Here’s an article I wrote almost 15 years ago.  Maybe I’ll post later about how the Clan Lord karma system evolved.

http://www.mactech.com/articles/develop/issue_29/vetneo.html

Mostly the same as Left 4 Dead 1, which is not a bad thing at all.  Shoot zombies!  Great pacing.

If anybody wants to join me in a game, I’m joedelta1 on Steam.  I think.

So my Wii repair is $75, +$10 shipping, + $8.29 salex tax?!  There’s no sales tax on repairs.  There’s no sales tax on shipping.  And sales tax, outrageously high as it is (8.75% in CA?) isn’t that high (11%).  I’m feeling even more ripped off.

So we’ve been having a great time rocking out with The Beatles on the Wii for a couple of months, but my Wii stopped reading discs.

I’ve always hated CD-based games.  The CDs tend to get scratched over the years (especially if strangers and kids handle them), and they become unreadable, and the players themselves tend to fail after 2-3 years, too.  My 20 year old Super Nintendo still works fine, as do 100% of its carts.  The same could not be said for either of my Gamecubes, my XBox, or my PS2.

Knowing the high failure rate of videogame systems, I actually got the extended warranty on the Wii.  About six months later, sure enough, it failed, and it was nice to just bring it to Best Buy and swap it out.  Those extended warranty things are almost always a giant ripoff, but not this time.

So now it failed again, and it’s still under warranty.  Hooray!  But it turns out that the downloadable content — like all the Beatles songs I paid extra for — is nontransferable to my replacement Wii.  Lame!  If I do the “free” replacement, I have to re-buy all my software?  Yikes!  So I’m going to end up paying $93.29 to repair my old Wii, just so I can keep my data?

Makes me wish I’d just pirated it.

I scored Rock Band for Wii last summer, and we had a lot of fun with it, but it was disappointing that I was unfamiliar with lots of the songs.  Or I just plain hated them.  So, hey, Beatles Rock Band… Everybody likes The Beatles, right?

Yep.

As it turns out, my daughters weren’t particularly familiar with them (the shame!), but, impressionable souls that they are, they picked up a fondness for the group pretty fast.

One nice thing about The Beatles Rock Band is that you can hook up three microphones and sing harmonies.  (And get a triple fab bonus for hitting them.)  And The Beatles have lots of cool harmonies.

I play drums (in the game, not in real life, though I like to think they might be similar).  I’ve always been kind of dismissive of Ringo as the least talented Beatle, but he’s actually pretty fun to drum along with.  And no, I can’t keep up, even on the simplified game riffs.

It’s super annoying that the Wii version has a bug that doesn’t allow one to slow down the songs to practice.  And ordering extra songs is unbelievably annoying (and expensive).

Still:  Big thumbs up.

Here’s a thing I wrote in 1990, and used to put in all our manuals:

Our Stand on Copy-Protection
We at Delta Tao think that copy-protection is an evil thing that could damage the growth of the software industry and the computer industry as a whole. We hope you’ll boycott all copy-protected products. Here’s why.

We believe people have a certain amount of money to spend on software. After they blow their software budget, they still want more software. If copy-protection is preeminent, they are out of luck. The software they buy is the only software they have. They find their Macintosh less useful, and don’t encourage their friends to buy one. The hardware and software industries dwindle and die.

On the other hand, if things aren’t copy-protected, people pirate software once they’ve blown their software budget. They learn what programs are good and useful first hand. The next year they will make informed decisions about what software to purchase. In the meantime, they find their computer more useful and friendly. They recommend it to their friends, who go on to become software purchasers.

There are two problems. Number one, in a world where some programs are copy-protected and others aren’t, people may buy copy-protected software (since that’s the only way they can get it) and pirate the unprotected software. This rewards the businesses who are damaging the industry, and punishes those who help it along.

Number two, publishers without copy-protection can’t sell bad software with massive advertising. Since people tend to try software before they purchase it, companies only sell their products to people who find it useful. This means companies with inferior products, but big budgets, should like copy-protection.

We don’t mind problem number two so much, but the first problem scares us. The solution: boycott copy protection. Make sure it isn’t profitable to copy-protect software.

Before the Software Publisher’s Association has us lynched (they claim that “billions of dollars of revenue are lost every year to piracy”) we’ll invent at least a little bit of evidence for our theory. Remember back when the cassette tape was invented? People could now copy records indiscriminately, and there was nothing the record company could do about it. “We’re doomed!” they shouted. “Now we’ll only sell one of each record!” What really happened? The music industry took off to previously unimaginable levels, generating more profits for more artists than ever before.

When VCRs were first available, people could copy movies indiscriminately, and there was little the movie companies could do about it. “We’re doomed!” they cried. “Now we’ll never sell another movie!” What happened? The movie industry took off to previously unimaginable levels, generating more profits for more people than ever before.

Pay for software based on its quality, not its advertising, packaging, and copy protection.

I just got a tech support call about somebody’s Spaceward Ho! icons being all wonky.  I had him send a screenshot:

My birthday, my hair, apparently.

I just got my first test version of iPhone Spaceward Ho!. It’s got a long way to go, but it’s looking fun.

For years we’ve been tweaking Ho! to take better advantage of larger typical screens, so now it’s interesting to go the other direction.  And our finely-honed Mac interface is not a perfect fit for the iPhone — but I think it will be.

For the second time in a few weeks, I’ve ordered something from Amazon (Beatles Rock Band) that is theoretically “In Stock,” only to find that they’ll find time to ship it out sometime next week.

Lame.

The best thing about the second most recent James Bond movie was the parkour chase scene from the teaser. The black guy Bond is pursuing, Sebastien Foucan, is a delight to watch.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is all about parkour as a game.  And undo via time travel.  (Great game, by the way.)

Anyway, I was just reminded of that by this robot parkour video.