After getting those problems generally sorted out, the first day has gone very well.  We’ve played a lot of Determinance, with several demo guys, some of which have bought the game straight away.  It’s so amazing to have someone buy your game based simply on loving the demo – it’s the ultimate respect.

When we get out of soft launch next week there will be a lot more marketing, and the demo users should increase by at least ten-fold.  Crazy times ahead, looking forward to it.

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There’s a reason we do this thing called a “soft launch”.  It’s so we catch things like the following:

1. If the updater server software isn’t running then a large proportion of people will crash before they even get in the game

2. Our erstwhile publishers had a dodgily uploaded full version

3. People who actually bought the game couldn’t register it because the web client that verifies their game does something different

These things are currently… under control.  (2) and (3) are fixed, but (1) is causing us problems as there isn’t enough ram in the machine, and we can’t get more until next week.  We’ve stemmed the crashing, but the news still isn’t coming down.

Arg!

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We had a couple of complications this weekend, which hopefully are now ok.  We’re still optimistic for DT being on sale this week.

In other news…. er, there isn’t much other news.  I’m still enjoying the calm before the storm that will be release.

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I’ve just found a reason I want a PSP.

Yes, I know.  It’s expensive, it’s Sony, I wouldn’t EVER watch film or TV on it, I’d never be bothered to recharge it, I’d probably lose it.

But this is a REALLY GOOD reason.

…

You can play the PS1 version of Magic Carpet on it.

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Supreme Commander is almost exactly the same as Total Annihilation, with a few minor changes.

On the plus side there’s:

• The zooming thing, which works very well
• Loads of cool bigger units – in fact, in general the difference of scale between units is very cool
• Minimap on the second monitor, very good if you have a second monitor

On the minus side:

• The new graphics engine is ok if you have a very fast PC, but looks pretty much worse than TA otherwise
• You HAVE to run it at a very high resolution to get a big enough playfield due to the ridiculously over-sized HUD (modders are reportedly sorting this out)

To be perfectly honest, the zooming feature/scale is responsible for how bad the game looks the majority of the time. They had to come up with a solution which looked acceptable very zoomed-in and was playable zoomed out. The only solution turned out to be a huge compromise, making it almost impossible to be emersed. As my esteemed colleague says, every zoom level is a trade-off between looks and the ability to do anything useful. They needed to have the max zoom level be much further out, abandon their desires for up-close visual carnage, and create a zoom level which was both acceptable-looking and functional.

But having said all that, it’s still TA.  And nothing else has been TA. The importance of territory and the sheer coolness of having battles so incredibly large remains, and that makes SupCom dissapointing, but still important and just about essential.

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Finally, I got hold of a Wii.

I love it.  I had more original thought about the state of videogaming on the day I got it than I have for a year.  The Wii is a fantastic machine and I cannot wait for it’s classic games to be released over the next two years.

But everyone loves the Wii, so I’ll post the negative comment I have on it as you’ve already heard what’s great about it a hundred times.

Wii Sports does not have a very good idea of what the WiiMote is doing.  Both Tennis and Baseball only really care about you moving it, and Golf shows that it doesn’t have a great idea of what the ‘mote is doing.  Having developed a bit for the Wiimote myself, I know that future titles will have a much better idea of what the user is actually doing with the ‘mote, but I am slightly dissapointed with how little Wii Sports actually does with the remote.

Having said all that, Sports is fantastic for non-gamers and drunken sessions, and is still a perfectly valid Game Of The Year.  Here’s waiting for the first “proper” tennis implementation.

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Diese woche auf dem Montag Nacht Live, haben wir herr Dan aus “Gibbage”, der einen notable indiedeveloper ist.

I’m sorry, on the day after the Superbowl, the faux German side of my personality takes over.  Happens every year.

Anyway, we’ve got an MNL from Dan of Gibbage fame and it’s going to be totally great.  Here it comes…

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Determinance has passed the GarageGames QA process, so you can expect to buy Determinance as early as next week.

