Entries Tagged 'News' ↓

A couple of days ago I was talking about the Pandora ( http://www.pandora.com ) music service that Brinstar ( http://acidforblood.blogspot.com ) brought to my attention. Well, I’ve finally had a chance to get back and take a deeper look at it. It’s a nice little package which uses Macromedia Flash to download and play songs that match with my request. The matching back end is awesome! It does a great job of finding similar tunes. The last.fm ( http://www.last.fm ) system can’t touch this at all.

Well, after checking it out for a couple of days it turns out that I used my ten hour free trial. What to do? There are two subscription choices: annual (12 months of unlimited use for $36) and quarterly (3 months of unlimited use for $12). I think we can see where the deal is…

So, in the interest of exploring the web application that makes this tick I started digging. I knew I wasn’t supposed (well according to the terms of service anyway) to disassemble the flash file they were using to play the MP3s. Since that was out I decided the easiest thing to do would be to use a proxy server on my local machine to watch the ‘conversation’ between my computer and *.pandora.com. I have to admit after watching it work for a few seconds I already knew I could trick the flash application into thinking I had logged on to the service. The flash seems to be coded to only expect a couple of different answers from the server so with two small changes to the reply from the server I was ‘logged in’ and to my surprise the rest of the application continues to work flawlessly - the music plays on.

During the dig I was able to see the method that they get the MP3s to the computer and it’s just a web address - all of the files are world readable with any web browser - if you know where to look or the url to type. Of course, it’s not nice to steal MP3s from poorly coded web apps now is it?

I’ll probably go into some more detail later but it’s time to go to the bar.

And all it took was five years… This link was sitting in my e-mail this morning:

*edit - broken link*

Sometime back in 2000 a friend of mine was very excited to tell me about an upcoming game he’d just heard about. It seemed someone was finally going to make another game based on HP Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu Mythos’. Being a huge Lovecraft fan I couldn’t wait! And to make it better a few days (if I remember correctly) later I found out that the developer ( http://www.headfirst.co.uk ) also had the rights to ‘Battle of the Planets’ aka ‘G-Force’!

It was almost too good to be true: a survival horror game base on Lovecraft’s writings with co-op multiplayer?!
( http://pc.ign.com/articles/074/074960p1.html ) And to make it better there would be sanity effects and a hud-less display. This game sounded like it was going to be a winner in my book! After the initial excitement wore off the game slipped off my radar, I figured I’d hear a ‘Gone Gold’ announcement.

Fast forward to May of 2002 when news came out that then publisher Fishtank/Ravensburger had been purchased by JoWood. They announced that CoC was seriously delayed ( http://www.shacknews.com/extras/cthulhu.x ). A few months later, in June of 2002, Headfirst announces that the Ravensburger is no longer the publisher due to ‘breach of contract’ ( http://pc.ign.com/articles/362/362849p1.html ).

In May of 2003 (just in time for E3) Bethesda Softworks steps up and says they will be publishing the game
( http://www.bethsoft.com/news/pressrelease_050703.html ). All is right with the world again. CoC excites the gaming press and gamers alike. The buzz was hot even with the delays the game has suffered already. At this point the game is scheduled for release sometime in the first quarter of 2004.

I’m not sure of the exact date that it happened but as Q1 2004 approached the release date slipped further back and eventually the game became one of the “most anticipated games of 2005″. Where have we heard that before? Around this time ( http://www.bethsoft.com/news/pressrelease_020305.htm ) announces a co-publishing agreement with 2K Games ( http://www.2kgames.com ). May of 2005 landed the announcement that Headfirst was also now busy not releasing another Cthulhu game this one called ‘Destiny’s End’.

So here we are - October 2005. The game was supposed to be out several times already this month and it keeps slipping by a couple of days. On the forums Headfirst says they can’t say anything about the release. When asked about the release date Jason Bergman over at 2K Games couldn’t give much more information. “For anything Cthulhu related, please contact Pete Hines at Bethesda” he said. Pete Hines over at Bethesda has yet to answer my e-mail so I sent a note over to press@bethsoft.com in the hopes that someone would be able to share the word. As of now I still haven’t received a reply. Not surprising since the e-mail isn’t coming from a big name game site/blog.

People on the CoC forums say they have been in some game stores and have held the display box - which should indicate that the game will be out any second now. But when it will actually hit the shelves no one knows for sure.

‘Duke Nukem Forever’ dev cycle aside, I am still looking forward to playing this game. Although, I bet it’s not going to be the great experience that I was looking forward too five years ago.

Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is now available for download. This is the first Beta release of our next generation Firefox browser, to be released later this year, and it is being made available to our developer and testing community for compatibility testing and to solicit feedback.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/

Now get back to work.

*edit* fixed broken link *edit*