About Me
Howdy, I'm Dave Snider. I'm one of the "dudes upstairs" and the primary designer / css junkie / photoshop nerd for giant bomb. If you don't like a feature on the site, or hate the way it looks, I'm usually the man to blame. You can blame Jeff, Ryan or Brad crew if you don't like the content and Andy, Ethan or Sean if something is plain broke. You can't blame Vinny for anything, because everything he touches is gorgeous.
I racked up a $200 bill on Prodigy trying to figure out how to beat KQ6
GB is basically a full circle moment for me. I started out as a young teenager frequenting game sites like
Gamespot,
IGN and
BluesNews. Much in the way I imagine a certain portion of our audience frequents this site. I've been gaming since as long as I can remember, having an Intelevision as a toddler, a NES as a little kid and a SEGA or Nintendo system into my high school years. I can remember washing cars in the neighborhood one summer so I could purchase an elusive SEGA CD system with Night Trap, Sewer Shark and a bunch of other craptacular games that I thought were amazing back then. Believe it or not, I even owned a Goldstar 3D0 machine in it's prime.
How the hell did I beat this?
Videogames were something I always loved, and though I played a lot of sports, there was nothing I loved more then sitting in the basement with a revolving cast of friends playing the newest video games. I even beat and enjoyed
Battletoads. That's just part of the story though, because as much as I loved sitting around with buddies playing console games, my true passion was messing around with whatever computer I had at the time (I started on a IBM PS1) and playing PC games and visiting Prodigy, BBS boards and eventually the Internet.
For those that remember,
Quake changed everything. As a game, GL Quake brought 3D graphics and my first true OMG moment along with Quakeworld Internet play. As much as people like to laugh at me when I say this, if you were playing quake online and had a copy of Netscape, you were able to witness the dawn of the world wide web as we knew it. I'll be more plain, I think Quake and the mass amount of websites, community interaction and hosted information and mods around it, paved the way for the advanced sites that were to follow decades later. Because you see, gamers are trailblazers. We love to try out new things, explore and generally tweak the hell out of anything we don't like. We also love to bitch at strangers on message boards.
And that was me. One of those crazy forum dudes that tried to emulate the bigger sites I visited with my own smaller work.
My XvT site had a starry background, cgi ticker and midi loop
It started on GeoCities. Yes, GeoCities. My first website was a "Squad" page for the upcoming
X-Wing vs. Tie-Fighter multiplayer game. Too bad the game, despite
its pedigree, turned out to be horrible. That's ok, because by then I was super into a small mod for Quake called
Team Fortress. Once day I sent an email to a guy who was running a Team Fortress 2 website called Quake2Fortress.com (this was back before Valve aquired the TF team and TF2 was going to be a quake 2 mod) asking if he needed any help with design. I think I was 17 at the time. He said sure, and though I started out writing news on the site I eventually got him to let me re-design the entire thing (I was a wiz at Frontpage back then!). We were actually a pretty big site, and a side bonus was that I got to join the site "Clan", an affiliation that by name alone scared the hell out of my parents. So there I was at 17 on Friday nights telling my friends I didn't want to go to the movies because I had a match that night.
Q2RA2 - Wharehouse. My favorite map ever.
Quake2Fortress immediately imploded when the TF boys jumped over to valve. A funny bit of trivia was that the guy who ran our site actually owned the TeamFortress2.com domain and gave/sold it (I never found out) to Valve. It was ok though, because I was off to college in Wisconsin and the glorious world of cheese, beer and ethernet connections. Within 2 months at college it was apparent that I really wasn't there to study, but to play Quake 2 Rocket Arena over the University's ridiculous fast servers. I made lots of friends on a Midwest server named "Nostromo" where I chanced upon other game addicts like Phil "
Wafflestomp" Reno, who funnily enough, is the guy that does
the music for Giant Bomb. We were nerdily enough in the Borg-Collective clan. [BC] was notable for having some true ringers (being #2 on the OGL at one point) and for having one of the better quake clan websites (built by yours truly). You see, for me, gaming and the Internet were always the same thing. I'd play a game online, make sites about them, and then make friends on those sites.
This of course was an obsession, and I dropped out / got booted out of college for essentially being too involved in video games and the Internet. It wasn't all bad, by this time I was good enough at Photoshop, Flash and HTML to work at a small government contractor in DC and make a decent living and fend off a pair of worried parents. However, after building websites for your quake clan, building websites for ad agencies wasn't the most exciting work, so I packed up my consoles, PC and DVD collection and moved west to LA where you know... movies are made and stuff. Instead of making movies, I made websites about movies and a collection based website called Guzzlefish, landed me an interview at CNET where omg... my favorite website was... Gamespot.
