index.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <channel>
    <title>Jare&#39;s Blog</title>
    <link>https://thejare.github.io/</link>
    <description>Recent content on Jare&#39;s Blog</description>
    <generator>Hugo -- gohugo.io</generator>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <lastBuildDate>Sun, 03 Dec 2017 01:27:02 +0200</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://thejare.github.io/index.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
    <item>
      <title>Ludum Dare 40</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2017/12/ludum-dare-40/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 03 Dec 2017 01:27:02 +0200</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2017/12/ludum-dare-40/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;I made a little Ludum Dare 40 entry by the name of Idle Icon. &lt;a href=&#34;./html/ld40/&#34;&gt;Try it here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Ported to Hugo</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2016/05/ported-to-hugo/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 02 May 2016 03:14:02 +0200</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2016/05/ported-to-hugo/</guid>
      <description>I have ported the Wordpress site to Hugo, an excellent static site generator. In the process I have also hosted it on GitHub Pages, at https://thejare.github.io/. Some posts will be badly formatted, or missing related files.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>GDC 2014 Slides Compilation</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2014/03/gdc-2014-slides-compilation/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Mar 2014 01:52:19 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2014/03/gdc-2014-slides-compilation/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;: I think the &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.gdcvault.com/free/gdc-14&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;GDC Vault&lt;/a&gt; has been updated with all available content, so you may want to go there instead. See you next year!?&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Get’em while they’re fresh! If you know of stuff missing here, please tell me about it on Twitter &lt;a href=&#34;https://twitter.com/TheJare&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;@TheJare&lt;/a&gt;. You can also check industry sites like &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.gamasutra.com/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;Gamasutra&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.polygon.com/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;Polygon&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.develop-online.net/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;Develop&lt;/a&gt; for ongoing coverage, and hopefully a lot of these materials will show up in the &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.gdcvault.com/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;GDC Vault&lt;/a&gt; soon.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Firedemo 20th anniversary</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2013/05/firedemo-20th-anniversary/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 04 May 2013 02:55:18 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2013/05/firedemo-20th-anniversary/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;It’s been nearly 20 years since we released that old fire effect and the demoscene turned out to love it. I have &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.iguanademos.com/Jare/files/Fire/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;ported it to HTML5&lt;/a&gt; to celebrate!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It all started when we bought a math coprocessor for our 386/25 and I started playing with fractals and plasmas. A few programming mistakes later, this thing came out and looked neat, so we slapped JCAB’s VT player and released it. Eternal gratitude to Jester of Sanity for unknowingly lending me his fantastic &lt;a href=&#34;http://mod.haxor.fi/Jester/mod.elysium&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;‘Elysium’ mod&lt;/a&gt; – it didn’t take me long to learn that such acts were VERY badly frowned upon.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;You can check out the &lt;a href=&#34;https://github.com/TheJare/FiredemoHTML5&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;source code on github&lt;/a&gt; if you are so inclined. The comments are slightly better this time! This version runs rather slowly on Chrome, and I don’t really know why, but IE, Firefox (Win and Android) and iOS Safari work great.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>GDC 2013</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2013/03/gdc-2013/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Mar 2013 21:22:04 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2013/03/gdc-2013/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;It’s that time of the year again, when everyone else is partying and having fun (&lt;a href=&#34;http://www.forbes.com/sites/carolpinchefsky/2013/03/27/really-igda-party-at-gdc-brings-on-the-female-dancers/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;or maybe not – WTF IGDA?&lt;/a&gt;) at GDC in San Francisco. I’ll try to collect any links to lecture materials I come across. If you know of stuff missing here, please tell me about it on Twitter &lt;a href=&#34;https://twitter.com/TheJare&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;@TheJare&lt;/a&gt;. You can also check industry sites like &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.gamasutra.com/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;Gamasutra&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/25/4145780/gdc-2013-panels-announcements-and-more-live-from-san-francisco&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;Polygon&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.develop-online.net/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;Develop&lt;/a&gt; for ongoing coverage, and hopefully a lot of these materials will show up in the &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.gdcvault.com/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;GDC Vault&lt;/a&gt; soon.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Improv math</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2013/03/improv-math/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 16 Mar 2013 11:59:45 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2013/03/improv-math/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;I always loved math and it was one of my favourite subjects during school. I have to thank my dad and my bro for instilling that love in my head. My young self was always baffled by how most people around me not only hated math, but they seemed to have a hard time with it. How could it be hard? It was all logical, you hardly needed to work or memorize anything because, hey, with just a few basics in your head you could deduce any formulas or theorems you needed during an exam, right? Heh.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This year I’m one of the tutors for the &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.u-tad.com/masteres-2/programacion-videojuegos/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;Master on Game Programming&lt;/a&gt; at the U-Tad. The subject I’m teaching this course is Game Architecture: Game Objects, Main Loop and Timing, Reading &amp;amp; Saving, etc. This is the Master’s debut year, so while I believe the course is going great (and students seem to agree so far), some bits and pieces are not ideal and will need improvement for the following years.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;One of them is, unsurprisingly, math.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Haskell</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2013/03/haskell/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 03 Mar 2013 23:05:18 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2013/03/haskell/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;Back in my 2nd year in college (1990), I took a half year course on functional programming. Back then, having several years of heavy duty Z80 assembly &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.mobygames.com/game/star-dust&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;videogames &lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&#34;http://computeremuzone.com/ficha.php?id=281&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;programming&lt;/a&gt;, and being recently introduced to high level languages via Pascal and Modula 2, my brain was very fresh and open to new paradigms and ideas. Structured languages like Pascal and C were a great way to remove some of the tedium and bureaucracy of assembly, but functional was mindblowing. I already understood the idea of passing functions around as parameters, since we did a lot of that in our semi-OOP approach to game character behaviour. But when you create your first infinite list, wow, that’s a moment to remember!&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>About Me</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/about-me/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:35:38 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/about-me/</guid>
      <description>My name is Javier Arévalo Baeza, I was born in sunny Spain in the year 1970. I have been making videogames for over 25 years, and I intend to keep doing that for as long as I can.
Other places you can reach me:
 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheJare Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheJare Github: https://github.com/TheJare  </description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Articles</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/articles/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:35:38 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/articles/</guid>
      <description> HTML5/Canvas Game Lessons Fixed Timestep Loop DLL / Macro Tricks Init / End Protocol DLL Interfaces Rectangle Packer Praetorians DevDiary - sadly, was hosted in GameSpy and vanished one day Reducing Game Load Times Positional Printf  </description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Downloads</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/downloads/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:35:38 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/downloads/</guid>
      <description>Articles and lecture slides  Slides from my talks at Mundos Digitales and GameLab, July 2006 (in Spanish). Slides from my talk at the Universidad Politecnica de Catalunya, March 2006 (in Spanish). Slides from my talk at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, April 2005 (in Spanish). Slides from my talk at the University of Seville in March 2003 (in Spanish).   Source Code  RectLayout, a class to aid in resolution-independent 2D layout of rectangles.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>SpainJS</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2012/07/spainjs/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:35:38 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2012/07/spainjs/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;Yesterday I had the honor to give a presentation at the &lt;a href=&#34;http://spainjs.org/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;SpainJS&lt;/a&gt; Javascript conference in Madrid, on the topic of Videogames and Javascript. I wasted a lot of time preparing a dynamic HTML5 page for my deck of slides, which was my excuse to play with CSS 3d transitions and fancy formatting. You can see the &lt;a href=&#34;http://iguanademos.com/Jare/docs/html5/SpainJS2012/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;dynamic deck&lt;/a&gt; (which needs Chrome/Firefox or a similarly decent browser), the &lt;a href=&#34;http://iguanademos.com/Jare/docs/html5/SpainJS2012/#all&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;static deck&lt;/a&gt; (should work everywhere), a &lt;a href=&#34;http://iguanademos.com/Jare/docs/html5/SpainJS2012/spainjs.pdf&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt; I converted using &lt;a href=&#34;http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;wkhtmltopdf&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&#34;https://speakerdeck.com/u/thejare/p/overview-of-javascript-in-games&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;Speakerdeck&lt;/a&gt;, or the &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4JmYAVjm1c&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;video&lt;/a&gt;. Enjoy!&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Githubbed!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2012/05/githubbed/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 16 May 2012 01:35:49 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2012/05/githubbed/</guid>
      <description>A few months ago I created a Github account to see what it’s all about. Even if you use it yourself without all the nice features of a distributed version control system, it’s a great way to manage &amp;amp; publish your open source projects!
I put up there some of my old C/C++ code, and a few experiments I’ve toyed with in my (now scarce) spare time, mostly related to JavaScript.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>GDC 2012</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2012/03/gdc-2012/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 Mar 2012 01:25:41 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2012/03/gdc-2012/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;[Edit]: The &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.gdcvault.com/free/gdc-12&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;GDC Vault is now open&lt;/a&gt; for business, with lots of slides and presentations. Meggan Scavio also had &lt;a href=&#34;https://twitter.com/#!/megganpez/status/185857804324712448&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;good news on Twitter&lt;/a&gt; about availability of free videos.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Unity3D 3.5 mobile is free&amp;#8230;</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2012/03/unity3d-3.5-mobile-is-free#8230/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Mar 2012 03:37:03 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2012/03/unity3d-3.5-mobile-is-free#8230/</guid>
      <description>..Until April 8th. It normally costs around $800, so get it even if you don’t have immediate plans to use it.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Metro and JavaScript</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2012/03/metro-and-javascript/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 07 Mar 2012 03:18:08 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2012/03/metro-and-javascript/</guid>
      <description>On Facebook I wrote a bunch of thoughts on the fact that Windows 8 treats JavaScript as a first-class citizen for native Metro apps. It was triggered by thisand a few other related reads on WinJS.
In general, there is value in having a single language available for all your needs and platforms even if it’s not 100% portable (look at C/C++). JavaScript is the most widely available language today and, while ugly, the popularity of runtimes like NodeJS and the myriad HTML5 mobile app wrappers like PhoneGap prove that it is viable.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Facebook IPO and Mobile Social Games</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2012/02/facebook-ipo-and-mobile-social-games/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:45:34 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2012/02/facebook-ipo-and-mobile-social-games/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;Facebook’s IPO has been announced, and this means lots of details on Facebook financials have become public. The most interesting bits for social game developers (in VERY broad terms):&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Almost all revenue from Facebook Credits is generated by games.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Zynga makes up 80% of the total Facebook Credits revenue.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;In broad numbers, on Facebook, Zynga has MAU equal to 1.5x all other game devs combined. But Zynga’s FB Credits revenue is 4x. That’s an idea of how much better Zynga is at getting players to pay.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Most of Facebook’s revenues come form advertising.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Facebook mobile gaming is in its infancy.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Half of Facebook users use the site via mobile, and this percentage is growing very quickly, but Facebook does not monetize them with games nor advertising.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>node.js</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2012/01/node.js/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 28 Jan 2012 03:47:06 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2012/01/node.js/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;cdoral in &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.iguanademos.com/Jare/wp/?p=2385#comment-3491&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;another post&lt;/a&gt; mentions &lt;a href=&#34;http://nodejs.org/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;node.js&lt;/a&gt;. I have been following this project for a while so I thought I’d write a little blurb about it and include a few links for further and more in-depth information. Coincidentally, the &lt;a href=&#34;http://nodesummit.com/&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;Node Summit&lt;/a&gt; was held this week in SF, so there may be interesting and fresh material coming from there soon.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;First things first: I have played with node.js for little experiments but haven’t yet found an opportunity to put it to real, production use. Version 0.6 addressed some of my questions about its capabilities and performance, and it is already being used on production servers for many traffic-heavy sites like eBay or LinkedIn, so it’s clearly gone beyond the experimental stage. If you are building a web service today, node.js is a technology you should consider.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Node is a stand-alone executable that will run a JavaScript file passed on the command line:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;node app.js&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Your JavaScript program can use the standard JavaScript libraries (Math, etc) and a bunch of node-specific libraries. In most cases, your program will enter an infinite event loop and start receiving, processing and responding to network requests.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Unity3D 3.5 Developer preview is out</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/12/unity3d-3.5-developer-preview-is-out/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:09:45 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/12/unity3d-3.5-developer-preview-is-out/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;And it includes a fancy exporter to Flash11 / Stage3D. All of a sudden, the best way to author advanced Flash content is Unity, not Flash. Considering that Adobe makes their money from Flash tools rather than the plugin, it’s a really odd situation. With the current outlook of Flash after the ‘&lt;a href=&#34;http://creativecodingpodcast.com/?p=140&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;Flashmageddon&lt;/a&gt;‘, it’s hard to say how relevant this will be in the long term, but it’s an impressive feature! And the obligatory cube to celebrate it:&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Colors!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/12/colors/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 26 Dec 2011 10:07:57 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/12/colors/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;Our little one loves to grab anything shiny, but is especially attracted to LCD screens of any type. He loves the netbook, the MacBook, my desktop’s dual monitors, and of course the big TV, but most of all he loves the iPhone. I often activate the camera in reverse mode and let him play with it, but there’s always been a problem: while he manipulates the phone, he will push some control or other and stop the camera, go to the desktop and start pushing random icons. I was wishing for some sort of ‘baby mode’ where something neat would be happening on the screen, but controls would be disabled.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I decided to use the Sunday morning to dust off my Canvas, CSS and JavaScript skills to code, with Alba’s design input and feedback, a little BabySaver that could keep his attention with bright colors, and be impossible to quit for him. &lt;!-- raw HTML omitted --&gt;Click here&lt;!-- raw HTML omitted --&gt; to see its current form. Click on the “Endless” button to enable interactions, otherwise any clicks will take you to my homepage.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Text Editors</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/12/text-editors/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:48:58 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/12/text-editors/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;Programmers spend most of our time in front of a text editor. Whether it is a standalone editor, or one integrated in an IDE, that’s just what we do.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Back in MS-DOS days, my editor of choice was &lt;!-- raw HTML omitted --&gt;QEdit&lt;!-- raw HTML omitted --&gt;, later renamed to The Semware Editor. I loved its configurability, and remapped pretty much everything in it to suit my preferences. Around that time I was also working on Unix systems and used vi there, although only for short editing sessions. I had been exposed to &lt;!-- raw HTML omitted --&gt;Emacs&lt;!-- raw HTML omitted --&gt; multiple times (starting with MicroEmacs on the Atari ST), but I could never get comfortable with its crazy keyboard combos.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;After Windows 95 came and became my regular environment, the best choice was &lt;!-- raw HTML omitted --&gt;Ultraedit&lt;!-- raw HTML omitted --&gt;. Very soon, Microsoft Visual Studio became the compiler and IDE of choice for Win95 development, and its built-in editor proved quite powerful, so I would use Ultraedit for editing files that were not C++.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>On Freemium, playstyles and evil game design</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/10/on-freemium-playstyles-and-evil-game-design/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 22 Oct 2011 09:08:14 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/10/on-freemium-playstyles-and-evil-game-design/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;In a couple of Gamasutra &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AdamSaltsman/20111018/8685/Contrivance_and_Extortion_InApp_Purchases__Microtransactions.php&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AdamSaltsman/20111020/8703/Contrivance_and_Extortion_II_Clarifications_Feedback__Suggestions.php&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;posts&lt;/a&gt;, Adam Saltsman (of ‘Canabalt’ fame) ranted against what he feels are ‘evil’ game design systems. I characterized his arguments as ‘hysterical’, which is perhaps a bit unfair since rants are meant to be hot. Anyway, at some point I felt compelled to write a long reply, and I’m reposting it here. I’ve edited it only slightly, so it’s possible that some of it is confusing outside of the context of the original discussion.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;My guidelines are not for gamers; they’re for humans. My guidelines are not about styles of game or difficulty of game; they’re about treating players with a modicum of respect.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Now, we agree that all players and all humans should be treated with respect. But there is no inherent lack of respect in ensuring that your game encourages players to pay if they like the game and want to enjoy more of it. If anything, you are asking players to respect YOU as a creator by paying something for the enjoyment they derive from your work. Short of a pure donation model, this encouragement must affect the product you create in some ways. That doesn’t make the creator greedy, which seems to be Adam’s characterization of the monetization process.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Stage3D Vertex Buffer formats</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/10/stage3d-vertex-buffer-formats/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Oct 2011 02:00:59 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/10/stage3d-vertex-buffer-formats/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;If you played with the Stage3D spinning cube sample I linked in the &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.iguanademos.com/Jare/wp/?p=2480&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;previous post&lt;/a&gt;, you will notice one thing: the vertex colors in the vertex buffer are given as 3 floats (red, green and blue). This is rather wasteful in most cases because color components often vary between 0.0 and 1.0, and it’s more efficient to specify vertex colors (including alpha) as a single 32-bit value. For example, in hexadecimal notation, 0xFF800040 would mean alpha of 1.0 (0xFF), blue 0.5 (0x80), green 0 (0x00) and red 0.25 (0x40).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;If you look in the Stage3D docs, you will find the constant &lt;strong&gt;Context3DVertexBufferFormat.BYTES_4&lt;/strong&gt; to use in the call to &lt;strong&gt;Context3D.setVertexBufferAt()&lt;/strong&gt;. But if you naively just change the vertex buffer array to turn each vertex color’s set of 3 components into a single hex value, make &lt;strong&gt;dataPerVertex&lt;/strong&gt; = 4 instead of 6, and use &lt;strong&gt;BYTES_4&lt;/strong&gt; for va1, then you will find that the colors are coming out wrong. Why? Because the function &lt;strong&gt;VertexBuffer3D.uploadFromVector()&lt;/strong&gt; always stores the values from the Vector in &lt;em&gt;floating point format&lt;/em&gt;. Of course! This is the most common situation for the components of the vertex positions, normals, texture coordinates and such. But we need our &lt;strong&gt;BYTES_4&lt;/strong&gt; color value to be stored verbatim as a 32-bit uint.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vector.&lt;!-- raw HTML omitted --&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;uploadFromVector()&lt;/strong&gt; do not give you control over the byte format of value. How do you solve this?&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Flash Stage 3D is out!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/10/flash-stage-3d-is-out/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:06:41 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/10/flash-stage-3d-is-out/</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;A couple of days ago, Adobe released to the masses a new version of their Flash Player, and an updated SDK. The biggest change (for me at least) is the inclusion of hardware-accelerated 3D, known as &lt;a href=&#34;http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/stage3d.html&#34; target=&#34;_blank&#34; rel=&#34;noopener&#34;&gt;Stage3D&lt;/a&gt;. Here’s a quick tour of what I did to compile and run my first Stage3D program (Windows 7 PC but should be applicable everywhere). Useful because the Adobe site is not really clear about this.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Fun with HTML5</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/09/fun-with-html5/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:50:34 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/09/fun-with-html5/</guid>
      <description>I have been playing around with HTML5, Canvas and WebGL. Not a lot to show for it, but at least I forced myself to write a bit again. Check it out here if you’re curious, and good luck reaching a score of 150 on Lesson 5!
