David Acevedo's Blog

Steam has released its first movie through its digital distribution network. Netflix streams movies directly to your computer. Hulu is the new cable. Is there a place for physical distribution? Is Bluray dead? The short answer is: yes it is. I used to work in the DVD industry and after getting laid-off a few years back I've been looking to re-invent myself as a writer, as a programmer and as a leader. Things easier said than done in this economy. The sad part of this is that this digital transition was inevitable and foreseeable. Yet the studios and the vendors (I worked for a vendor) and even the retail stores all pretended that it wasn't happening, until it did. Blockbuster is no more, Hollywood Video is no more. All preventable 'deaths' if they'd moved their assents correctly. The next thing on the chopping block is film canister delivery to movie theaters. With silver jumping in price (I'm not sure but I think it quadrupled) and silver being a huge compo...

1. Shadow of the Colossus  It has an incredible atmosphere, challenging game play and deep pathos. It's hard to capture a mood with a game and this game captures it perfectly. 2. Silent Hill I played this game in Japan while healing from a broken clavicle. The way it uses sirens and background noise to evoke dread in the player is unmatched. The game set a tone and kept it throughout. It was like diving in into my favorite horror stories. It was the first game that felt truly cinematic and the first that scared the shiatsu out of me. 3. Legend of Zelda Without complication this game rewarded exploration. By eschewing experience points it created a simple mechanic of hearts that was easy to understand and powerful. I still remember burning a tree and finding the Level 8th dungeon, before my neighbor did.  4. Castlevania The challenge of this game was incredible! The music was pulse-accelerating and you had to be precise, ...

I'm not much for Horror Novels and while I've read lots of Stephen King I've more or less avoided all his scary books. I never saw the point of it. I had however read one of his horror novellas: The Mist which I completely enjoyed.  When I was in Japan, nursing a broken collarbone that kept me indoors for months, I entertained myself playing with the Play Station. I had a couple of games two of which proved to be amazing ones. One was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night , which had a lot of nostalgia Gothic flavor and the other one was Silent Hill . Playing Silent Hill was an altogether new experience for me. This game did it right, it felt like you were playing a horror novel or a good horror movie. Before actually reading the Mist, I had heard a radio play done in 3-D audio which was utterly fantastic (and better than the decent movie Frank Darabont did a few years back). Silent Hill felt like you were there. Surrounded by the mists, that rolled off the sea in the littl...

NiNis are the youth segment of the population 16-35 that neither study nor work ( Ni estudian, Ni trabajan). They are the Spanish and Latin-American equivalent of the slacker. They typically live at home with their parents or other family and are sometimes referred to as leeches on family resources. I posit that the NiNis like the slackers before them are mislabeled as lazy by society and incorrectly perceived as leeches or drains on normal society. Slackers were of my generation. Smart people that seemed unable to focus and apply themselves to take work seriously; they spent a lot of their time on seemly wasted hobbies like video games, making videos, or writing blogs (many of which are now rather decent careers). But thinking of them as lazy is wrong. These are people that want to work, sometimes desperately, but they just don't see the point. They're not lazy, just unmotivated. I recently got Jane McGonigal's book 'Reality is Broken' and I agree with her. It is ...

Here is a very short video that speaks of the importance of entrepreneurship in life and compares it to the epic win mentality of video games. Fora.tv

I've played a few really great indie games recently and would like to share a bit about them. None of these games are brand-new and all are available in both Mac and PC versions. 1. Aquaria Aquaria is a gem of a game for those that loved the original metriod games. In Aquaria you play a young mermaid creature that decides to explore her world beyond her home waters. In doing that you guide her through many adventures that reveal a bit about her world. The game is visually beautiful and the game mechanics, though simple, are very nice. You can play the whole game with a mouse if you wish though gamepads are supported too. In the game you access special abilities by singing different songs. It is a neat concept.  The game was made by an indie outfit of mainly two people out of Canada. But it feels much more than that. It's very big like an underwater version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, with multiple treasures to collect and many secrets to uncover. It is available for ...

Back in the nineties Apple made some key mistakes: 1. It refused to sell computers over catalogs, even thought it had one (Dell and Gateway took off with this) 2. It messed up the licensing of its operating system and 3. Having a better graphics platform than many PCs of the time it actively discouraged the use of the Mac for gaming. Now finally gaming is coming of age on the Mac. This year has seen the release of Valve's steam platform for the Mac. Which not only brings Valve's very popular games like Team Fortress 2 (TF2) but also allows cross platform purchasing. If you buy a game like Braid that is available for both Mac and PC you only need to buy it once and you can use it on both Operating Systems (OS).  Arguably the beginning of this period was the smart move by Bioware to release it's popular MMORPG World of Warcraft (WOW) as a Mac and PC release. Now the Mac has become a great gaming platform for most casual and occasional gaming. And Apple has learned it's le...

This is a response to Denis' blog . Here is the apparent problem with lots of RPG games: the encounters can favor either combat or exploration skills and characters that are good at one tend to be bad at the other so supposedly on type of character is bored during combat encounters and vice versa. Denis proposes that players use two characters. It's a neat idea.  I was thinking about how lots of RPGs degenerate into dice-rolling combat and "I want xp" fests. I liked the idea (also from Denis' blog) to only give xp for treasure that you spend on wasted stuff, like a wine, women and song. ("Brave, brave sir Robbin, sir Robin ran away...") But I remembered an idea I had a while back when I was considering what would make a good rpg game. I though that it was interesting that you had monks in RPG that are anything but monk-like, are really just fighters with less hair and bare fists.  I realized that part of the reason for this is that there was no incentive...