I wasn’t really sure what was in American Nightmare until coverage for the game started picking up prior to the release.

Alan Wake’s story was kind of like Twin Peaks. Alan and Alice Wake, his wife, visit a sleepy northwestern town for a vacation and mystery ensues. Alice’s wife is trapped by “The Dark Presence, ” Alan rescues her only to find himself trapped with the same “darkness” that has been controlling the townsfolk and causing them to turn against him.

In American Nightmare’s the “darkness” is a villainous parallel version of Wake, Mr. Scratch. Each level is presented like an episode of The Twilight Zone, featuring decent Rod Serling-esque narration and a campy plot. The story is engaging and has enough going on to keep you interested until the exciting conclusion. I was definitely surprised a few times at what the developers were willing to do outside of a disc-based retail game.

It sounds awful when you find out that you’re going to play the same three levels three times. The developers have understood how terrible that might play out and instead change each level with each visit. Initially you’re seeing almost everything a stage has to offer, but on repeat playthroughs you’re getting the gist while the developers put in twists for Alan.

Once you’ve completed the game you’ve got Arcade Mode still to play. Nowhere is it more clear that Alan Wake is Max Payne’s literate cousin than in this wave-based survival mode. With ten minutes on the clock Alan has to stay alive until sunrise.  Weapons are more automatic than the previous game, and is still the unique blend of third-person shooting where you’ve got to weaken enemies by illuminating them with your flashlight before lead can do them in. The slow-mo effect from Max Payne is back whenever you’ve cleared a set of enemies. This camera effect also occurs when a foe is about to sneak up on Alan, pulling back to give the player a second to react. The camera can be a little frustratingly inconsistent in giving the player this glimpse of danger. Sometimes you’ll be left wondering why you’ve lost your score multiplier due to a hit that could have been avoided if only the monsters were a little less subtle.

Though entertaining, American Nightmare is short. Despite returning to the same locations over again I only got about 4 hours out of the story mode. This isn’t too little, instead it feels just about right for what I expect from a $15 side-story from the original Alan Wake.

If you haven’t played the first game, I can’t recommend this one. The original game is referenced through manuscript page collectibles strewn around the game but there isn’t any reason why you wouldn’t want to play it when it can be had for about $20.

Speaking of manuscript-page collectibles, one addition to the game is really nifty. Each area in the game has a TV with a short FMV sequence featuring Alan’s nemesis indulging in some of the finest b-grade movie villainy witnessed on the small screen.

One final note, If you do decide to purchase American Nightmare on Xbox Live Arcade, please make sure to switch the HUD to “fading” on the options menu. Otherwise the HUD will obscure your view for far too long.

I loved Alan Wake’s American Nightmare and it is one of the best games to be released on the 360′s downloadable service. While the story-mode content could have made more sense as DLC for the original game, the arcade mode is fun enough to justify the price. Get the original if you haven’t played it, and then have a Nightmare.

Long story short: if you have issues with a PCI-E card like video cutting out randomly and never returning it’s because the designers were on meth. The solution is to only have RAM in DIMM slots 3 and 4. If you put anything in 1 or 2 you’ll want to commit suicide.

What the hell, Dell. This is why I build my PCs.

Anyway, I had a battery die on a controller again and write cache was disabled. Replacing the battery on that controller did not fix it — it was still saying the write cache was suspended. After a LOT of poking it finally came back, but I don’t know exactly how or why. I currently have a theory though that I hope helps someone out some day.

1) Known issue that MD3000i units ship with writeCacheEnabled=true and mirrorCacheEnabled=true, which puts the write cache into a suspended mode because it can’t mirror with only one controller. (They come with one controller unless you order two)

2) Fixing the above problem requires disabling both, then re-enabling only the write cache.

3) Trying the above did not work. Mirror disabled, but still suspended. Somehow with mirror disabled and forcing it to ignore the battery (cacheWithoutBatteriesEnabled=true) would get write cache working again. That’s not a good or safe solution, though.

4) Disabling all write cache settings, doing an offline/online of each controller, and then enabling all the write caches and fixing paths seemed to work.

