2003.10.19
Rocket: Robot on Wheels. It's a really nice platformer/puzzle game that makes great use of a terrific physics engine.
The main character design is great as well...you control this little robot that's basically Marvin the Martian melded with a unicycle. (Hmm, shouldn't it be "Robot on Wheel" then?) With a tractor beam instead of arms, that you can use to swing from various hooks, or carry objects around. I was reminded about this game when it showed up on Gamespy's Top 25 Underrated Games, and I'm glad I picked it up from half.com.
Quote of the Moment
...if the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does on lust, this would be a better world.
Quote and Link of the Moment
After the first few times I played [this Japanese 'drumming' video game], a strange new screen began to flash after nearly every game. I could not figure out what this screen was at first, because it was in Japanese. Then I realized: It was the high-score screen. I was setting new high scores every time I played. You could tell because it was asking me to select three kanji characters, and then these would display next to my score at the top of a list. This was deeply satisfying, because it demonstrated how beautiful was my gift. It was also deeply frustrating, however, because I don't know how to write 'ASS' in kanji characters.The article is a great read for anyone interested in Japanese culture. I was amused by this ending, refering to a sophomoric, profane urge every videogamer in the 80s felt at least every once in a while.
Geek Note of the Moment
Not sure if anyone else will find this useful, but sometimes I like to leave little technotes to myself for future reference (come to think of it, I have a seperate database for this kind of thing, but whatever.) Anyway, to do a recursive "search and replace" in Unix (that has Perl installed), try
perl -e "s/oldstring/newstring/g;" -pi.bak $(find nameofdirectory -type f)
According to this CoolComputing page, this will replace oldstring with newstring in all files, making a ".bak" backup.
Followup: obviously it helps to know a little about perl and/or unix to full use this...Like if you're substitution involves funny characters or slashes, you needed to escape 'em thusly: \/
Or, in my case, it was loading up too many files, so I had to add in a "-name *cgi" after the "-type f".