Good news and maybe-good news

Well I’ve been burning a bit of midnight oil on BBQT, as well as working on it during lunch at work, and the progress has been good. It is all but complete (except for a merge of some of Chris’s stuff) so this weekend I’m hoping to spend some time fixing up our website and adding BBQT to it. I’ll also be adding builds of BBQT, Demolish and Abyss to ClickGamer so we can finally sell our own games from our own website-and wapsite. On top of that, Chris is almost done with our next game as well, an arcade puzzler called Brik-Link. Exciting times! Then it’s on to the grind of contacting distributors, demanding money, and offering them the new titles.

 

Falling again

One of my all time favorite bands, Evanescence, is finally releasing a new album. It’s called The Open Door and will be hitting stores in the US in early October. Hopefully we’ll be seeing it here soon as well. The first track from the album, Call Me When You’re Sober is streamable from their website. Thanks to pfangirl for mentioning this in her blog, or I would have been oblivious to it.

 

ICASA Finally showing some backbone

ICASA released it’s broadband regulations this week, with a mixed response. Since the regulations do not seem to actually address any pricing issues, customers were pretty much up in arms about it. They did notice and welcome a few long overdue items such as the removal of all port-shaping and unlimited local bandwidth, as well as a couple of service related items like a maximum delivery time of 30 days and the imposition of minimum connection speeds. The largest issue remains that of the inflated cost of ADSL and it seemed to go largely unaddressed. ICASA have however clarified some of the wording in the regulations, and it seems that the monthly line rental charged by Telkom (and which currently makes up a significant portion of the cost of ADSL) will quite possibly have to be dropped. Numerous questions remain, as it’s quite likely that Telkom will try and get around this somehow, but it seems there is some light at the end of the tunnel. I’ll take the same stance as many customers seem to have a dopted-that of ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’, but hopefully this time around ICASA will prove they are actually worth something. Heck-I might even be able to afford a broadband connection!

Women forging cubicles

This Wednesday was women's day in South Africa, so we had a day off in the middle of the week :) I definitely think that we should always have a four day week, and apparently quite a lot of people agree. A recent UK survey revealed that approximately 60% of respondants would rather have one less working day a week than have more money. Results were similar when News24.co.za asked it's readers the same question. We can all dream.

To snap back to reality, here is a hilarious parody of James Blunt's Beautiful. Just be warned, it might just strike a little close to home ;)



Forging on
On a more serious note, thanks to the wonderful service provided by GetMyIP.com we have been able to circumvent Telkom's evil IP resetting policy on ADSL (always on broadband my ass!) and now have a permanently available server using Krusty's ADSL connection at home. He made good use of that by setting up a SourceForge server to host our Smallfry development. This is already turning out to be a great move, thanks to the SourceForge CVS server, and the excellent CVS integration in NetBeans, we now have a really robust and useful collaberative source control system. Another fantastic (and really useful) feature of the server is task management. no more silly little scraps of paper that get lost of obscure emails that take forever to search for, we now have a proper task, issue and bug tracking system (that has great email update options as well). There are loads of other useful features as well.

rAge, the new E3 and Game.DEv

It looks like the PSP/DS LAN at rAge is going to be a hell of a lot of fun. Some of the guys from Rebound (who organize WiFi gaming tournaments) will be joining us while they're up here attending the expo, which will just add to the fun. The more the merrier! I really hope that I meet up with some folks that would be interested in making this a regular event!

E3 Refocuses
The big news of the week in the gaming world is undoubtedly the announcement that E3 will be changing formats. Contrary to doomsday reports last week claiming the show has been cancelled, it is simply undergoing a (massive) overhaul. Prompted by skyrocketing exhibitor costs and diminishing percieved value, show organizers (the Entertainment Software Association) have announced that the show will be renamed the E3 Media Festival , moved later in the year and become more 'intimate'.
Reactions to this announcement have of course been mixed. While larger industry players and journalists are applauding the move towards an event that will focus more on getting business done, fans have expressed less positive reactions.
The reality of the situation is that E3 is supposed to be a trade show first and formost, and while it's great for fans that somehow manage to wrangle tickets to ogle booth babes and demos of unreleased games, that doesn't really contribute to the event's goals. I can understand the desire for a more business oriented event that will allow developers, publishers, buyers and media to get their jobs done without having to spend a fortune on fluff. It also allows focus to be spread across multiple events.
That's not to say I won't miss the insane excitement that each year's (traditional) E3 usually generates online, with too many videos and articles available for any one person to process..


Game.Dev competition 10 offers big prizes
As Justin blitzed in the comments to my last post (thanks dude :p), the latest competition being run by the Game.Dev community on the NAG forums has been announced, and for this incarnation NAG have sponsored a total of R10000 worth of prizes! The competition challenges entrants to come up with a management game, which is already resulting in some really interesting ideas.
In addition to this, Game.Dev now has it's own webspace, independant of NAG, to be found HERE.