Category Archives: Sigh

iPhone sluggishness

The iPhone is shiny, let there be no doubt. It’s a fascinating device, but since you can find a hundred articles about all the good it does I won’t waste too much time on that. Instead today I’ll describe some curious slowdowns I’ve experienced. Nothing too problematic, certainly these are slowdowns I’ll live with as [...]

GTA:IV-ever

So I just completed GTA. And, despite my earlier comments on how fun it was, it turned out to be a pointless exercise in nothingness. A huge number of people slaved over this game for several years and crunching for more than a whole year!, to give birth to this weird monstrosity. I liked many [...]

Musings on Linearity

I’ve heard it argued how linearity is bad, that developers should always aim for open ended sandbox games rather than the linearity displayed in titles such as Half-Life 2. But that’s a gross oversimplification.
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The point of linearity is that it’s not actually a problem at all, there’s no “solving” it by making every game a [...]

Half-Life

Y’know, between Valve’s Half-Life 1 and the sequel I think HL1 was the superior genre-defining product. In HL1 you weren’t slowed down, there were no inescapable cutscenes of people talking for several minutes at a time. It’s not that HL2 was a step backwards, but maybe a sort of.. sidestep? They broke innovative new ground [...]