I don’t remember my exact age, but I guess it must’ve been in my mid-teens when I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or that is, I saw some of it. I found it to be somewhat interesting due to the whole space-thing, but ultimately lacking in alien creatures and explosions.
A few years later I saw some of it again with Rikke and this time around it felt even longer and just mind bogglingly tiresome. I was a bit disappointed since I genuinely wanted to like this movie. Why people older than me hailed it as one of the greatest movies ever made I couldn’t quite understand, hadn’t these people bothered with watching Aliens!?
Continue reading ‘Heilemann’s YMMV Law’
You know you ain’t gettin’ any of da ladies any more… You just ain’t got da bling bling anymore. What you need is a fresh GUI.
By popular request (well one anyway…) – Here it finally is, the complete guide to why my GUI looks the way it does and links to the files you need to make yours look the same.
Continue reading ‘It’s all about the Bling Bling’
You can argue back and forth about whether or not this leak will hurt sales or not. Personally I think it will. Assuming that the April date is correct, that’s 7 months of time where gamers will be looking elsewhere. Most people probably had the money put away for buying it now and some might end up getting annoyed at the delay (especially considering the massive quantities of hardware sold for this particular release). And then of course there’s Christmas. Christmas sells games by the bucket loads!
Also you have to take into account that the increased development time of 7 months is about half the time that most ‘normal’ games take from start to finish. 7 months of rent, wages and degrading hardware on your hands is expensive for Valve, very much so.
On top of that Half-Life 2 had the advantage of a head start with its original September 30th release date. It would have been out ages before Doom3, Halo 2, Duke Nukem Forever (heh) and Painkiller, allowing it to dig itself thoroughly into the marketplace. Especially in terms of mods and let’s not forget that mods for HL1 are currently still selling HL1 copies!
Granted all these games will still sell tremendously, but with the new April release date it now looks as if all these heavy hitters have bunched up in the same quarter. Half-Life 2 will in fact be late! Both Doom 3, Halo 2 and Painkiller are set for March release dates.
For the consumer the first quarter of 2004 and the beginning of the second quarter is going to be a great time to be a gamer, but for the companies it’s going to be publishing hell. I’m putting my money on HL2 and though there is no way to find out, I’ll bet you that this is going to cost a lot of sales for both Valve, id and Bungie. It’s a bit harder to predict Painkiller, it’s getting good previews, but it’s not exactly a prove company; and Poland? Heh.
But guess who benefits from this? Everyone set for release before christmas :) — Max Payne 2 just went gold, I bet they’re happy little ducks right now…
I picked up this Matrix Revolutions storyboard from a small clip shown on the Reloaded DVD site (Google it lazypants!). Hardly a spoiler, but still…
Well I think that I can get away with postulating the leak of the Half-Life 2 code to be the second biggest blow to the gaming community this year. The largest being the initial announcement that Half-Life 2 was going to rock our worlds this Q4 2003. And due to the extreme blockbuster-nature of Half-Life 2 and the high expectations that are rampant throughout the gaming community this is a truely unique and to some extend devastating blow.
Continue reading ‘Some musings on the Half-Life 2 source code theft’
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