Xandu's blog

As some of you already know I’ve been in to games development for over 20 years. I created my first game on the Sharp MZ-700. I later went on the PC platform and created a couple of simple games including a snake clone and a trivia game. As a curiosity I also developed games for the TI-82/85 calculator. When Windows 95 was released I converted to C++ and created a slot machine and even started work on framework for a online Casino… this was back in 1996 and I really regret not finishing this project.

Today I've used senocular's brilliant Interactive Location Map tool to create a map of all the checkpoints that can be set for online routes in Burnout Paradise. Check out the map here: http://www.senocular.com/burnout/?load=http://burnoutaholics.com/KML/checkpoints.xml. You can click any checkpoint and information about the roads crossing at the checkpoint will be shown.

I still have a couple of things left to do:

Today Toshiba announced that they will be terminating all production of HD-DVD players and recorders in March 2008. It seems like Warners announcement about not releasing any more movies and series on HD-DVD was the final nail in the coffin. In total 730000 HD-DVD players have been sold world wide and I own 1 of them . 300000 of the sold units are XBOX 360 HD-DVD players.

Last night I decided to host some online races in Burnout Paradise. I set up a 3 round race and set the access to open. Within 10 seconds I had a full room. 7 people were all asking me to start the race. Apparently several of them had been looking for races for a while and they were all tired of doing challenges. I had a couple of people asking me to turn traffic off but I normally ignore this kind of request. The only time I see a point in having traffic off is when trying out new routes. Traffic stayed on all night!

Next week, three new titles will be available on XBOX Originals. Black, Ninja Gaiden Black and Sid Meier’s Pirates will be available for download at 1200 points each starting Monday, February 11th.

The super jump guide is now done. Thanks to evild for taking all the screen shots and making the map.

Have a look at our new Super Jump Guide. Originally I made it so that you could zoom in on parts of the map and then select the jump. This solution was not brilliant and I finally ended up showing the whole map in 1600x1200 rez with a horizontal scroll bar. This is easy to navigate and the map is displayed the way it was meant to. You can click on the green dots to go directly to a screen shot of the jump.

I don’t know where to start… So far I’ve only got positive things to say about the game.

Did a complete System Update today and upgraded the whole site to the latest version (5.6) of Drupal (the content management system we are using). I'll try to list some of the improvements that you will probably notice.