Archive for November, 2007

There’s currently a lot of buzz about the supposed firing of Jeff Gerstmann, a long-time editor at GameSpot (Penny Arcade! even has a comic about the incident). He was apparently fired based on a poor review he gave for “Kane & Lynch: Dead Men,” a game for the xBox 360. Eidos, who publishes the game, currently has a large advertising partnership with GameSpot for the game. This move indicates to me that Eidos was attempting to buy a good review, which they didn’t get. I have no trouble believing that they had a hand in getting Mr. Gerstmann fired.

It’s really sad to see when professional reviewers are forced to say one thing or another, but it’s not surprising. The almighty dollar seems to make most of the decisions these days. Years ago I subscribed to Computer Gaming World magazine, but I canceled my subscription after the quality took a nose dive. The “larger” gaming websites are starting to head in that direction as well, especially after shenanigans like these. I do most of my game review reading through Metacritic, checking out what reviewers as a whole have to say about various games. I also try to seek out independent reviews, from people like myself.

This kind of story is one reason that I decided to post my own reviews here on this website. Although I don’t have as much readership or visibility as the big review websites, I try to provide an alternative to the paid endorsements that publishers try to shove down our throats. Hopefully you find my reviews to be useful and honest. If so, then I’m succeeding where the large sites are failing. And that’s good enough for me.

I really hate how news outfits continually refer to Cyber Monday as ‘the busiest online shopping day of the year.’ If you take a look at the Wikipedia article, you’ll see that the term “Cyber Monday” is actually a neologism, undoubtedly created to generate public interest (and therefore, boosted sales figures). A number of online retailers point out that early December is actually a busier time than today supposedly is.

That being said, I love shopping online, and I try to do most of my holiday shopping through online outfits (though some things just have to be bought locally). How about you? Do you do your holiday shopping online, or do you head to the brick and mortar stores?

I have posted a new version of Googlebar Lite over at Born Geek. This release fixes one semi-critical bug and adds a new localization.

I recently posted a few thoughts on Team Fortress 2, but I thought I should write a full review now that I’ve spent more time with the game. Let me start off by saying that when I purchased The Orange Box, I was not in the least interested in Team Fortress 2. Portal and Episode 2 were the only titles I anticipated playing, and I even considered buying them separately. I’m very glad that I went for the better deal, as I hope this review will indicate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Valve recently posted the results to their hardware survey. There are many interesting things that can be gleaned from the data:

• At least 54% of users have broadband connections
• 39% have 2GB or more of memory
• 55% have Intel processors versus 45% with AMD
• nVidia graphics cards are much more popular that ATI cards
• 1280 x 960 is the most common primary display resolution
• Embedded audio chips are more popular that stand-alone cards (I found this particularly interesting)
• 84% of users are still using Windows XP

Lots more interesting data is available, so be sure to check it out if you’re into that kind of thing. The results of another survey were also recently released. Statistics for Half-Life 2: Episode 2 are available for viewing. I particularly enjoyed the overhead maps that show where players die most often. I’ve got to believe that the developers at Valve think this kind of data is pure gold.

File this one in the “Oops!” department.

During a recent US Navy exercise in the Pacific, a Chinese nuclear submarine popped up in the middle of the US fleet, completely undetected until it surfaced. I’m guessing that the top brass in the Navy will demand answers for why the submarine was not detected. This was no doubt a shock to everyone aboard the US ships, as the Chinese sub was easily within range for launching torpedoes.

There’s a really great article over at Stuart Parmenter’s blog discussing memory fragmentation in Firefox. This phenomenon is what’s causing Firefox to appear to consume so much memory. Most folks simply assume that Firefox leaks memory, mostly because they probably don’t understand what a memory leak is. Although Firefox did at one point have a number of memory leaks, the majority of them have been plugged (see this article by Jesse Ruderman for further details).

It’s great to see that someone is investigating this issue, and I find it very interesting that it’s a fragmentation problem that’s causing things to look bad. Hopefully we can see some fixes for this issue in the near future, and Firefox can get a better foothold in this department.

Update: There’s a great followup article that shows some of the preliminary work going on to solve this problem.