Evan Sims

Announcing libGameFly

Tonight I’m releasing libGameFly, a PHP class for interacting with GameFly.com- the video game rental service. At the moment it’s very simple, just allowing you to expose your GameFly queue as a native PHP class and doing… well, whatever the hell you want with it. I imagine some pretty nifty WordPress widgets coming from this, much like we’ve seen in the area of Netflix widgets.

It’s sad that companies like GameFly still haven’t realized the usefulness of RSS and APIs; exposing this kind of data isn’t just useful for their users and developers, but it’s a vital tool for creating word of mouth on the web these days. The more eyes that see your product, the better off you are; no?

So, if you’re a PHP developer and want to play around with this, you can grab it from http://code.google.com/p/libgamefly/. Enjoy.

Happy Holidays

Howdy folks. Surprise; I’m not dead! No no, I’ve just been quite busy with work, projects, and the usual laundry list of life-related bits that lead to my vacationing from a blog every so many months. In any regard, I have a number of rather exciting things looming, the least of which is a live test of my new Wiki-inspired content management system for this site, which I hope to launch in January.

I finally got an Xbox 360 this Christmas, which I received early several weeks ago and have been playing the hell out of Halo 3 and Eternal Sonata. If you’d like to add me, my gamertag is Okaria.

Alright, I best head back to the family room and join in the present opening. A safe and merry Christmas to everyone!

A Quick Review of Orange Box

Here’s a quick and dirty review of Valve’s “Orange Box”, containing Half Life 2: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal (along with the original Half Life 2 and Episode One, both of which I’ve already taken a look at in previous blog entries.)

Half Life 2: Episode Two

Short and sweet, would be my best description of it. I got about five hours of gameplay out of the episode. While it’s far shorter than Episode One was, and certainly a fraction of what Half Life 2 was, I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much work Valve had put into the quality of this release.

The expansive new outdoor environments are just stunning to experience. Beautiful, really. The action was pretty intense too, especially the second to last chapter in which you’re faced with using the gravity gun to toss explosives onto Striders and blow them up. The Strider sequence was the most challenging for me, and certainly one of the more intense experiences I’ve had in a game in recent memory.

Continue Reading ‘A Quick Review of Orange Box’ …

ZOMG Hai!

Who missed me? *counts hands* Hm, well even so, I’m home and glad to be back. We had a fantastic time in Ireland, but decided to cut the trip a week short due to the looming possibility of a union strike for the Airline we were booked with and more importantly word of my grandfather being admitted to the hospital. He’s doing OK, thankfully, but we didn’t want to get stranded without a way back if things didn’t south. Besides wanting to be with my grandfather, we couldn’t be stuck in Ireland with my Dad’s obligations and contracts.

At any rate, things are good! We visited a lot of cool places and had a wonderful, relaxing vacation. It was great having a couple of Mom’s friends come along this trip- it really mixed things up from our usual trips over there. We toured a lot of spots on the coast, but spent most of our time in Lahinch, a beautiful coastal town in the northwest of the country. It’s a big surfing spot, apparently, so it was quite busy during the weekend. However, it was quiet during the week and we pretty much had the town to ourselves for most of our stay, which was kind of nice.

I’ve posted quite a few photos on my Flickr account, and have put together a little compilation video of our travels:

FYI: On Vacation

Just a heads up: I’ll be on vacation in Ireland until the 24th of October. I’ll have Internet, certainly, but it will be somewhat intermittent. If things go as they usually do during my visits, I’ll just be logging on at net cafes along the way to check my email, Skype voice mail, etc. If I don’t get back to you immediately, that’s the cause.

I’ll be sure to post plenty of photos and videos as time permits. Have a great October, everyone.