already...you're too late.
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My coffee machine, a Krups-something-or-other that I probably got for free with the purchase of some coffee, has my vote for worst designed thing ever. But it's only marginally worse than most coffee machines so I haven't bothered to get a new one. Consider all the possible ways I can screw up making my coffee. I have done *all* of these, probably because when I need my coffee in the morning it's because I'm too tired to actually make it without mistakes:
* I can forget to plug it in. (That's the one I did just now, that prompted this post. Sometimes Sofi plays in the sink so Cathy unplugs everything. So if this post seems incoherent it's because I haven't had my coffee yet.)
* I can forget to add water.
* I can forget to put a filter or grounds in. (If I remember the grounds I remember the filter, thankfully.)
* I can forget to turn it on.
* While running, the filter can sort of fold over in the chamber and then the water goes past the grounds entirely, making a really weak pot of coffee.
* And I can forget to put the lid on the pot, which causes it to do that back-up-don't-actually-make-any-coffee thing. Oh - and when I pour the coffee - that lid often gets in the way and causes me to spill coffee on the floor.
That last one is the one I hate the most, because it's the most obviously fixable. For a feature I never wanted (be able to take the pot out before your coffee is finished brewing and have a cup of overly strong coffee) they added this extra point of failure. Alvin Toffler would disapprove.
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We've been using an old Dell laptop of mine as our autobuild machine. I've had it for almost three years...it seemed like it was on its last legs: the battery doesn't hold a charge, the touchpad no longer worked, some keys are missing, the hard-drive is fragmented to hell. Just a few days ago the screen went out. I went to their online support chat, not expecting much - a Dell desktop that I had for less time melted down and I simply had to replace it - but they told me I still had a couple weeks left on my warranty, and they sent a tech to fix it. (And they fixed the touch-pad to boot.) I vaguely remember now - when ordering the laptop, through work, there was some discount if I got the long service plan that made it seem worth it. (I'm normally a "For God's Sake Don't Get The Service Plan!" guy.) Getting it fixed was so unbelievably painless, such the complete opposite of my horrendous experience with the company formerly known as Hewlett-Packard, that I'll probably go with Dell for all my computing needs in the future...and get the service plan.
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Although in my earlier post on DBTS I talked about Mark Nau's level design contributions, the truth is that it wouldn't even have had levels if it wasn't for Chris Busse. We thought of it as a fighting game - two guys face off, one lives to face the next guy. Then, instead of going home to his family, Chris spent Christmas making a prototype level, proving it would be more fun as an adventure game. I'm a little ashamed for having forgotten - it was many years ago, and once you've been working on a game for a long time those early design decisions start to seem 'obvious' and you forget how much people agonized over them - but basically, Chris invented Die By The Sword as we know it.
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You think of videogames as being on the shelves for a few weeks and then disappearing forever, but it's actually not too hard to find and play my best games.
The latest Xbox 360 update made it possible to play Spider-Man 2 on the 360. Don't bother with the missions, just swing around.
You can play Die By The Sword on GameTap - although they disabled the limb-severing - which, hey, was half the fun. But it's still got the unique, never-imitated swordfighting and there's a lot of cool stuff (much of which came from Mark Nau) in the levels.
And you can violate the copyright on Magic Candle 2 at Home of the Underdogs. Steal this record.
This pleases me.
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This has never happened to me before...everything on my Gamefly list is either "Short Wait", "Long Wait", or hasn't released yet. Only 6 games on there, but still.
Guess I'll get to play some PC games.
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I didn't even know what "rich presence" was until a couple of days ago and I've got to tell you, I'm not crazy about it. Or even presence, period. Here's the thing - I log into Trillian or my Xbox 360 and a bunch of my friends are online. If I stop and say "hi" to all of them I'd never get anything done, ever. I'd suddenly find myself in the grave after having wasted my life IMing people. But if I don't say "hi" to them, I have to wonder - are they offended? Maybe they said "hi" last time and now it's my turn? Is there an etiquette for these things? My solution is to log in as little as possible. But now I've got the same thing on my 360 - "Hey, Jamie's online! I wonder why he doesn't want to play Gears of War with me?"
Or am I just weird?
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So, finally got through to my case manager, asked him the status, and no progress had been made, unsurprisingly. He told me that the receipt I had e-mailed in was the wrong kind of receipt. (Something I didn't mention in the last post; I couldn't find the receipt, which was weird because that's one thing I'm usually pretty organized about. So I called Fry's and got another one printed up. But apparently it wasn't good enough.) Fortunately, since the previous call, I had found the old receipt. This time I decided to fax instead of e-mailing; apparently turnaround times on their faxes are much better than e-mails. Go figure.
But I couldn't get my "fax machine" (which is actually a scanner+account with trustfax) to work! Some days I think I'm cursed. Running out of time before the day was out, I went down to Kinko's to fax the six-page Fry's invoice from there. Take that, HP. I fully intended to call to make sure that they got it but something came up and before I knew it, the day was over. And I couldn't call the next day because I was out of town on business and busy the whole day. I was certain that nothing was happening.
Here's where it gets kind of anticlimactic - even though I didn't pester them, the FedEx label showed up Monday morning, a mere two business days later - that was fast. And they had made arrangements for FedEx to pick up the machine for me, which went very smoothly. (The first time I sent it in, they forced me to make the trek down to Kinko's/FedEx, even though they said I wouldn't have to, one of many promises broken.) And, most stunning of all: THE VERY NEXT MORNING MY WIFE'S NEW MACHINE ARRIVED, sent overnight delivery. Which means they didn't even wait to get my old machine back - they just waited for the tracking # to confirm it was on its way, and then immediately overnighted the new machine. For the first time in the saga, they actually trusted me - I could have sent them a box full of rocks. Or at least stolen one of the RAM chips. Not to mention, the new machine was an upgrade, with more hard-drive space and faster processors. And...it worked! I had gotten really good at reproducing lockups on the previous machine (trying to play three movies at the same time usually did it) - but this machine sailed on as if nothing was amiss...the movies didn't even skip.
In other words, in the last couple days, the company formerly known as Hewlett-Packard finally pulled its head out.
But it did take a while:
Date we first tried to use the computer: 12/25/06.
Date we first called support: 12/26/06.
Date we were finally able to use our computer: 1/30/07.
So...I suppose I'll relax my boycott. I may even continue to buy printer ink from them...and that's where they make their money. I won't risk buying another computer from them, because having to wait a month to use our PC sucks. And there it is.
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