Cut The Rope Won "Best Handheld Game"

Pretty awesome to see an iOS app winning a GDCA for Best Handheld Game. Next stop: Game of the Year!

Sounds like it was a fun awards show. GDCA was one of my favorite parts of GDC in the past...I hope to go next year!

A Couple Of Mash-Ups

Saw a couple of amazing video mash-ups, thought they were worth sharing.

Scott Pilgrim's Threshold 8-Bit vs. How Low by Ludacris.


Also, the "first" live performance of Smack My Bitch Up, circa 1965.

Snake? Snake! SNAAAAKE (Oil)!

Gotta hand it to them, Steorn just won't quit peddling their unproven "free energy" device. Despite not yet achieving a successful public demo in the past (but they sure did boast), Steorn wants you to shell out 399 Euros for an "Orbo Evaluation and Development System," which will let you:

Evaluate the core principle of Orbo Technology, which is that a time-variant magnetic interaction leads to a non-conservative energy result

Le sigh.

Core-Count Wars?

You want singularitarianism? Think of how long ago (answer: not long) the "Giga-/Mega-hertz" wars gave way to multi-core CPUs, and now this:

AMD CTO of servers Donald Newell prognosticated that the number of individual CPUs on a chip won't go up forever: "There will come an end to the core-count wars," he told IDG News. Just as the megahertz race was eventually defeated by thermal restrictions, so too will the number of cores on an chip cease to increase. " I won't put an exact date on it, but I don't myself expect to see 128 cores on a full-sized server die by the end of this decade...

Accelerating returns!

FF14 Uses BitTorrent to Patch Itself

I picked up Final Fantasy XIV this morning, specifically the ginormous collector's edition so that Sora and I can play together during the 30-day trial.

By the time I got home with the box, I had an hour before I needed to leave for somewhere else. No problem, I figure I'd have at least enough time to install the game, watch the opening movie and roll a character. There has been a patch or two since the game came out, but my ISP provides 16Mbps downstream.

Only problem there, is that Square chose to use BitTorrent to update their users. As I write this, 50 minutes have passed, I've downloaded 10% of the patch, and my current U/L is 8.0KB/s to zero.

That's right, I'm uploading this patch to other users while my 16Mbps downlink sits idle. Why Square doesn't have *any* usable seeds running in my vicinity is beyond me, but this has so far been a terrible experience.

Salaries, The World, and You

So, Joystiq is bemoaning Satoru Iwata's low salary. He makes $770,000 per year. Tell me one remotely-reasonable thing that he couldn't afford.

As long as he didn't buy Nintendo stock when I did (Goddammit), he probably makes a hell of a lot more than $770,000 per year. I wish more companies followed Nintendo's model, and gave CEOs, rockstar-employees, and headline-makers far lower salaries, enough to live a very comfortable life, but nothing on the 7-to-8-digit obscene salaries that Western companies pay to their big players.

A company's success should belong to that company. It should NEVER belong to that company's leaders, nor its peons, because neither one is solely responsible for said success. That money should be reinvested into R&D, marketing and customer benefits. It is an insult to all involved parties to see that wealth distributed in unfair ways.

IGF Call for Submissions

So the time has come, once again, for all good indie game developers to...well, to make indie games and submit them to the Independent Games Festival.

My company, Gendai Games, is looking forward to seeing our users submit some awesome work this year. If you're interested in participating in IGF, you could do a lot worse than to head to GameSalad.com and whip up a killer app!

Best of luck to all the participants!