My Game of the Year, 2011

30 hours.
I have played this game for 30 hours.
How is this even possible?

Not only have I played The Binding of Isaac for 30 hours, I have beaten mom exactly once, and by beaten mom I mean defeated the heart, not just her foot/hand/eyes. My stats are pathetic, and yet I keep returning to this game, over and over, never getting bored or overly frustrated. I have had playthroughs where I get exactly one key, but I press onward and still manage to make it a good 3 or 4 levels in before dying. No matter what, I always feel like I am making progress while the game becomes more and more challenging and my character continues to look more and more fucked up as a reward for progression.

Few games have the potential to be played in short spurts of 5 minutes but then last 2 or 3 hours. That is certainly an achievement for a game that was made in such a short amount of time as TBoI was.

I started and beat a lot of games this year. I played through Assassin's Creed 1-Brotherhood, and am currently playing Revelations, but they don't beat out Binding of Isaac. I played through both Batman games, and they don't beat out Binding of Isaac. Minecraft's gotten boring. Bastion was incredible but doesn't have nearly the replay value that Isaac has. I could go on, but really, in the end, this was my Game of the Year.

So suck it, Kotaku, it's not that hard to choose a game of the year, just ignore the discs and look through your downloads.

Multi-Camera Google+ Hangouts

This was an idea I had a while back. Since I have my main computer's webcam in front of me, and my laptop's webcam to the side of me, could I run a 2-camera setup in Google+ Hangouts? The answer was yes, but it took some doing. Now I'm going to share my secrets with you!

Step 1: Setup the Hangout. This is the easy part. In G+, click the Start a Hangout button in the right-hand sidebar.

It's not completely necessary, but on the start screen for hangouts, you can click Hangouts with Extras. I prefer using the Extras version of hangouts myself, because it offers desktop sharing functionality, which allows the people you're hanging out with to view your desktop. I've used this for showing off the current builds of my games, but you can use it for whatever you'd like, be it teaching or sharing video, etc.

Step 2: Once you are in the hangout, copy the URL at the top and email it to yourself.

It'll look something like this. Make sure to copy the whole thing, even the part I've pixelated out. Alternatively, if you are setting up a public hangout, you don't need to copy this at all, and you'll see why in a second.

Step 3a: Open up your email on your other computer and click the Hangout link you sent yourself.
Step 3b: If you are running a public hangout, just go to Google+ on your other computer and click the Hangout link.

Step 4: Before you join the hangout, you will want to check your volume settings. Specifically, you will want to mute EVERYTHING on your secondary machine, both Playback and Recording. If you don't, you will get a MASSIVE amount of feedback between both computers, and your ears will be ringing for days.

And no one wants that!

Besides, you will have your camera and mic active from your main computer, so the last thing you want is echo, feedback, or anything of the sort.

Step 5: Once your sound is muted, go ahead and join the Hangout. Voila, you are now visible from 2 cameras!

Now you may be wondering, what's the point of all this? Well, I've come up with a few possibilities.

1. You are giving a presentation but don't want to disappear completely. This way, you can run, say, the Power Point on your laptop, click the mouse to continue, and never have to take your eyes off your audience.
2. Record a video from two different angles
3. You want to do a Podcast with yourself as your own guest!
4. Check your hair!
5. Let those you're hanging out with know, "This is MY HOUSE!"

I'm sure there are more uses that I haven't come up with, but overall this was just a fun little experiment I tried out one day and it worked. I don't think I'll ever Hangout from just one angle ever again.

Silver Shop - Beast Mode Tech Setup

Inspired by my good friend Jon Jones, I have decided to give you guys a rundown of the tech I am currently running. This is all used mainly for game development, but as they're also my personal PC's they're great for gaming in general, watching movies, listening to music, and 2-camera Google+ Hangouts (which I'll go over in a bit).

Here's the setup as it stands today. It consists of my main rig, my laptop, my TouchPad, and my Palm Pre.

Let's get the small stuff out of the way first.

