existence, refactored

Last week, I stumbled upon SpaceChem, an indie game where you play the role of a reactor engineer sent to various planets to turn harvested raw materials into more useful products.

What’s really great about this game is that you are practically programming the “reactors”. Not only does it dabble upon both digital design (clock timing, implementing state handlers from scratch) and software development (performance tuning, refactoring), missions that require you to connect multiple reactors also make the player learn supply chain management.

I won’t post any videos since it will spoil the joy of making your own solutions to the missions. I suggest you go grab the demo here (available on Windows, Linux, and Mac) and try it out yourself.

It’s a week before every certified geek in the world would drop everything to get their Zerg on.

Now, a lot of people have already reserved their copy of StarCraft II from DataBlitz, but I’m more of a digital download guy: less clutter for my room, the better. Fortunately, Blizzard is now using this opportunity to sell the new Battle.net as a viable digital distribution platform just like what Valve did when they made Half-Life 2 a Steam exclusive.

Unfortunately, as with Steam half a decade ago, the current version of Battle.net is crap in terms of actually distributing the data. Unlike Steam’s high-speed global CDN, Battle.net uses BitTorrent. Now that would be nice if only their BitTorrent client isn’t crap — the one bundled with their installers gives you limited settings on how the torrent is downloaded and shared.

Thankfully, it’s easy to extract the torrent file from their installers. All you need is a Hex editor.

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I’ve talked about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 even before it hit the stores. Given that I am one of the people who actually boycotted the game, I never got the chance to play it. Instead, I chose to wait for a couple of months to support a game that actually supports the PC gaming community: Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

By chance, Activision decided to let the game be free this weekend. They also lowered the price, possibly both as a bid to deal a blow to the continuous migration of players from their game to the competitor’s, or as a last minute move to promote the game before shit hits the fan. Whatever the reason, the key here is that I get to play MW2 and compare it with BC2.

So how does the “biggest launch in entertainment history” compared to the current underdog?

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