bradya

Happy New Year & Updates

brady.archambo+blog@gmail.com (Brady Archambo) — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 01:54:23 +0000

Happy 2013 to all. Looking forward to many great days this year. :)

Over the past few months, lots has happened. Some good, some bad, and some just plain sad.

Sad: Glitch closed down. I don't think I'll ever be able to shake the feeling that we had something going with Glitch. I think in a parallel universe -- in a majority of parallel universes, Glitch is wildly successful.

I'll be sticking around at Tiny Speck to work on what is next. Keep an eye out here.

Updated design

brady.archambo+blog@gmail.com (Brady Archambo) — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 03:22:30 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I've been reworking my blog from scratch. The old look just wasn't cutting it.

It is now live! Hope you like it.

Turf Geography Club

brady.archambo+blog@gmail.com (Brady Archambo) — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 05:34:07 +0000

Turf Geography Club is an 8-bit game mashup of Foursquare and Monopoly for iPhone. Released a few days ago on the App Store, it's an extremely polished game, with little to complain about.

The art was primarily done by meticulous Turf Geography Club founder Michael Tseng. Done in the oh so common 8-bit style, it's not even the art quality and attention to detail that stand out the most about this app; it's the tremendous quantity of art that was created for the game. As far as I know, every single Foursquare venue category has its own special (animated) art. And Foursquare has tons of venue categories.

Gameplay is fun -- it's pretty much what you would expect of a Monopoly-inspired location-based game. Check in to locations, earn coins and experience, add floors to your buildings, and collect rent. That said, it brings back the feeling you first had when you started checking in and earning badges on Foursquare. It's now fun to check in again. Time will tell if this game continues to be fun in the long term, though.

If you have a chance, download Turf on the App Store here. It's free and worth downloading if not just to see what an extremely polished game can look like.

P.S. Check out their great introduction video, it's one of the best I've ever seen for a game release:

Why I Stopped Playing Diablo 3

brady.archambo+blog@gmail.com (Brady Archambo) — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 21:53:22 +0000

After about a month and a half of pretty hardcore play, I'm finished with Diablo 3.

Blizzard made a very good game, getting a 9.5 on IGN, 5 stars on Joystiq, and numerous other positive reviews.

Unfortunately for the slightly more hardcore gamers, Blizzard didn't create a sustainable end-game in Diablo 3. Once you've killed Diablo in Inferno, you've seen it all. The only thing left for you to do is to run the same content (slightly randomized) over and over, farming for better gear and higher numbers. This is fun for a while, but eventually gets old, as it did for me, and many many others.

In total, I made over $500 on the Real Money Auction House - mainly from selling my normal character's gear when I started playing Hardcore.

I ended up dying in Hardcore on my 60 Barb to Inferno Belial - phase 3. With about 5% left, I knew I was close to enrage, so I went back to DPS before a pool phase ended, and he spawned 3+ pools under me. I chose (fatally) to stay and pop potions and DPS, and died gloriously in green poison explosions. Fortunately, I was relieved instead of sad - I no longer had any reason to continue farming the same content over and over.

Here's a screenshot of my demise, from Sunday.

Blog Updates

brady.archambo+blog@gmail.com (Brady Archambo) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 03:31:20 +0000

Just updated the blog with the following features:

Sidebar beautification + font fixes
Beta feeds via RSS and Atom
Permalinks and external links
Main page limited to 5 posts
The ability to hold posts until a specified date

Pocket Planes