Dec 16, 2009

OverClocked Remix turns 10

So, most of the people I know are familiar with OverClocked Remix, a website famous for hosting some of the best re-interpretations of videogame music out there. Its hard to believe that the website has been running for 10 years now, and that I've been part of it for a good 9 years and a few months.


I remember finding this little jewel back in 1999, it was this crude website which had this eye-burning orange background and where the only way to navigate through the songs was this huge combo list with the name of the songs, and you could only download the songs at certain times of the day because the songs were offline for a good part of the day everyday.

But all this really didn't matter, it also didn't matter that I had to download every song at a whopping 2 kbps, I knew I had to download every and each one. McVafee, AE, Joe Redifer, Disco Dan, Evil Horde, Virt, and the very owner of the website, djPretzel, were some of the remixers around in the day, that made some of the songs that I still listen to even today.

I've seen the website going from its humble beginnings to the big community that it is today, and I'm always happy when the website manages to go one step forward. Now this community is recognized by the very own artists they make remixes for, and has gone as far as making a soundtrack for a commercial game, which is also a remix of an older videogame, Super Street Fighter II HD Remix.

In the end I have a lot to thank OCR for. It gave me a motivation for learning music composition and software synthesis, which turned into one of my favorite pastimes, it gave me great music, and it also gave me some good friends. So although I'm not as active in the community as I was 3 or 4 years ago, I have to say thank you OCR, and thanks to David Lloyd and his staff.

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Dec 2, 2009

Awesome Trek

So, I got a bunch of movies to watch this week. Among them was the last Star Trek, which I wanted to watch when it was released but never got around to do it. After the disappointment that was the new Star Wars trilogy, I really wasn't expecting much when I popped this sucker in. Oh but I was pleasantly surprised.

This is just a good movie, period. The acting, casting, direction, everything was spot on, and really, for a reboot of an old, mostly campy space opera series, you can't really ask for more. It avoids the usual traps that remakes of old movies fall in, and also doesn't overdo it on special CG animation, the whole movie just felt really solid to me.

I never watched the original Star Trek as a child, I grew up with "The Next Generation", I was more of a Star Wars kid, watching the (still great) original trilogy over and over on my father's VCR. However I have watched the original Star Trek and I could identify all the little nods and references. This isn't really a straight ripoff, no one is trying to make a carbon copy of their 1960 counterparts, they bring the essence of the original characters, and make them their own, and unlike the horrible new star wars trilogy, the actors feel natural and most of them feel like real people, unlike George Lucas' script-reciting robots. When Spock's mom dies, you care. When Anakin's mom dies, you wonder why you are wasting your precious time watching it.

Anyhoo, two thumbs up for this one. unlike what Hollywood has been trying to make us believe by churning out soulless space opera crap-fests every once in a while, space sci-fi movies can still be done well, and it makes me happy. I think the trekkers should be proud.

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Nov 30, 2009

Coming back...

Well it's been quite a long time since I posted anything here.


I doubt anyone reads it anyways but here goes:

I have a new job now, I'm quite enjoying it, I am working with friends, its a nice place, and I am doing what I like to do.

Besides that, I've been playing a little game named Torchlight. At first glance, it looks like a diablo clone, and it is, but can you really call it a clone if its made by the people behind diablo 1 and 2?

Anyways, unlike the many other diablo clones out there, this one gets the gameplay just right. The loot, the monsters, the spells, the satisfying feel of upgrading your character, the solid gameplay, it's all just very well done. The game is small, compared to modern games that take a whole dvd, this one could fit nicely in a cd, but what it lacks on jaw-dropping cinematics or tons of spoken dialog, it boasts personality and solid, engaging gameplay. For people who loved diablo 2 and have been waiting for a game that just plays like it but looks and feels updated, this is as good as it gets, that is, until diablo 3 arrives. The game is just tight.



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May 5, 2009

All work and no internet makes Mike a dull boy.

So other than the internet I can access at work (which is where I've been posting shit from), I have been disconnected for like 2 weeks now. My ISP is the ultimate form of SUCK, but it's the only one that can provide the service around my area. But since it isn't working anyways, I might as well cancel it and start carving drawings in caves.


