Gabe Newell

Dev Community Sips on Haterade, Trashes Sony

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Hopping on the “I hate Sony” bandwagon this week, Valve’s head-honcho Gabe Newell went on a tirade against the PS3 in a GameInformer interview. And I quote:

“The PS3 is a total disaster on so many levels, I think It’s really clear that Sony lost track of what customers and what developers wanted… I’d say, even at this late date, they should just cancel it and do a ‘do over’. Just say, ‘This was a horrible disaster and we’re sorry and we’re going to stop selling this and stop trying to convince people to develop for it.'”

Whew, those are some harsh words, Newell. There is just no more Playstation love these days. And this hasn’t been the first time this has happened, either. Last week, id’s John Carmack told GameInformer that he has disliked Sony’s subpar dev tools since the PS2. →  Read the rest

PC Gaming dead!? But it’s so young and innocent!

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In a somewhat bizarre turn of events, I’ve actually started reading a book. Yeah, I know. Simply amazing.

My friend at work let me borrow Masters of Doom, the book that details the two men that helped shape the PC gaming industry into what it is today: John Carmack and John Romero of id Software.

A very interesting part in the book was when Carmack, in only one night, recreated the first level to Super Mario Bros. 3 on a PC. For an IBM PC at the time (1990), this was an amazing feat. No PC was powerful enough to simulate the scrolling effect that Nintendo did so easily on their NES system, but Carmack created an algorithm that somehow faked the effect, calling it adaptive tile refresh. Basically, the screen changed only what needed to change, and it would be the starting point for what would later become id Software. →  Read the rest