More than a year ago, I wrote this here in this very blog:

"A few friends and I built a site dedicated to games on the iPhone."

I was referring to a little iPhone gaming site we had built, called Slide To Play. There were four of us back then, with one guy doing the majority of the writing. Our pace was pretty leisurely, releasing a few reviews a week.

It's remained my side project, but over the past year, I've watched something amazing happen. The site started to get traffic. We then started to get some sponsors. Then we were able to get some freelancers, and were able to produce more content. And so on.

Well, the most gratifying event in our site's existence happened just yesterday, thanks to GameSpot. The announcement was made public that GameSpot is now covering mobile games, and editorial content, at least iPhone game reviews, is coming from none other than SlideToPlay!

I'll be honest. When I started building STP, and even after it launched, I didn't have an iPhone and didn't really plan on it. It didn't seem that important; I'm not an editor after all. But just a little exposure to some of the games on the system changed my mind. I got myself an iPhone and have been a believer in its gaming capabilities since! It can handle an intense combat flight sim in the form of FAST to flawless ports of old stand-bys like Myst and The Secret of Monkey Island or ports of great new games like Peggle or completely addictive simple pick-up-and-play games like Flight Control and Harbor Master and everything between.

I was a little skeptcal at first, but I gotta say, it's really hard to put down the iPhone: it doesn't hurt that it's always with me packaged into a phone I'd need all the time anyway.

Regardless, I'd just like to say thanks to GameSpot for giving us an opportunity to expose to a new audience all the cool things you can find on this platform! Keep an open mind and try it out!

It's been more than seven years since I signed up for my GameSpot account on the "new" registration system.

Boy, things sure do change, don't they? One of the reasons I'm writing this is because I'm curious how many people will be surprised because they forgot that they were following some ex-GSer named Adam_B. Even now, my inbox has hundreds of unread notifications of people who decided to follow. Sometimes people did it because I had an official GameSpot emblem or because I occasionally posted wacky heavy-breathing videos showing tours of the GameSpot offices.

But boy, things sure change. I had written more, but I guess that's the crux of it -- things change before you know it. But what have you all been up to, peeps?

Is Blinx still the all-time floppiest flop ever?

Hey all,

I don't know if any of you have Apple iPhones, but if you do, you know what a potentially great gaming platform it can be.

As such, a few friends and I built a site dedicated to games on the iPhone.

It's called Slide To Play and can be found at: http://www.slidetoplay.com

Let me know what you think! Thanks guys!

[-- There's a column over here.

And a column over here. --]

^

[ And a column here. ]

v

Lotsa columns. That's all.

Oh, and twitter: http://twitter.com/Adam_Buchen

Hey all,

Just wanted to mention this, primarily as shameless linkbait

So one of my side interests has always been politics: even though I'm a software engineer now, my degree from UCLA is for Political Science. For a handful of reasons, I've been even more interested in this election season than I have been in the past , especially when it comes to the Presidential campaign. And my political views? They definitely tip toward the left.

So, with all that stuff in mind, I built a political site from the ground up: http://www.flip-flop-express.com

It was a good opportunity for me to do some top-to-bottom development: from setting up the Web server, doing the backend and database, and all the way up to the design, html, and css. It was definitely a good learning experience, especially in the fields I haven't had much experience with, particularly the front-end html and css.

As far as my personal blog, it mostly died, which is okay. I've switched to Twitter anyway!

Later all!

Hi GameSpot,

It's been awhile. You look good. I saw you with whatshisface.. what's that? Oh, just friends, huh? So... um, we had some rocky times back there, didn't we?

What's that? Oh, I've been seeing other sites, but mostly pretty casually. A stop by to get Yahtzee's opinion of something, or maybe I could read a quick overview at 1up on something. That Dan Hsu is cool, but we're just not that compatible.

You know, you and I had some good times. I remember stopping by a computer lab on the UCLA campus around lunchtime sometimes just to see what kind of crazy chatter was happening in Deep Fighter... er... Goose's Garage when we first contemplated heading into Iraq. Those were good times. The time we spent together, I mean, not the Iraq war.