YES.

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While waiting for GarageGames to QA Determinance I’ve been taking a mini-holiday, doing very little apart from drinking beer, ******* **** ** **-**********, watching Diagnosis Murder, and, um, playing Bridge. Here are a couple of subjects I wanted to briefly bring up though.

42 all-time classics

This DS game has got some deserved praise from Eurogamer, but I have a couple of problems. The first is a general one – I don’t like the presentation much, information boxes moving around the screen too fast in a NOT RELAXING manner. Forty of the forty-two games are done well. The other two games are Chess and Bridge. Now, I haven’t played the Chess game and I imagine they just bought a chess AI and it plays ok. I can’t comment. But the Bridge implementation is horrible – you can’t see who’s bid what, Dummy is placed in a ludicrous position on the screen, you don’t have the option to play for your (AI) partner when you’re Dummy, and the AI is absolutely terrible. Oh, and it doesn’t use proper Bridge scoring.
Including Chess is understandable – apart from anything else being able to play chess with someone else without a Chess set is worthwhile. But the Bridge AI is so terrible that the only possible use would be with four human players. And I do not think it’s more likely you’d have 4 DSes than you would a pack of cards.

Come on Omar Sharif – bring your excellent Bridge implementation, and your leering face, to the DS.

Eastside Hockey Manager cancelled due to piracy

I go for long periods of time forgetting that piracy actually fucks PC games very very badly. ESHM 2 sold too poorly to get another sequel because all of it’s fans pirated it instead of buying it. I can’t imagine ever pirating a game I love. Frankly, the fans are getting what they deserve, but the devs certainly are not.

Console manufacturers deny console price-drops until ten minutes before price is dropped

Some people get annoyed at the companies for lying to them, but honestly there is no alternative. It sucks for the guys who buy the console in the month before the price-drop, but I think it just has to happen.

Cut-scene sub-titles – worst videogame crime ever?

Sub-titles in cut scenes literally RUIN them for me. I just don’t understand why anyone would leave out the option to turn them off, and in fact not have them turned off by default. Obviously this is good for deaf people, but I just do not understand how people under-estimate the atmosphere-killing nature of reading sub-titles quicker than the line is spoken.

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This week we’ve got top Determinance-tester bloke Alex “Malakian” Hayes at the controls of the Monday Night Live machine.  He’ll probably be popping up in some other form in the near future so stay tuned, and enjoy what he has to say.

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In case anyone’s wondering what’s happening with that Determinance thing, it’s in final QA testing at our distributors.  You should be able to buy it very very soon.

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This has already been on Joystiq, but is interesting enough to post here.  This article on the PS3′s scaling talks about how the new PS3 formware allows developers access to the before-now unavailable hardware scalar, to allow scaling of lower resolutions up to 1080p/i.

But what’s fascinating is that Sony only allow access to the horizontal scalar, not the vertical.  Sony have done a lot of strange things in the past, but this counts as possibly the most bizarre – one can only imagine that the unit doesn’t work properly.

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I’m sure it’ll end up being terrible, but this screenshot actually makes me want to play this new Turtles game.

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Craig Pearson previews Stalker again in this month’s Gamer – very positively too.

I’m getting pretty excited about Stalker.  As I mentioned before, I really hope that the gun combat is good, because everything else is looking fantastic.  It’s been a while since we had an epic PC release… Stalker could be the next one.

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Release Candidate 3 is in our distributor’s and testers’ hands – it may be the one.  I’m organising a big test this sunday, be there if you can.

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Many of you may already be aware that Valve are putting a lot of in-game adverts into Counter Strike 1.6 – the older but by far the most popular version of CS.

The vast majority of CS servers are run by players and people who have nothing to do with Valve.  These people pay for servers for people to play Valve’s game, so Valve don’t have to.  And now they will also have to host adverts, for which only Valve will get money.