I think it refuses to mirror the cache which keeps it suspended because the controllers still have some weird cache setting that doesn’t get cleared until you offline/online both controllers to “reset” them. It’s currently the best theory I have, but doesn’t explain why I could force it to work by setting cacheWithoutBatteriesEnabled=true.

tl;dr this SAN is a big box of shit.

We’ve never had much luck with mysql-proxy as we’ve seen it crash its fair amount of times or not start properly on boot, but this was unending. Core dumps weren’t giving anything useful; logs were no better. Here’s the MySQL-Proxy alternative that we should have implemented ages ago. Note, we’re running FreeBSD, so adapt to your own OS/Linux distro:

What you need:

net/socat
net/haproxy

FreeBSD’s rc.conf:

# mysql_proxy alternative
socat_enable="YES"
socat_flags="UNIX-LISTEN:/tmp/mysql.sock,fork,reuseaddr,unlink-early,mode=777 TCP:127.0.0.1:3306"
haproxy_enable="YES"

HAProxy’s config:

global
log 127.0.0.1 local0
maxconn 4096
daemon
#debug
#quiet
#
defaults
log global
mode tcp
option tcplog
option dontlognull
option tcp-smart-accept
option tcp-smart-connect
retries 3
maxconn 200
#
listen mysql :3306
mode tcp
option mysql-check
balance roundrobin
server mysql1 1.2.3.4:3306 check port 3306

Ultimately, HAProxy manages the connections very well and socat fixes any old clients trying to talk over the /tmp/mysql.sock file.

Enjoy.

Ask any game developer and they’ll tell you that publishers are the scum of the earth. It’s never a question of “if” the publisher screws you, it’s “when”. During my 15 years as a developer I have seen publishers pull every dirty trick imaginable, from telling the dev team of a certain AAA title to remove all the black kids from the game (“it hurts sales in Germany”) to informing a small studio that they were only going to pay half what they owed for work already completed, and then only if the studio signs a legal waiver first (knowing full well that because of late payments the studio would be out of business long before it reached court). This story is not about publishers, but it is about the kinds of situations that publishers create and the lengths that we developers are often forced to go to in order to clean up the messes they leave us with.

via The Day MAME Saved My A**.

Game Dev Story is a business simulation about choices.

What genre, what platform, and what theme do you want for your game?

Is the game cute and simple or realistic and innovative?

Do you want to use an in-house art, story, and audio folks or outsource assets and writing?

There are quite a few choices and you’ve got the freedom to make larger decisions about advertising campaigns and which development path to focus on.

Nothing is free, you’ve got to pay platform holders for devkits, employees their salaries, and fees for everything and everyone in the studio. Game developers won’t choose to grow on their own, you’ve got to prod them forward with research data gathered during development. Once they’re more talented their salary has to rise too. Though at least the game doesn’t simulate headhunters to recruit your developers out from under you.

Your team of developers will approach you during the various stages of development with costly suggestions that could result in a dramatically superior game or it could fail and fill the game with bugs. You’ll pay for those in development time before the game ships. Alternatively you can choose to ship early and chance critical disaster.

Maybe you should show off a vertical slice at Gamedex, or you could spend that money on advertising instead. Buy some Dead Bull to keep the developers motivated and read the latest Game Guy magazine to see what people are saying about your studio. Lets hope you don’t suffer a power outage and no-one else releases a similar game before you ship your own.

What makes Game Dev Story fun is interacting with your staff to create the best game, watching it develop, taking risks, making a name and shipping it. Was it well-received or did it fail miserably at the hands of critics and the gaming public? Maybe you’ll do better next time and eventually the fans will be lining up for launch day.

It is a never-ending dream come true for anyone who enjoys simple simulation games and is curious about game development.

The default interface left two black bars at the top and bottom of my iPhone screen, didn’t support landscape mode, and doesn’t support task-switching. Just enable the superior virtual gamepad and save often. This initial release is otherwise extremely promising and bodes well for future games from Kairosoft.

10/10 Magical Aardvarks Will continue to waste many hours into this sim, and heck it even got me to write my first game review in a year.

Buy Game Dev Story for $3.99 on the iOS app store. it is a truly special once-in-a-lifetime sim that will ruin your life with its addictive gameplay.