By the way, for some reason Firefox has started to run Lesson 5 rather slow in both my PCs. I’m pretty sure it used to be a rock solid 60 fps back when I wrote the game, but at some point either upgrading past Firefox 5, or upgrading to Windows 7, has made it slow.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Hello world again</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/09/hello-world-again/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Sep 2011 12:25:42 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/09/hello-world-again/</guid>
      <description>I may be getting interested in writing stuff again with more depth and detail, appropriate (even if small) audience, and with clearer ownership than social networks provide. Twitter is cool as a sort of RSS aggregator; Facebook has become intrusive, annoying and just generally inadequate for anything but on-the-fly photo and YouTube sharing; and Google+ has flatlined. In preparation for more writing, I have added a WordPress blog to my site, because my old blog system was fun to write but boring to maintain and extend.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Google&#43;</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/06/google-/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Jun 2011 22:53:54 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/06/google-/</guid>
      <description>Catch me there: https://plus.google.com/109393462510769944302/</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Relinuxed</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/05/relinuxed/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 12 May 2011 12:44:33 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/05/relinuxed/</guid>
      <description>Time for that old laptop to receive Ubuntu 11.04!
Er…
Apparently, the graphics card is too old to run the fancy new Unity UI. Ah well, in any case, it’s a good idea to have a working Linux machine.
Then, the same problem as before. And I hate myself for not detailing precisely what I did to speed up the HDD. I need to fix this ASAP because the system has started doing massive checks to update packages and the machine is completely unusable.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Web design</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/04/web-design/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Apr 2011 00:44:17 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/04/web-design/</guid>
      <description>I wrote a minimalistic photo gallery for my wife. It’s a quick mix of php and MySQL on the server, css/html page, and some Javascript+jQuery for a still unfinished slideshow function.
The layout spec was:
– left-side navigation column – picture to the right of the navigation, with a title centered underneath – work with pictures of varying sizes – a screen-wide footer – as little else as possible
I wanted to make it as friendly as possible to screen sizes and form factors, so that even in the smallest or weirdest screen, you would see as much of the picture as possible.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>MySQL</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/04/mysql/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 17 Apr 2011 13:33:18 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/04/mysql/</guid>
      <description>In the previous post, I made references to MySQL but didn’t say anything about a quick local setup. So here’s what I did for mine:
– Download MySQL binaries from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/. I chose the huge 64-bit Zip archive.
– I unzipped the /bin/, /data/, /docs/ and /share/english/ folders into my destination MySQL folder. Then I deleted all the .pdb files.
– Start the server via start mysqld. You can later stop it with mysqladmin.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>nginx 1.0</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2011/04/nginx-1.0/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 16 Apr 2011 01:56:32 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2011/04/nginx-1.0/</guid>
      <description>Since I started working on Pyro’s server backend for its social games, I have grown to love the nginx web server. Compact, efficient and fully featured, it’s a great alternative to Apache if you are in full control of your web server and apps.
A few days ago nginx came of age with the release of 1.0, so I did a refresh of my simple web dev setup at home:</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Ping</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2010/11/ping/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 14 Nov 2010 12:02:16 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2010/11/ping/</guid>
      <description>Still alive… cleaned up some of the hacks I did with dates a while ago. Now I must test them. 🙂</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Linuxing like it&#39;s 1993</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2010/05/linuxing-like-its-1993/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 09 May 2010 12:37:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2010/05/linuxing-like-its-1993/</guid>
      <description>Well not exactly, Linux distributions these days are much more organized and documented than in the wild west days before 1.0 hit. But I have installed Ubuntu Desktop 10.04 on my old Laptop, a 7-year old thing with 512Mb RAM, some Centrino CPU and a slow-ass ATI 9200.
Windows XP on that laptop had slowed down noticeably over time, especially since I installed an antivirus, but back in the day it was a decent PC.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Replies and Captchas</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2010/05/replies-and-captchas/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 02 May 2010 02:17:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2010/05/replies-and-captchas/</guid>
      <description>Hey gang,
I have inserted Google’s reCAPTCHA widget to validate user registration.
The Captcha is a bit annoying right now because pressing Enter after typing it in will default to Login rather than Register, forcing you to manually click on the button. I think I don’t really need two separate buttons anymore, so I may fix that soon.
I’ll probably wipe the user database because by now everyone who ever posted here may have forgotten their password.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Taskbar vs Tray</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2010/04/taskbar-vs-tray/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Apr 2010 08:23:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2010/04/taskbar-vs-tray/</guid>
      <description>Dismayed to find out that MSN’s and Skype 4.2’s lack of a proper tray icon in Windows 7 is by design. According to this: &amp;ldquo;This icon pattern is no longer recommended for Windows 7. Use regular taskbar buttons instead if your program has desktop presence.&amp;quot;
I think the taskbar is notthe right place for icons that we use very rarely, but what do I know… For now the best approach if you don’t like this feature is to set the programs to run on Vista SP2 compatibility mode; in the long run I guess I’ll just have to get used to it.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>RSS Fixes</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2010/04/rss-fixes/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Apr 2010 22:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2010/04/rss-fixes/</guid>
      <description>At the insistence of Cesar, I took a look at the date issues in the RSS Feed generator. It should be fixed now. The timezones used are not correct and the time shown in the RSS is different than the time shown in the Blog itself. Ah well.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Ping!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2010/04/ping/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Apr 2010 23:02:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2010/04/ping/</guid>
      <description>Hey!
Yeah I’m still alive, and so is the site. For some reason, posting here got completely sidetracked, I guess I just ended up doing my &amp;ldquo;social updates&amp;rdquo; via Facebook instead. I don’t know if that’s going to really change, so no promises.
Whew, 2009 flew by and what a great year it was. Then 2010 came with some surprises early on: Activision laid off my entire team at Radical. I was already considering coming back to Spain after finishing the project, so this just sped things up.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>3D Movie craze</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2009/04/3d-movie-craze/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:33:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2009/04/3d-movie-craze/</guid>
      <description>I recently watched Coraline, a charming fairytale. I was mildly excited to see it in 3D and find out what all the craze was about. Back in the 80’s I watched Jaws 3D using the same technology, and being less than impressed after the first 3 or 4 gimmicks.
The result? I liked Coraline but didn’t enjoy the experience. I found the 3D distracting at times, and generally tiring. This article describes many of these symptoms and possible causes much better than I can try.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Jammin!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2009/01/jammin/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:43:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2009/01/jammin/</guid>
      <description>Happy New Year!
The Universidad Complutense team is organizing a Game Jam in Madrid around the end of January 2009. Check it out! It’s the same people who organized the Master in Games Programming with which I collaborated as a tutor a few years ago, so I know you will be in good hands. (thanks Bak, I had totally missed this one)
&amp;laquo;insert New Year’s Resolution about blogging more often&amp;raquo;</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Games</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2008/10/games/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2008/10/games/</guid>
      <description>I’ve been playing lately:
LEGO Batman: Just like all the other LEGO games. Funny, forgiving and with tons of stuff to do on the side. I love the idea of playing the missions from the point of view of the heros and then the villains.
Braid: Irritating but creative and ultimately very rewarding. Most of the puzzles have relatively easy to execute solutions, but they can be hard to figure out, while the more obvious solutions are jolly hard to do.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Updates</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2008/08/updates/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 17 Aug 2008 21:33:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2008/08/updates/</guid>
      <description>After the Activision Blizzard merger thing, a lot of people have been laid off at Radical Entertainment, but thankfully I’m not one of them. I wish the best of lucks to those who are no longer in the company, and I hope they land on their very capable and knowledgeable feet.
When the final details of the layoffs were announced, I was on holidays in Alaska. It’s weird to be hiking, trying to catch sight of a bear or moose, and generally having a great time, while you know that at that precise moment you may be losing your job.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Dude, where&#39;s my loot?</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2008/07/dude-wheres-my-loot/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2008/07/dude-wheres-my-loot/</guid>
      <description>The Diablo 3 announcement got my loot-whore juices flowing again. Loot in WoW is a grind to get, Titan Quest hadn&amp;rsquo;t done it for me, AoC didn&amp;rsquo;t even register, Robokill is nice but small, and I am fighting the urge to buy the Diablo 2 battlechest. But then I remembered that the Too Human demo was coming out soon. Today, in fact.
I like what they were trying to do with the game, I like it a lot.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Movies and stuff</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2008/07/movies-and-stuff/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 05 Jul 2008 20:16:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2008/07/movies-and-stuff/</guid>
      <description>Age of Conan came out, a promising MMO from veterans Funcom. It promised gore, nudity, great graphics and a few twists to the classic MMORPG genre. Even though it delivered in those areas, the game is way too buggy, unfinished and, well, unpolished. I reached level 43 and stopped playing. As a developer, I can endure normal bugs, but there’s just not enough variety in the game to make me want to play further.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Movies</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2008/04/movies/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:09:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2008/04/movies/</guid>
      <description>It’s been a while since I updated this, so let’s at least recap a few movies I’ve seen lately. From better to worse:
In Bruges: Unique film full of strange situations and unforgettable characters and dialog. Despite being so weird, it still manages to be very entertaining.
Charlie Wilson’s War: interesting characters and excellent dialogs in a very entertaining and thought-provoking movie. Very good acting except for Julia Roberts, who for some reason is not believable at all in her role.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Evil Spam</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2008/03/evil-spam/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:35:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2008/03/evil-spam/</guid>
      <description>Spammers have caught up with the site. For now I have disabled anonymous posting, a more permanent solution will come soon. And hopefully more interesting news.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Devil May Cry 4</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2008/02/devil-may-cry-4/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 14 Feb 2008 01:13:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2008/02/devil-may-cry-4/</guid>
      <description>It’s out, and it’s fantastic! Finishing the game is relatively easy even for old farts like me, but the point of the game is killing with style, variety and effectiveness. The game’s biggest flaw is that it repeats a lot of content, but it doesn’t feel too repetitive to me because it’s the fun of fighting that matters.
They pulled off a tough feat when more than half of the game is played with a new character instead of our beloved Dante, and that character doesn’t suck!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Rez HD</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2008/01/rez-hd/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Jan 2008 23:03:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2008/01/rez-hd/</guid>
      <description>The wonderful Rez is back on XBox Live, and it looks and sounds absolutely glorious. Even though the game has an hypnotic and relaxing quality, my right thumb hurts, and with Devil May Cry 4 next week that’s just the beginning. 🙂</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Political commentary in FPS games? No thanks</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2008/01/political-commentary-in-fps-games-no-thanks/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 26 Jan 2008 17:04:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2008/01/political-commentary-in-fps-games-no-thanks/</guid>
      <description>A few monhts ago in Gamasutra, Harvey Smith described the intriguing elements of social and political subversion in his shooter Blacksite: Area 51. The game apparently turned out to be crap, but I never got to try it. Now Gamasutra again introduces us to another contender for &amp;ldquo;politically conscious FPS games&amp;rdquo; in the form of Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. From the horrible demo just released, this game is even worse.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Cloverfield</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2008/01/cloverfield/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 19 Jan 2008 22:57:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2008/01/cloverfield/</guid>
      <description>JJ Abram’s latest baby is here, after months of speculation generated by last summer’s trailer and an Internet viral campaign. It’s basically a Godzilla-like monster movie shown through the eyes of a guy’s camcorder. There are many reports of people feeling sick and even throwing up thanks to the savage shaky-cam work. I certainly saw way more people getting up and out of the theater than in any other movie I remember (except for Vatel, but that’s a different story).</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Merry Xmas!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/12/merry-xmas/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Dec 2007 15:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/12/merry-xmas/</guid>
      <description>And a happy New Year to everyone!
It´s good to be in Spain for a couple of weeks, see the family, friends, and of course have plenty of tapas and fun.
Yesterday I went to watch Michael Clayton, an excellent directorial debut by writer Tony Gilroy. He was clearly influenced by producer Steven Soderbergh’s style: slow pace, complex storytelling and heavy emphasis on character development. One of the best movies this year.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Sound effects</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/12/sound-effects/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/12/sound-effects/</guid>
      <description>A few days ago Dr Petter released a little tool to generate simple sound effects for hobby game developers. &amp;ldquo;An MS Paint for sound effects…&amp;rdquo; as he puts it himself. It’s certainly no SoundForge, but lots of fun to play with, and more than capable for many quick projects.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Passage</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/12/passage/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Dec 2007 00:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/12/passage/</guid>
      <description>Ok, this is really cool. Passage is a sort of artsy-fartsy game that’s supposed to make you think and all that, rather than entertain.
Jokes aside, it is a really interesting experiment. It’s not pretty, it’s not even fun, but it certainly touches some of the ways in which a game can speak about us, both the author and the players. You should play it without reading any instructions, just… well, like creator Jason Roher says, fire it up and play it.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Fun bits</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/12/fun-bits/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:54:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/12/fun-bits/</guid>
      <description>Fun with boxes in Crysis. If you are not a demoscener then you may not already know that cubes can be beautiful.
Independent Games Festival finalists. Some great-looking stuff there (with interesting emphasis on rhythm games), and some are freely available. Best of lucks to all of them!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Montreal Games Summit</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/11/montreal-games-summit/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:57:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/11/montreal-games-summit/</guid>
      <description>Some good stuff coming from there, but from all the coverage I have had access to, this talk by Jonathan Blow is the most interesting (and complete – audio and slides included). A bit incomplete in the sense that it doesn’t address the need for commercial games to work as commercial products, but commercial viability is not his point anyway.
For some time I have held the belief that games have a hard time as meaningful forms of expression, because the kind of activity and instant-to-instant attention they require tends to overwhelm the mind and distract from what could be meaningful in them.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>XNA 2.0 Beta</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/11/xna-2.0-beta/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Nov 2007 23:13:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/11/xna-2.0-beta/</guid>
      <description>The beta is out, so I dusted off my test project and checked it out.