That sounds pretty bad to me.

Servers are not cheap – I should know, I have to pay for the official Determinance ones.  Every person who hosts games for us does us a huge favour, and I plan on rewarding people who run good servers.

I don’t plan on spitting in their face and effectively making money off them.

Valve do have to pay for the master servers and all the Valve servers.  The master server when you have so many games really is negligable, and as far as Steam goes: I don’t think anyone asked for CS 1.6 to be put on Steam in the first place, I certainly don’t think they view it as a good thing.

I’m not especially close to this issue however, and there may be sides to this issue I don’t understand, so if I’m misrepresenting anything please let me know.

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On my way back from Electronics Boutique today – having bought Commandos: Strike Force and Marc Ecko’s Contents Under Pressure for a total of £8 – I was approached by two twelve-year-olds.  They tried to buy the following age-restricted items from me:

1. Cigarretes
2. Marc Ecko’s Contents Under Pressure

I’m not kidding.  (And I don’t smoke).

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Once Upon A Time is a 4 player MP title which I like a lot because I think it’s the right size for a first title.

This interview with the devs is worth reading.

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We’re almost at code freeze.  Quite possibly tomorrow.  Big stuff.

I don’t have much else to say, just been fixing bugs all week.

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The USC Media Division’s retraction of their sponsorship of Slamdance is very interesting.  That’s one of the most insightful pieces of text I’ve read by someone not deeply involved in indie gaming.

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… act most likely to wake the fuck up your stupid lazy good for nothing cat.

Scooter FTW.

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Awesome casual game Zong by the wonderous Starvanger is now associated with Determinance. We’ll be linking to this on the main page shortly but for now go play it!

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Yeah, I think that worked.

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You guys have all probably heard of Sony’s Emmy Butt-up by now – they won an Emmy for the Dual Shock controller (for it’s contribution to game controllers in general) and thought SixAxis won it.

Why isn’t the N64′s controller winning this award? It had the analogue stick and rumble well before Dual Shock was released. It may not look that much like all the other controllers, but Dual Shock hardly innovated that format either.

I’m going to make a game about the N64 conquering Northern Europe and then mating with the princess DD, making a HUGE AMMOUNT of Rare/Edgerrin James metaphors along the way.

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We sent an old Determinance beta to Slamdance, and they politely told us we weren’t selected because they couldn’t work out how to play it. We’ve dealt with that issue, or at least tried to.

But now they’re getting one ass-load of press due to them removing Super Columbine Massacre RPG from their festival. After they invitied the game to contend to start with.

I haven’t played SCMRPG, although I did read this review of it. The review made it sound incredibly interesting.

As far as the morality of making the game goes, I don’t have a problem with it. It’s a guy making a piece of art based on the memory of a tragic event and I sincerely hope that the people seriously affected by Columbine never have to hear of it. But I don’t believe in censure of an internet-distributed product on those lines. (I don’t like all the 9/11 films because it’s too soon and they’re more about profit than expression, but I don’t think they are morally wrong either really.)

As for Slamdance pulling it… well, I think they helped our industry avoid another massive Daily Mail GAMES ARE EVIL headline. But it’s once again diverted everyone’s attention from what indie games festivals should be about. I think that using shock tactics like that in a game is obviously a valid form of art. But I’m all about indie games being good because they’re fun and atmospheric and original and lasting. That’s what I want a festival to be judged on right now. Films can be judged on how shocking they are, I’d like games to be rated by more fundamental stuff at this stage in their development.

By pulling SCMRPG Slamdance have put all the attention on that game and taken it away from the other entrants, whose only recourse is to withdraw and get a Joystiq post about them.

A joystiq post about them withdrawing, not about their merits as a game.

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I have been writing Determinance for over three years now.  Determinance is based on the Torque Game Engine from Garage Games.  I doubt there are many people as qualified as me to tell you whether you should use it or not.

