Triple Post Day!

That can happen when you work on the weekend.
All I want to say is - I would so upgrade to BlogSpotPlus and get rid of that damn ad at the top of the screen if only their order server worked.

Sometimes it's fun to just read the Perforce changelist and see what amusing titles people come up with for their changes.
Changes like "Made combos madly funner" and "Sound check-in of DOOOOOOOM!" and "Whee" and "La, la, la, la, la, la - via allegre I mean, VOICE OVER!" (I admit it, the last one's mine.)
Got lost on the Double Fine web-page today. Doing research. For the column.
Why wait for Psychonauts when you can get the essence of Tim Schafer right there at http://www.doublefine.com/news.htm?

It's my turn to make fun of the N-Gage

You can't point to a single thing about the N-Gage and say, "This is why it failed." There are so many things wrong with it fixing just one of them won't help. For example, this Halloween discount promotion is not going to sell very many more N-Gage's: although it almost fixes the price problem, there are too many other problems to count.
Discounting is a loser move. It will sell a few more units in the short term, but if they return to their original price they won't sell any. Everybody will wait for it to go on sale again.
And it doesn't fix the price problem: one of Jack Trout's rules of pricing - it has to be in the same ballpark. $200 for an N-Gage when you can spend $75 on a GBA is still not in the ballpark.
But even if they sold the N-Gage for $100 they'd still be fucked by these two things:
1) It does not have a killer app. As you can see, there is only one game for the N-Gage that's even slightly above average. (70 approximately is the mean on Gamerankings.)
2) It's a swiss army knife. People do not want swiss army knives. They want specialty products. They want a game company to make their game machine. They want a cell phone company to make their cell phone. Convergence is a myth. It didn't happen with stereos and it won't happen with PDAs. (Note: right now, you're probably thinking "But I do want a toaster in my car. That would be very convenient." You say that, but you don't want a crappy toaster in a crappy car, and when the toaster car comes out, no matter how good its toaster and how good its engine you're still going to think that it's either a crappy toaster or a crappy car because how good could a toaster made by a car company or a car made by a toaster company possibly be?) Now, if you built a GBA into your phone...then maybe I'd buy it.

Videogame Production Newsgroup

This started over on Yahoo groups: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VideogameProduction/. There were about a dozen messages in one day and then crickets. Here's your chance to participate and make it something other than stillborn.

Xbox and .NET are complementary goods

Now you know why Microsoft introduced Xbox: so they could require developers to update .NET. 6000 game developers * $1000 = six million dollars! 94 million and they've recouped their costs. BTW, I pulled these figures out my ass.

Ahh, Eudora

Going back to Eudora after suffering under Outlook for a while is like going back to my old broken-in Doc Martens after trying Kenneth Cole.