Category: General

At any given time, my wife has a musical addiction of the month. I will get a contact buzz or more, then try to figure out how to work it into a gaming-related post. I often give up, but this month’s is Rilo Kiley. Perfect: the lead singer is the girl from The Wizard, so keep your power gloves off her. (I was going to link to a song here, but the Portions For Foxes video distracts from the song a bit. That is the song my wife recommends, and you can play it at the Rilo Kiley link above.)

: Zubon

As noted several places on the web, Gods & Heroes has been indefinitely delayed, i.e. cancelled in favor of the other project that Perpetual is working on, Star Trek Online.  According to F13.net, some of the folks on G&H have been shuffled over to STO, while others have been let go.

Today’s Nobel Prize in Physics is for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance. This was discovered less than twenty years ago, and now you use it in your iPod. Less than twenty years from unknown to ubiquitous: The Singularity is Near. On that Nobel Prize link, note that the page 1 graph is logarithmic. That is a >100x improvement in a decade.

If you have an iPod and still have some money to toss around, why not convert your computer entirely to flash memory? Hard drives with moving parts are so unreliable, and that 320GB drive will cost a little less than $10,000.

: Zubon

Uh, okaaay. NC Soft announces Carbine Studios, and it is heralded in the press as a “new studio”, “acquisition”, “new team”, “unveiled”, etc. Someone has their wires crossed or NCSoft is trying to drum up some press to get past the tepid industry response to the Tabula Rasa open beta.

Carbine Studios “was founded in 2005 as a division of NCsoft North America by ten former members of Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft core development team.”

First, why wasn’t this news two years ago, and second, how the hell many people worked on World of Warcraft? Everytime I turn around, there is another new studio founded by former members of World of Warcraft (like Red5 for example). Even more curious, they all seem to be leading or key members of Blizzard’s dev team. Who the heck is left at Blizzard? Is this why Burning Crusade was more like “warm lint crusade” than something really hot? How is this an acquisition or a new studio?

[“This is a dev team made in heaven,” said Robert Garriott, CEO for NCsoft’s North American business. “This group is as experienced as they come in the area of computer role playing and multiplayer game design. Making successful games is second nature to them. They are a very welcome addition to the NCsoft family. The gaming community should be excited to see what great things come out of Carbine Studios in the coming years.”]

You have GOT to be kidding me. I mean honestly, I don’t mind a little hype in a press release, but “a dev team made in heaven” that is “as experienced as they come”? Then why is it, two years later, they need an “unveiling” and we still don’t know what they are working on?

[Details are scarce, but NCsoft said that Carbine is currently working on an unannounced project that “promises to break new ground in massively multiplayer gaming.”]

Ok, this line really makes me ill. Didn’t Garriot say this about Tabula Rasa (I have yet to rant on this, it is coming, I promise). There should be a law that says you can’t say something like this without qualifying it with some facts and examples. When someone like Garriot says stuff, people listen…he isn’t doing the industry any favors by fluffing up his own games or NCSoft “new” studios, particularly when there isn’t anything worth fluffing. Fine, say your game is great, awesome, or whatever, but don’t call it evolutionary (that’s my line by the way), “the most anticipated game ever”, or “ground-breaking”.

The bar must be getting really low these days…

On our new Wii, we have only played Wii Sports so far, and no boxing because we have only one nunchuk. On the tennis court, she serves much better, and I have a good net game. She bowls more strikes, but I can pick up difficult spares. We need other couples to play against, so that we can team up. We bowl better without pants. That could be an issue.

We need to get an MMO going together sometime. She likes hitting things with swords, and I like support. I hear that it is always easy to find some damage dealers once you have your tank and healer.

: Zubon

I have mentioned my fondness for Peggle before (buy it for your mother, unless she is the Halo 3 sort). With a hat tip to Cuppycake for the link, The Escapist has a stellar review of it. 1:50 to 2:03 summarizes everything well. (Yes, four links in one paragraph; click the LAST ONE. Okay, that was five, but the last two were the same.)

: Zubon

If you have not been to Tweety‘s shop, Guildcafe, I have been thinking of it as MySpace for online gamers. It is funny that I do not have a MySpace account, despite my wife’s pushing, but I signed up here on the theory of “what the heck.” Maybe I can track down some old names from Asheron’s Call at some point.

You can find Kill Ten Rats folks at:

• Cyndre
• Dave
• Ethic
• KTRNicodemus (note: not just “Nicodemus”)
• Zubon

If any other staff get profiles, I will list them.

If you are signed up and have been wondering how to send us friend requests, there you go. If you have not, hey, list one of us as a referrer when you do, so we can get valuable points that can be used for … okay, we get points. We are gamers, that is what we do.

: Zubon

I will stop calling them “Lum” and “Tweety” once I start using my own name instead of “Zubon.” I don’t think I will have a job in the industry any time Real Soon Now.

One of those mistakes that people keep making is how long it takes to make a MMO. Schedules get pushed back and the game releases massively bugged anyway. Though I have never made an MMO, my experience with planning tells me how long it will take to make the next one: about as long as it took to make the last comparable one.

All those reasons why your game will be done faster and cheaper than the last one? Lies. If you believe them, you are deluded. Your only hope is to skip some steps by borrowing an existing engine, and even then your new features will make your game take as long as usual.

On average, there is no difference between what people predict as the “realistic” time frame and the “best case scenario” time frame. Think about that one for a moment. Your schedule assumes that nothing will go wrong. Where you left slack, you left it only for problems you know you will face, without slack for the unknown, even when you know there will be unknown problems. It won’t help anyway, since your staff is already planning to use up that margin of error like an o-ring.

The fun part is that the more you know, the worse your schedule will be. More detail makes the problem worse. You know that step A will take 10 man-months, step B will take 15 man-months … and no, your perfect schedule is going to fall apart. You will get far more accurate predictions by looking at the last three similar projects and assuming you will take about that long. I have a highly detailed task list, and I use it only to bludgeon work from co-workers. I would never go so far as to expect us to meet the schedule. I mean, I used to, but then you get your first job or college paper, and reality sets in.

: Zubon