I have a question for you: are you serious about actually finishing a 3d game?

If the answer is yes, you should use Torque.

TGE is a pain in many places.  TGE’s documentation, while comprehensive if you look hard enough, is still not wonderfully noob-friendly.  But if you take the trouble to learn Torque (which will take at least the first 3 months while developing your game) then your chances of finishing your game are massively improved over other low-price engines.

If you don’t have the ability to spend three months learning an engine, the chances of you finishing a 3D game at all are pretty tiny.

Why the sudden praise from me?  Because I just saw that three of Game Tunnel’s top ten indie games for December are made with Torque.  You don’t need a better reason to use an engine than three good indie games being released in one month on it.

If you make that step, and you become proficient at Torque, you’re nearer to your goal than 95% of everyone else out there.  If you want to succeed, do what tastes right.

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My head is about to explode with bug killing.  Paul has found a lot of bugs today and I’ve solved them, which is good.  However my todo list still has too many issues on it.  And the game is crashing a bit, which is worrying me.  I hope tracking down the crash bugs will be relatively straight forward.  It probably won’t be.

We finished Single Player today, with a Street-Fighter-esqu progression through all the bots, and some actual unlockable content.  It’s really a remix of the content we had in there already, but I’m pretty sure people are going to really appreciate its formalisation.

BIG BOULDER GOING DOWN A HILL.

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I’m a bit late with this one.  Dubble, awesome dude who runs Reticulating Splines, interviewed us a couple of weeks ago and the transcript is here.  Has some interesting stuff on development, so check it out.

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I have no love for the Superbowl.

For a start, it’s melancholy.  It signals the end of the season.  When the game is finished it’ll be seven months until the next meaningful game.  Seven long lonely months.  And the game will most likely involve two teams you don’t care about, or be a blowout.

The playoffs on the other hand are great.  Teams play better, strategic coaching matter even more, there are a good number of games each weekend, and you get to see the match-ups you’ve wanted to all season.

I think NE-SD could be the game of the post-season.

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I always knew this time would come.  The time when Determinance feels like it’s actually there.  I didn’t expect doing the demo would be what caused it though.

There are still bugs and a couple of things to tweak, but we have a very real chance of having a bone-fide release candidate next week.

Having the demo makes Determinance feel complete.  I didn’t realise this before, but having a thing which you can release into the wild without having to interact at all with the people playing it is what makes that difference.  Determinance can now actually stand on it’s own.

People will download the demo.  They will play the tutorial, and a lot of them will get bored at some point during the demo (because core gamers are twitchy and our tutorial is long).  They’ll probably play a few rounds against a bot, and then they’ll go and click on “query internet”.

A number of servers will be presented, most of which will not allow demo users.  But they’ll see the Mode 7 Official Free For All Server, populated by five or six other guys, and they’ll join.

Playing Free For All against five or six guys is a raucous way to first really experience Determinance.  It’s the best way to start with.  If you don’t have fun with it then log off, uninstall, and never think of us again.

But I think quite a lot of people will love those first five minutes.  And if they do, Determinance will take off.

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The demo is now in the beta.  The testers are being exposed to only being able to play the beta for a day or so, so that we get it tested and have some good opinions on it.

Our demo has the following elements:

1. Can only play tutorial and two bots in single player
2. Cannot Host a game
3. Can join official servers and play with the registered guys, but have several disadvantages
   • Get kicked off every 10 minutes, and have to wait 3 minutes before being able to rejoin
   • Can’t name themselves: just come up as “Demo User”
   • Can only play as Blunder
   • Can only use one kind of sword
   • Can’t voice-taunt or pose-taunt
   • Can’t use special moves
   • Can only play on one level
4. Can’t use any of the editors

What we obviously need to do is let people really experience Determinance, and if they like it then we need to make sure they buy it, because our servers and my whiskey aren’t free.  We reckon this will work.