The transition was fairly painless, and the great news is that it works with Visual Studio 2005. No more of that Express crap! (to be fair, VC# Express is quite good for the price)
I was curious about the Content Pipeline stuff since I had never touched it before, so I set out to prepare a custom Model processor that would extract more detailed material parameters from the source art, including a property to specify a specific fx shader / effect.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Mario Galaxy</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/11/mario-galaxy/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 17 Nov 2007 23:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/11/mario-galaxy/</guid>
      <description>It is absolutely incredible. So much charm, creativity, humor, polish and attention to detail. After playing this, you will never again wonder why you bought a Wii.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Thank you GPG and some PS3 impressions</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/11/thank-you-gpg-and-some-ps3-impressions/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 11 Nov 2007 12:16:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/11/thank-you-gpg-and-some-ps3-impressions/</guid>
      <description>Gas Powered Games have released a patch that removes the SecuROM copy protection crap from Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. The game was released this week, so the patch has taken less than 4 days to arrive. Another game to add to the neverending pile!
I also bought a PS3. I knew I would get one sooner or later, and with the recent price discounts and Ratchet &amp;amp; Clank now out, there just wasn’t any reason to delay the inevitable.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Jericho!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/11/jericho/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 04 Nov 2007 19:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/11/jericho/</guid>
      <description>At last the chaps at Mercury Steam have released their baby. Gore, guts, twisted demons and tortured souls, the kind of stuff you would expect from Clive Barker. NOT subtle. 🙂
Reviews and fan response so far are quite spread, with a few reviews totally panning the game, a few loving it, and pretty much everything in between. Why? Well, because the game really IS a lot of different things. I’ll tell you what I think.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Collaborative Fiction</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/10/collaborative-fiction/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 21 Oct 2007 10:27:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/10/collaborative-fiction/</guid>
      <description>Via Indygamer, The Abrupt Goodbye is an intriguing little experiment about the nature of user-created content. It’s only been active for a few days and it already has over 5K entries, but in practice most conversations still feel very short (do the math). If you are curious, the author is commenting on the process in a forum thread.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Those Tip of the Day boxes you disable right away</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/10/those-tip-of-the-day-boxes-you-disable-right-away/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 15 Oct 2007 20:56:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/10/those-tip-of-the-day-boxes-you-disable-right-away/</guid>
      <description>I hate them. I run some application, and instead of letting me work right away, it decides to pop up and invariably tell me something I already know. My mind is already anticipating the first steps that I’m going to perform, and that flow is abruptly interrupted by the need to push that evil &amp;ldquo;Close&amp;rdquo; button. I normally choose to disable it immediately. However, sometimes there may be useful stuff lurking in there, but I never get to revisit them.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Orange Box</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/10/orange-box/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:16:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/10/orange-box/</guid>
      <description>Futureshop: &amp;ldquo;Sorry we sold out the few units we got.&amp;quot;
EBGames: &amp;ldquo;We only got a few copies and they sold out. Maybe in a few days.&amp;quot;
HMV: &amp;ldquo;Our order hasn’t arrived yet.&amp;quot;
Interesting launch for a Game Of The Year contender. 360 version BTW.
Edit: As a consolation, Puzzle Quest if finally out in XBLA. It’s a fantastic game.
Well, found a copy in Best Buy, and played through the regular Portal missions.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Things pile up</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/10/things-pile-up/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 05 Oct 2007 00:04:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/10/things-pile-up/</guid>
      <description>Almost done with Halo 3, but hoping for some coop runs. Being near the end of Blue Dragon still means quite a few hours left. Halfway through Super Paper Mario. Stuck in Guitar Hero Hard mode. HL Orange box is coming next week. Courtesy copy of Crash of the Titans arriving soon. Want to try World In Conflict. Still curious about Metroid Prime 3. Jericho in stores shortly. Mario Galaxy next month.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Halo</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/09/halo/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 25 Sep 2007 19:53:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/09/halo/</guid>
      <description>Unless you are hiding under a rock, or your name is trace, you probably know that Halo 3 has just been released with the hopes of becoming the fastest selling game ever. Regardless what you think of the game or the series, you will probably agree that this video is quite funny. I won’t be playing the game until next week, but I’m looking forward to it.
A demo of Crash of the Titans from Radical is also available for the 360.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Misc</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/09/misc/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 22 Sep 2007 02:26:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/09/misc/</guid>
      <description>I finally bought a Wii, so I’m playing Super Paper Mario (thanks Houmi!). Very entertaining, although the switching to 3D thing becomes more a gimmick as you play. Still, very imaginative maps and characters.
I also bought Blue Dragon on the 360, and I’m impressed. This thing is HUGE, I can see in excess of 40 hours to complete the main story, and god knows how much more for the side quests.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Crysis Rendering Techniques</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/09/crysis-rendering-techniques/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Sep 2007 21:58:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/09/crysis-rendering-techniques/</guid>
      <description>Very interesting material from Siggraph here. Information overload available at ACM’s SIGGRAPH Course index; take it easy. 🙂</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Prototype</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/09/prototype/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Sep 2007 21:49:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/09/prototype/</guid>
      <description>Trace wants to know less about the games I play, and more about the games I work on. 🙂 I joined Radical Entertainment to work on the Advanced Technology Group (known as ATG). We create the technology (the &amp;ldquo;Titanium&amp;rdquo; engine) that all game teams at Radical use to create their games. Radical’s ability to make that happen was one of the things that attracted me here. As I learn more about how they got to this point, I realize that it has been far from easy, but it’s not an impossible task like *ahem* previous experiences might suggest.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>And more games</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/09/and-more-games/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Sep 2007 21:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/09/and-more-games/</guid>
      <description>Bioshock is really good. It’s not perfect, but it does so many things so well, that it has won a place in my &amp;ldquo;best games of the past few years&amp;rdquo; list. I’m close to the end now, and I’m pretty sure that I won’t play it again after I’m done… but the very fact that I asked myself that question should be quite telling. The only modern games that I replayed immediately after finishing (normally at a higher difficulty) have been… Commander Keen, Doom, Quake, Quake2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (see a pattern?</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Bioshock Bugs</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/bioshock-bugs/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 21 Aug 2007 22:53:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/bioshock-bugs/</guid>
      <description>Grrrrr.
The game is good, but (a) subtitles are still heavily desynched like in the demo, and (b) save often, or you risk wasting lots of time when it crashes. I have 1:30 to replay. 🙁 This is on 360, so I can’t blame the drivers.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>New Kenta Cho Game</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/new-kenta-cho-game/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 19 Aug 2007 23:52:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/new-kenta-cho-game/</guid>
      <description>From Indygamer, Kenta Cho’s latest little gem in Flash, Least Best Room. It’s very original, and more than a little claustrophobic. If you are curious about what you’re supposed to do, check out this video.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Bioshock</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/bioshock/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Aug 2007 22:05:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/bioshock/</guid>
      <description>The 360 demo is available on Live, and it kicks some serious ass. Combat can get a bit confusing, and there was some odd problem with the timing of subtitles, but I’m sold.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Siggraph</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/siggraph/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 11 Aug 2007 23:59:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/siggraph/</guid>
      <description>Via Beyond 3D, Non-exhaustive list of papers presented at Siggraph. Unfortunately, no links to the actual papers, but at least you get an idea what to look for, and there’s a video at the top that illustrates some of the stuff. Feel free to add links to papers in the replies. One example is Seam Carving.
Also, some details about the new OpenGL standards.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>XNA</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/xna/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 09 Aug 2007 20:37:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/xna/</guid>
      <description>CoDe Magazine has published a rather large article about XNA games development, with a lot of input from professional developers like Jamie Fristrom and Raph Koster (both linked in the left sidebar). There’s a lot of repetition, but it does bring home the point that XNA and C# can be useful even for professional developers today, and will most certainly become more useful in the future. I have only done a couple of minor experiments with XNA 1.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Smart Shooters</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/smart-shooters/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 08 Aug 2007 00:18:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/smart-shooters/</guid>
      <description>By now I have finally accepted that I don’t like them. What’s a &amp;ldquo;smart shooter&amp;rdquo;? A First Person Shooter type of game where the emphasis is more on atmosphere and story (the environment in which you do things) than on raw gameplay (the things you actually do). The classic examples were System Shock 1 &amp;amp; 2… I tried SS1 and had zero fun with it. The story bits and character progression in SS2 kept me hooked for about 2 hours, but at that point the cruddy combat just got to me.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Raid and Boss Design</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/raid-and-boss-design/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:39:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/08/raid-and-boss-design/</guid>
      <description>I just ran into this writeup of a presentation by Blizzard lead designers about their processes and criteria for creating instances and bosses. Short but very interesting.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Sunshine</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/07/sunshine/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 28 Jul 2007 01:54:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/07/sunshine/</guid>
      <description>Despite a number of oddities, Sunshine is the best Science-Fiction movie in many years. Visually stunning, excellent music, and a story with a lot of personality despite being essentially a mish-mash of sci-fi topics already used in previous movies.
The commercial success of this movie is doomed due to the strange way in which distributors have handled it, with late and staggered releases and a marketing campaign that tells too much.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Games and demos</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/07/games-and-demos/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/07/games-and-demos/</guid>
      <description>The Darkness: it’s fun, it’s creepy, it’s quite good. The 360 version looks way better than what I remember of the short PS3 testdrive I did a few weeks ago. Cutscene animations are very stiff.
Tomb Raider Legend: I finally sat down to play it through to the end. Very good platforming and puzzles, simplistic combat, and weird bosses with pretty bad (accelerated?) animations. Quite nice overall, and great value at $19.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>E3, Transformers and a new JJ Abrams Mistery</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/07/e3-transformers-and-a-new-jj-abrams-mistery/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 15 Jul 2007 10:50:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/07/e3-transformers-and-a-new-jj-abrams-mistery/</guid>
      <description>Voodoo Extreme has collected a fantastic index of coverage and trailers from E3. I suppose the new E3 format sucks for game fans and small/hobby game sites and bloggers, but looks much better and useful for developer and publishers doing actual work. As a visitor I’ll miss the old E3, as a developer I think I won’t.
The Transformers movie was exactly as expected: cheesy, long, boring and mostly irrelevant script, fast and erratic editing, saturated colors, and excellent CGI and explosions.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>From zero to&amp;#8230; a f*ng mess</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/07/from-zero-to#8230-a-fng-mess/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 Jul 2007 09:04:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/07/from-zero-to#8230-a-fng-mess/</guid>
      <description>A week before E3, someone unveils a Circuit City ad with a PS3 announced for $100 less. People speculate of a PS3 price drop. Sony categorically denies. E3 arrives, and Sony formally announces a $100 price drop. Ok, the deny-then-confirm tactic is old and tired, but hey… the PS3 needs all the help they can get, because they are simply not selling like they should.
E3 goes well for Sony, with a number of interesting exclusive games, and the general impression is that PS3 is going to start taking off.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Ratatouille</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/07/ratatouille/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:38:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/07/ratatouille/</guid>
      <description>Call me a fanboy if you want, but I just came out of the movie theater feeling that Ratatouille is the best animated movie ever made, and one of the best movies of any kind in many years. Script, characters, visual design, animation, rendering technology, pacing, humour… I absolutely loved all of it. I spent the entire movie with an unmistakable feeling of pure joy in my chest.
It does many things against what we may consider &amp;ldquo;mainstream business sense&amp;rdquo;, from the rat theme, to the french accents and the adult themes in an animated movie… and it’s probably going to pay for it with a less than stellar box office.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Canada Day</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/07/canada-day/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 02 Jul 2007 23:28:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/07/canada-day/</guid>
      <description>July 1st is Canada Day, so there was lots of partying all over the city. At night they put out a neat fireworks show up over Canada Place. I took the Nikon and a tripod, and went over there with Sergio and Diego. You can see a little gallery here. This is just a sample:</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Funky Visual Studio 2005 bug</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/06/funky-visual-studio-2005-bug/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Jun 2007 01:32:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/06/funky-visual-studio-2005-bug/</guid>
      <description>I ran into this today with VS2005 SP1: if you define the body of a specialization of a template class’ member function in a separate cpp file, the linker will barf:
  `template&amp;lt;class T&amp;gt; struct A { void f() {} };template&amp;lt;&amp;gt; void A::f(); // body in a separate cpp    You have to define the body in all source files (or at least one) that actually use the specialization of that function, normally in the header file:</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Region locks</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/06/region-locks/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 18 Jun 2007 01:07:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/06/region-locks/</guid>
      <description>My european copies of Gears of War, Lego Star Wars 2, King Kong and Tomb Raider Legend work on an american 360. Burnout and PGR3 don’t. I hope the PS3 marks the end of region-locked games forever; I hate them. Actually, I’m not sure if Wii games are also region coded. Anyway, that’s the mini-rant before going to sleep.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>State of the Next Gen</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/06/state-of-the-next-gen/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 16 Jun 2007 16:34:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/06/state-of-the-next-gen/</guid>
      <description>No more Vista posts for a while. 🙂
It seems that my bold predictions for the Nintendo Wii were only half right. The Wii is a runaway success (it is still impossible to find one on the shelves here in Vancouver), but in terms of software sales, Nintendo games are the only real sellers for that system. Add to that the impressive numbers for the Nintendo DS.
Meanwhile, the XBox 360 and the especially the PS3 are having a hard time penetrating the market.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Firefox and Vista</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/06/firefox-and-vista/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 10 Jun 2007 10:27:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/06/firefox-and-vista/</guid>
      <description>Another annoyance gone now: with Firefox installed and set as the default browser, clicking on links in applications would result in an annoying error message from Vista despite Firefox opening the link correctly. Same happens if you type a URL in an Explorer window. This popup only happens if Firefox was not already running. The fix is to remove or rename the registry key:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\FirefoxURL\shell\open\ddeexec
This key will reappear when Firefox is updated, so you may want to prepare a .</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Blizzard does it again</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/06/blizzard-does-it-again/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/06/blizzard-does-it-again/</guid>
      <description>I know a few people got the Starcraft urge after the SC2 announcement; a couple of them even went and bought it again. I might have done likewise if I didn’t have Supreme Commander. But this?
Starcraft Battlechest and Warcraft 3 Battlechest up in the top 10 PC sales. The former is 9 years old, the later 5. And of course WoW and its expansion taking the top 2 spots. It’s just insane.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Tower Defense</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/06/tower-defense/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 03 Jun 2007 21:55:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/06/tower-defense/</guid>
      <description>If you have never played a Tower Defense game, now is the time to check them out by downloading the demo for Immortal Defense (via Indygamer). I believe this game concept originated as a mod for Starcraft and later Warcraft 3, but it has become a subgenre of strategy games in itself. The idea is simple: place and upgrade static defenses and destroy the incoming enemy waves. Different towers have different abilities, and the amount of enemies can be overwhelming at times, so make the most out of your limited resources!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Vista!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/05/vista/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 May 2007 22:55:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/05/vista/</guid>
      <description>I have installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my desktop PC. So far, the usual: it is prettier but it feels noticeably slower and more unstable. The OS keeps asking for permission to do anything, but I know where that comes from and I don’t mind.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Lost</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/05/lost/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 24 May 2007 00:04:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/05/lost/</guid>
      <description>I just finished watching the 3rd season’s finale, and despite having found most of this season fairly uninteresting, I think the finale is among the best endings of a TV series I have ever seen. The finales of Battlestar Galactica’s 2nd season and Invasion’s first and only were very good as well, whereas this years’s Heroes has been a bit meh, 24 was &amp;ldquo;more of the same&amp;rdquo; and BSG was downright terrible.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Supreme Commander</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/05/supreme-commander/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 May 2007 00:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/05/supreme-commander/</guid>
      <description>I’ll keep it short: the actual game is not so terrible, and all in all it seems a nice update of true Total Annihilation gameplay. I played the first few campaign missions and I found them fairly uninspired: complete some early objectives before the map expands and then decimate a large enemy base. Fun but a bit monotonous.
The only problem that remains is that the game freezes my PC after about 10-20 minutes of playing.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>RTS time!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/05/rts-time/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 19 May 2007 19:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/05/rts-time/</guid>
      <description>Unless you are hiding under a rock, you will know by now that Blizzard has officially announced Starcraft 2. Juciy cinematic and gameplay videos are cluttering the Internet, fanboys and detractors heated in dialectic debates about the apparent lack of a difference between this game and the original. Me? I loved the original and I don’t mind Starcraft 1.5 with a visual upgrade. I don’t mind that at all. It looks exactly how I hoped it would, nothing more and nothing less.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>And more on game reviews</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/05/and-more-on-game-reviews/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 09 May 2007 22:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/05/and-more-on-game-reviews/</guid>
      <description>I wish they were all as honest as this. But what would have David Jaffe done if that was about his game?
