I’m pretty sure the NFL, NCAA, Collegiate Licensing Company, NFLPA, EA, Sony & Microsoft should all want a piece of this guy’s company considering this and other legal action. I found his site through a targeted Gmail ad above my inbox, so he isn’t being too discreet. Actually verbatim from the site:

Last year we broke into mainstream media with a bang. Our president, Brian Kaldenberg, was featured on several prominant[sic] websites including ESPN, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune and MSNBC.com just to name a few. We were also written about by the Assocaited[sic] Press and the story posted in over 100 newspapers across the nation.

So yeah, not discreet at all. Good for him though, providing a valuable service regarding a problem that the Powers That Be refuse to solve.

My name is Zack and I play PC games with an Xbox 360 controller.

I know, I know. I can hear the scoffing already. Clearly, it is inferior. Clearly, I must be a 14-year old Halo kiddie. Clearly, everyone in a multiplayer match playing the “right way” will murder me (actually, I do quite fine for myself in TF2 thanks). Clearly, I am wrong. And PC developers must think I am wrong. But I don’t want to be right.

My left hand doesn’t like the “claw” position I have to contort to to use the W-A-S-D keys for movement. I’m always hitting F or E by accident anyway. I have to look down to find R or T while the buttons on a gamepad are nicely spaced. And keyboards are digital. I can’t “kind of” hit A where I could nudge on an analog joystick.

I have a preference. I’m not alone.

But I tried to play Battlefield Heroes yesterday and after fighting with the installer, I could find no joystick support. I am spoiled. In Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead or Fallout 3, one simple command enables support with the 360 controller. So I quit. Not worth my time.

I downloaded Morrowind off of Steam last night. The game was ported to Xbox, so clearly it can support a joystick. Sure, it “supports” a joystick, but not well. I had to download a third party app to get it working, (Joy2Key solutions are stop gap) but I still have to switch often between mouse and keyboard control, where on the Xbox version I could control everything by the joystick.

PC developers can piss and moan that they are being run out of business by the monolithic habits of the console hardware providers, but they provide something that PC devs are unwilling to provide: simplicity.

World of Warcraft is like a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie.

That’s pretty beautiful and applies to a good majority of the RPG/MMORPG space.

As you can see from the timestamp below, I stopped updating this in June 09. From my server logs, I see that many people are still coming to this page. You should know that since Zynga is constantly changing the game, many (most) of this information is out of date. Take that as you will - z.

Last Updated on 13 June 2009.

As promised, here is the companion to my Mafia Wars Field Strategy Guide. The format has changed slightly since there is only one consumable item in the entire expansion.

The focus in Cuba is on cash and so I have added a column for approximate cash and one for approximate cash per energy point. Since the amount of cash is rolled randomly, I can only supply a midpoint for the range given. Results may vary. Also, as with the previous guide, these numbers may differ from yours due to the bonuses given by your Masterminds, Wheelmen, etc. Regardless, since these apply across the board, it shouldn’t affect the rank order of any of your choices.

Since the focus of advancement is on cash, you will want to outfit your businesses as quickly as possible and boost their output and quality.

A potential area that may be missed is that instead of a per-hour upkeep cost as items had in the NY Mafia Wars, items here have a percentage grift cost. What this means is that having excess weapons, armor or vehicles will greatly hinder your progress. My advice for this is to tackle one job tier at a time and get rid of the items that you will not need in subsequent tiers as quickly as possible. For instance, the machete and hatchet are not needed past the Soldado tier, so get rid of them when you master that tier and you will get an extra 0.5% cash for each job per item you dump.

As you will see in the chart, there is little variation in XP/EN or ~CASH/EN. Both seem to increase incrementally as you progress through the job tiers. The one exception is in the final tier where “Set Up A High Volume Smuggling Operation” yields quite a bit more cash per energy point. At this point though you will have pretty much conquered the entire expansion, so there is little benefit to grinding that job.

Address any questions you have in the comments and I will do my best to answer.

Gamasutra posted a fantastic article on how to be a good producer. Producers get a bad rap because there are so many bad ones out there. Because you should never really notice a good producer (all the work is happening behind the scenes), it is just as easy for a producer to simply do nothing or be a slave to an MS Project file and claim ignorance. It’s also easy for artists and engineers to look at a producer as someone who doesn’t contribute to the content of the game except by fiat. That should never be the case.

I’d like to add a couple more good and bad qualities to the list Mr. Shin created, from my experience.

Good:

• Listens. Many times when team members come to a producer, they need to vent about stressors that are piling up. It helps them to get their issues of their chest, but the producer is also the main guy/gal that can actually do something about it and connect disparate problems. There are too many producers who simply don’t want to hear problems so they can have plausible deniability or because the issues are someone else’s job. And there are too many well-meaning producers that are happy to be a sounding board without following up.
• Lives in a cube. I bet you are gawking at this one, but probably two-thirds of producers I’ve worked with who have had offices instead of cubes have had poor communication with the team and inadvertently fostered an us-vs.-them attitude or were just generally out-of-the-loop.
• Is a fighter. The producer should be the chief advocate for the team to any external group - licensors, publishers, senior staff in big studios, etc. The team should know that he/she will fight tooth and nail for the things the team needs and not just roll over because someone with power says to or because it is easy.
• Should have programmed something before in their lives. It’s pretty obvious in meetings when a producer says “shouldn’t that just drop right in?” and engineers roll their eyes that the producer is either baiting or being naive.

Bad:

• Doesn’t believe there is much difference between a game project and any other software project.
• Believes that being a video game fan makes them an authority on how to design and implement a game project.
• Takes over design issues instead of being a mediator.
• Values the trees (hitting all tasks on the schedule) over the forest (quality of game as a whole).