Aside from that, it has been an... interesting week. I was sick for most of the week of something that must be the ultimate boss form of the swine flu, which didn't let me sleep at night at all. I got a memo graciously telling me that for the next 2 months or so I have to work 3 or more extra hours a day to get a project done before the deadline. Then my car decided that I wasn't having enough of a rough time so he blew up 2 tires, one of them twice. Then there's this guy who thought that going up the wrong way while I was taking out my car out of parking at 2 am in the morning was TOTALLY AWESOME hit me and broke one of my car's tail lights. Oh, and my rock band 2 save file got corrupted just yesterday, right when I got my wii back after 3 weeks without playing it.

Needless to say, I'm in a GREAT MOOD. Oooooh yeah you bet your ass I am. I encourage everyone I know to call me right now and ask me to lend them money, or to do them a favor I wouldn't normally do, or heck, if you ever made out with one of my girlfriends while we still were in a relationship, this is also an awesome time to confess.

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May 1, 2009

Sid Meier's Covert Action



If there's one thing I like about old DOS games, is that back then, the guys who did the games didn't have to investmost of their time and resources in implementing or developing a fancy state-of-the-art 3D engine with real-life physics, complex filters and all the mumbo-jumbo that games today have to carry. It was just a few guys (sometimes even just one guy) and a cool idea.

Not to say there weren't bad games back then, or that games today are generally worse (though some may argue). It's just that sometimes games today can get lost by worriyng too much about fancy graphics, or following stablished clichés, and some other things that not necesarilly improve what is most important: the gameplay.


But this isn't going to be a rant about that. This post is a bout a little game called Covert Action, created by the genious called Sid Meier (the mind behind Pirates!, Civilization, Alpha Centauri, Colonization, Railroads!, F-15 Strike Eagle). This is one of my favorite games of all time.

I started off with the long introduction because I felt it was needed in order to explain what makes this game so great and unique. There's simply no other game like it out there, and believe me I've looked.

So what is it about? well, in this game, you are an international detective/spy, part of the CIA. Sort of like a James Bond with Batman brains. The game is divided in missions, at the start you get a few clues about the crime. It can be about what the crime is going to be about, or who is involved, or what organizations are involved, or in which city is happening, etc. After that it's up to you to find out what's going on, who's involved, and how to arrest them or prevent the crime.

The game is a mix of a lot of things. Part carmen sandiego, mixed with an action game, mixed with several puzzle games. You have several tools at your disposal, you can travel to a known hideout of an organization, or an unkown address obtained in a clue or investigation, you can decypher coded messages, you can contact other agencies, it's pretty complex.

Say for example that you have a clue leading to a known hideout. You first travel there, and you have the option to watch the building for anyone suspicious coming out of it, or you can try to tap the phone lines, or you can try to break in. If you decide to wait and someone suspicious appears, you can try to follow him/her by car, or you can put a tracker on his car and let him/her go (maybe it will lead you to another suspicious address). If you tap the phone lines you enter a little minigame that will look awfully familiar to people who have played bioshock or Fallout 3. If you decide to break in, you enter a top-down perspective and the game becomes an action game.

After the break in, you can look into the hideout and open file cabinets for clues, take photographs of files, open safe boxes, hack computers and search for a topic related to the crime for answers, kill bad guys, and if a suspect is actually in the hideout, you can take him as a prisioner and then escape the hideout. If you have enough information on him, you can turn him into a double agent, or just simply arrest him.

Describing the possibilities and all the things you can do in this game will take me pages, needless to say, it's incredibly complex but if you can think of something a spy can do to solve a crime, you can do it here. PLUS, all the crimes are randomly generated, you can never play the same mission twice, and it does it in a way that it feels like a real crime is being planned and commited because all the pieces fall in place, and as time passes so the crimes start developing.

