Twitter

Oh, I’m trying the twitter thing now. You can find me at twitter.com/thejessesnyder. I’m sure I’ll be posting there a lot more than here. The blog will be the economy size version while twitter will be more the like mini-fun size.

Pennies for Points

This year, on New Years day, I made the resolution to donate a penny for every point I earned getting achievements on Xbox Live. I really want to do some charity work, but I’m busy with games day and night. I’m in a fairly time demanding line of work, believe it or not. However, I feel pretty lucky, so why not do something nice for everyone while doing something I love?

So, Pennies for Points. Eventually I’ll get a more proper site up and running so people can track my effort a little better. Maybe I can get a few other people to join in. For now, you can check the side of my blog and watch the number get bigger.

I started at a gamer score of 101,467. Now I’m at 106,952. The months not over but the total gamer score increase since Jan 1st is 5,485. That means $54.85 in total donations thus far. Did I mention I’ll donate through Microsoft near the end of the year so they match my donation? One more cool thing about working for MS is that they’re pretty good about charity donations and giving back to the community.

Where does all this go? Most likely Child’s Play since it’s one of the best charities for gamers I could find.

So that’s it! I set up a new years goal and it’ll be fun to stick to it.

Billy vs. Steve

This isn’t about Microsoft vs. Apple.

I just finished watching King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a documentary about the crazy culture of professional arcade gaming. If you haven’t seen it, stop reading, because I’m going to spoil a lot. It’s a great documentary, so go check it out.

Anyway, the plot revolves around a guy name Billy Mitchel, who set a bunch of arcade records in the 80’s. 20 years later, a guy named Steve Weibe (pronounced Wee-bee) decides, “Hey I can beat Billy’s score in Donkey Kong,” buys a Donkey Kong cabinet and plays in his garage. Eventually he beats Billy’s score.

If only it were that easy. His 1,000,000+ score (something like 150k higher than Billy’s score) must be verified by the officials of “Twin Galaxies” who are the self appointed refs for classic arcade games. The rfefs end up coming to Steve’s house when only his wife is home and start ripping his cabinet apart to verify it. At this point, these guys sound officially insane.

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You Down With 343? Yeah You Know Me!

I’ve been quiet for a while. Too quiet. The truth is I was deathly scared I’d accidentally post something about the team I work with and get fired over it. Man, these Microsoft guys are serious business!

As it turns out, I can now say I work for 343 Industries. Haven’t heard of em’? Soon you will. I have the privilege of working with some of the top talent in the industry, across the board.

Microsoft recently announced 343i’s existence at ComicCon ’09. They also announced some of the stuff we’re working on, like an anime series and something called “Waypoint.” They revolve around a popular intellectual property you may have heard about.

So in short, I got to work on Call of Duty and Nazi Zombies and now I get to work within the Halo IP. Not many people get to say that in their lifetimes.

A Treatise on Achievements

I get a lot of flak for having a huge gamer score. Part of the problem people have is that I play games to “boost” the score; games I probably wouldn’t play otherwise. For example, I probably wouldn’t be playing Lost, the Cabela series, and a few other games if it weren’t purely for achievements. Also, those people never look at all the AAA games I’ve played, or point out that I’ve played the same or more (both in amount of games and achievements in any particular game) of any game they’ve touched. Haters!

However, here is where I take a stand. On the Internet! Every game I’ve played, even Cabelas, I’ve been able to take something away from. Before achievements, I’d stand around a Best Buy, look at the back of the box and laugh at the value games, then buy my copy of Halo, Gears, whatever.  I was a game snob. Now that I play these kinds of games, in addition to the AAA titles, I fully appreciate a good game when I see it. The difference is huge. I remember growing up, when I thought all games were good, mainly because I could only get one a year.

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Indie Games Galore!

