There is something about car racing that makes it the perfect genre for a video game. It's the type of game format that allows for 2-3 minutes of intense concentration (a big race), and you can follow it up with some low-intensity fun (just driving around, exploring the game).

Game makers learned long ago to add a "career" element to most games, so you can feel a sense of progress. Computer-controlled competitors get tougher every race, and you in turn get cash and points to improve the look and performance of your car. You get better as they get better.

I recently read an article that claimed that computer games have gotten a lot easier over time. That is, 99% of gamers that played PacMan could not get past the first few levels, whereas in today's games allow "saves", infinite lives, and are more easily conquered. I don't view this as "the games of today are suckier", but instead as "games have evolved and improved".

For instance, when you play the game Laura Croft Legend, for instance, there are several pre-defined levels. Each level gets tougher. If you had to go back to the beginning each time you died, you would never see the later levels. All of the graphical design and programming work that went in to creating them would be wasted on all but a small number of gamers.

So I don't think it's fair to say that games are easier today than they once were. It's just that the objective of the game has changed. In 1976, a video game was meant to provide 10 minutes or so of entertainment at a time. In fact game designers didn't want you to play for longer than that, since it would cost them money (fewer quarters in the arcade slot per day). Now 30 years later in 2006, games are meant to provide weeks of entertainment. They provide in game prizes for achievement. They provide an incentive for a customer to keep playing them again. The next level is only 1 hour away!

So on my new Xbox 360, I have been finding myself investing dozens of hours in Need for Speed Most Wanted. I am defeating Blacklist guys left, right and center. And I am loving every minute of it.

OK, I finally bit bullet. I decided to take the plunge. I put my money where my mouth is.

I finally bought an XBOX 360.

I blame my wife. In all honesty, without her I would not have bought one yesterday. I would do what I normally do - go to Best Buy, go to the XBOX section, check to see if they have any in stock, stare at the demo of Project Gotham Racing 3, drool, say "That's a lot of money", and then leave.

But yesterday, as I was dropping my wife off at the shopping mall so that I could go to Best Buy, she said, "You're not going to buy one. I don't know why you bother going to Best Buy."

And that pretty much did it. I mean, she called me out. She basically called me "chicken" to my face. And so, $700 later, I found myself holding a brand new XBOX 360 Premium Edition and 2 games.

$700 is a lot just to play two games. I can't wait until a couple of years from now when these games end up at the "discount" game bin for $12 like the current XBOX 1.0 titles are.

But, at the end of the day, as I unwrapped my new toy and showed it to my wife, she said "Why don't we put that in the living room?" She claims that it's so that when guests come over, people can easily play it too. But I think she secretly thinks it looks cool!

Oh one more thing: Her first question when I took it out of the box at home was, "Does it play Tetris?". So my maybe my wife is the true gamer in the family?

An IT pro confesses her 9 biggest professional blunders in this interesting article.

This inspired me to share one story with you on one of my biggest blunders. It was also my first.

I will set the picture for you. I'm a kid - 21 years old. Less than three months after graduating from university. At my first real job - a big Canadian oil company. It's the end of August - the September long weekend is coming up soon. And my boss comes to me and asks me to make a small change to a important (and complex) application that I know nothing about...

So I spent the afternoon looking at the program. I still didn't really “get“ how it worked, but I made the change he requested anyways. I didn't do much testing to be honest, but threw the sucker into production anyways.

So what do you think happened?

Well, I come into work on the Monday after the long weekend, and one of my co-workers comes up to me. “Scott, did you hear what happened?” Apparently, one of the oil company executives was driving up to his cottage for the long weekend, and he pulls into one of the company gas stations along the way. They ran out of gasoline - completely. He was furious, and obviously got my boss on the phone to find out what happened.

My boss was amazing about it. Thanks Bryan! He told the executive that the gas station should have known it was going to run out of gas soon and call somebody. What kind of gas station LETS itself run out of gas? He never called me into his office, and I never heard about the incident from him directly. Great boss - protecting his staff from the company politics as much as he can.

Lessons learned? (1) Testing, testing, testing (2) Understand how the program works before making any changes to it (3) Work for a great boss

 

Did you ever wish you could go back and see some of the old posts from this blog?

Don't feel like using the Search feature? (search box is in the right panel) ->

Don't feel like using the calendar?

