Year in Review

Last year, I made a New Year’s resolution to post something on this blog every week for a whole year. At the time I made that resolution, that meant that I’d have to write 50 blog posts before the end of the year. If I count correctly, this post makes 46 total. Not perfect, but not bad. At one point, I even had a buffer that was several weeks long!

One of the things that I was curious about going in was what the effect of an increased post volume would be on my pageviews. According to Google Analytics, my number of visits increased by 40% from this time last year. Most of my traffic came from search engines or referrals from Facebook, and most people came for my esoteric tips or my crotchety advice.

For those who like looking at graphs (because really, who doesn’t?), here’s my weekly “views” every week this year (blue) vs. last year (orange):

Truth be told, I started to run out of things to say sometime in November. We’ll see if I keep this post-a-week thing going into 2012, but it’s been an interesting experiment at the very least. Happy New Year!

Holiday Chipmusic

Happy holidays! By now, you might be sick of being bombarded with the same 15 saccharine, dated holiday songs by mall loudspeakers and radio stations everywhere. As my gift to you, Internet, let me point you at something different – that’s right, it’s holiday chipmusic time!

Doctor Octoroc – 8-Bit Jesus: Holiday classics in the style of video game classics. Includes such gems as “Have Yourself a Final Little Fantasy”, “Bubbles We Have Heard on Bobble”, and “Super Jingle Bros.”.

George and Jonathan – The Best Christmas: The dynamic duo of pxtone wizardry bring their infectious energy to the holiday season with a Christmas-inspired album.

Rush Coil – 8-bit Christmas: Rush Coil covers Christmas music. Deck the halls … and defeat the Master Robots.

EvilWezil – Carol of the Bells: The inimitable EvilWezil takes on a holiday classic, and produces this in a day. EvilWezil cannot be stopped!

Sonic CD – Seriously, Just Play It

Sonic hasn’t had all that great of a run for most of the past ten years or so. The franchise was handed off to a bunch of different teams in the 2000s, each of which had their own vision of what a Sonic game should look like. Unfortunately, each of those visions was more mediocre than the last. Recently though, the future’s been looking a little brighter for our spiky blue hero. Sega put a new guy in charge of Sonic’s future direction last year, and one of the first things his team did was pull all the recent “average” Sonic titles from the shelves. Shortly thereafter, they released Sonic Colors, Sonic 4 Episode 1 and Sonic Generations, and they all got pretty good reviews (for next-gen Sonic titles, anyway). Sonic 4 Episode 1 and Sonic Generations both attempt to re-attract the “older” generation of Sonic gamers who remember a time when Sonic titles were known for being good instead of, well, laughably awful.

The next big thing in Sonic’s “everything old is new again” renaissance is the re-release of Sonic CD on PC, XBox 360, PS3 and iOS devices. I’ve already played through Sonic CD several times (in emulators and on the Sega CD), but I bought it again for XBox 360, and I’m really glad I did.

Sonic CD is in many ways the spiritual successor to the original Sonic the Hedgehog, even though it was released a few months after Sonic 2. Most of Sonic’s sprites are re-used from Sonic 1, special stages are accessible at the end of the level rather than at checkpoint lampposts, and each zone has three acts rather than two. Sonic CD takes advantage of the ill-fated Sega CD’s hardware, sporting a CD-quality soundtrack (which was a novelty in 1993) and levels that are absolutely massive by comparison to those in the first couple Sonic games.

The big novel gameplay mechanic in Sonic CD is time travel (because really, what series doesn’t get better with the inexplicable addition of time travel?) Each level in Sonic CD is playable in three time periods: past, present, and future. Sonic gets between time periods by hitting a Time Warp sign (conveniently labeled Past or Future) and then running at top speed for a few seconds without stopping. The future is further subdivided into the “good” future and the “bad” future. Dr. Robotnik has put a machine in the past on each level that powers his badnik army; if Sonic travels to the past, then finds and destroys this machine, the future is saved (unlocking the “good” future); if not, Robotnik has taken over in the future and it isn’t a very happy place (the “bad” future). If you unlock the good future in every level or collect all the Time Stones (the stand-ins for that classic Sonic macguffin, the Chaos Emeralds), you get the good ending.

Sonic CD is pretty much tied with Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on my list of the best Sonic games of all time. The fact that every level is essentially four levels is a testament to the enormous amount of room the designers had to work with on the Sega CD. The different time periods aren’t just palette swaps either; they actually went through the effort to modify the graphics and level design and write different background tracks for each one. The soundtrack (while very ’90s) is pretty great in both Japanese and English versions (the Japanese boss music is by far my favorite). The “go really fast for a while without stopping” requirement for time travel actually inspired some really inventive level design; speed traps and loops that were just nuisances before become things the player actively seeks out. Seeking out Dr. Robotnik’s machines in the past puts a much larger emphasis on exploration, although you can still race through the levels at full speed if you want. It’s got “replay value” in spades.

