awesome

Caught this on Hacker News:

Gamasutra - Dirty Coding Tricks

Hacker News discussion

Nine real-world stories of the horrible hacks that games programmers had to use in order to meet their deadlines. Here's one from the comments on the page by Ken Demarest:

Back on Wing Commander 1 we were getting an exception from our EMM386 memory manager when we exited the game. We'd clear the screen and a single line would print out, something like "EMM386 Memory manager error. Blah blah blah." We had to ship ASAP. So I hex edited the error in the memory manager itself to read "Thank you for playing Wing Commander."

I cast my eyes upon the landscape, and saw a third season. I despaired.

Guy Steele gives an excellent presentation on the importance of designing languages that grow. It's dated 1998, but it's still relevant today.

50 minute talk on video.google.com

Hacker News discussion

Essential reading for any Git user:

The Git Parable

If you read my article, Git for the lazy, you at know the simple commands. The Git Parable comes from the other end: what the pieces in Git are, and why they are the way they are.

GomTV Averatec-Intel Classic S2 Finals, Game 4

Watch the video, then read some of the comments. My favourite has to be this one:

King Bee [2009.02.09 14:42:51 | 152.7.49.200]

Ha ha! Puny humans! Finally, our superior bee race has taken over Korea. Why Korea? We need to eliminate the crazy intelligent starcraft players, for they are our only weakness. As you can tell, we have succeeded. All hail your new Bee overlords!

Watch the VOD and you'll understand. :)

Presenting... Tiny Cannon ML!

Move with arrows/WASD, shoot with Ctrl/Z/N, slow with Shift/X/M.

The Japanese make the best shmups.

Spelunky is described by its creator as "La-Mulana meets Nethack": a horribly addictive mix of unforgiving yet compelling platforming action. It's been covered by many other places, so all I'm going to say is that if you've got Windows, you want to download this right now.

So instead of reviewing the game, I'm going to tell you how to kill the shopkeepers.