Nuno Silva

I’m a Fan of Amazon!!!

That’s right. In the past couple of months I became a huge fan of amazon, in my particular case Amazon UK.

In Portugal games are extremely expensive. Every good PS3 game cost between 50€ and 70€. A quick search at amazon and we can find real bargains. Yesterday i bought Little Big Planet for only 22£ (about 25€). I saved 45€ because in Portugal this game costs 70€!!!

In the last week, PES 2009 was being sold at 20£ (about 25€) when in Portugal this game costs about 70€. This week PES 2009 costs about 39£ (about 45€).

This examples are not good for Portugal economy. If more people knew this, they would buy their games thru companies like Amazon. But buying stuff online is, for most people, something that is strange and complicated. one thing is certain: you can save a lot of money buy things abroad.

So Amazon UK is making some great Christmas promotions. If you be aware you can find real bargains!

New Dragon Ball Trailer

Some while ago i posted a Trailer od Dragon Ball that had been leaked. Now the official trailer is here with some major changes (Starting with the Name - Dragon Ball Evolution - maybe to justify the changes they made to the original anime story).

Well, see for yourself:

Intellisense with JQuery

It is known that Microsoft has adopted JQuery has it’s “official” javascript Framework.

Now it is possible to have, in Visual Studio 2008, intellisense using this javascript framework.

In this post made by Scott Guthrie he shows how to install this support in javascript.

Although i don’t use JQuery (by some reason i prefer Mootools) it is a very good feature to add to visual studio. I know what it costs me to program using Mootools docs page has a support. Having intellisense would become things so much easy!

Frankfurt

In the last 3 days i made a business trip to Frankfurt to attend to a conference, the browser games forum 2008.

Unfortunately Portugal is such a small market that we need to go to Germany to get some real information about the area i work in, browser games.

It was a great way to do some networking with all the big players, like Big Point (the primary sponsor), Travian Games and a lot of other companies not just in the game area, but in specialized game marketing, browser game publishing and licensing.

it was a great opportunity to know what the big players are doing, how they work and what do we have available in our area to make a browser game successful.

Next year i hope to attend it, this time making a presentation (yes it’s difficult but not impossible).

Real Programmers Don’t Write Documentation

Priceless!!!!

source: Geek Hero Comic

75% of the World Spam eliminated

Spam is one of the biggest problems we face on the web. Our email is always full of it (i receive about 50 spam emails each day. I’m glad that google catches them all) as out blogs are.

According to Gizmodo, a surgical strike to an ISP, called McColo, erased instantaneously 75% of the world Spam. This is really incredible.

Of course in a week or so that spammers will find another way to start spam all over again. Nevertheless this successful strike is a very good news.

Wordle - Tags with style

I was reading some blogs when i found a reference to Wordle in Vitor’s Blog.

Wordle gives a new dimension to the Tags we commonly use. The tag clouds we usually see are just a bunch of words with different sizes. Wordle tries to give them some style.

So, like Vitor did, i decided to generate the wordle of this blog. And here it is, my Wordle:

It really gives a new aesthetic dimension to tags. It’s art made with words, our words.

Warcraft Retrospective - Part 2

Game Trailers has just released the second part of documentary called Warcraft Retrospective. This second part, called “A Call to Arms”.

In this documentary, they describe Warcraft 3 and it’s expansion, the Frozen throne. they also give a little introduction about the subject of part 3: World of Warcraft (as expected).

It’s amazing to see how all the lore was built. For me that only played half of Warcraft 3 and played World of Warcraft for about 6 months, it’s incredible to see how they transported all the lore of Warcraft 3 and built the amazing universe of World of Warcraft.

(Video below)

Battles in Orion’s Belt

In Orion’s Belt, a massive multiplayer game that i’m helping developing (blog), the battles are made in a board similar to the one used in chess.

Until now, i could only explain the idea. If you wanted to see how the battle works, you had to play the game. Because that is something that very few people are welling to do, we created a way to embed the battle in order to insert it in any place we like.

So, i introduce you a battle of the game Orion’s Belt. This is a battle between me an Tiago that we had finished yesterday. You can use the control above the battle field to move the units and see our moves.

It’s work in progress, but at least you can get a first look into the battles of Orion’s Belt

(Embedded battle after the break)

Fallout Retrospective

Writing the previous post i found out another game retrospective. It’s wasn’t a blockbuster, but it was one of the RPGs that i most enjoyed playing because of the number of turnouts an features that the game had. The game is Fallout and here is his history (Video after the break):