The only flaw of this game is the action parts, because the controls are very clunky. Other than that, this game is a forgotten masterpiece. It has influenced so many other masterpieces as well, like bioshock and fallout 3 as I said before, and the randomly generated missions influenced many other games as well. This is a game that I've been playing for years now, and always come back to it for more. If you want a game that is both complex but addicting and with infinite replay value, then look no further.

If you are a hi-res graphics snob, or old games turn you off just because they are old, then GTFO of my blog you ignorant turd.

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Apr 24, 2009

MS Rant

So in the spirit of clogging the tubes, and bringing something TOTALLY NEW to the interwebs, I am going to rant about Microsoft. More specifically about their stupid, behind the times, stubborn, slow, hell to design for, gargantuan waste of code and resources called Internet Explorer.


See, most people wouldn't notice the difference between using IE or another, vastly superior internet browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or Opera. And I don't have a problem with that. The problem is that, I'm a web developer, and when I have waste time writing the same code TWICE because MS is so fucking stubborn on not following any fucking standart out there, it pisses me off to no end.

Instead of following what everyone does, and making their products compatible with the rules and standars clearly outlined and widely known, they decided long ago that they are the fucking kings of everything and that everyone should pander to their own way of how things should be. And you know, 8 years ago that wasn't so bad. After all, they were the majority, they ruled the webspace. No one cared about supporting a web browser that was used by less than 0.5% of the population. IE was king, and their word was the rule.

But things changed. IE is still the most used browser, but that statistic is going in decline (rightously so), and in some places other browsers like Firefox are gaining the upper hand with the users.

But this isn't a rant about that. It's about how they are still fucking stubborn about adapting. IE8 was supposed to be a browser capable of competing with the previously mentioned superior browsers out there. But guess what, they failed again, and failed hard. Let's look at one brief example. Say you want to set the opacity of an element through css. To do this in any fucking browser out there, all you have to do is:

opacity: 0.5;

Simple enough right? Well microsoft said that was pure bullshit, and in previous versions of IE, you had to add this line, exclusive for IE, to make that simple task work:

filter: alpha(opacity=0.5);

And you can say, well that's not too bad. And yeah it isn't until you have to spend developing time figuring out why your crap is working on every damn browser but in ie. Then you have to figure out the little nuances, like how the code above won't work by itself because you have to position the element (even if it doesn't needs explicit positioning) to make it work.

And you can say, well IE8 promised to adhere to every standart out there, so we designers and developers don't have to waste time on finding what the fuck was that developer smoking when he decided to do things their way. Well, you're WRONG.

-ms-filter:"progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=50)";

What the fuck?

I mean... what the fuck is this shit? come on. Throw us a bone out here. This is just but one example of what can make you want to tear your hair out. There's javascript functions tailor-made for IE, shit like the previous example in css, even stupid simple shit like XML.

I don't know what could ever be the thinking behind the turds who think that STILL going against the norm is a good idea in this day. Designers and developers hate this, and guess what, your market share is shriking, which means that probably, you will see websites that will treat you like how we treated Netscape some years ago. As the black sheep who nobody wants to support.

I'm not one of those Firefox militant assholes, nor I am trying to sell anyone to change to another browser. I used to love Firefox and use it everyday and recommend it to everyone that wanted a better internet experience, but as soon as I started using Google Chrome I changed in a heartbeat. It's still buggy, but its a simple browser packed with a lot of good ideas an functionality, and very light (in my experience). I'm just a developer who hates to waste time on simple things that should be that, SIMPLE. What I'm trying to say here is, I don't care what the most used browser is, but when the most used browser is still pulling bullshit like this on us, it's hard to not publicly burn it at the stake.

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Apr 17, 2009

And now you're going to say...

The Interwebs is huge. It's a magical and misterious place where you can find anything and everything that you can and can't think about.


So here I am sitting on my desk, thinking "What does these series of tubes need? and how can I help clogging them?", and as I took the last sip from my morning coffee, I just had an epiphany: "Clearly, what the internets need is another guy posting stuff that noone will care about, the intarwebs need another useless blog about random stuff. It needs me."

The rest, is history. Or perhaps future.

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