Membase, surprise answer. In general it sounds like they had a pretty crazy time -- rebuilding the plane in flight even more than usual. "This had us on our toes and working 24 hours a day. I think at one point we were up for around 60-plus hours straight, never leaving the computer. We had to scale out web servers using DNS load balancing, we had to get multiple HAProxies, break tables off MySQL to their own databases, transparently shard tables, and more. This was all being done on demand, live, and usually in the middle of the night. We were very lucky that most of our layers were scalable with little or no major modifications needed. Helping us along the way was our very detailed custom server monitoring tools which allowed us to keep a very close eye on load, memory, and even provided real time usage stats on the game which helped with capacity planning. We eventually ended up with easy to launch "clusters" of our app that included NGINX, HAProxy, and Goliath servers all of which independent of everything else and when launched, increased our capacity by a constant. At this point our drawings per second were in the thousands, and traffic that looked huge a week ago was just a small bump on the current graphs."

great Berserk/Space Invaders mashup tee from drtofu. HUMANOID MUST NOT ESCAPE

An amazing article, via Nelson Minar -- careful examination of the evolution of chess programs over the past 8 years appears to show clear signs of code/algorithm copying and unauthorised reverse engineering -- by many of the developers. 'Dr Søren Riis of Queen Mary University in London shows how most programs (legally) profited from Fruit, and subsequently much more so from the (illegally) reverse engineered Rybka. Yet it is Vasik Rajlich who was investigated, found guilty of plagiarism, banned for life, stripped of his titles, and vilified in the international press – for a five-year-old alleged tournament rule violation. Ironic.'

'organizing your data for efficient processing, especially with respect to cache misses etc.' -- essentially an approach to breaking good OOP design practices in order to gain performance, seems to have come from the game-dev community

“This is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem,” writes Khatib. “These results indi­cate the potential for integrating video games [like FoldIt] into the real-world scientific process: the ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”

wow, very impressive -- as far as I can tell, it really _is_ using GMaps infrastructure to some degree

The author of cult web-games QWOP and GIRP is a member of Cut Copy! crazy

wow, the *entire games industry* (basically) comes out to praise Old Man Murray -- the influential satire site. I'd forgotten about their Time-To-Crate game rating system (which I still apply)

wish more "piracy = theft" people would think about this viewpoint. mind you, fwiw, I buy my games, and have paid for Minecraft ;)

'Notch’s luck was that he came across the idea of doing a first-person fortress building game. His alignment was that the game that he wanted to make was culturally connected to [he PC gamer] tribe. While the game may appear ugly, and its purchase process etc seem naive to many a gaming professional, all of those decisions that Notch made along the road to releasing his game were from the point of view of a particular perspective of what games are, what matters and what were the things that he could trust the tribe to figure out for themselves.'

just about right (via Waxy)

cool web-based, wikipedia-driven game from Jim Blackler; test your movie knowledge

'Publishers would have people believe that MAME and the emulation scene is the root of all evil, that it promotes piracy and ultimately hurts the poor, starving developers slaving away on the game. Not only is this claim patently false, it ignores the fact that many developers use things like MAME, mod chips, and homebrew development utilities to help us overcome the day-to-day frustrations caused by the people behind the real problems in our industry.'

this is not going to help my addiction

exhibition billing itself as "the world's biggest celebration of games", arrives in Dublin on Sep 20 at the Ambassador, on tour from its home in The Barbican Art Gallery in London. 'Enjoy a totally interactive experience with rare memorabilia and play your way through over 100 playable games from the arcade classics to the latest releases.' tix are EUR10

wow, fantastic review -- real Japanese mobsters give their take on SEGA's latest videogame

big thumbs-up for 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution'. I'm looking forward to it

wow, this sounds good. a lot of 100% reviews and a 95% overall

too nerdy? it seems possible

'The troubled councilor, Dimitar Kerin, has defended himself by saying he was not the only one in the City Hall watering virtual egg plants. He said he had reached only Level 40, whereas Daniela Zhelyazkova, a councilor from the rightist Democrats for Strong Bulgaria party, was already at Level 46.'

GDC post-mortem; Facebook takes over the games industry. 'the three primary designers of the Civilization franchise (Sid [Meier], Brian, and myself [Soren Johnson]) are all now making social/online games.' -- wow

fantastic article about Mass Effect's political allegory. I'm slightly disappointed that Mass Effect 2 didn't live up to ME1's quality, IMO

whoa. really looking forward to this, Mass Effect was one of the best games I've ever played

linked by Nelson; will return to this once i've gotten into the game

great article on the 80's one-man shareware game hobbyists (via Walter)

Tom Francis gives "Red Faction: Guerilla" a truly massive plug based on its pervasive freeform environment destructability. I'm sold!

to read, yoz gives it the thumbs up

good and cheap; good reviews; supported by Linux HID force-feedback joystick library; EUR58 at Play.com

an alternative way to get pedal controls working; use a racing-game steering-wheel controller, instead, since they're cheaper