This is my Palm Pre. That's right, it has a gesture area button. This is, indeed, a Palm Pre- on Sprint. Fuck anyone who hates this phone! I have been running all my business off this phone for over two years. The ability to sync all my contacts, calendars, emails, social networks, and various business accounts seamlessly makes handling everything effortless. Got an email? Boom, right in my notifications. Need to update the calendar? Boom, done three minutes before my friends with iPhones can even access their calendar app or figure out how to sync it to the business Google Calendar. webOS is amazing, which brings me to my next piece of tech.

HP TouchPad! I managed to snag one in a TigerDirect HP Laptop sale. The laptop became the company laptop and is currently being used for file syncing on Children of Liberty, so it is not in my possession. However, the TouchPad is, and it was free. This thing is in-fucking-credible and HP really dropped the ball on discontinuing it. Remember how I said running the business was dirt easy on my Pre? With this thing, I can not only keep the calendar and my contacts synced, but typing emails is 100x faster, I can show off screenshots and video at conferences or meetings really easily, and I can even play my Flash games I've put online! Let's see your iPad do that. I used to leave those duties to my laptop, but it has since become a strictly on-the-go work station.

This is my laptop, a Sony Vaio with a quad-core Intel Core i3 at 2.13ghz, 4GB of RAM, 500GB HD space, and an NVIDIA GeForce 310M chipset, running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. I have been using this thing to show off Children of Liberty since its old Multimedia Fusion build (and in fact got it right before PAX East 2010 for that very reason), but have since been using it mainly for bringing back and forth to the office. This thing is fairly light, but I wouldn't want to lug it around for more than a couple hours at a time. This gets carried around in my old Timbuk2 messenger bag from high school, where it fits perfectly into the soft secondary pocket and stays nice and protected, while the power cable, USB cables, and mouse fit into the main bag area. When I need my Wacom or TouchPad with me, that goes into the back pocket. It's certainly not a top-of-the-line laptop, but a very solid mid-range piece of tech. It can play just about anything at medium settings, though, and can just about max the latest Unity build of Children of Liberty. That's all that really matters, because when it comes to gaming and game development, I'm all taken care of.

This is my baby, this is my jam. This mofo is an AMD Phenom X6-powered monster, running at 2.8Ghz PER CORE, 8GB DDR3 RAM, eVGA GeForce GTX 460, Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi (yeah you heard me, sound card, and it's regular PCI so when I have the money to throw in another video card I'll also have the room), almost 3Tb of hard drive space, Logitech G15 keyboard (the greatest keyboard ever made), Logitech MX620 Mouse (frictionless scrolling is such an amazing innovation, I can never go back), DVD writer, a 3.5" floppy disk drive for decoration, multi card reader, Wacom Intuos tablet, XBox 360 controller, HP webcam, and running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit all encased in an Antec 900 chassis with a Samsung SyncMaster 216BW monitor. This thing can run anything at full settings. The venerable Manveer Heir once said of this, "When you turn your computer on, does it say 'Is it in yet?'" It'll take anything I throw at it and laugh. It's a joy for game development, renders HD video at a good speed, Photoshops without a care in the world, can run GTA4 and Assassin's Creed at full settings (not to mention every other game on the planet, yes, even Skyrim), and is just an intimidating piece of machinery if you don't know what you're doing with it. Also, that is a screenshot from Children of Liberty as the background, duh.

My programs for game development consist of:

• Adobe Creative Suite 4 with Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash
• Silo3D for modeling
• Multimedia Fusion Developer 2 for prototyping, flash games, game jams, and small projects
• Unity 3.4 Professional for, you know, the big shit
• Pinnacle Studio 14 for video editing
• CeltX Studio for dialog editing
• OpenOffice for business work and design docs
• Google Chrome for everything else
• Steam with way too many games to count or list.

The one thing I'd add to this would be a multiple monitor setup, but as it is I'm too low on desk space to manage it. Some day, though.

Let me know what you guys think! If you have any other questions about my setup I'd be happy to answer them. What's your setup look like? I'd love to see it!