Nah, I bet he would have loved it.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Don&amp;#8217;t anger the game developer!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/05/don#8217t-anger-the-game-developer/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 02 May 2007 09:16:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/05/don#8217t-anger-the-game-developer/</guid>
      <description>David Jaffe (THE God of War creator) just finished a completely different kind of project: casual, downloadable, $10 PS3 game &amp;ldquo;Calling All Cars&amp;rdquo;. Then, Gamespot gave it a 6.7. David didn’t like it, but apparently something in the reviews (he says the IGN one) made them decide to spend a bit more time fixing some problems. Joystiq made fun of him, and he got really mad.
I like to see game developers voicing opinions, and I have my share of secretly (or not so secretly) hated gaming sites and reviewers… but when one of our industry’s best tells a gaming site to just &amp;ldquo;Fuck you, guys.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Frabrausch does it again</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/04/frabrausch-does-it-again/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 23 Apr 2007 23:50:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/04/frabrausch-does-it-again/</guid>
      <description>They are back. Hope your machine is up to the task! (If not, here’s a Youtube alternative)</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Stick demo</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/04/stick-demo/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 22 Apr 2007 12:21:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/04/stick-demo/</guid>
      <description>Indie team Wired Weasel have finally released a public demo of Stick. This game received an award at the 2006 Art Futura videogame development contest, in which I had the honor of being part of the jury. Very simple game, but well polished and it will surely bring a smile to your face.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>More Jericho love</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/04/more-jericho-love/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 21 Apr 2007 09:43:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/04/more-jericho-love/</guid>
      <description>There is a new trailer for Mercury Steam’s next game, and it is fantastic. Enric &amp;amp; crew are busting their asses, and it´s great to see that the effort is paying (but now we want more in-game footage!). If you like Clive Barker’s horror style (and I certainly do), this will be a must.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>And some best wishes</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/04/and-some-best-wishes/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 18 Apr 2007 23:31:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/04/and-some-best-wishes/</guid>
      <description>Noel Llopis has left High Moon Studios to create his own little studio, Power Of 2 Games. Best of lucks to you two!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Jet Pac</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/03/jet-pac/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 29 Mar 2007 22:23:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/03/jet-pac/</guid>
      <description>This is a trip down memory lane! Jet Pac Reloaded is now available for download in XBox Live Arcade. For those not insanely old, Jet Pac was an 8-bit game released sometime around 1982. I played it on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and it’s a very dear game to me for several reasons.
This is the game that distinctly made me want to make games. I was 12 years old, but I used to say &amp;ldquo;someday I will make a Jet Pac&amp;rdquo;.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Will Wright material</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/03/will-wright-material/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Mar 2007 00:25:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/03/will-wright-material/</guid>
      <description>Will Wright gave a keynote speech at the SXSW conference. i had never heard of it, but if Will was there, it can’t totally suck. 🙂 3pointD has a fantastic transcription.
I’ll keep at least one quote: &amp;ldquo;Movie: What’s going to happen next? Games: Can I accomplish this?&amp;quot; He also mentions Groundhog Day and Truman Show, both of which are extremely popular among gamers, because they speak about the world in terms that any gamer will recognize.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>GDC materials</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/03/gdc-materials/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 10 Mar 2007 13:31:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/03/gdc-materials/</guid>
      <description>Go to the GDC page, head to the 2007 Written Proceedings sections, and start downloading! With no way to filter pieces by upload date (to find new downloads), and meaningless filenames, it’s not the most user-friendly system ever created, but it should still be very worth the trouble.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Chris Hecker is a moron</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/03/chris-hecker-is-a-moron/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 08 Mar 2007 21:06:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/03/chris-hecker-is-a-moron/</guid>
      <description>He really is. And if someone gets offended by this opinion, perhaps I will apologize.
Maybe. I find it hard to get over the fact that for all his blahblah about who is doing what for the industry, he has never shipped a finished game. Fucking clown.
In other news, I’ve been in Vancouver for over a week now. The relocation process is going quite smooth. Even with the rain, I love the city and all it has to offer.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Backcompat boomerang</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/02/backcompat-boomerang/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Feb 2007 07:29:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/02/backcompat-boomerang/</guid>
      <description>Yet another let down for Europe’s Playstation customers.
&amp;ldquo;the European hardware specification for the PlayStation 3 seems to show that the original PlayStation 2 “Emotion Engine” is no longer included, presumably necessitating the new reliance on software emulation for older titles.&amp;quot;
I hope Sony’s own ninjas are up to the task. You can check here for the list of PS2 titles confirmed to work on the European PS3. Oh wait, you can’t, because there’s none, and there will be none until the console is out.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Moving!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/02/moving/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:43:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/02/moving/</guid>
      <description>Late last year, I accepted a job offer from Radical Entertainment, and I will be moving to rainy Vancouver next Monday. The past month has been quite busy with preparations, spending time with friends and family, and yes, playing World of Warcraft as well. The arrangements for the move have been fairly smooth thanks to Radical’s fine HR crew Nicole and Marc (good luck in Google!). I expect to do a lot more hands-on programming there than I have been able to during the past years.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>WOW Expansion Pack</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/wow-expansion-pack/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 16 Jan 2007 19:16:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/wow-expansion-pack/</guid>
      <description>The Burning Crusade, World of Warcraft’s first expansion pack, is out, and presumably, 8 million subscribers will be buying it in the next few weeks. As far as numbers go, it should become the fastest selling videogame in history. Aside from a few bugs and the expected server overloads / crashes, the launch seems to have gone quite smoothly, and most people are loving it (me included!). It is more of the same polished and playable gameplay and content, don’t expect any radical changes.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Procedural city generation</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/procedural-city-generation/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 13 Jan 2007 05:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/procedural-city-generation/</guid>
      <description>Everyone’s favourite indie developer Introversion have started a very promising development blog where they hope to describe the ongoing process for their new project Subversion. In one of the entries, Chris shows some prototype work on procedurally-generated cities, including a fascinating (and hard to play – use VLC Player) video.
The whole thing reminds me of an older post.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>AAA Development Contracts</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/aaa-development-contracts/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 12 Jan 2007 10:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/aaa-development-contracts/</guid>
      <description>Gamasutra has posted a commented reproduction of the Call of Duty: Their Finest Hour development contract between Sparks Interactive and Activision. This document was made public as part of the legal battle between the two companies. It contains everything: clauses, obligations, warranties, assignment of rights, dates and payments, royalties, key team members – the whole shebang. Three lawyers comment the details of each section, and what problems they think could arise in the future.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Gameto</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/gameto/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jan 2007 09:14:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/gameto/</guid>
      <description>Designostic, the Spanish game design site, has been recreated as Gameto. It includes a News section along with the Articles, and a lot of new features. The intent of the site creators is to extend its coverage to all aspects of videogame development. I went ahead and submitted a Review of what I consider to be one of the best games of 2006, Lego Star Wars II.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Interactive Fiction</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/interactive-fiction/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 10 Jan 2007 06:27:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/interactive-fiction/</guid>
      <description>In the wake of the Slamdance fiasco (6 finalists have already dropped), I’m ending up checking the entries. I ran into Book &amp;amp; Volume, and thought it might give me new respect for the current state of Interactive Fiction.
After 5 minutes, it’s only given me despair. It works like a classic text adventure: a bunch of text and a prompt where you write what you want to do. So the game starts: I’m in a room, there’s a pager buzzing.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Super Columbine Massacre RPG!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/super-columbine-massacre-rpg/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 08 Jan 2007 09:34:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/super-columbine-massacre-rpg/</guid>
      <description>These past days I’ve been increasingly interested in the controversy raised by this game, its inclusion and later removal from the roster of finalists of the Slamdance Festival, and the debates the whole thing has created. I won’t bother linking every piece of the story, as other people have already done so. You can download the game from the Manifesto site, or (given how bad the actual gameplay is) watch a video run of it.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Juul on Goals, Freedom and Challenge</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/juul-on-goals-freedom-and-challenge/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 03 Jan 2007 19:31:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/juul-on-goals-freedom-and-challenge/</guid>
      <description>Excellent article here. Worthy alone for the differentiation between having goals and pushing the player in certain directions. It should be obvious that &amp;ldquo;giving you something to do&amp;rdquo;, and &amp;ldquo;forcing you to do something&amp;rdquo; do not need to be present together, but I had never thought of that in the context of sandbox and linear games.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Happy New Year!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/happy-new-year/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 02 Jan 2007 09:18:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2007/01/happy-new-year/</guid>
      <description>Best wishes to everyone reading this! The rest can go f… nah, best wishes to them as well. 🙂</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Children of Men</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/12/children-of-men/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 26 Dec 2006 12:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/12/children-of-men/</guid>
      <description>Whereas the visuals for Hard Candy didn’t totally do it for me, Children of Men is a whole different thing. A very unforgiving look at how our modern society would destroy itself if the reins were let a bit loose. The movie has some problems with pacing and very unlikely resolutions to some situations, but it still well worth watching. The visual design is amazing and (in my opinion) deserves at least an Oscar for Cinematography.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Ask and you shall be given</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/12/ask-and-you-shall-be-given/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 15 Dec 2006 14:06:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/12/ask-and-you-shall-be-given/</guid>
      <description>The good news is that Soul Calibur 2 Xbox is among the new batch of gamessupported by the 360 emulator. The bad news is that only the US version does. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr. I know that my brother and the other Ninjas keep working their asses to make this stuff happen, but sometimes I think I’m jinxed. I’ve never been much into fighting games, but the Soul Calibur was uniquely awesome and still my favourite.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>When backwards compatibility goes wrong</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/12/when-backwards-compatibility-goes-wrong/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 13 Dec 2006 15:37:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/12/when-backwards-compatibility-goes-wrong/</guid>
      <description>After all the jabs that Sony threw on Microsoft for being unable to play ALL XBox games in its 360 backcompat emulator, someone decided to check how Sony’s efforts are much better. This video is the result, and does create serious doubts that anyone will want to play their PS2 games on a PS3. If they work at all, that is, because Sony has a list and even a database of their own.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>XNA 1.0</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/12/xna-1.0/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 12 Dec 2006 13:07:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/12/xna-1.0/</guid>
      <description>Microsoft’s XNA Games Studio Express 1.0 has been released, opening the door (for a price) to homebrew XBox 360 development. Will it work, or flop like Sony’s PS1 Yaroze? $100 a year, lack of networking, and the inability of unsubscribed users to run your games are not homebrew-friendly features.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The REAL casual gamers</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/12/the-real-casual-gamers/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 Dec 2006 06:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/12/the-real-casual-gamers/</guid>
      <description>My 2 sisters and my parents never really understood my brother’s and my own fixation with videgames. They mostly accepted it, understood it was something that we enjoyed, and at some point they were happy that we made successful (even if a bit rollercoaster-like) careers out of it. The closest thing they got to enjoying a videogame was watching me play Ico.
Marta was sometimes curious about some games when she was much younger, but since then she kind of felt that videogames were a terrible way to waste one’s spare time.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>More confusion</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/more-confusion/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Nov 2006 15:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/more-confusion/</guid>
      <description>So, Scott Miller thinks Valve is not a good route to follow, with quotes like &amp;ldquo;I’m not a big fan of using Steam, because I’m not a fan of a strong competitor of ours having access to our download stats and revenue totals.&amp;quot; or &amp;ldquo;if Valve doesn’t do well for a game or two, Steam will get cut before their internal game development&amp;rdquo;. Then, the same day, Prey gets released on Steam.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Gears of War</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/gears-of-war/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 25 Nov 2006 18:03:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/gears-of-war/</guid>
      <description>I finally had a few hours to sit down and play the game through to the end. It is verygood, probably the shooter I’ve enjoyed the most since the original Halo. The technology is brilliant, the levels and firefights are very well designed, and the production is fantastic. It’s a lot of fun to play, and brings a fresh approach to the genre. It takes a while getting used to the controls, movement and cover-based fighting, but the first Act does a good job of teaching you all of that without being too easy.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Titanion</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/titanion/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Nov 2006 19:22:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/titanion/</guid>
      <description>Kenta Cho has done it again. A stylish, abstract, frantic shooter with a twist – you can capture enemies to increase your firepower.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The Next Gen</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/the-next-gen/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Nov 2006 15:14:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/the-next-gen/</guid>
      <description>Gears of War is reallygood. The PS3 has launched, even if with very limited units and a number of problems. The Wii is out in force. It’s going to be hard to not spend a LOT of money this xmas. 🙂</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Future</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/future/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 12 Nov 2006 03:04:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/future/</guid>
      <description>Some people have emailed me to ask if &amp;ldquo;what they have heard&amp;rdquo; is true. Yes, it is: this Christmas I will be leaving Pyro Studios. Unlike other veterans, I’m staying in the games industry; I have already accepted a job offer outside of Spain, which means I will be doing a lot of packing in a couple months.
Leaving the company at which I have worked hard for the past eight years was a hard decision, but in hindsight it was inevitable.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>When things don&amp;#8217;t go as planned</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/when-things-don#8217t-go-as-planned/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 10 Nov 2006 17:04:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/when-things-don#8217t-go-as-planned/</guid>
      <description>I just came back from having dinner with Enric Alvarez, the CEO of Mercury Steam and currently hard at work on Clive Barker’s Jericho. We shared a roundtable a couple weeks ago in Art Futura, but didn’t have much time to talk there. Great food and even better conversation. Although it’s not been easy for such a small studio, they seem to be doing a great job transitioning into the fabled next-gen.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>XNA Games Studio Express</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/xna-games-studio-express/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 09 Nov 2006 18:13:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/xna-games-studio-express/</guid>
      <description>I sat down today to check out what’s inside XNA Games Studio, the platform which Microsoft touts as the future of bedroom games coding (well, sort of). It’s still in beta 2, and it doesn’t support XBox 360 executables yet, but it works fairly well. I ported my old C# game experiment without much pain, and you can check the results here. Don’t expect a lot of polish in the code or the actual game: the platform is still beta after all, so I didn’t want to spend more than a few hours with it.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Defcon</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/defcon/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 01 Nov 2006 01:58:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/11/defcon/</guid>
      <description>After waking up somewhat early, I sat down and tried Defcon by &amp;ldquo;the last of the bedroom coders&amp;rdquo; Introversion Software. The game’s premise and visuals are fascinating: an RTS about global thermonuclear warfare, with a graphical style borrowed from tactical displays (as seen in movies like the inspirational Wargames).
After a simple and clear tutorial, you can start freeform games in a multiplayer-oriented fashion. There are no campaign or missions, but you can make games versus AI.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>El Laberinto Del Fauno</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/10/el-laberinto-del-fauno/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 24 Oct 2006 16:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/10/el-laberinto-del-fauno/</guid>
      <description>I just watched the movie El Laberinto Del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth), by fantasy film master Guillermo Del Toro. What a wonderful movie! It is a dramatic and at times gruesome fairytale set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, with stunning visuals and a gripping story. One of the best films of this year, which sadly won’t get enough worldwide attention due to it being recorded in spanish.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Doom!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/10/doom/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 14 Oct 2006 05:18:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/10/doom/</guid>
      <description>I just bought Doom on the 360 Live Arcade Marketplace… Ahh the memories! As a port it’s quite cheaply done, doesn’t even properly support 16:9 screens, and they certainly haven’t touched any gameplay, graphics or features. But the old magic is there: maze-y levels, secrets with disguised hints, cheap scares, and LOTS of baddies to rip apart! Raw, unadulterated gameplay, without catering to mundane things such as &amp;ldquo;story&amp;rdquo;, &amp;ldquo;realism&amp;rdquo; or &amp;ldquo;coherence&amp;rdquo;.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Online Distribution and DRM</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/10/online-distribution-and-drm/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 10 Oct 2006 17:27:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/10/online-distribution-and-drm/</guid>
      <description>Scott Miller used to praise  online distribution of games, and Triton as the future king of the hill. I guess he was a bit hasty: Triton has apparently shut down operations, and left Prey (and their other games) buyers out in the cold.
This highlights the biggest issue with Digital Rights Management, online distribution, and the concept of consumers having to buy not only the goods, but the right to use them: to what extent should the law bend to protect the sellers, rather than the buyers?</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Software development, Agile and Google</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/10/software-development-agile-and-google/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 05 Oct 2006 16:48:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/10/software-development-agile-and-google/</guid>
      <description>Via Joel, I ran into this excellent article and discussion: &amp;ldquo;Good Agile, Bad Agile.&amp;quot; It’s long and detailed, but very humorous and energic. It attacks the &amp;ldquo;official&amp;rdquo; approach to Agile Development and Extreme Programming, and then moves on to discuss how Google’s process is vastly superior to anything else.
Obviously, what works for Google may not necessarily work for other companies, other products, and other markets. What company could afford to run a beta for over two years, and not be laughed at?</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Wii bits</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/10/wii-bits/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 04 Oct 2006 16:23:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/10/wii-bits/</guid>
      <description>Ars Technica ran an article entitled &amp;ldquo;How the Wii was born.&amp;quot; Nothing earth-shattering, but it’s a nice read with a bit more details about the design decisions and philosophy behind the hardware.