I didn't know what I was gonna do after college -- I knew I needed a job, but my Political Science degree turned out to be not all that practical -- go figure. I had even thought about going back to my original home state of Wisconsin. But then Greg Kasavin saw a PM I made about an intern position, and since we had been casually acquainted due to Developer for a Day (I!) and thanks to my previous stalkership of the GameSpot booth during E3, I had a very small part of a foot in the door.

I ended up with an internship in San Francisco at GameSpot, a place that was awesome. The people were awesome. And it turned out, that led to a career in development. Just turns out I had a knack for it, who knew? GameSpot gave me that opportunity, and I look back on those days fondly. I also look fondly at stuff like the DDR Arcade machine on the third floor, which I sadly do not have access to anymore.

It's been a turbulent time, GameSpot. Some bad stuff went down, and everyone's unhappy with that. But I happened to check the site today and saw fiddlecub... er.. Kevin van Ord is taking over the reigns of Developer for a Day, that contest whose first iteration I ran while I was still in college, and the TOTAL prize for that? $100.. I guess I found it touching that after everything, people like Kevin are showing they truly care. It made me realize that there's plenty of good still in you, and maybe, just maybe we can someday work things out.

We've all gotten a little older and wiser, and what's happened in the past is done. For the good of the country, GameSpot should drop out of the race... err.. wait, that's politics, not gaming. Anyway, remember what got you where you are, and with persistence, you can get back there. There are still thousands of talented people who'd love a job there. And I have no doubt that Ricardo can take care of things since the man has literally been able to break the laws of the Universe by being in eight different places at once, or so it seems.

Bring back GameSpotting Live! There are plenty of talented people in the organization who are behind the scenes. Remember Vinnie? Anyway, have a good one.

I'll be watching you!

Sincerely,

former Superfan, Intern, Data Produer, Associate Software Engineer, Software Engineer, Lead Software Engineer,

-Adam

I don't have much more to say than that...

Oh, hell, sure I do. "Almost perfect" just doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?

In how many games did Tom Brady lead a come-from-behind drive to win the game? Well, he almost did it this time, till he got outshone by Peyton's little brother...

Billy Billachek showed what a great sportsman he was when he left the field before the game was even over. Go cheat some more, Bill.

So so sweet.

Hi again, GameSpotters!

I ended up taking a couple pictures of my home theater setup the other day, so I figured I might as well post them here. I went with a video projector, which means it's a great big image, and also means that the room needs to be dark enough to watch it.

In order to take the first couple photos, I had to turn on some lighting, which is why you can't see the image quite so well. The third photo is without the ambient lighting, giving you a better indication how it looks.

I took these for my personal blog, where I outline some of the pros and cons of adding a projector to your home theater setup. I also outlined some of the challenges you may have to solve when implementing your own setup. Check out my blog post about it.

So I followed the trend and finally got my own blog. It'll let me be a little more straightforward and honest, and no threat of random blog deletion.

The very unoriginal URL is: http://adambuchen.com -- I'm making a personal commitment to myself to update it at least once a day, so bookmark it, or add it to your RSS feeds.

Well, it's been some time since all that nastiness happened, and I'd like to think I made some point, in some small way. I canceled my paid account and I know I wasn't the only one. I'm Basic.. er.. Free, now, and that suits me just fine for the forseeable future.

I'd like to make something very clear -- the reason I continue to hang around here, on the forums, writing blogs, whatever else, is because I love GameSpot. I've been a fan for years and years, well before my three or four year tenure. Why was I so vocal? Because I was very angry. It's not anger toward GameSpot -- but instead at someone who put GameSpot, and the great people I knew who still worked there, at risk. I wanted to telegraph a message to that person that this wasn't gonna be the kind of issue that just blows over. But more than that, I wanted to defend the people I knew, the people that were so dedicated and passionate, and who put integrity above all else. I hope I was able to do at least that, if not anything else.

