2006 News Archive

October 1, 2006

Today was my birthday. I don't feel older.

You probably wonder why this site is pink. I lost an aunt to breast cancer, and October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. A lot of sites have gone pink for October.

August 26, 2006

Like Tetris Worlds before it, Tetris DS is considered broken by quite a few reviewers, who complain about the inability to turn off the beginner-oriented infinite spin. Some have compared the "Super Rotation System" to cattle feces. In fact, it's so broken that Best Buy is selling extended warranties.

Well just be glad it's not this broken.

August 18, 2006

Wii must clear Aaur minds before Wii go insane. Forget the Time Cube; here's Nintendo's Simultaneous 4-Player Game Cube. Or is this the right Game Cube?

August 15, 2006

Until now, all my PC and GBA falling block games have used a game play back-end called Carbon Engine, which I first developed in 1998 in the Microsoft QBasic language and then ported to C as my first DOS game, and to C+Allegro as part of freepuzzlearena, my first Allegro game. But Carbon Engine is dated, as it doesn't have the infrastructure to easily support the rules of newer falling block games. Features include support for flexible wall kicks, gravity greater than one block per frame, fast sideways motion, double rotation, variable lockdown rules, and clean reuse of the back-end on multiple platforms that support the C language. I've embarked on a complete rewrite of the falling game engine, intended to support multiple games' rule sets. The new back-end is called Lockjaw Engine. Because the Allegro library used in the reference front-end is so portable, cdsboy has begun to maintain a port of the whole package to Mac OS X.

And I'm starting to to port all my GBA projects to work with the devkitPro R19b compiler toolchain. First up is GBFS.

July 22, 2006

The Tetris Company just cease-and-desisted the developers of Quinn, a tetromino game for Mac OS X, apparently due to fast-and-loose use of the Tetris trademark. I've updated pages that talk about falling block games to more clearly disclaim sponsorship or endorsement.

May 21, 2006

I've discovered tetrisconcept.com, a community for Tetris fans. But last night, I dreamed that a representative of Blue Planet Software (which owns half of The Tetris Company) was offering me a job if I'd remove all of my falling block games from this and other web sites.

May 2, 2006

DS development has arrived. The axe is musical.

April 30, 2006

This Friday, May 5, 2006, is also el cinco de Mayo. It also appears to be No Pants Day, but that's not a problem for me. Sometimes you have to ask yourself: What would Jesus wear?

April 28, 2006

Houston, we have a NoPass. This review of Datel's Max Media Launcher reveals that the card implements its own crypto and appears no different from any other DS game to the DS hardware, unlike the complicated PassMe2 solutions that have been popular for the last six months.

April 27, 2006

Nintendo's forthcoming "Revolution" console has a new name.

March 23, 2006

Quick rants have been updated, and three articles are ready for readers:

The problem with PC multiplayer video gaming
CAPTCHA Hall of Shame
Explanation of existing and proposed Nintendo DS passthrough methods

February 14, 2006

Spam? Ewww.

It appears that a script running on this server has been used to relay bulk e-mail. I have taken steps to prevent this from happening in the near future, and I am investigating what went wrong in the hope of finding a long-term solution.

In better news, it appears that people who cannot pass Google's visual test can e-mail Google support to get an account manually created. I have an e-mail from Google support to back this up.

January 4, 2006

What a bunch of hypocrites. Today, Google honored the birthday of Louis Braille, inventor of the "braille" tactile writing system. However, Google's account creation page requires all people to pass a visual test before they can create an account. This test is intended to exclude abusive scripts, but it also excludes users of assistive devices that speak web page text or render it in braille. Because of this lack of accessibility, the W3C has condemned visual tests. And to think I let Google display ads on my web site...

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