Our biggest problem is still the step of getting people to play enough DT to get into the controls so that they experience what fun it is.  We’ll see how that does when the demo is in the public.

Having a demo is giving me a really good feeling, that we’ll be able to give out Determinance in some way.  I’ve always had to be really worried whenever I give a beta or something to someone.  And also always had to worry about things breaking, about people not having servers to play on and so on.

We’ve still got a few bugs, but everything’s looking quite robust now.  If I give you the demo, you’ll be able to find a server and play.  You’ll be able to play my game without paying for it and without me having to do anything special.  That’s something I’ve wanted for a long time.

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People who don’t understand IP and the movie business hate Uwe Boll. But Uwe Boll is one of the greatest people alive.

He consistantly gets together casts which include (a) really amazing B and C-list celebrities and (b) hot girls, then makes so-terrible-they’re-awesome movies based on ridiculous game franchaises. And people’s problem is… what?

Oh I’m sorry, did you want Scorsese and Cameron to work together under Bruckheimer to create a two and a half hour epic starring Johhny Depp, Al Pacino, and Cameron Diaz based on your beloved game that you only love so much because you were playing it when you were going through puberty?

People seem to hate Boll because not only are his movies “bad”, but they make money. People also seem to think he’s dirty because he makes use of a German tax “loop hole”, much like ones which MOST FILMS YOU HAVE EVER SEEN use.

Boll has bought together Matthew Lillard, Ron Perlman, Burt Reynolds, Jason Statham and Kristanna Loken to create possibly the greatest bonus-film cast of all time. He then has called that film DUNGEON SEIGE. The man is a legend.

And when faced with the ridiculous abuse he gets from fanboys living in a fantasy world, he doesn’t hide behind marketing men and ignore it. He invites his critics to box against him and gives the greatest interviews known to man. He even makes an actually valid point – that games companies are so utterly inexperienced at this business that they won’t cross promote. He shows incredulity at that because it is incredulous.

We should all feel damn lucky that someone with an ability to actually make a profit is bothering to turn weird games into movies, and not be insulting him at every turn.

Bonus cast + bonus IP + bonus director = ftw.

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Many, many thanks go to Mr. David Rosen of Lugaru fame for being this week’s Monday Night Live Guest Poster Extraordinaire!  I hope you enjoy what he has to say.  We’re all ears for any indie game developers who would like a slot to post here – just give us a shout via the Contact page.

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I have no idea why I’m talking about this now.  It just came to me in the car.

HTML is not like coding.  Very often you’ll ask someone if they code and they’ll say “no… well, a bit of html I guess”.  That’s like me asking you if you can drive and you saying “no… well, I can wash cars a bit”.

HTML is just nothing like coding.  Making a powerpoint presentation is precisely four hundred thousand times more like HTML than coding.

Of course java script is like coding.  Java script is nothing like HTML though.  It may be driving a scooter, but it is at least driving.

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Last night Lizzie and I cooked a very nice three-course meal (goats’ cheese stuffed peppers ftw) and then went around to a neighbour’s, where we drank until four in the morning with some very classy people.  I then came back here and watched the Packers-Bears game while Lizzie passed out on the sofa; finally going to bed at seven.  That’s what we call a New Year’s celebration around here.  When poked about what he was doing during the evening, my esteemed colleague simply replied “YES!  COCKTAILS!”.

2006 was a very stable year for me.  Not that this job has ever been particularly stable, but it certainly hasn’t been a year of change.  Determinance changed from bad to good, but that was about it.

It’s no coincidence that 2007 and Mode 7 share the same last digit.  This is the year we find out what the hell the public thinks about our little flying sword-fighting game.  I have no doubt that Determinance will be recomended to people with strange tastes in games, eulogised in blog posts, and name-dropped in poncy conversations for literally years to come.  However, I have absolutely no idea what people will make of it on release.  Let’s hope Determinance is famous before it’s demise.