Going to GDC always inspires me to go on an indie game bender. A few of us are sitting at this big award show hosted by the Independent Games Festival (IGF) waiting for the Game Developer’s Choice Awards and feeling guilty that we’ve played 0% of the games they’re calling out. Between the bunch of us we only heard of like three games they talked about…

So, within the next week I start getting games from Steam, downloading them for the PC or getting them for my iPhone. The one thing I found about a lot of these indie games I’m interested in is that most of the nominees (and some of the winners) haven’t even released their game yet. How does that work exactly? Does this happen in the movie industry too? “Well, no one has seen this movie yet, but here’s your award, I’m sure it’ll turn out great.”

Anyway, after getting back from San Fransisco, I went on my yearly indie game binge. Here’s a quick run down of the games I played:

> – – – Read the rest – –

One Year (and two days)!

It’s been a little over a year now since I started this blog. About this time last year, GDC has just finished up and I was inspired by Patrick Curry’s blog (which seems to have fallen into disrepair) to start a developer blog of my own. Blog. Blog, blog, blogity. Blog.

The most popular post? The one about Nazi Zombies, of course. However, the gamer Myers / Briggs personality type post gets quite a few hits as does the collectible design post. For the occasional review, people generally search them for how to beat certain parts of the game, where to find items and so on.

I think doing the game review thing is fun since it forces me to think much more about the games I play and not simply be entertained by them. However, I’ve been slacking. I’ve been playing a lot of games and not writing about them. I blame it on the influx of games around Christmas… there was just too much to play! I think in the future I’ll do less review-y type stuff (or make those posts more terse) and focus more on design “issues” and concepts. Those are more fun to write about anyway.

So, yeah. One year (and two days). Here’s to a bunch more.

“Achievement Guides”

Dear Internet,

Please stop publishing “Achievement Guides” that simply list the all the possible achievements found in a game. I can do that from within the game itself. A guide is supposed to tell me the best way to get certain achievements, not just tell me what they are.

Love,

Sir Haxington

Halo 3 Stencils

As you may know, I’m into geocaching quite a bit. I’ve found some really cool caches, and some not so cools caches. I always appreciate a well made cache much more than most cache you find out in the wild. Some caches are pure awesome. You can tell the person hiding the cache put a lot of effort either in creating the puzzle to find the cache, the sneaky hiding place they put the cache, the neat container they made, or the art on the cache itself.

So, my plan is to hide four Halo 3 themed ammo can geocaches in Washington somewhere. Since there’s four difficulty levels in Halo 3, each hide will be harder than the next. The Legendary hide will be extremely challenging and will possibly include a tough puzzle coupled with a tricky and physically exerting hide.

I created some stencils for each difficulty level in Halo 3 that will be spray painted on each ammo can. Once I made the stencils though, I realized that other fans of the series might want them for other reasons… so I’m posting them here! They’re in an Illustrator (.ai) file, so you can change the color and scale as you wish. I’m displaying them as green and yellow since the ammo cans are green and yellow looks good on green, but I may change my mind later.

Anyway, here’s the source file for the stencils… enjoy!

Disclaimer: Although I work at Microsoft, the following has nothing to do with work or is meant to promote any games I’m working on. Remember… these are Halo 3 themed and I have never and currently do not work for Bungie! I’m doing this solely in my spare time and as something I like to do as a hobby. Nothing from my work was used in the creation of anything described in this post.

More Nazi Zombie Quickies

Not sure if this is actually due to Nazi Zombies or not, but the resemblance is uncanny so I thought I’d link it anyway. Shabs, a guy I used to work with at Treyarch send me a link to this game called SAS Zombie Assault, which is a top-down flash version of Nazi Zombies.

Also, someone started a site / blog dedicated to Nazi Zombies over at the aptly named nazizombies.com. Why didn’t Activision buy that webspace? Oh well, kudos for getting the best URL ever!

Hopefully by now every has seen the trailer for Dead Snow (Or Dod Sno) which is a Norweigen horror film that features- you guessed it… Nazi zombies. Okay, so Nazi Zombies the game and Dead Snow the movie have nothing to do with each other, but the trailer is still awesome and worth checking out! I think the movie is out now, so I’ll be watching it in the near future hopefully…

So there you have it, a few more references to Zombies, Nazis, and combinations thereof.