Redeemer.Blog

Lately I started playing Assassin's Creed II on PC, which I bought last year during Steam's Holiday Sale. Lo and Behold, rather than just entering a serial number, I'm forced to register for a Ubisoft account, AND log into said account to play the game :|. This is old news to most of you, but I'm at the point where I have had to register accounts to play every blockbuster that I've really wanted to try, and worse, each of these games tend to have their own Achievements systems, their own "points" systems, and their own save or DRM systems. Right now I have accounts for Battle.net, LoL, Steam, EA, Bioware, XBL, Uplay (which I had to register to play AC2), and a handful more that I forget. I probably have to register another 4-5 accounts to play the rest of the games in my collection.

I understand the motivation behind these things, and I understand that companies all want to build thei
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2 years ago I wrote a post about the decline of PC games presence in retail stores, and this year I took another look at the situation.

Sadly, the problem today is worse than ever before. And the problem is likely world wide. In Vancouver, no EBGames store that I went into had a single row of PC titles for sale that I could find. In department stores the same is true, except even console titles are rare there. In big box electronics stores, like Best Buy and Future Shop, you *might* find a small selection of either casual titles, or very narrowly focussed AAA titles. EB is owned by GameStop, and I'm guessing no GameStop store sells PC titles either.

The problem stretches itself across to the other side of the world, where no GAME store in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, or Italy seems to stock PC titles.

It's probably because of Steam and other online download services, and I think th
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As we gear up for an architecture change and server update for Neoseeker, I thought I'd write some behind the scenes information about our recent v1.0.3 launch of the forums. This post might get a bit geek-techie so please mind that its intended to be somewhat technical.

Normally when we update the site, the process can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours depending on the scope of the upgrade. Updating files is not a problem, even though we run the site on multiple servers we have a system from which we can deploy necessary files with a point and click interface, and which then rsyncs the entire change to all of the servers.

The v1.0.3 update took a total of several days to launch - so long that for a while we were running at half capacity because some servers were running the old code, and others were running the new code. We had to take the updated servers off the site r
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I was reading the forums at a few Mac sites anticipating the next launch of the Macbook Pros, rumoured to be happening this week, and I realise that most users of either Windows or OSX either have very little idea about the truth of the "counterpart" OS that they make fun of, or they're blind to it.

Let's take a few examples.

quote some guy

Support files need to be in specific places, but not the physical App. This is not Windows.

I'm not sure what this user is smoking, but Windows hasn't required you to install an App into any specific folder since Windows 3.1. Any apps that have trouble with this would be poorly coded.

quote

I was a Windows user for 13 years and since switching to Mac I haven't crashed once.

This seems to imply Windows crashes all the time. I've used Windows far longer than the above person, and the thing has earned a deserved reputation for being unstable in past iterations
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Tekmosis told me today about the potential of the PSP2 to do what I have been thinking is the future of gaming: enable completely seamless gaming from traditional platforms to the mobile and back by allowing users to pick up from save games made on the PS3 platform to the PSP2. He knew I was interested in the topic since I had told him some while back that I felt the future of mobile gaming for "core" gamers like myself was a tighter integration with traditional gaming.

The idea is simple to imagine but difficult to achieve. Mobile gaming is turning a new corner with wider and wider adoption of powerful smartphones capable of graphics and games that in my opinion can far exceed what "handheld consoles" could traditionally offer. The ultimate achievement would be the ability to seamlessly switch from playing a game on your traditional console to your handheld, and back. Services like S
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Ok, as promised, here is the second Free Name Change "sudden death" giveaway. For the next 1 hour from the time of this blog post, I am giving away free name changes to your Neoseeker account. It is currently around 10AM PST, 1PM EST, 6PM GMT, and 11PM GMT+5.

Here are the rules:

• To qualify, post a reply to this Blog post with one single New Year's resolution relating to Neoseeker. Eg "I hope to reach ____ NeoPoints this year", or "I will refresh my NeoHome this year" and PM me with your preferred username.
• No account merges (unless you qualify as a regular contributor below), but I will trade names with another account if you wish.
• If you have 250 NeoPoints or more I will also trade join dates for you.
• If you have 2000+ NeoPoints, 100k+ NeoWiki bytes edited, and the account you are merging from has fewer than 250 forum posts I will give you an account merge.

New Year's, New Name
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I've wanted to write on this topic for a long time. I'm a firm believer that the world changes very rapidly, and what we see today is vastly different than what we'll see 10, 20 years from today (not just "kind of different", I'm talking about VERY DIFFERENT). The world's progress in technology is picking up pace too as the world improves its technology and processes in how those technologies are created.

You see, people working on things aren't only interested in finding out what's new, or how to change something, there are entire efforts being made in finding out how to find out what's new, and how to improve the process of improvement. Ultimately, this evolution of how we revolutionalize things leads to altogether new discoveries at ever amazing rates. Just think, 20 years ago our online interactions were so vastly different that to someone who hasn't experienced that world it is
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Merry Christmas everyone.

I'm doing a "sudden death" Christmas giveaway of Name Changes on Neoseeker, today only, and only "First Come, First Served" for the next 3hours from this post. (Ok, so its the day after Christmas, but I couldn't get this set up for yesterday).

Here's how to get your free name change, read carefully as I won't reply if your request is invalid.

1. Make sure your Neoseeker Collections (aka own/want list) is up to date for the next step.
2. READ CAREFULLY: Reply to this blog post with the name of your favourite game you bought this year in your Collection, and the name of your most anticipated game from your Want list. If its not in your collection I consider you're not following the instructions properly.
3. PM me your preferred username, make sure that it qualifies. I won't reply if it doesn't, read the "Taking Names from Very Old Accounts" section if the name is taken al

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I just finished answering the Q&A questions from the "Q and A with the Neo-Staff / Administrators Q and A with the Neo-Staff / Administrators" and I thought that opening up a way for members to request Blog topics might be an interesting to keep this Blog updated.

So go ahead, ask away in the comments section for things that I should write about. Please keep it serious and don't ask me to write on things I know totally *beep* all about :P.
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This is a post mostly for my own reference, but contains some useful web development related plugins/addons or extensions for Firefox and Chrome.

Firefox Web Developer Addons

• User Agent Switcher: useful for teasing sites (like Neoseeker) into showing you their mobile mode for easier development.
• JSONView Prettifies JSON output so that it is easier for you to read (eg colour coding + improved layout). Very useful for when looking at various RESTful API JSON output.
• Live HTTP Headers: Let's you track all incoming and outgoing header requests and responses as you visit pages. This is great for watching your redirects as well as the total volume of JS calls that ads and other features make.
• MeasureIt: allows you to measure anything on any site. I see people take screenshots of a site and open it up in Photoshop to measure box sizes, etc, but MeasureIt let's you do it right in the browser

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