Kim Pallister also offers some doubts about the Wii pricepoints and launch strategy. I can’t entirely agree with the specifics, but I do with the overall idea that perhaps a bit more agressive pricing might help a lot. We’ll see in a few months.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Overengineering in games</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/09/overengineering-in-games/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 18 Sep 2006 15:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/09/overengineering-in-games/</guid>
      <description>Wonderful article (in Spanish) by Sergio Garcés, in Designostic.
Think about the code you might have to write, but write only the code you knowyou have to write.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Wii are disappointed</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/09/wii-are-disappointed/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 17 Sep 2006 02:53:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/09/wii-are-disappointed/</guid>
      <description>Wow, the final details on Nintendo Wii’s launch came out this week, and the gaming world seems to be less than impressed. Every final number is at the high end of the bracket people were considering &amp;ldquo;reasonable&amp;rdquo;. In Europe:
– 250 euros for the console (Wii Sports included)
– 40e for extra wiimote + 20e for extra nunchuck
– games priced between 50e and 60e
– release in December so if the console is a success you might have trouble getting one for xmas.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Joel&amp;#8217;s gems</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/09/joel#8217s-gems/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 11 Sep 2006 03:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/09/joel#8217s-gems/</guid>
      <description>I have Joel on Software linked on the sidebar list but, if you are like most people, you have ignored it. However, if you are a software developer of any kind, there is a recent series of articles that you simply can not afford to miss:
– Finding Great Developers
– A Field Guide to Developers
– Sorting Resumes</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Obligatory Will Wright link</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/09/obligatory-will-wright-link/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 04 Sep 2006 01:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/09/obligatory-will-wright-link/</guid>
      <description>He spoke at the BAFTA in UK, and Functional Autonomy has posted a writeup of it.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Shoot&amp;#8217;em Up Competition</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/09/shoot#8217em-up-competition/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 01 Sep 2006 09:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/09/shoot#8217em-up-competition/</guid>
      <description>The folks over at shmup-dev have started a new competition to develop a 2D shooter with the rule that there must be some form of weapon autofire. Considering that this feature is extremely common, it’s safe to say that pretty much any shooter you could come up with qualifies for the competition. I hope many entries will take the opportunity to do something interesting with the autofire concept.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Adams on the cultural impact of games</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/08/adams-on-the-cultural-impact-of-games/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 17 Aug 2006 02:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/08/adams-on-the-cultural-impact-of-games/</guid>
      <description>Wow, it’s been almost a month since I last wrote anything here. I guess blogging is a state of mind, not so much about the importance of the content you write, but about feeling like communicating it to other people. Guess I’ve been a bit asocial lately. 🙂
You can read Ernest Adams’ wonderful article here. He talks about the need for culturally respectable games in order to consolidate videogames as a respected medium itself.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>More lectures!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/07/more-lectures/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 16 Jul 2006 14:44:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/07/more-lectures/</guid>
      <description>I just came back from Mundos Digitales 2006 in La Coruña, where I gave a lecture on Game Design. It was a blast! Lots of interesting presentations, great people from the animation and computer graphics industry, and a whole load of fun partying at night.
Next week I’ll be flying to the north of Spain again. The GameLab group at the Universidad de Oviedo has invited me to give a similar lecture.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Episodic content</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/07/episodic-content/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 12 Jul 2006 15:28:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/07/episodic-content/</guid>
      <description>Mark Rein’s dismissal of episodic content as a &amp;ldquo;broken model&amp;rdquo;.
He mentions marketability, user interest, price and other things that have come up in this thread. Can’t wait for the full writeup. Although I can’t avoid a certain level of agreement with him, it does seem to me that he’s talking as if the whole distribution and publishing model is not going to change at all.
 Yes, in the current retail, console manufacturer-controled, extremely competitive market, boxed episodic content can’t work.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Game Design Blog (in spanish)</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/game-design-blog-in-spanish/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/game-design-blog-in-spanish/</guid>
      <description>Unos cuantos profesionales de esto de hacer juegos han creado un blog en español desde el que van a contar muchas cosas interesantes: Designostic. Espero que pronto se convierta en una visita obligada para todos aquellos desarrolladores españoles. Hale, todos a suscribirse a su RSS y a participar (aunque para empezar solo sea un &amp;ldquo;hola&amp;rdquo;)! 🙂</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Backcompat redux</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/backcompat-redux/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Jun 2006 12:29:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/backcompat-redux/</guid>
      <description>Apparently, complaining in public worked for Tim Schafer’s Psychonauts:
_&amp;ldquo;We are working on Psychonauts, I promise.Later,
Alan Stuart Emulation Ninja Xbox 360 Team&amp;rdquo;Or maybe it’s just pure coincidence.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>On the reliabilty of software</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/on-the-reliabilty-of-software/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 17 Jun 2006 13:51:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/on-the-reliabilty-of-software/</guid>
      <description>I ran into this paper which addresses the topic of software reliability from a (to me) very surprising point of view. In a nutshell, it defends the notion that our computing model (Turing’s) ties together software complexity and unreliability, but there are fundamentally different approaches where increased complexity actually increases reliability as well. Integrated circuits and our very own brain use such approaches.
It is true that Alan Turing and Fred Brooks are among the worshipped gods of modern software engineering.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>High Voltage</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/high-voltage/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:32:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/high-voltage/</guid>
      <description>I only spent one year working at High Voltage Software in Chicago, but I have many fond memories of my time there. One of these was working with Eric Nofsinger, who is featured in this Gamasutra feature.While he may sound fairly corporate in his responses, he’s as driven and talented as they come. He describes some of the joys and woes of being an independent developer, working with licensed material, and striving to create original IP.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Bye bye Bill Gates</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/bye-bye-bill-gates/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 15 Jun 2006 17:38:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/bye-bye-bill-gates/</guid>
      <description>Well, not for a couple years but still quite a bombshell. The interesting part is, pretty much every comment seems to agree in lamenting that it’s not Steve Ballmer going away instead.
Hm, too many Microsoft-related posts lately, I gotta start looking elsewhere.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Backwards compatibility</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/backwards-compatibility/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Jun 2006 17:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/backwards-compatibility/</guid>
      <description>This is too funny. If you are a fan of Psychonauts, you might want to send Microsoft [an email](mailto:backcomp@microsoft.com?subject=Please support my favourite game) expressing your preferences for backwards compatibility support on the 360, but I suggest you get a bit more creative than a straight cut &amp;amp; paste of Tim Schaeffer’s text. 🙂
Rumour has it that Criterion’s Burnout team offered their support to make their XBox game work on the emulator, and ended up releasing a native (and awesome) version instead.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Coding Standards</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/coding-standards/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:57:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/coding-standards/</guid>
      <description>Programmers and programming teams should strive to use a reasonably well defined and consistent set of coding standards in their projects. These typically include rules for notation (use of case and special characters in identifiers, etc), style (layout of language elements within the source code), and idioms (specific usage of language features).
The benefits of a clear and useful coding standard are twofold: make the code easy to read and understand even in the absence of code inspection tools or previous knowledge, and encourage the creation of code whose performance and functionality are safe, predictable, verifiable and maintainable.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The Game Tribune</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/the-game-tribune/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 09 Jun 2006 01:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/the-game-tribune/</guid>
      <description>This new spanish webmag just published their first issue, which includes an article by yours truly. Best of lucks to Bor and all the crew!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>More wonderful movies</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/more-wonderful-movies/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 Jun 2006 17:14:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/more-wonderful-movies/</guid>
      <description>A History of Violence and Lord of War. It’s a great time to be a movie lover.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Tolerance, ideology and the modern world</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/tolerance-ideology-and-the-modern-world/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 04 Jun 2006 07:17:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/06/tolerance-ideology-and-the-modern-world/</guid>
      <description>Over the past few years, I have devoted short chunks of time to reflect on what is my personal ideology. I suppose age is a natural motivator for this sort of process, but there have been other fuels burning that fire. Most notable among them is being accused of ideological relativism; of offering explanations to phenomena rather than solutions to problems; of flagging any subject on which I don’t have a strong position as being too unfocused to be worthy of an position; of using tolerance as an excuse for avoiding a clear standing on subjects in which I am actually not confident, or more to the point, knowledgeable.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Bringing on corporate change</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/05/bringing-on-corporate-change/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 21 May 2006 17:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/05/bringing-on-corporate-change/</guid>
      <description>The MiniMicrosoft blog has been a very popular place for Microsofties to anonymously bring up and discuss the issues that plague their company. For those of us not in the loop, the blog might be just a PR stunt by the company’s HR department, or maybe it’s exactly what it says and has somehow managed to avoid being bombed by Microsoft’s policy-enforcement teams. I don’t know. But they are pounding their chest a lot on the recent announcements by MS executives regarding certain HR practices.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The Axe swings again</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/05/the-axe-swings-again/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 13 May 2006 02:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/05/the-axe-swings-again/</guid>
      <description>While all our attention was focused on the bells and whistles of E3, bad things were happening back in Viena. My condolences to the over 100 guys and gals who are now looking for another job. Special best wishes to ex-democoder fellow and great dude Erik Pojar. It’s eerie that this news comes a week after Take 2 decided to close their Salt Lake City studio Indie Built, and just a few days after they announced the opening of a new studio in Shangai.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>SpacePaint available</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/05/spacepaint-available/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 08 May 2006 16:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/05/spacepaint-available/</guid>
      <description>Inspired by the 48-hour game compo and Jari Komppa’s excellent And The Sky Is Full Of Stars, I sat down and wrote a little minigame, unimaginatively named SpacePaint. Source code included so you can have a laugh. It served as a nice learning tool for the most basic OpenGL, which I had actually never used before (go figure).
Even though the difficulty is not properly balanced, I’m quite happy about the way this strange gameplay concept worked out.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Original IP?</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/05/original-ip/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 04 May 2006 14:52:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/05/original-ip/</guid>
      <description>From EA’s press release: &amp;ldquo;At E3, EA will debut of Orcs &amp;amp; Elves, id Software’s first originalintellectual property since Quake&amp;rdquo;
Orcs &amp;amp; Elves are original. Woooohoooo! 🙂</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The birth of the 360</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/05/the-birth-of-the-360/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 May 2006 17:43:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/05/the-birth-of-the-360/</guid>
      <description>The GameSetWatch people continue to be a great source of interesting reads. This time it’s about the process of creating the XBox 360.
One excerpt surprised me: &amp;ldquo;Microsoft’s brass was worried that Sony would trump the Xbox 360 by coming out with more memory in the PlayStation 3. So in the spring of 2005, Microsoft made what would become a fateful decision. It decided to double the amount of memory in the box, from 256 megabytes to 512.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Word of mouth</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/word-of-mouth/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 30 Apr 2006 17:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/word-of-mouth/</guid>
      <description>Apparently, Hollywood is scared to death because they can’t make crap and get rich like they used to. Lynda Obst points at videogames and other distractions (your guess) as reasons why teenagers are not as interested in visiting the movie theater and digesting their latest piece of shit. Gasp! Could teenagers have suddenly become smarter? Surely not.
The secret that is about to kill the movie industry turns out to be word of mouth.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The Inside Man</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/the-inside-man/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 29 Apr 2006 19:07:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/the-inside-man/</guid>
      <description>What a wonderful, entertaining and intelligent movie! I’ve never been a fan of Spike Lee, but with The Inside Man he manages to disguise as a &amp;ldquo;standard&amp;rdquo; cop movie what really is a diatribe about deception, racism and how everyone can be fooled by appearances and preconceptions. The movie has many characters, but with just a few lines of dialogue, they all communicate a lot about their personality, background and motivations.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>That time of the year</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/that-time-of-the-year/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Apr 2006 15:53:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/that-time-of-the-year/</guid>
      <description>Back home from work at 23:30 (that’s 11:30pm for you americans)… hm, yeah, it must be that time of the year. I’m not travelling to E3 this time, and I can’t say that I’m terribly sad about that. I mean, it’s always cool to get some hands-on experience with new stuff, and see old friends sweating behind closed doors in the epic fight against sensory overload. But the media coverage for E3 has grown so comprehensive, that I would expect to come back and the people here had seen things I hadn’t even heard of on the showfloor.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Oblivion</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/oblivion/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 22 Apr 2006 17:39:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/oblivion/</guid>
      <description>So I sat down and spent a few more hours with the Oblivion on the 360, trying to enjoy it. And I’m almost there! Almost… but not quite! I realized that I was reliving the Everquest 2 experience (and Black &amp;amp; White before): a game that is interesting and has many things to do, but I end up not having fun doing them. A game where I like some bits of the graphics but never stop feeling like it’s all just cardboard cutouts.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Kenta Cho speaks, you listen</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/kenta-cho-speaks-you-listen/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 20 Apr 2006 13:22:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/kenta-cho-speaks-you-listen/</guid>
      <description>Little Mathematics has recently interviewedKenta Cho. He knows how to make beautiful, engaging and unique games, he releases them for free including source code, and he does it all out of sheer love for the classic shooting genre.
And of course, he loves Geometry Wars on the 360. 🙂</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Procedural visuals</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/procedural-visuals/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Apr 2006 15:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/procedural-visuals/</guid>
      <description>Fascinating procedural generation of urban-like images. Simple is sometimes beautiful. Check the whole gallery here.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Oh, the GDC stuff!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/oh-the-gdc-stuff/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 13 Apr 2006 18:34:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/oh-the-gdc-stuff/</guid>
      <description>Guess I never got down to post my notes… actually, I haven’t written most of them yet! Ah well, it’s not like I promised anyone. 🙂 Keep checking the Archives page because they have added many new slides.
Halo 2 is a fantastic game. I only played it halfway through when it first came out, so I took the opportunity to replay it to the end. The story ended up confusing me with the twists and jumps, but the very fact that I was paying attention says a lot about how well presented it was.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>More 360 games!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/more-360-games/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 07 Apr 2006 17:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/more-360-games/</guid>
      <description>– Tomb Raider: Legend demo: Surprisingly good! I’ll play the full game after Easter, although I doubt I’ll finish it. I enjoyed the first Tomb Raider a lot but eventually grew bored with the puzzles, and never really played the rest. After the series went downhill, this one goes back to the roots. It seems to have more combat and physics-based puzzles, and might very well prove to be the best Tomb Raider.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Strange!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/strange/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 06 Apr 2006 11:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/strange/</guid>
      <description>Noticed today in Gamasutra that there’s a Postmortem for Galactic Civilizations 2. The article is very interesting and the team should be proud of their accomplishments. They mention how the first game sold quite well but they failed to receive a good chunk of their royalties due to publisher Strategy First going bankrupt.
Then, in the news section of the same site, I see that Strategy First just acquired small studio Malfador Machinations.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The death of UMD movies</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/the-death-of-umd-movies/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Apr 2006 00:53:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/the-death-of-umd-movies/</guid>
      <description>All I can say is: yay!
Who wants to pay more in order to own a movie they probably already own on DVD, with lesser quality, in a format that can only be played on a specific piece of equipment, and which can’t even be connected to a TV. At GDC I asked the Sony reps if they planned on releasing the devices they used at the booth to display PSP games on TVs, and they said those were test kits and that such a device was not in the works.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>So who is the Revolution good for?</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/so-who-is-the-revolution-good-for/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 02 Apr 2006 04:35:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/04/so-who-is-the-revolution-good-for/</guid>
      <description>Nintendo is counting on their new controller and low prices for both hardware and software, as the key factors for their next offering, the Revolution console.
As a goal it is laudable, but the part I don’t get is… doesn’t this consumer already have exactly that in the form of a PS2 or XBox? Both have a pretty extensive collection of fantastic games at budget prices. That’s the kind of user that Sony counts on to keep the PS2 alive the next 5 or so years.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Blizzard woes?</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/03/blizzard-woes/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 30 Mar 2006 14:09:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/03/blizzard-woes/</guid>
      <description>Blizzard has one of the best track records in gaming history, with every game release becoming a massive hit. But they have had their share of failures as well: Warcraft Adventures was canned after a year or two, and Warcraft 3 was redesigned from the ground up two years after development started. Now, you may have heard that Blizzard has haltedthe development of Starcraft: Ghost.
So is Starcraft: Ghost going the way of Adventures, or will they pull off a redesign?</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>UPC 2006 Lecture Slides</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/03/upc-2006-lecture-slides/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 29 Mar 2006 05:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/03/upc-2006-lecture-slides/</guid>
      <description>Ah, GDC trip prevented me from uploading the slides from my lecture at the Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña on March 16th 2006. Here you go! Edit: Updated with the latest version of the slides.