I have no ill-will or vendetta against GameSpot whatsoever. Yes, it's true that a blog post of mine was deleted in the middle of all that craziness, but I can't really blame that person in his situation. It was up long enough to make an impression, and for that I am grateful.

So, what now? I'm curious what a Jeff-less GameSpot will be like. Don't get me wrong, everyone who's on staff now is great, and I know Alex will do a great job. But Jeff had the ability to be an entertaining live presence. I still think that there's some really awesome stuff to be conjured up. (Dear Alex, Whatever happened to Burning Questions? By the way, do you play Rock Band? Or are you sticking with the real, non-achievement-point-awarding set that's not even compatible with.. well.. ANY video game system?? Sincerely, KarlBFan11)

At any rate, I hope that this is the opportunity for the editorial staff to shine. And I don't mean a lame new series that's designed for an advertiser ("Welcome to Zane's Diamond in the Rough, where we feature games you may not know about. But don't get too addicted or you'll have to grovel to that special someone for neglecting her! Fortunately for you, if that happens, we can help you find the perfect gift, the gift that says 'I just got you a diamond, so let me play Halo 3 in peace for 5 freaking minutes!'")

Yikes, that sounds like it could almost be real. So GS, I look forward to seeing you guys continue to adapt and grow and innovate. I'll even pitch another segment for you: Every week, we watch some poor, randomly selected soul face everything the DDR machine has to offer. You could call it "Dance or Die Revolution." Okay, well, the name needs work. Or perhaps Alex can give his next review while totally doing some awesomely irrelevant drum solo.

I think this blog might start to return to normal ol' Adam B. Kind of already looking forward to writing my next entry. Someone gave me and a friend the best Christmas gift ever. We got tickets to go see Van Halen - David Lee Roth style! It was this past Friday, and it was freaking awesome. I hope some of my photos turned out.

I'd like to relate a story about my second day as a GameSpot employee, when I was a timid and awkward intern suddenly cast into an organization I had immense respect, and even awe, for.

Jeff took me to lunch. We got burritos from a place near the CNET building. I'm a little embarassed to admit how nervous I was - here's this guy who in real life turned out to be just as funny and charismatic in person as he had been on all the videos I'd seen him in. Our conversation ended up revolving around games, of course. I'm not sure what led to this, but I ended up gushing for a bit about Eternal Darkness, which is still one of my favorite games. I didn't think much of it, other than being happy I hadn't made a big idiot of myself. Lunch was over, and I was back to work.

Skip ahead about four years. I was no longer an intern, but instead was Lead Developer of the site. I was at a get-together at the local bar with my GameSpot colleagues. It was essentially my going-away sendoff as I was moving on to a new opportunity. Jeff shakes my hand, and tells me that maybe sometime in the future, I can stop by and gush about Eternal Darkness to him again.

Your team is very good.

But it is not the best football team ever, as some of you want to believe. It is a one-dimensional, one-trick pony. When a team like the Eagles (playing with a backup quarterback, mind you) can come so close to defeating the Patriots, it becomes very apparent that your team is not as invincible as you'd like to believe.

That is all.

I used to be an avid retailer of games stores like EB and more recently, the bigger chain, GameStop. As time progressed on, I started to go less and less to stores like GameStop, until one day, I stopped going altogether. You know why? GameStop is bad for the videogames industry.

I'll let you take that in for a second and reiterate it once more. GameStop (and its ilk) willfully and selfishly harms the industry you and I all love. I'm sure you may have heard this argument before, at least in regards to the selling of used games, but that is only one part of it which I will address a little later on.

The first strike is that the larger gaming stores are actively fighting the natural maturing and growth of the industry. Case in point: release dates. When it comes to CDs and DVDs, it is almost certain that they will be widely availble for purchase on the morning of their street date, which traditionally is a Tuesday. "Release date" is sadly a vague term in the gaming industry these days. As it stands, it could mean anything, including the day that it's first shipped to retailers or other such constructs. It should simply mean the day on which a game will be available for purchase. But Adam, you tell me, it's up to publishers to adhere to some organizational scheme, and then the retailers would happily oblige. At least, that's what you'd think.