What really sets Sonic CD apart from any other Sonic game from that era are the boss battles.

Typically a boss battle in a Sonic game is a pretty standard affair. Dr. Robotnik shows up in some kind of mech whose design is inspired by the level’s overall theme (i.e. if you’re in an ice level, that mech’s gonna have a freeze ray), you hit him seven or eight times while dodging his attacks, most of his mech explodes and he runs away. Sonic CD’s bosses are in that same vein, but are a lot less conventional. You’re still fighting Robotnik in a mech most of the time, but in one level he’s at the top of a giant diabolical pinball machine and you only have to reach him and hit him once to end the whole thing. In another, he locks you in a room containing a fearsome death trap and watches in mounting dismay as the death trap slowly tears itself (and his conveniently placed adjacent control room) apart. In still another, he traps you underwater only to make the critical mistake of making a shield for his mech out of air bubbles. Really inspired and original stuff, some of the best of the whole series.

Oh, and did I mention that in one level there’s a shrink ray?

Yeah, in one level? There’s a shrink ray.

To their massive credit, Sega has really done Sonic CD justice with this re-release. Rather than sticking a huge border around the old VGA graphics like a lot of 16-bit game conversions, they actually took the time to port it to 16:9 native. Many people think the US soundtrack wasn’t as good as the Japanese soundtrack, so they included both soundtracks. They even added Tails in as a playable character. I mean seriously. That’s pretty awesome.

Seriously. Play this game. It’s well worth the $3-$5 you’ll pay for it on your platform of choice.

Two Months Working with GitHub: A Retrospective

For a long time, my thesis work was housed in a Mercurial repository on the department NFS server. We had a mailing list where team members could discuss ideas and report bugs. Ideas, to-dos and “bug reports” were kept in a combination of e-mail logs, Google Sites, Google Docs, and various text notes. We tried getting code review to work with a few different tools, but I quickly grew tired of keeping them running. About two months ago, in response to the team’s increasing size and in preparation for releasing the code to some teams within UCSD, we decided to move the project to a private repository on GitHub.

All the cool kids seem to be hosting their source code in GitHub these days, and it’s not that surprising. GitHub’s UI is pretty, responsive, and knows when to stay out of your way. Adding things like post-commit hooks are really straightforward. It’s “social” without being in-your-face about it all the time. We liked the idea of having code review, issue tracking, and a wiki all in one place that we didn’t have to maintain ourselves. Also, we liked the idea of having a private repository that could be made public with the flick of a switch¹.

Switching over to GitHub was a big adjustment, but in the end I think we made the right decision.

The one big thing that made us hesitant to switch over to GitHub was Git. Nobody on the team was really familiar with it, and frankly it looked kind of scary compared to Mercurial. Lots of commands, the ability to edit history, etc. It looked really heavyweight. I can say though, that in the long run I’m really glad that we switched to Git, GitHub or no GitHub. Git’s technical complexity is a little daunting at first, and I’m still frightened of rebasing, but the transition was a lot less rocky than I’d expected it would be and I’m happy enough with Git that I find myself picking it over Mercurial even for projects that (for various reasons) aren’t hosted in GitHub.

Moving from “hack, hack, commit, push, hack” to “branch, hack, send a pull request, branch, hack” also seems to have been an easier adjustment than I expected. Once we got comfortable with the idea that branching and merging frequently was OK, things went pretty smoothly. Most of us are old school(?) CVS and Subversion guys who remember when branching was largely more trouble than it was worth (tree conflicts, anyone?), so dealing with many branches at once was a bit of a shock. As it turns out, frequent branching has been more of a boon than a burden. git branch and git stash together have changed my whole workflow. Being able to jump back and forth between tasks without having to have a dozen copies of the repository littering my directory tree is really liberating.

By far my favorite piece of GitHub’s tool suite is the code review system. Having every line of code looked at by at least one other person before it gets committed has really improved our code quality. It also helps to prevent any single person from being the only one who knows how a given module works. Being able to have conversations about parts of the code with other team members and having those comments show up in context is a huge win over ad-hoc fumbling with e-mail (“on line 20 of foo.cc: this thing should change this way; on line 25 of foo.cc: that other thing should change too”, etc).

I’m really impressed with GitHub overall, so much so that I’ve been slowly migrating repositories to them from other services. If you’re looking for a place to host your team’s code, they’ve got a really solid offer and you can’t beat the price (especially considering it’s free for public repositories).