They are in Spanish, and if you have read other slides from previous lectures, most of the material will ring a bell. Call me lazy, but there’s a reason for that: lectures aimed at general audiences (any student at the University) can’t dive too much on the details of technical issues or they will necessarily alienate parts of the audience who don’t have the necessary background.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>GDC 2006</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/03/gdc-2006/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 28 Mar 2006 15:43:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/03/gdc-2006/</guid>
      <description>Cool as ever, with lots of interesting insights and a few disappointments. My one-liner summary: &amp;ldquo;How we stopped worrying and loved to Prototype&amp;rdquo;. I’ll post some notes and impressions on various lectures later this week. You can hop over to the GDC Archives or Gamasutra for slides and writeups on several conferences.
Edit: Alberto Garcia-Baquero passed me this link to the Microsoft GDC presentations
Mandatory Will Wright article link</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Making of Shadow of the Colossus</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/03/making-of-shadow-of-the-colossus/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 10 Mar 2006 05:51:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/03/making-of-shadow-of-the-colossus/</guid>
      <description>Ok, so maybe not a full-fledged Making of feature, but a very interesting interview with the creators of two of the most beautiful and unique games of the past 5 years: ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. Focus is mostly on visual technology, but there’s a little bit for everyone. Both the game and the article are a must for anyone interested in game development.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Spore gameplay video</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/03/spore-gameplay-video/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 05 Mar 2006 00:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/03/spore-gameplay-video/</guid>
      <description>I didn’t know there was actual footage from Will Wright’s Spore presentation at last GDC. Watch it. The technology involved in all the procedural modelling and animation of the creatures looks nothing short of amazing.
I hope Maxis has authorized its release, and they don’t send a black van to my house. In this day and age where google search gets sued for copyright infringement, you never know. 🙂</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Are you ready for PS3?</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/02/are-you-ready-for-ps3/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2006 02:41:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/02/are-you-ready-for-ps3/</guid>
      <description>Or have you become an obsolete programmer? Fear not, IBM is working hard to ensure that your skillset remains viable.
Jokes aside, it’s a very interesting paper that highlights the Cell’s architecture from the point of view of code generation, which means it’s probably the most practical article on Cell programming that you’re going to find in the near term. Yes, for a long time we have been able to ignore the requirements and techniques involved in multiprocessor programming, but that time is over.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Ilion Animation Studios</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/02/ilion-animation-studios/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 13 Feb 2006 09:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/02/ilion-animation-studios/</guid>
      <description>Shameless plug coming up: Ilion Studios, a feature film animation studio, which is sort of a sister company to Pyro Studios. You can watch some frames of the CG film they are working on. I have seen some of the in-progress work they have done, and I can attest that the quality of the modelling and animation is astounding.
Best of lucks friends!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>That&amp;#8217;s what I call a touchscreen</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/02/that#8217s-what-i-call-a-touchscreen/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 09 Feb 2006 02:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/02/that#8217s-what-i-call-a-touchscreen/</guid>
      <description>The chaps at New York University have been building a really neat set of experimental applications for their force-sensing, multi-touch drafting tablet. The results are fascinating.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Munich</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/02/munich/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 03 Feb 2006 16:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/02/munich/</guid>
      <description>I just watched Munich from Steven Spielberg. Now, I have been sorely disappointed by every single movie from Spielberg since, I don’t know, the first Indiana Jones? All of them contain a few touches of brilliance among too much fluff, too many scenes that are either uninteresting (A.I.), pretentious (Schindler’s List) or plainly mediocre (The War Of The Worlds). In most other movies I don’t care too much and just enjoy what good is there to enjoy, but with the talent for storytelling and production that Spielberg posesses, the contrast is just too sharp.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Good old Lemmings</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/01/good-old-lemmings/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2006 16:33:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/01/good-old-lemmings/</guid>
      <description>Relive your youth with DHTML Lemmings!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Good old Mario 64</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/01/good-old-mario-64/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 29 Jan 2006 16:35:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/01/good-old-mario-64/</guid>
      <description>One of the best games ever made, and they did it quick</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Couple of interesting links</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2006/01/couple-of-interesting-links/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 03 Jan 2006 05:44:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2006/01/couple-of-interesting-links/</guid>
      <description>Stroustrup describes some of the expected features in the next standard of the C++ language: http://www.artima.com/cppsource/cpp0x.html
Bruce Sterling talked about games, narrative and art, at GDC’91. His words are still very relevant: http://lib.ru/STERLINGB/story.txt</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Will they fly a plane&amp;#8230;</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/will-they-fly-a-plane#8230/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 25 Dec 2005 07:50:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/will-they-fly-a-plane#8230/</guid>
      <description>…into our house? If you don’t regularly read SomethingAwful’s Photoshop Phriday, at least make sure you don’t miss this one.
Merry Xmas everyone!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Guestbook begone!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/guestbook-begone/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 20 Dec 2005 14:43:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/guestbook-begone/</guid>
      <description>Even after filtering out URLs, that thing was just a spam magnet, and I’m not gonna waste my time cleaning it up every couple of days. Bye bye, my first PHP app!
On another note, I tried the compatibility of the 360, and found out that Halo 1 still rocks!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>XBox 360 in da house</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/xbox-360-in-da-house/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 18 Dec 2005 16:06:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/xbox-360-in-da-house/</guid>
      <description>Yeah, hum… I’m not calling it the XBox 2 anymore, and I even bought one a couple weeks after release. 🙂
– XBox Live Arcade positively rocks. I tried to approach it as a dumb user, and found that the menus are not simple, but they are consistent, so once you get the hang of them, anyone should be comfortable. The ability to download game demos, trailers and such is great, now all it needs is more more more content.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Wikipedia</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/wikipedia/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 16 Dec 2005 14:55:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/wikipedia/</guid>
      <description>It’s great, useful and… I have always had some dark thoughts about it, which Penny-Arcade has pretty much summed up in their unique style:
&amp;ldquo;What you’ve proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn’t exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information.&amp;quot;
With the heated debates going on about its updated procedures, policies, goals and fundraising, it’s hard to see it growing in significance beyond what it currently offers.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>A little AI goes a long way&amp;#8230;</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/a-little-ai-goes-a-long-way#8230/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 15 Dec 2005 13:56:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/a-little-ai-goes-a-long-way#8230/</guid>
      <description>Version 0.2 of the little C# game can be downloaded here. It has a little bit of AI, enough to make the game, if not truly challenging, at least much more interesting.
I have also included a Release version which shouldn’t require Visual Studio 2005 installed, and links to the necessary runtimes. I get reports that it still fails to run in some machines – I have no idea why. Can someone help with this?</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>C# and const-correctness</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/c#-and-const-correctness/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 14 Dec 2005 17:51:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/c#-and-const-correctness/</guid>
      <description>Every now and then, I experiment with C# and the .NET Framework. For the most part, it’s an amazingly useful environment to develop on; you can crank up tools and interfaces in no time, and Visual Studio provides lots of helpers to improve productivity and general comfort. However, not all is rosy. Being a const-correctness fan, I dismayed when I found out about this.
To quote from one of the comments:</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>New DirectX</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/new-directx/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:56:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/new-directx/</guid>
      <description>The December DirectX 9 SDK has been released. It apparently includes some DX10 tech previews requiring unreleased hardware and the latest beta of Windows Vista.
Ah, the joys of another version of the D3DX DLL…
Edit: Oh yes another buggy installer from your favourite Software giant! A few seconds into the installation, it halted with an error because it couldn’t find some &amp;ldquo;April 2005 SDKfiles&amp;rdquo;. Then it started to rollback the installer, and then decided to continue installing anyway.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>How to abuse your customers</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/how-to-abuse-your-customers/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Dec 2005 06:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/12/how-to-abuse-your-customers/</guid>
      <description>This, this and this, are some of the latest &amp;ldquo;horror stories&amp;rdquo; about retailers trying to abuse and screw their consumers.
Sometimes I think we deserve to be wiped out by a new and cataclismic Ice Age.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>RSS feed!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/rss-feed/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 29 Nov 2005 15:39:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/rss-feed/</guid>
      <description>Due to popular demand (i.e. 3 of the 4 people who read this blog requested it, Trace being the last), I added a RSS 2.0 feed to the site. It can’t be viewed directly as XML in the browser because I don’t know how to make the server output that page typed as XML. Nothing serious I guess. I tested it with RSS Reader but I suppose people will complain that they want support for 0.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Stainless Steel folds?</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/stainless-steel-folds/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:16:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/stainless-steel-folds/</guid>
      <description>Damn, this is bad news! Stainless Steel brought us Empire Earth, Empires, and were working on the absolutely gorgeous Rise and Fall. Although not my personal favourite RTS games, they were very well done and showed all the technical and artistic talent of the SSSI crew. I had the pleasure to meet Rick Goodman a few times, and it was apparent he loved his job and cared for his employees.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Alabama 1 &amp;#8211; Jack 0</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/alabama-1-#8211-jack-0/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 22 Nov 2005 10:02:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/alabama-1-#8211-jack-0/</guid>
      <description>Our official Games Industry Clown gets a nice slap in the face. Among other beauties: ‘Judge Moore stated that Thompson’s behaviour in court &amp;ldquo;suggests that he is unable to conduct himself in a manner befitting practice in this state.’&amp;quot;
Edit: JT didn’t like The Escapist’s take on him. Anything that makes him sad, makes me happy. Rejoice!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Intellectual Property</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/intellectual-property/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 13 Nov 2005 15:22:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/intellectual-property/</guid>
      <description>The recent revelations about &amp;ldquo;The Warden&amp;rdquo; (Blizzard’s anti-hack detection system for World of Warcraft) and Sony’s absurd DRM software (and its EULA), are making headlines everywhere. Are users being robbed of their (our) fundamental rights, or are companies simply exerting theirs? Is law really covering the topics, or are lawyers and companies merely abusing the system to build up power?
This article is very interesting. If you ever felt that Intellectual Property is being interpreted by law and the courts in ways that harm your fundamental rights, but you could never really explain why in reasonably formal terms, you’ll find plenty of arguments there.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>360&amp;#8217;s Backwards Compatibility report</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/360#8217s-backwards-compatibility-report/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 12 Nov 2005 00:34:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/360#8217s-backwards-compatibility-report/</guid>
      <description>Microsoft has finally published the list of XBox games that work on the 360. Kudos to the BC team, and of course my brother, who played no small part in it.
Notable absences from that list: the Madden, Splinter Cell and Project Gotham Racing series, as well as Soul Calibur II. Another funny bit, Half Life 2 is on that list despite still being in the works.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Visual Studio 2005</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/visual-studio-2005/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Nov 2005 11:23:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/visual-studio-2005/</guid>
      <description>So I guess I’m not the only one who finds it less than stellar. It’s just a first contact, but it’s been a rough ride: bugs and general slowness in the IDE, bugs in standard user interface elements (I managed to crash the scrollbar in the Output window!?!?!), the whole &amp;ldquo;security push&amp;rdquo; making a good chunk of the standard library deprecated by default.
Oh well I’m sure I will find good stuff after using it for some time.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Event Horizon</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/event-horizon/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Nov 2005 16:12:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/event-horizon/</guid>
      <description>This movie is really disturbing, and many people (myself included) have been caught off-guard by it. It was brought to my attention again because the director is in charge of the film adaptation for Castlevania.
I love horror movies even though I tend to be very critical of them. However, this is now. When I was a kid, I spent 6 months on light medication after being scared to death by trailers for several movies like Alien, Phantasm and The Fog, which were released about the same time.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Primer</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/primer/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 01 Nov 2005 03:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/11/primer/</guid>
      <description>Every now and then, a small independent movie filmed on a shoestring budget, manages to catch some attention. Primer reportedly cost $7000, and it shows: actors being also technicians, blurry focus, bad sound, you name it. But all that doesn’t matter, the movie tells an incredibly interesting story and has the perfect atmosphere. Guess what, it’s about a group of people who… do something great on a shoestring budget.
The sci-fi topics it deals with can be very hard to follow and understand at times, but don’t worry too much about precise and detailed explanations, just enjoy its twists and turns.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Before you criticise Microsoft Windows&amp;#8230;</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/before-you-criticise-microsoft-windows#8230/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 29 Oct 2005 03:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/before-you-criticise-microsoft-windows#8230/</guid>
      <description>Think about some of the issues they run into. Sure, Windows is bloated, the Win32 API is full of badly-formed interfaces, but… there’s also a lot of crap programmers around using it and preventing the Windows development team from cleaning up the system properly. So, what would YOU do?
– Let old &amp;amp; misbehaving programs crash? Many people wouldn’t upgrade to Vista.
– Leave the old stuff there? Well, this works once or twice, but after 10 years of Windows, the shit tends to accumulate in large piles.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Game Design and Prototyping</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/game-design-and-prototyping/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Oct 2005 06:48:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/game-design-and-prototyping/</guid>
      <description>Check this out: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051026/gabler_01.shtml</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Petzold article</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/petzold-article/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 26 Oct 2005 17:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/petzold-article/</guid>
      <description>Found this nifty article in Slashdot, it’s a very entertaining read. Don’t take it as the Holy Gospel, it is half information and half provocation, but if you let it make you think about the topic, you may be surprised how many things ring a bell in your head.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>F$&amp;#038;#@NG iPod!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/f#038%23ng-ipod/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Oct 2005 17:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/f#038%23ng-ipod/</guid>
      <description>It doesn’t work on my desktop machine, nor on two other PCs I have tried. Shortly after plugging the USB cable, the iPod goes back to the regular menu like it was disconnected. Sometimes it stays connected, but the moment I try to transfer anything (even just updating a tag on a song from iTunes, or checking the drive from Explorer), it resets to the menu. However, it does work fine on my machine at work and on my laptop.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Kojima, Colossus, Serenity</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/kojima-colossus-serenity/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 23 Oct 2005 09:14:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/kojima-colossus-serenity/</guid>
      <description>This may be interesting…
I started playing Shadow of the Colossus… it’s simply amazing, a game like no other. The scale of the Colossi and the way you climb up on them makes most other 3rd person games feel as primitive and flat as, say, classic 2D scrollers. It’s quite hardcore, and breaks pretty much every rule of game design.
Serenity is a plain old fun sci-fi adventures movie. Everything in it is fairly simple and predictable, but the result is very entertaining, and deserved much better success at the box office.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Abstract games</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/abstract-games/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 21 Oct 2005 05:39:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/abstract-games/</guid>
      <description>If your eyes are sore with all the bumpmapped glory of the latest FPS shader fest, check this out! Kenta Cho’s site has a collection of impressive (and incredibly simple) games for several platforms. Vector graphics at their finest!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The end of an idiot?</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/the-end-of-an-idiot/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 19 Oct 2005 14:57:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/the-end-of-an-idiot/</guid>
      <description>Let’s hope so. Go go Penny-Arcade!!
Edit: And the story goes on!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Rebellion of the bloggers!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/rebellion-of-the-bloggers/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Oct 2005 12:18:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/rebellion-of-the-bloggers/</guid>
      <description>Ok, so I have a few blogs linked in my page. Over the past week, the first two of them have left their jobs, and precisely in that order. What does that say about me, or them, or anything? 🙂 Are Joel Spolsky and Raymond Chen next in line? Hm… nah I don’t think so.
Anyway, if you need some game consultancy work done, I’m sure you can’t go wrong with Jamie Fristrom.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>King Kong demo</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/king-kong-demo/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 08 Oct 2005 06:41:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/king-kong-demo/</guid>
      <description>So Ubi Soft has released a short PC demo of the King Kong game… 2 months in advance??? Granted the demo doesn’t exactly spoil anything, but with probably the biggest movie license this year, do they really need to get the hype up so early? Aren’t they running the risk of making the game &amp;ldquo;old news&amp;rdquo; by christmas?
Anyway, the demo is short, but interesting to watch. Textures are a tad bit too sharp, to the point of becoming noisy.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Visual trick</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/visual-trick/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Oct 2005 12:26:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/10/visual-trick/</guid>
      <description>http://www.compfused.com/directlink/944/ is amazing!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>An old friend</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/an-old-friend/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 30 Sep 2005 04:18:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/an-old-friend/</guid>
      <description>Sometimes nostalgia hits me hard:
Dedicated to Turbo_Bit!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Lord of War</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/lord-of-war/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Sep 2005 15:06:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/lord-of-war/</guid>
      <description>I’m looking forward to Lord of War, the latest movie from Andrew Niccol. His previous films include everything in Gattaca, writing The Truman Show, and the misguided S1m0ne. Reviews are coming out quite positive, but I don’t really know why I already had really strong positive vibes about the movie just from the main logo and the 10-word concept.