You may have never heard of the GAMA convention in Las Vegas. It is small, and completely unlike any gaming convention you've probably seen. It actually does first and foremost focus on business. Several years back there was a panel in which game publishers tried to discuss remedies and standardizing to ensure a consistent game release process. It was the gaming stores who fought tooth and nail against that proposal. Why? Well, if a game arrives in abundance at Best Buy consistently the same day as it arrives in anemic quantities at GameStop, where do you think the customers would go?

This leads me into my next point: the dreaded pre-order. I'm not sure how many of you have stopped and thought about just how ridiculous this practice is. You are... depositing money toward a game that you may not even know the release date for. And yet, people happily fork over a little amount (or in some cases, the whole amount) of money so GameStop can perhaps gain a little interest by doing nothing except promising to hold a copy of the game when it's released. And from personal experience, I can say that sometimes, stores can't even guarantee they'll have your preorder when you get there. Back when I was still a patron of such establishments, I once placed a deposit on Doom 3. On release date, I confidently walked to the register, receipt in my hand, only to be told that the clerk had accidentally put me down for a pre-order of the Xbox version. Their solution? They just gave me what I now realize in retrospect was someone else's preorder copy. Nice.

Really, preorders anger me. It's a little bit a combination of some of my bad experiences, the knowledge that a store is happily taking people's money without knowing when or if their product will ever arrive, and the smugness of clerks who would tell me "Only copies we have are preorders. Maybe you should preorder next time!" Maybe, sir, your company should better anticipate customer demand next time! Again, just think about New Release Tuesday. You go into your Best Buy or Circuit City or Tower, and it's easy to spot the shiny new media in the New Release section. None of that "We only got one copy of 300, and that was for a guy who preordered it" nonsense. Now I hope you can see why game retailers are terrified at the notion of standardized and organized release dates. Then they would have to COMPETE, and "You should have preordered" just won't cut it if there's a Best Buy with 30 copies across the street. I will concede that publishers need to get better with taking back unsold returns to be on the same level as music and movies, but I think it's done a good job heading in that direction, albeit in baby steps.

There is a lesson that should be self-apparent here: "You can't sell what you don't have." It seems like game stores missed that particular lesson. Sometimes you can go to a games store and get lucky, finding a copy of the game you wanted and leaving without much hassle. But it seems to me that's becoming an increasingly rare occurrence. In an ironic twist of fate, it's actually harder to find most games in games stores than in bigger electronics stores. But hey, they might have a used version of the game for several dollars less!

I'd like to point out that I think used games do have a place; it's great to play some older stuff that I never had when I was younger. I remember with great fondness Funcoland's vast selection of used games offered and I loved it. But that does not describe GameStop's vision of "used." Instead, just buy back games that are still selling, pay a pittance, and sell for a few dollars less than retail. Customer saves a few bucks, and instead of that greedy games publisher, now all the profit goes to the Games Retailer! The $8-10 retailer take on new games apparently isn't enough. And the best part about used is that you can just keep reselling them. The same copy of a game could make GameStop earn profits of one hundred dollars or more. With such a profitable option available, no wonder they don't particularly care about having a wide variety. They'd instead prefer to take a more parisitic approach.

And as if all that weren't enough, I present the final insulting act: it is common procedure to sell the floor-opened and clerk-borrowed games as "new." Do you see this casual negligence towards merchandise that will be sold in other industries? I worked at a Circuit City when I was in college, and they sure didn't let me borrow any of their merchandise for my off-days. The clerks of game stores shoud be expected to be upheld to the same standards as other professional employees. That they're not is just once again, suggestive that the store and its culture are severely hindering the industry. I'm tired of gaming stores. I've been tired of them for awhile. I thought it'd be painful to switch to Amazon and wait for shipping. But you'd be surprised how easiy one can get accustomed to that, as opposed to the alternative.

