Seth Gorden

Warren Spector is my new favorite designer, as per the Gamasutra interview I just read.

When asked about the limited processing power of the Wii for his current project Epic Mickey, he said this:

“Constraints always push you to be more creative. I mean whatever the constraints are, whether it’s the constraints of a license, the constraints of a piece of hardware, I mean, no creative act is made better by being constraint free.”

And isn’t it the truth? This man gets it. A few fun facts that support this idea:

The Nintendo Entertainment System revitalized the Video Games industry in America after the Video Game Crash of 1983. It had only 56 colors and a central processor that ran at 1.66 MHz. That’s less than 2 mega-hertz, people.

The most successful game console to date, Nintendo’s Gameboy, had only four shades of gray and central processor that ran at 4.19 MHz. It sold well over 100 million units worldwide.

It turns out that a few bright colors and a couple mega-hertz were enough to revitalize an industry. A few shades of gray were enough to set sales records that top any console since created.

But why was it enough? (more…)

Okay, I broke down and bought a new computer. First time I’ve built one up from pieces ordered individually. I got a decent new processor from Intel, the i7 line (not i7 Extreme). And I got decent graphics card from EVGA with the NVidia GeForce 9800 GT chipset that will get me through most applications without too much trouble. Nothing jaw dropping, but a decent machine with 4GB of Ram, all coming together around an award-winning Asus motherboard.

So I boot it, install the OS, and before I could even blink… Blue Screen of Death! The error was always something about MEMORY MANAGEMENT. It happened a number of times before I decided to address the issue. Turns out that my two fancy 2GB  Corsair XMS3 memory sticks operate at higher voltage than my motherboard’s default. Thankfully, Asus had my back with plenty of BIOS options to adjust the Voltage. For my particular setup, I manually configured the DRAM voltage to 1.65 and the frequency set at DRAM-1600MHz. This solved my problem. No more BSOD, and the system response just felt a whole lot snappier. All that done… it was time to benchmark!

A friend recommended the 3dMark program available from FutureMark. So, I download and run it. And what did I find? Well, words can only say so much…

(more…)