Of course we’ll have to wait three months to watch it in Spain.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Data handling in C#</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/data-handling-in-c/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 18 Sep 2005 13:17:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/data-handling-in-c/</guid>
      <description>This looks very cool – SQL-like query and select capabilities for any type of container (enumerable?) type, integrated in the language.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Next-Gen Development, Rockstar</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/next-gen-development-rockstar/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 17 Sep 2005 16:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/next-gen-development-rockstar/</guid>
      <description>Looks like Neil Young of EA gave a very interesting talk at the Tokyo Game Show. In particular, the way he summarizes EA’s product strategy as &amp;ldquo;high-quality execution, 1-3 design innovations and audience appeal [being] the ideal combination to produce both a critical and commercial hit.&amp;quot;
Lots of comments all over the place about the Nintendo Revolution controller. It feels like the Big N is going all-or-nothing: either it redefines gaming and Nintendo becomes the top dog again, or it is seen as a short-lived gimmick and Nintendo is definitely relegated to the niche gamer audience.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Life on the corporate land</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/life-on-the-corporate-land/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 13 Sep 2005 14:21:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/life-on-the-corporate-land/</guid>
      <description>Mini-Microsoft is an interesting and fairly critical blog about life at Microsoft. Lots of insight at the bureaucracies and internal politics that take place at Redmond. Many people consider Microsoft to be well on its downhill path to death. Not like it’s going to happen next year, but life teaches us that nothing lasts forever; why would nations and companies be any different?
Microsoft still puts out a number of solid products, but most of them have outgrown their level of usefulness – new releases consisting of features nobody really needs, and the odd improvement (read: bugfix) here and there.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Cheat Sheets, Escapist</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/cheat-sheets-escapist/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 05 Sep 2005 09:52:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/cheat-sheets-escapist/</guid>
      <description>This is kind of convenient, a collection of quick reference charts for popular topics like PHP, MySQL, etc:
http://www.petefreitag.com/item/455.cfm
I mentioned my feel that the Escapist was a bit elitist… well it’s annoyed me that in the latest issue, two articles bash Doom 3 and World of Warcraft, essentially labeling them &amp;ldquo;bad games&amp;rdquo;. I usually wouldn’t care, but since those are among the best games I’ve played in the past few years, I had to position myself: it is perfectly OK to personally be uninterested in them, but attempting to imply that they are objectively bad games only shows how little care has been put into creating that opinion.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>2nd Masters Course on Game Development</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/2nd-masters-course-on-game-development/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 01 Sep 2005 14:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/09/2nd-masters-course-on-game-development/</guid>
      <description>Now that August is in the past, we’re again meeting and discussing our approach for the 2nd year of this Master course at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Hot topics are:
– Student projects: should they figure out and design their own game?
– Assignments: should we require assignments to be completed in order to complete the degree? Should we hand out assignments that can be integrated in the student projects?</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The Escapist</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/the-escapist/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 26 Aug 2005 11:28:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/the-escapist/</guid>
      <description>There’s a new online gaming mag! The Escapist wants to do serious gaming journalism with a polished presentation. There’s something a bit elitist about it (not unlike UK’s printed Edge Magazine), but the effort is commendable and the reading well worth your time. Best of lucks!
Reading the piece about Bungie’s Marathon, I can’t help but remember my impression of that game back in 1995: an ugly doom clone. Apparently, I missed a LOT of great stuff!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>ATITD&amp;#8217;s anecdote</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/atitd#8217s-anecdote/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 25 Aug 2005 01:04:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/atitd#8217s-anecdote/</guid>
      <description>The creator of A Tale In The Desert wrote the following:
Interesting fact: Over 50,000 people have [my personal] phone number, and in the 2+ years that I’ve been giving it out (since ATITD 1 went live), I’ve only had 19 inappropriate phone calls. And my favorite of those 19 was from a developer at Blizzard who said &amp;ldquo;some of us here just wanted to know if this was for real.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Praetorians Modding</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/praetorians-modding/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 24 Aug 2005 08:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/praetorians-modding/</guid>
      <description>The nutters at ImperiaL TeaM keep working on new units and civilizations for Praetorians: http://www.mod-project.com/modproject/modules/news/article.php?storyid=74 http://www.mod-project.com/modproject/modules/news/article.php?storyid=55
It’s really cool to see a small but still active modding community for our beloved game. Thank you guys for your support!
Edit: Also released is a small tool to compress music files for use in the game. Thanks to Rubén Ramos and Jason Walker for their effort making this happen.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>More on Game Programming practices</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/more-on-game-programming-practices/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Aug 2005 01:29:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/more-on-game-programming-practices/</guid>
      <description>Very smart article</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Late Praetorians review</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/late-praetorians-review/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 17 Aug 2005 03:12:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/late-praetorians-review/</guid>
      <description>Although it’s been over two years since it came out, it’s still cool to read about people who are enjoying the game. This review showed up at GameRankings.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Sin City</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/sin-city/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 Aug 2005 15:59:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/sin-city/</guid>
      <description>After so many months, Sin City opened in movie theaters in Spain last week. What a movie! I was more curious than really interested, since I’m not a fan of comics, nor of Robert Rodriguez. But this was really worth the wait.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>F.E.A.R.</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/f.e.a.r./</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 07 Aug 2005 00:56:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/f.e.a.r./</guid>
      <description>Check the singleplayer demo, it’s really neat. There’s a certain blandness everywhere (controls, weapons, textures), which is my main gripe with every single Monolith game, but the atmosphere, AI and combat effects are really worth experiencing.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The Island</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/the-island/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 06 Aug 2005 16:41:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/the-island/</guid>
      <description>Obligatory comment about The Island: brainless script with very good action and production. Entertainment business in its purest form… except it seems to be a commercial flop. Was marketing badly done? Were people not interested in the theme of the movie? Was it too sci-fi for the mainstream crowd, while too mainstream for the sci-fi crowd?
Whatever the reasons, expect Michael Bay to go back to absurdly bad movies like Con-Air or Pearl Harbor.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Good programmers, average programmers</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/good-programmers-average-programmers/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 04 Aug 2005 06:38:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/08/good-programmers-average-programmers/</guid>
      <description>Slashdot spotted this from good old Joel on Software
One word of caution: the article seems like an appeal for the prima-donnas in the software industry. Anyone with a few years of experience has endured the pains of diva team members screwing the mood, atmosphere, and ultimately the project. Talent and dedication are the most important traits in a programmer; knowledge can be acquired, experience is just a matter of time, but talent is innate, and dedication is a part of the personality.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Indie games</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/indie-games/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jul 2005 14:47:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/indie-games/</guid>
      <description>Greg talks indie games… again!
My biggest problem with this type of manifestos is, they all end with the motto &amp;ldquo;let’s make better games&amp;rdquo;, they rarely address the question &amp;ldquo;better for who?&amp;rdquo; I’m an Old Turk (almost 19 years since my first game went gold), but my list of favourite games include GTA, Call of Duty, Age of Mythology, Halo, World of Warcraft… all vey high budget games, and all considered derivative in some form.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>DKP Points System</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/dkp-points-system/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Jul 2005 15:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/dkp-points-system/</guid>
      <description>My guildmates in WoW asked me to design a points system to manage the high-end raid loot drops. I’m not sure if they’re going to use it, but since I’d hate to waste the effort, here’s the link.
I’ve also changed the buttons (who were basically ripped Asheron’s Call 2 bitmaps) and changed reply listing to go the more familiar older-to-newer.
Ok this is too funny to miss: WW2 RTS chat</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Fuck you ESRB</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/fuck-you-esrb/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 20 Jul 2005 23:33:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/fuck-you-esrb/</guid>
      <description>&amp;ldquo;the ESRB calls on the computer and video game industry to proactively protect their games from illegal modifications by third parties, particularly when they serve to undermine the accuracy of the rating&amp;rdquo;
Just another reason to be VERY pissed at Rockstar, for stirring this whole mess in order to make a few extra bucks that the rest of us end up paying for in grief.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Back to work!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/back-to-work/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 18 Jul 2005 10:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/back-to-work/</guid>
      <description>After my 6-month stint at having absolutely no obligations, I’m back to the nutty world of games development at Pyro Studios. Needless to say, I was half asleep the entire day, alarm clocks suck!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Life at 60 in WoW &amp;#8211; II</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/life-at-60-in-wow-#8211-ii/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 16 Jul 2005 10:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/life-at-60-in-wow-#8211-ii/</guid>
      <description>As expected, after our more than successful first attempt at the 40-man Molten Core dungeon, a number of people have left the guild, in search of a more dedicated (and numerous) group of players who can guarantee such 40-man, 3-4 hour raids several days a week. Good luck, and good riddance! They are mostly nice people but they are impatient; can’t blame them, however I would have liked to see more of them being upfront about the whole thing: THEY want the big stuff NOW, so there was no need to blame everyone else for &amp;ldquo;not being there&amp;rdquo;.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Life at 60 in WoW</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/life-at-60-in-wow/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 07 Jul 2005 16:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/life-at-60-in-wow/</guid>
      <description>Well, turned out that the road to 60 wasn’t that hard, but could be terribly annoying. A couple of days when I tried to quest solo in my 50’s I ended up logging out completely angry at the groups of Alliances enjoying a cheap shot. However, the group instances (Uldaman, Zul’Farrak, Maraudon and Sunken Temple) allowed me to play with other people in a gank-free environment.
So at 60 now, free to run any high-level instances with the friends, the shadow of repetition and eventual boredom looms in the horizon, but until that happens, it is more fun than ever.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>War of the Worlds</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/war-of-the-worlds/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 02 Jul 2005 18:04:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/war-of-the-worlds/</guid>
      <description>Well, this story (book and 50’s movie) has been in my mind since I was a kid, a reference for all other stories about aliens taking over Earth. I was hopeful that Spielberg’s version would be the great alien invasion movie, some kind of grandiose version of the book’s idea.
Instead, we got a pretty standard movie, with kids, dysfunctional family, some watered-down horror and some simplistic action. Not bad, but I didn’t feel immersed at any point throughout the movie.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Master in Game Programming</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/master-in-game-programming/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 01 Jul 2005 04:07:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/07/master-in-game-programming/</guid>
      <description>Yesterday was the conclusion of the 1st Master in Game Programming at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. It’s been great! The students had to step up and show their projects in front of a crowd, got their diplomas, and we all had fun celebrating it. They should be really proud of their accomplishment, the projects were quite ambitious but they were able to wrap up quite reasonable versions. Lots of variety, from strategy to racing, 2D and 3D, humour-based and seriuos ideas, singleplayer and networked, there was a bit of everything.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>WoW</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/wow/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 24 Jun 2005 17:33:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/wow/</guid>
      <description>Heh, I’ve reached a strange point in my WoW life. Up until now I had been leveling up slowly, taking my time, joking in the guild chat, devoting time to explore the world and the places I’m not supposed to be at.
Thanks to the wonderful dynamics of a PvP server, all that is changing. After level 40 or so, solo questing and hunting has become a real chore, with zones full of red-named players that want to see you die, no matter the means or the (lack of) reward.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Ads and the free Internet</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/ads-and-the-free-internet/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 23 Jun 2005 16:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/ads-and-the-free-internet/</guid>
      <description>Interesting topic of discussion here. Summary: well-known internet ad firm says systems that block their ads will remove opportunities for sites that want to remain free (their claim is a lot more outrageous, but of course they’re an ad firm so what do you expect?).
Like I mentioned a couple posts below regarding MSN Messenger, the real problem comes when you annoy people. Like most people remark in the slashdot discussion, I never have had a problem with Google Ads, and I have clicked them a few times.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Pics</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/pics/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 22 Jun 2005 07:43:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/pics/</guid>
      <description>Added 5 or 6 new pics to the Gallery. Also discovered a handy tool to remove all the crap that Photoshop insists on including in JPG files. Thumbnail pics gone down from 18Kb to 4Kb, what’s not to like?
Edit: finally revamped the Gallery to use a database backend and an upload form through the web. Took a while to figure out all the proper parameters and code in the PHP script and the server panel, but it works now.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Messenger 7</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/messenger-7/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Jun 2005 02:26:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/messenger-7/</guid>
      <description>Congratulations, Microsoft! After several years of staying with Messenger and refusing to use other IMs, your latest and greatest additions to an app already crammed with CRAP has finally convinced me.
Trillian here I come.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>New spam technique?</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/new-spam-technique/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 16 Jun 2005 04:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/new-spam-technique/</guid>
      <description>Maybe someone can shed light on this. This morning I found 300 emails in my inbox, from various Mailer Systems, notifying that &amp;ldquo;my email could not be delivered&amp;rdquo;, all from various sources and different styles. Some of them included the original email or the subject, which was essentially spam.
My PCs were turned off at the time all those error emails were generated and sent, so I doubt I have been virused or trojaned.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>XBox Live Arcade</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/xbox-live-arcade/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 14 Jun 2005 03:37:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/xbox-live-arcade/</guid>
      <description>Microsoft finally launches a casual game download service for the XBox. Strane, considering the next iteration of the console comes out in about 6 months, and the service is launched in Europe of all places. I assume they simply want to test and polish the download / promotion / billing system so it’s available out of the box for XBox 360’s launch.
Oh and Jason is right: I have given up and joined the masses in accepting the XBox 360’s name.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>CARVI 2005</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/carvi-2005/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 10 Jun 2005 16:17:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/carvi-2005/</guid>
      <description>The Virtual Reality-focused conferences at CARVI 2005 took place these past two days. Very well organized by EUVE, lots of interesting talks and people to meet. I had fun giving my talk exploring where Virtual Reality and Videogames meet, and got asked tons of questions during the coffee breaks.
And, of course, nothing beats a few sunny days in the Basque Country. Good times.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Independent games viability</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/independent-games-viability/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 03 Jun 2005 02:32:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/independent-games-viability/</guid>
      <description>Interesting quote from Greg Costikyan: &amp;ldquo;fostering an independent games movement really requires solving three problems simultaneously: First, creating a desire among developers to do something different; second, finding a solution to the business issue of creating a viable channel for distribution of independent product; and third, changing gamer culture. By that I mean that people who like indie music and film are willing to accept lower production values in exchange for individual vision and creativity.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The cost of entertainment</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/the-cost-of-entertainment/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 02 Jun 2005 09:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/06/the-cost-of-entertainment/</guid>
      <description>Browsing through GI.biz, I came across this bit where a UK store is speculating with a retail price of 400 pounds for the XBox 360. That got me thinking into the prices for other territories.
400 UK pounds is roughly US$ 700. However history says a more likely US price would be $500. History also says that the rest of Europe would see a price of 500 Euros. Weighing in the standards of living, average salaries and whatnot, this means gaming in Spain and most of Europe is twice as expensive as gaming in the US.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Some game theory</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/some-game-theory/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 31 May 2005 15:18:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/some-game-theory/</guid>
      <description>I found this discussion very interesting:
http://www.buzzcut.com/article.php?story=20040827160706119#comments
The whole site is quite interesting, actually. Another blog to keep track of!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Festimad!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/festimad/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 28 May 2005 06:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/festimad/</guid>
      <description>Nightwish, Slayer, Marilyn Manson along with a few others. Slayer were capable but boring (I just don’t like machinegun metal); Marilyn Manson was effective but a bit uninspired; Nightwish totally rocked the place, with great performance and what I believe to be the best sound I’ve experienced in a live concert since Mike Oldfield.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Will Wright, Revenge of the Sith</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/will-wright-revenge-of-the-sith/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 21 May 2005 03:31:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/will-wright-revenge-of-the-sith/</guid>
      <description>Will Wright chatted with Wired, and participated in an E3 panel. Great stuff in both articles.
I went to watch Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, and was pleasantly surprised! While the two prequels had been visually amazing, the story, dialogue and character development seriously lacked. Episode 3 – RotS is different: the story is really good, and it certainly has the darker tone that Lucas had promised.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Sony 1 &amp;#8211; Microsoft 0</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/sony-1-#8211-microsoft-0/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 17 May 2005 03:52:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/sony-1-#8211-microsoft-0/</guid>
      <description>The first battle, in what will hopefully be a long war, is over. Both have given their first presentation, and Sony has completely stolen the show. Why? Because they have shown a lot of cool stuff and Microsoft hasn’t, that’s why. At the moment theres a certain feeling that Sony has Dreamcasted the XBox 2 (I refuse to call it 360).
