Seth Gorden

While I never run out of commentary or complaints about various aspects of the gaming industry, it doesn’t always make for the most stimulating blogging experience. To remedy this, I’ve decided to create and update a new page on this site, which I have dubbed Retro Lane. Therein, I will begin posting on happenings in the gaming world that really do get me excited. Please visit the page, and read about some retro-inspired projects and posts. Go ahead. It will be good. Like old times.

Continue to Retro Lane

Most mornings, I can set a watch by my stomach. At 10am sharp, I will be hungry. This is generally an interruption to the day. And if no snack-able items are present, it does not make me a happy camper. I am likely to be thinking about lunch for the next two hours. But there is hope.

I have discovered a magic food. It is called a Blueberry Bagel. They are thick and force me to chew slowly, thereby extending the enjoyment of eating. And afterward, time seems to pass quickly without thought of consuming more food.

However, tragedy has befallen me this week, having consumed the last Blueberry Bagel. Sad times. Must attain more, for they are delicious and magical.

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? Continue…

My new favorite coding trick is as follows:

#ifdef _DEBUG
assert( something );
#endif

In terms of error-checking, there are couple interesting things about this code. Firstly, as can be seen, this code is only compiled in Debug mode. This results in faster performing code in Release mode, since we’re removing some of it. But the more curious part is that there are no error conditions here to trap, really.

When in debug mode, the program execution stops here, and forces you to address the problem such that it does not occur. Continue…

OH goodness. Nail on head. Read about it here.