Yeah I didn't think so. But I notice some of my old posts are not showing up in Google. The way that my blog is organized makes it difficult for the search engines to find all the posts. So I wrote a little C# .Net program to parse through the blog index XML and build an archive page. This (hopefully) makes it easier to index everything.

Feel free to check it out. Or not.

 

If anyone is interested in a short tutorial on how to solve those Japanese-inspired Sudoku puzzles, I have written and published an e-book on it at Lulu.

How to Solve Sudoku

Only $0.95 as a PDF!

When friends and family ask me, “So, how is the book business these days?”, I have usually answered, “Dunno, I'm retired.”

(For those that don't know, I wrote a few books a couple of years back.)

Book publishing is a brutal business, and authors often get the short end of the stick. Besides earning a lousy $1.30 for each $25 book sold, the last book contract I signed would have given me an advance of about $7 per hour of time invested. That's minimum wage in Canada!

I have had a completed book kicking around on my hard drive for a while. One of the publishers I worked with went out of business before the book could get published. I've been thinking about it for a while, and so I decided to publish it myself.

Check it out at Lulu here. It's called “JavaScript 2.0: Everything You Need to Know”.

For less than $2, you can own an entire copy of this book in PDF format. Or if paper is your thing, it costs $7. The first edition contains only the first chapter, but over the next few weeks I will add more. And certainly within a month I will have the entire book uploaded. And anyone who buys it now (at this low price) will get the whole thing as a PDF free when it's complete.

So please, check it out and let me know what you think.

 

I have friends who refer to soccer (football for the rest of the world) as "the beautiful game". This phrase is credited to the soccer-great Pele.

I am not a true soccer fan I guess - I only watch the World Cup. But I have seen bits of every game in the 2006 World Cup. For instance, the goal Maxi Rodriguez of Argentina scored against Mexico. That was a beautiful goal. Off the chest, and onto the left foot and in the net in one smooth motion. Worth replaying again and again.

But more often than not, soccer is not beautiful. It is ugly. It seems to be full of cheaters, and rules that are meant to be bent. It is often a totally unsatisfying game to watch. Disgusting at times.

For instance, yesterday's France-Spain game is a good example. The winning goal was stolen. The French player Henry ran into a Spanish player, and then fell to the ground holding his face although the replay clearly shows his face was never touched.

Of course, the ref gives the Spanish player a yellow card and France has a free kick just meters from the goal. Some lucky bounces of the ball, and it's in the net. With less than 10 minutes to go, the game was virtually over. Spain was robbed.

Now, occassionally people ask "Why doesn't soccer 'take off' in North America the way it has in the rest of the world?". This is why. A game, in the North American point of view, is defined by a very precise set of rules. We employ every reliable means available to ensure the rules are followed.

American Football is known as "a game of inches". The referees employ camera replays from multiple angles to determine if the ball travelled one inch or two. Chains are available on both sides of the field to ensure an exact placement of the ball on each down. Each coach has the ability to "challenge" one or two calls during the game. And the ref can, on his own, go to the instant replay to double-check a call. A single toe touching the sideline can bring a touchdown all the way back up the field for 4th down.

Hockey also uses the instant replay. Did the puck cross the line? The instant replay judge can even call down to the on-ice referee during the next break in play and tell him of something he saw on the tape that the referee might have missed. Hockey players are tough - two players can have a big collision mid-ice, and both get up and keep playing. No diving, no fake injuries, and very little whining to the referee.

Basketball has shot clocks, lines, buzzers, 3-point lines. It's a very precise game as well. Since basketball is a small court, players are in contact much more often and the occasional foul call is made. But basketball is not broken nor corrupted.

Why not soccer? The biggest problem with soccer, as I see it, is the diving. It's a weird thing to watch. How did grown men get so fragile? These men are athletes! Yet, one little tug of a shirt is enough to cause a 200-pound man to fall to the ground clutching his elbow like it had fallen off. Oh the pain! Oh the agony! It gets to the point where the best soccer players are actors, and not goal scorers. They might as well hire Patrick Stewart to run around and pretend to be near death as the pinky finger of an opposing player came within half-an-inch of his forehead.

And the whole concept of "timing". Does the game last 90 minutes or not? With extra time added to both the first half and the second, the game often lasts 100 minutes. But some games don't. In this World Cup, I've seen a goal "called back" by a ref because time was up just seconds before the goal. This not knowing precisely how many minutes or seconds remain is ridiculous.

They need to fix this game. It is seriously broken.