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Yeah… Dead Rising.  I really enjoyed the first half an hour and then realised I’d just be killing zombies for the next ten.  Zombies are such a boring enemy, and all the “humour” inherent in the zombie-genre is so incredibly low-brow, that it put me off.  Great, great first half hour though.

I also got Rainbow Six Vegas for Christmas, hoping to play it today.

I didn’t feel like coding anything actually necessery last night, so I transformed the move editor instead.  Let’s see if it’s transformed enough for my esteemed colleague to let me put it in the actual main menu.

I met up with one of our big community guys last week, Malakian.  Had a great time, we had a butt-load to talk about and got on very easily.  Meeting online people in real life is always a bit risky, but I had a feeling Malak was a good guy.  You can tell quite a lot from someone’s IRC behavour.

So, I guess we’re releasing this game this month.  Yeah.  You’ll probably hear more about that.   So will I, I expect.

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Happy Christmas from us at Mode 7 Games – we hope you’ve had / are having a good one.  There’s no Monday Night Live today because working at Christmas is “naughty” and if Santa finds out I’m even typing this he will come and send me to his elvish gulag.
Ian has been playing Dead Rising and I’m sure he’ll give you his take on it shortly;  I am plotting how I will get a Wii in the near future – we are both so out of date.

We will return soon.

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In the latest issue of PC Gamer UK there’s a feature about Valve designing engines for multiple-core processors. Sounds pretty dry on the surface, but they popularise it by saying that multi-core CPUs are sounding the death of the add-in GPU.

The 360 and the Redacted-Station 3 are multiple-core machines (to sane and insane extents respectively), and every new Intel CPU has at least two cores. The technology is here to stay.

Valve think that general-purpose CPUs are better than dedicated GPUs because, and I quote, if you’re having difficulty running your AI calculations you can just get the user to turn the resolution down to free up cycles. Interesting. There’s every chance of the GPU becoming on-CPU as standard (as ATI are currently experimenting with), but we won’t lose it altogether – graphics are always going to be important enough to warrant the specialised architecture.

There are a lot of developers going on about how multi-core CPUs are going to let them do AI “properly”, but I’m not buying it. CPU consumption is a coder’s natural excuse why AI isn’t better, but the truth is that AI is just very hard to do properly and depends far more on genius design that processor cycles. It’s not that they have all these great AI algorithms which they can’t ship for framerate reasons, it’s that at the stage of development when you get to doing AI it isn’t something you want to put a lot of energy into. They’re suggesting that cycles are all that’s holding them back from making great new games simply by having better AI. If that were true then someone would have made them already with 1999 graphics.

Everyone’s excited about more realistic AI and physics bringing us much more immersive worlds. But emergent gameplay from AI is only suitable for a very small percentage of games. An FPS would be improved if guards didn’t act stupidly, but that’s just bad design anyway. An FPS where a guard reacts predictably to a situation is easy to code. An FPS where a guard reacts unpredictably to a situation is going to break immersion unless the world can handle everything the guard could decide to do. For a game to be more emergent all of it’s elements need to support than emergence.

We all want human-like AI in freeform RPGs like Oblivion, and the people making these games are already on the path. But hugely better/emergent AI is untenable in almost every other established genre, so do not listen when developers talk about their next FPS having ground-breaking AI. It’s either an outright lie or they just mean better combat AI. And people have been promising better combat AI for ten years with about a 3% hit rate. You do the maths.

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I’ve been quiet recently, mainly crushing bugs and playing with our group of loyal testers.  My esteemed colleague has stepped up to the plate very effectively.

First I’d like to say a huge thanks to our loyal testers, especially Archa, Pineapple, AraCH, Malakian, Everybody, and new entrants Kab00m and Solo from my old Tribes 2 clan.  Playing 4+ player games with you guys, and the slightly less usual suspects, is just a huge amount of fun right now.