Most of the videos are pre-rendered clips, and for those that are in-game footage, when you see the screenshots you notice a lot of tricks which you know will lessen the sense of photorealism and detail.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>E3 and Next-Gen media machine</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/e3-and-next-gen-media-machine/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 13 May 2005 16:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/e3-and-next-gen-media-machine/</guid>
      <description>It’s official: I’m overloaded with videos, screenshots, announcements, rumours and facts sheets. Everything has become a messy blur of bumpmapped shading, explosions and numbers.
Imperial Glory is finished and I have a final copy. I only worked on it for three months, but (with permission of the dev team) I am as attached to it as to any other game I ever worked on.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>All About Eve and other movie stuff</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/all-about-eve-and-other-movie-stuff/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 08 May 2005 06:22:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/all-about-eve-and-other-movie-stuff/</guid>
      <description>If you only ever watch one classic movie (those filmed in black and white, before you were born), you won’t go wrong if you choose All About Eve. Amazing script, great performances and witty dialogue… it really is one of the best movies ever made.
Interesting interview with Paul Verhoeven (from 2002). I really enjoy the unique view of the world he creates in his movies (I even found Showgirls not that bad!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Lecture slides</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/lecture-slides/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 04 May 2005 03:09:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/05/lecture-slides/</guid>
      <description>Gave my lecture at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and the slides (in Spanish) are available here.
I’m not terribly happy with the way the lecture went. To begin with, there were very few attendants; Friday afternoon right before a long weekend with sunny weather? Even I was anxious to hit the road and get to the beach! I also felt that the students were more curious that truly interested in professional and philosophical games development issues.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Nikon vs. Adobe</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/nikon-vs.-adobe/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 25 Apr 2005 07:47:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/nikon-vs.-adobe/</guid>
      <description>Their current argument over the encryption system in Nikon’s Raw file format is pretty funny. In the past, Adobe has been just as protective about their own format: Adobe’s font formats were not open, and the Photoshop SDK stopped being freely available around version 7. So, I am the happy owner of two Nikon digital cameras, I dislike unnecessary protection / encryption systems, Photoshop is an amazing piece of software, and my experiences with Adobe’s tech support people have been horribly bad.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Pearlmageddon</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/pearlmageddon/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 24 Apr 2005 05:55:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/pearlmageddon/</guid>
      <description>http://www.pearlharborii.com is too funny to miss.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>SOE endorses sales of MMO properties</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/soe-endorses-sales-of-mmo-properties/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 20 Apr 2005 11:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/soe-endorses-sales-of-mmo-properties/</guid>
      <description>http://stationexchange.station.sony.com/
It was bound to happen, sooner or later, but it is still shocking to see it materialized. I have never been interested in buying online properties, since I assume that acquiring them in the game is one of the main reasons for playing in the first place. Playing a MMO has to be fun in itself, but as we know already, fun is a dish with many ingredients.
So, rather than find my own stance among all the moral, ethical, emotional, rational debates about the meaning of this, I’ll be realistic about my assumptions, and simply sit back and see what happens.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Lecture at the University</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/lecture-at-the-university/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 15 Apr 2005 12:19:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/lecture-at-the-university/</guid>
      <description>Looks like the people at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid haven’t got tired of me yet, and have invited me to give a lecture by the end of April. Details here: http://www.fdi.ucm.es/local/eventos/index.html.
In the lecture I try to explore four key areas of videogames as a professional career: the business side, the engineering (the lecture is for their Computer Science campus), entertainment, and the value of games as art. Broad topic!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Weird things happen</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/weird-things-happen/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 11 Apr 2005 23:26:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/weird-things-happen/</guid>
      <description>Allow me to chuckle over this: [Majesco]’s NASDAQ symbol has been switched from MJES to COOL. The changes are designed to &amp;ldquo;more accurately reflect the company’s identity as a diversified digital entertainment company.&amp;quot;
I got a link (which I’m not spreading here) to a pretty sick site: lots of pictures of a cute bunny, and the promise that the animal will die at a certain date if the site owner hasn’t received $50K in donations.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Classics</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/classics/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 06 Apr 2005 17:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/classics/</guid>
      <description>I watched Shakespeare In Love and Cyrano de Bergerac again this week… two masterpieces in my opinion. Witty, heartwarming and flawlessly executed. I love how well the music works in both of them (Shakespeare’s Oscar-winning score is one of my favourite movie soundtracks of all time).</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Devil May Cry 3</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/devil-may-cry-3/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 03 Apr 2005 15:38:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/04/devil-may-cry-3/</guid>
      <description>It has happened! I love World of Warcraft, but I have only played it for a couple hours in the past week (4 weeks if you count my Scotland trip).
One of the reasons is Devil May Cry 3 on the Playstation 2. The concept: you are a human-demon slashing and gunning hordes of demons in a quest to prevent the Demon World from taking over Earth, while uncovering the secrets of your family as you progress.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Science Fiction</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/03/science-fiction/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 31 Mar 2005 15:29:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/03/science-fiction/</guid>
      <description>After reading a number of SF novels from the last few years, I keep getting frustrated at what feels like a failed renaissance of the genre. I enjoy the emphasis on real world politics, innovative science and weird but believable theories, now that time travel, hyperspace and robots are pretty much exhausted. Many books seem too much &amp;ldquo;Crichtonized&amp;rdquo; – trying to match the formula that blends larger-than-life characters involved in a limited version of world-changing events.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Cruel Quotes</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/03/cruel-quotes/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/03/cruel-quotes/</guid>
      <description>In the wake of GDC 2005, weblogs are more active than ever, which means lot of stuff to read and enjoy! Forgive me this bit of cynism, but sometimes, random quotes ARE a good substitute for depth of thought.
Greg Costikyan: &amp;ldquo;Iwata-san has the heart of a gamer — and my question is, what poor bastard’s chest did he carve it from, and how often do they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo HQ?</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Back!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/03/back/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 27 Mar 2005 02:51:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/03/back/</guid>
      <description>My trip to Scotland is over, about two weeks roaming around the highlands and Edinburgh. It was great fun, weather was not too bad, and I was left wanting more! Hopefully I’ll upload some piccies soon.
Thanks to Coque for the link to this article that details the history of Topo Soft. Every time I read about Stardust I want to bang my head on the wall for the multidirectional control system that Jose Manuel Muñoz proposed us – it was quite original and we loved it, but in hindsight, it made the game quite frustrating to play.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>GDC materials</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/03/gdc-materials/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 08 Mar 2005 07:02:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/03/gdc-materials/</guid>
      <description>Some stuff coming from GDC:
Raph Koster’s keynote transcription
More as I come across them.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>World Of Warcraft</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/02/world-of-warcraft/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 21 Feb 2005 16:19:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/02/world-of-warcraft/</guid>
      <description>Yes, it arrived in Europe, and went on to surpass all expectations. I’m finally playing it without the &amp;ldquo;beta hat&amp;rdquo;, so I can put some effort into the chars I play.
It is every bit as awesome as it felt in the beta. Penny-Arcade wrote this about Burnout 3, but I think it describes WoW perfectly:
&amp;ldquo;Try to imagine a scenario in which someone paid you twenty dollars every time you had an orgasm.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Million Dollar Baby</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/02/million-dollar-baby/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 05 Feb 2005 16:52:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/02/million-dollar-baby/</guid>
      <description>Million Dollar Baby is the latest movie by Clint Eastwood. If you follow my musings about films, you may know I totally love his work. Well, I think this movie is a complete and flawless masterpiece. Script, dialogues, characters, pacing, everything about it totally blew me away. There’s little more to say, really.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>City render movie</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/02/city-render-movie/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 Feb 2005 06:27:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/02/city-render-movie/</guid>
      <description>3D Blasphemy posted some stills and a video of a photorealistic city render he did to experiment with postproduction effects and lighting. It’s really impressive, I recommend you check it out!
http://www.3dblasphemy.com/personal/CITY.html</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Blizzard interview</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/01/blizzard-interview/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Jan 2005 15:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/01/blizzard-interview/</guid>
      <description>It’s a pretty cool 2-part interview:
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=6281
Despite the pseudo-standard language they use, their description of what makes World of Warcraft so engaging matches every bit of what I felt while playing the beta.
In other news, I finished watching the second season of Alias, and it was very entertaining! Lost of surprises, great pace, and an extremely ambitious cliffhanger. Also entertaining was Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. The action scenes were not very exciting, which detracted from the movie, but the unique style still makes it well worth watching.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Irreversible and Alexander</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/01/irreversible-and-alexander/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 17 Jan 2005 20:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/01/irreversible-and-alexander/</guid>
      <description>I just watched Irreversible, a truly unique, graphic and brutal french film about (so to speak) violence against women. Only for people with either a strong stomach, or a complete lack thereof, especially if you’re a woman. Despite the &amp;ldquo;shock value&amp;rdquo; that one may read in the film, it has so much more.
Also watched Alexander which, while overly long and pretentious (european production kicks in), was still worth it.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Sabbatical!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/01/sabbatical/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 15 Jan 2005 05:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/01/sabbatical/</guid>
      <description>Well it’s finally happening! I’m taking a 6-month sabbatical away from Pyro Studios and work, to replenish my batteries and pursue some things I’ve been NOT doing for too long. Game development is tough and stressing, and after this many years I feel the drain, so when the opportunity showed up I decided to take it.
Some people are betting after I have relaxed for a few weeks I won’t feel up to the task of going &amp;ldquo;back to the trenches&amp;rdquo;… All I can say is, I still feel the same passion for games development, so despite the hardships and headaches, expect me back in the summer.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Fake Yamauchi interview</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2005/01/fake-yamauchi-interview/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 05 Jan 2005 16:05:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2005/01/fake-yamauchi-interview/</guid>
      <description>A Spanish website reprinted a Wired Magazine interview with Hiroshi Yamauchi, retired CEO of Nintendo. It was all a hoax for the Dec 28th, which is Spain’s version of April Fools.
http://www.gamerah.com/noticias.php?bias=180#180
It’s awesome, outrageous, fun and… yeah I had to be told it was a fake.
By the way, Happy new Year!</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Online economies and EBaying</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/12/online-economies-and-ebaying/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 18 Dec 2004 06:43:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/12/online-economies-and-ebaying/</guid>
      <description>Pretty interesting article:
http://www.overanalyzed.com/portal.php?topic_id=19</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Everquest 2</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/12/everquest-2/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 14 Dec 2004 15:49:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/12/everquest-2/</guid>
      <description>I’m enjoying EQ2 a lot more than I expected, being a longtime EQ1 hater. I just had a 5-day streak of powergaming (so to speak) exploring the game. I am even crafting, which I could never force myself to do in previous MMO’s!
More details inside, hit &amp;ldquo;View Replies&amp;rdquo; to read it.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The Incredibles, and more movies</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/11/the-incredibles-and-more-movies/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 28 Nov 2004 15:39:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/11/the-incredibles-and-more-movies/</guid>
      <description>Amazing movie, Pixar once again outdoing themselves. Everything in the movie is a joy to see: characters, style, animation, special effects, script, action… It’s just too good to describe it in depth here.
Also watched Alien vs. Predator, which was ok, entertaining and forgettable action. Shaun of the Dead was quite funny, too cheap and sitcom-like to be a classic, but an above-average parody.
A few months ago I bought Blood Simple on DVD, but didn’t get around to watching it until yesterday.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>&amp;#8230;And the Half-Life 2 opinion</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/11/#8230and-the-half-life-2-opinion/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Nov 2004 11:33:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/11/#8230and-the-half-life-2-opinion/</guid>
      <description>To sum it up, I’m disappointed after 5-6 hours with it. It’s great to see and play with all the amazing technology tricks shown in the HL2 promo videos; visuals and atmosphere is sometimes brilliant; the gravity gun is a very original and interesting idea. But! In my experience, it just lacks pace and coherence. It starts great, then drives you nuts with an overly long driving sequence, then the whole thing goes to hell when you are thrown into a messy pit of physics puzzles with zombies and a mad guy jumping around.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Halo 2</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/11/halo-2/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 20 Nov 2004 09:26:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/11/halo-2/</guid>
      <description>After the Half-Life 2 experience (not finished yet), I’m in love with FPS games again! Halo 2 is probably the most fluid and downright fun shooter I have ever played. Not terribly innovative, but does everything right, and brings an outstanding dual-wielding feature that will most surely become as standard as the WASD keyboard layout. And I thought it was just eye-candy for the masses when I saw that in the videos… Well written script without imposing overly long narrative sections, a perfect design where different gameplay styles blend smoothly, nice array of weapons and enemies, and again a control and aiming implementation that makes the keyboard and mouse almost obsolete.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>The EA Spouse</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/11/the-ea-spouse/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 13 Nov 2004 18:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/11/the-ea-spouse/</guid>
      <description>You have probably seen it a million times already if you’re into game development, but here it goes again just in case.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ea_spouse/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/joestraitiff/368.html
And the current IGDA and slashdot discussion threads on the issue:
http://www.igda.org/Forums/showthread.php?threadid=13068 http://games.slashdot.org/games/04/11/11/0031259.shtml?tid=98&amp;amp;tid=10
Reading the article may be depressing (just like 1999’s Why Being a Computer Game Developer Sucks did), but it also serves as a reminder, for those of us that want to spend the rest of our professional lives making games, that we need to improve our management practices and truly care for the people we work with.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>World Of Warcraft</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/11/world-of-warcraft/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 05 Nov 2004 19:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/11/world-of-warcraft/</guid>
      <description>Finally started playing the stress test / open beta. My first impression is that it’s a polished and pretty DAoC set in the Warcraft universe. If I actually have the patience to progress my char and see the high-level game, I’ll have more things to say, .</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Random bits&amp;#8230;</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/11/random-bits#8230/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 04 Nov 2004 16:38:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/11/random-bits#8230/</guid>
      <description>Check this out! The worst part is, that image IS the poster shown at http://www.starwars.com :
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1193002
I watched the movie Spartan again, and I loved every bit of it again.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas smashed every record for sales during the first weekend, and easily competes with any major blockbuster movie. Crisis? What crisis? Well… Longtime developer Argonaut (of Starglider fame) went bankrupt, which is not good news.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Praetorians 1.05 patch</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/10/praetorians-1.05-patch/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 22 Oct 2004 07:47:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/10/praetorians-1.05-patch/</guid>
      <description>Fileplanet download
Basically, it fixes the bug with troops becoming invulnerable after splitting them. It includes the 1.04 fixes as well, so you can apply it directly to a fresh install of the game (any language, including eastern versions). It is not officially supported, but I’m very confident that it works.
My big thanks to all the people who helped with this, and those who had the patience to wait this long.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Half Life 2 went gold?</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/10/half-life-2-went-gold/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 18 Oct 2004 11:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/10/half-life-2-went-gold/</guid>
      <description>And I still own that 3-year old piece of crap PC. I hope the game really is so good that I finally find an excuse to upgrade.
It will be interesting to see how the whole deal with Steam sales vs. retail goes… especially with the &amp;ldquo;preload&amp;rdquo; trick that Valve pulled off: removing the pains of having to wait for the download while other people are already playing, means that more people will be willing to go the Steam route.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Fable</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/10/fable/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 16 Oct 2004 20:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/10/fable/</guid>
      <description>I started playing Fable on the XBox. It looks great so far: varied, beautiful and polished. My only complaints are some control issues and the usually crappy cutscenes consisting of little more than slow dialogue.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Strange day&amp;#8230;</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/10/strange-day#8230/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 15 Oct 2004 12:21:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/10/strange-day#8230/</guid>
      <description>Now for something completely different. Since a few days ago, some people have decided to use our parking spots at the office. Different people each time, this wednesday it was a police car that invaded our space! (Our offices are located near a police station)
Today there were two cars, so after the usual process of asking around with no results, I simply moved my car to block the exit of our area of the garage, and left a note to come upstairs if someone needed to exit.</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>More pics</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/10/more-pics/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 14 Oct 2004 16:47:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/10/more-pics/</guid>
      <description>Feels good to be slowly populating the Gallery with more photos.
My up and coming plans regarding this weblog system is to remove the requirement to register in order to write a comment. Who knows, maybe some day someone will bother replying to a post. 🙂</description>
    </item>
    
    <item>
      <title>Welcome!</title>
      <link>https://thejare.github.io/2004/10/welcome/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 11 Oct 2004 19:43:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://thejare.github.io/2004/10/welcome/</guid>
      <description>This is the weblog system I have written for my site. Please don’t abuse it. 🙂 It supports a number of phpBB tags like [b], [i], [u], [img] and such. Give it a try and tell me what you think!
The old archives are still available here.</description>
    </item>
    
  </channel>
</rss>