The site I've been working on has finally launched! Feel free to check it out: http://starwars.yahoo.com/

An alternate ending for Silent Hill 2. I'm pretty sure it was stripped out of the American version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUDcSeUvkOw

In my last post, I mentioned the Global Market Insite promotional partnership with GameSpot. I was a little annoyed with by what I saw as blatant advertising for everyone. But the part that annoyed me most about that was the dishonesty that was demonstrated by skinning a third party site as GameSpot.

Since then, someone pointed out to me that this site actually promised the chance to receive emblems.

"Plus, you'll have the chance to receive other rewards from GameSpot, including the latest games, game gear, emblems, and even paid trips to the GameSpot studios in San Francisco."

Right now, I totally dig emblems. They're really cool, they're interesting, and give users a chance to really establish a well-known and unique presence. Obviously, lots of users are really into them as well. They're a good feature, and are generally a really positive thing for the community.

However, one thing I always believed was that GameSpot should never sell emblems. Everyone should be able to get emblems just by using the site. It's no secret that CNET is out to make money, and in the end, emblems do help with that. They encourage users to participate in site events, use the site a lot, or do other such activities that ultimately do bring revenue to the site. But giving emblems to users for participating in a third party "promotion?" Come on. When you get to that point, how much of a stretch would it be to start offering stuff like an exclusive Halo 3 emblem for pre-ordering the game from Best Buy?

Enough of this, and emblems stop becoming about the users and the community, and instead, just turn into real estate for sales people to sell to marketers.

Keep emblems sacred.

This weekend, and the past month or so of weekends, I've had a really erratic sleep schedule. That's why I'm writing this blog entry at about 4:30am on a Monday morning. I'll get to the explanation for that momentarily.

So, one would perhaps assume that when I'm at the office, the majority of the work I do is to do development work. That seems like a reasonable assumption, but for the moment, it's not even close to the truth. I'm currently working on a project of a fairly significant size, and so coding is just one aspect of the project as a whole.

So yeah, when I'm at work, I typically end up having meetings where we make fundamental architecture of our codebase and our hardware setup or meetings in which we conference with specific groups in this massive organization to nail down some external dependency. Or I'm on the phone with the ops department trying to get servers for our project. This is a wonderfully maddening process, as they want to know how much traffic this unannounced project will get when it's launched (and I'm not a fortune teller, I'm afraid} and how much traffic each box should be able to handle before giving us any hardware to test. Between all this, it's hard to get large amounts of coding done during work hours. So lately, I've been doing primarily weekend sprints. Getting code done in larger, uninterrupted blocks makes the process much smoother. So I do a lot of coding interspersed with short naps during the weekend these days. Hooray for new projects.

However, things have started coming together pretty nicely. Obviously I can't talk about anything beyond that, but I'm really enjoying it.

Anyway, time to get back to sleeping, or coding, or something.

At some point during my time in the web development business, I coined a new term to describe when absolutely everything goes wrong. It's a combination between the word "catastrophe" and a very colorful and expressive four letter word that I'm not allowed to say on here. Something like "Catastrofish," which is several times worse than a Clusterfish.

It's very common for something to go wrong, especially in the tech industry. A server goes down, or the database gets overloaded. These events do suck, but usually it's not that hard to recover from them. But then, every so often a problem aruses that just seems to get progressively worse, and spins out of control. Such an event happened with a big datacenter in San Francisco this week, as jsd discussed in his blog. I didn't have the... pleasure of being directly affected by the problems at that datacenter, but their report about why their guaranteed backup power didn't kick in reads like a Greek tragedy or something.

