Two interesting links:
20 Counterproductive Video Game Covers
My favorite in the list is Phalanx, a “hyper-speed shoot-out in space” with a banjo player on the front cover:

11 Great Playable Video Game Satires
My favorite spoof is the “cow clicker” Farmville spoof:

Creator Ian Bogost: “You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom ‘premium’ cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called ‘mooney’), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.”

We are kicking off an Empires of Steel summer sale! Instead of the regular price of $35, you can now purchase the full version of this unique strategy game of global domination for just $20 for a limited time!

If you have any friends you’d like to get into the game, now would be an ideal time.

While researching some stuff on WW2 North Africa, I stumbled on an elaborate boardgame called “The campaign for North Africa”. I thought it was interesting, so I added a short blog-post on the empires of steel website. Then, I continued doing google searches about North Africa. Literally, within ten minutes of adding that blog-post, I noticed my own blog post come up in the search results — in less than ten minutes! Wow.

I kind of wondered how they did 3D without 3D glasses. I knew that a parallax barrier would work, but I figured it would have too small of a sweet-spot to be very good (i.e. shift a little to the left or right and the 3D would fail). I guess it’s big enough, though I haven’t actually tried it in person.

Based on their description, this system wouldn’t work for TV or movies – unless they dramatically increased the number of images handled by the system, creating a whole series of sweet spots.

Over the weekend, I discovered that my computer would no longer bootup. It would get most of the way through the bootup process, and right before displaying the desktop, it’d crash and restart. I couldn’t get in with safe mode, and couldn’t access my hard drive with an adapter, either. Everything on the drive was inaccessible. Even worse, I had forgotten to do backups lately, meaning I was potentially losing two weeks of work.

I’ve had the worst luck with hard drives getting corrupted lately. It took me about a day, but I was eventually able to get the Windows repair to work. When I finally got in, I found out that a bunch of files were corrupted. Some files could be repaired, and some were permanently lost. Fortunately, I had backups of all the corrupted ones.

Tonight at a local Starbucks, I realized the guy across the table from me was charging people to jailbreak their iPhones and install an application that would let them to pirate all their iPhone apps. He obviously set it up beforehand, because I saw a half dozen people come in and pay him $30 or $40 for each phone. Gee, that’s lovely. He pulled down around $200 in less than an hour. I felt like confronting him and his “customers”.

I’m obviously in the wrong business. Creating stuff for people is for suckers, the real money is in helping people screw over software developers. I would’ve taken a video of the whole thing and added it to this post, but my camera battery was completely dead.

A while back, I setup a system to track game-updates. It helps give me an estimate of sales on a day-to-day basis since my publisher only gives me monthly numbers. A couple interesting things: I’ve discovered that only about half the copies sold actually get updated. It makes me think I should do more to get players to update their application so they have the latest improvements and bug fixes. I’ve made it extremely easy already, but 50% of the players aren’t clicking that “Update Available” button. I completely understand why Windows does automatic updates by default. I don’t want to force players to update, although, it might not be a bad idea to start popping up reminder windows if players have gone a month without getting an update.

The other thing I’ve noticed is the horrible sales numbers I’ve had since Starcraft 2 came out a week ago. I hope it rebounds soon.

Congrats to Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy for getting a show on Discover.

Starcraft 2 got 4 out of 5 from PC-Gamer.

Empires of Steel got 4 out of 5 stars from Armchair General Magazine.

Just sayin’.