Pretty much the only problem left before Release Candidate is stability, and stability is improving every day.  We’re almost there.

There’s been news that Sin Episodes is basically cancelled, and I’m surprised it hasn’t caused more of a stir among the tabloid blogs (and by that I mean Joystiq).  Sin Episode 1 was basically run-of-the-mill, and I’m not surprised they can’t be bothered to make any more.

My life in the last three weeks has been considerably more testing and considerably less whiskey than usual, and I’m so excited about the game at the moment that I’m having a tough time relaxing.  I can’t wait until there are populated server at all times of day and night so I can play more.

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Here is a very frank, well-written and interesting article by Tom Arundel on the business side of Introversion.  Obviously for someone like me who has been fascinated by their rise to notoriety, it’s a goldmine, but gamers interested in what’s really going on with the “Last of the Bedroom Programmers” should take note.

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Hope you enjoy this week’s Monday Night Live below.

I’ve just opened an Arkade store to make some older nervous_testpilot tracks available to purchase once again. These aren’t in the same style as the Determinance soundtrack, but there’s some nice tunes in there if you’re into melodic electronica. You can go over here and take a listen – there’s a whole album of 8 tracks available for only £3.50 which is what we call a bargain in this country.

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We’re running a competition today for the best pre-fight “stance” made with Determinance’s move editor, winner getting a free copy of the game!  And some respect.

I’ll post the winners and others tomorrow, or you can watch the action LIVE in our forums.

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I have never been happier with Determinance than I am right now.  The new beta testers and I are playing for longer and longer, and it seems everyone is really getting into it.  Here’s what I think is helping:

The game’s better

First and foremost, Determinance is just the best it’s been.

Stability

Crashes are much rarer now, so people who aren’t called Archa can play for more than half an hour without any crashes.

Net code

The net code is now working extremely well.

More, better testers

And by better I mean better at Determinance.  We’re seeing a larger group of personalities and styles and that’s making the difference.  We had 8 guys playing FreeForAll at one point today, and 5 guys a few other times.  That’s just a lot of fun.

———

Determinance is actually almost ready now.  A few bugs and we get a release candidate.  And right now I am extremely damn excited about it.

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The spam comment menace is over.  Unfortunately, this means that you now have to register and log-in to post.  Yes, it’s traumatic I know, but it’s a small price to pay.

If you are a WordPress user and you’re experiencing a “zero sized reply” error message when you try to enter the Comment Moderation page; or indeed if the Comment Moderation page appears to do NOTHING when you click on it, you may have the same problem we did i.e. TOO MANY COMMENTS IN MODERATION.  Simply hit “Manage” and then view the comments, manually deleting them from there to make this go away.  We reckoned that we were able to access moderation again after getting the comments down to about 200.  HOW FASCINATING THIS TRULY IS – hopefully that was useful to someone.

Next time – stuff about games and monkeys.

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We’re about to hit you with some cool stuff this evening…

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The beta finally got off today, with fifty people getting the email.  We’ve had ten or so people playing today, and things are going… well.  Too many crashes is the main problem, but my security stuff seems to be doing well and the updater is surviving, so it’s positive.  Oh, and some of our new testers really like the game, which is happy.

Mode 7 as a whole, and by that I mean my esteemed colleague and me, are fairly annoyed we haven’t been blogging more.  We apologise, and will try harder.

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Beta is uploading, slowly.  If it works, people will be getting their betas!

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Apologies for the lack of updates here, I’ve been working flat out on the security code. If you’ve emailed me the past three months about getting a Determinance beta you will most likely be getting in on it on Sunday. Yes!

Joystiq are reporting that people’s opinions of Blu-Ray are very low because they perceive it’s inclusion in the PS3 as the main reason the console costs so much. Let’s be clear here: if the PS3 including Blu-Ray turns out to hurt the format’s chances, this will count as the biggest back-fire ever.

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