# When the initial surge was detected at 1:47 p.m., the building's electrical system attempted to roll all colocation rooms to diesel generator power.
# Generator 1 detected a problem in its start sequence and shut itself down within 8-10 seconds. The cause of the start-up failure is still under investigation though engineers have narrowed the list of suspected components to 2-3 items. We are testing each of these suspected components to determine if service or replacement is the best option. Generator 1 was started manually by on-site engineers and reestablished stable diesel power by 2:24 p.m.
# After initial failure, Generator 1 attempted to pass its 732 kW load to Back-up 1, which also detected a problem in its start sequence. The exact cause of the Back-up 1 start sequence failure is also under investigation.
# After Generator 1 and Back-up 1 failed to carry the 732 kW, the load was transferred to Back-up 2 which correctly accepted the load as designed.
# Generator 3 started up and ran for 30 seconds before it too detected a problem in the start sequence and passed an additional 780 kW to Back-up 2 as designed.
# Generator 4 started up and ran for 2 seconds before detecting a problem in the start sequence, passing its 900 kW load on to Back-up 2. This 900kW brought the total load on Back-up 2 to over 2.4 MW, ultimately overloading the 2.1 MW Back-up 2 unit, causing it to fail. Generator 4 was manually started and brought back into operations at 2:22 p.m. Generator 4 was switched to utility operations at 7:05 a.m. on 7/25 to address an exhaust leak but is operational and available in the event of another outage.

Yikes. I sure feel for the current devs at CNET. That's the kind of thing that's just bad news to deal with. So yeah, I just figured that was a good story to introduce my awesome word.

In other news, the group at my current job is going to be moving once more, this time to the Financial District of SF, on a 10th Floor somewhere. We'll be the first ones in this new space, and that means we can set it up how we want, put the ping pong table where we want it, and, I guess, less important details like making sure we have desks or whatever.

Finally, I have a movie recommendation for you if you like AWESOME movies. Maximum Overdrive! It's based on a Stephen King story and is about the earth passing through the tail of a comet, which somehow makes all the electronics and machinery gain sentience (I guess via aliens). Not only are all the vehicles and electric turkey carvers now sentient, but they're also BLOODTHIRSTY. And it's got Emilio Estevez. That sounds like a formula for success to me!

Now the that my shock and horror of an "Alvin and the Chimpmunks Go To The Hood and get CGI generated" movie has subsided, I can get on with my blog post. (I could stay thematically consistent and discuss the terrible new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the Future show, but that would just make me sad.)

So this was the first time in six years that I didn't go to E3. I thought I'd miss it a lot more than I actually did. In the last three years I trudged down to LA, I was a GameSpot staffer sweating it out in the booth. Serving as a developer for GameSpot during E3 is akin to... well... being a developer for GameSpot during E3. Software developers must account for a number of unknown variables when writing code. For me, the biggest question was always traffic. You could generally get a sense for day-to-day traffic after awhile, but E3 was the classic examples of "all bets off." The majority of the time I spent at my last E3 was devoted to staring at real time traffic graphs and sweating. I think it went pretty well back then, though I do remember that at one point, the Akamai-streamed Sony Press Conference stream dropped for everyone. And everyone in the Universe had the instinctive reaction to hit F5. All at the same time. Yikes. So to summarize,I experienced E3 from the other side this year, and it was a lot less stressful.

Been doing a lot of coding lately at the new job. Obviously, mum's the word, but I'm excited about it. And my ping pong skills have increased dramatically.

So how about that new Harry Potter, eh? I'd heard that Rowling might be phoning it in now. I was skeptical at first, till I read this excerpt:

The evil wizard raised his wand, sneering hatefully at Harry. "It is time to end this."

Harry stood firm, more focused and confident than he had ever been. He knew that his nemesis was right. One way or another, this was the end. This was the most important moment in his life. He spoke in a slow, measured tone, "You cannot ...

Eh. I'm tired of writing these Harry Potter books, and you guys will buy them anyway. I'll let you readers figure out in your heart how it really ends. Anyway, I think it's time for me to go purchase Big Ben or something. Thank you, fans! - J.K. Rowling

Seriously though, I believe that anything that results in more people reading is an ultimately good thing.

Better than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the Future or whatever.

Words cannot express.