Arcanum wasn't for everyone, but it was perfect for the nerd RPG crowd
Greg Kasavin was one of a couple of dudes that interviewed me there. After an awkward fanboy handshake I went into a long monologue about why I loved that he reviewed pure genre aimed games like
Arcanum poorly but recommended them highly. Because for me, those 7.3 games were 10s, yet I was still ok with the reasoning behind the review. I wasn't kissing up, I just liked Greg and his writing style.
Long story short I didn't work at GS, but ended up at MP3.com and later TV.com where I met most of the guys I work with today. Gamespot though was always my lunchtime website, and as I scarfed down a quick burger in between site launches I watched work time buddies Ryan, Jeff and Brad tell me which games I should buy. I got the benefit of late night arguments over the merits of pop culture, and yes videogames. Needless to say, we all stayed friends even after I'd left the company years before to build a
comic book website with Ethan. After all, who else did I know that could slip in a
Jonny Mosley Mad Trix joke like Ryan?
Somehow, by luck and accident we're all working together again and have Shelby and Mike to thank for the opportunity to try and build something fun here on the bomb along with all you guys.
The point of such a long bio? I guess I just want all the younger gamers on GB to realize that if they love games THAT much, there's nothing to stop you from making love of games a profession somehow. I wish you luck.
Added by snide on Nov. 12, 2008
comment |
friend |
ignore
This post relates to:
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
Jeff passed over some copies of Wrath that just came in for Andy and I. You won't see us for a little while guys ;-)
White Titan of Woe
Added by snide on Nov. 6, 2008
comment |
friend |
ignore
I have started to love the japanese philosophy of
Kaizen which focus on continuous improvement using small steps. Unlike most big sites, the Giant Bombs dev team likes to push code on an almost daily basis, with a new feature once every two weeks or so.
Today I was looking at the forums and realized that they pretty much looked horrible on lower resolutions (1024 or so). Jeff and I had also previously talked about how many peeps who weren't used to our board style probabaly didn't know we had sub boards because they were looking at the topic names and not noticing the board names on the right.
The solution? Move the board names under the topic itself so you are forced to know where the topic exists. I also removed the underlines on all the links there which in general tends to make a page with lots of links less busy.
In any case I know peeps usually freak out when forums are changed up, so please give me some feedback on the change. If you didn't even notice a difference, even better.
Added by snide on Nov. 5, 2008
comment |
friend |
ignore
Today was the first day I comitted and pushed code on 4 different sites. It wasn't a hugely busy day, but I figured some people are interested on what it's like working on sites like GB so I thought I'd make a post about it. Here was my day:
- 9:00 - Leave the house and stop in at 7-11 for coffee. Then proceed to walk to work (I like 5 blocks or so away) whilst thinking about how much work I need to do on the new site we're launching.
- 9:30/10:00 - Arrive at said office, check my emails and browse my RSS feeds. Attempt to decipher PMs usually sent while I sleep from a country that starts with "The".
- 10:00/10:30 - Check in with Coonce and brainstorm on his new project, which people here will love.
- 10:30/11:00 - Check in on ad delivery and make sure our ads are hitting their targets. Test some code Andy wrote yesterday for new ads to be run later in the week.
- 11:00/11:30 - Fix a bug on GB that caused the video page promos to wrap funny because of a long title name. Fix a bug on Comic Vine that causes the home page to load all funky. It only shows up on one computer in the office, but it happens to be the guy who runs it, so that means it's a real bug.
- 11:30/12:00 - Realize that it's too close to lunch to start working on the new site, and instead go get some awesome egg/sausage scramble at the local diner. Read a copy of Wizard and lement about my comic book reading habits of late.
- 12:00 - 12:30 - Put out a fire on political base and blind push a bunch of code I'm not sure about since I haven't edited that site in forevs. Stop in downstairs after and give the dudes the scoop on our dev schedule. Use the oppurtunity to talk with Jeff and Ryan about how excited I am Cammy is going to be in Street Fighter IV.
- 12:30 - 6:30 - Spend a lot of time trying to lay out a single page on the new site. It's a complicated one similar to the main game page here so it takes some thought.
- 6:30 - 7:00 - Go downstairs to hang with the guys and marvel that Ryan edits every bad sound spike in the podcast. Chat with Jeff about ways we can make ads not suck for users, but that publishers will still like, then go into the usual routine where he reports hyper-specific bugs or feature requests and I immediately feel guilty I haven't fixed them yet. Attempt to cheer up Jeff by throwing a couple crazy ideas at him instead.
- 7:00-730 - Chat up Ethan about the new site and feel guilty that I'm not able to work on it as much as I should.
- 7:30-10:00 - Go home, play some TF2 and catch some election drama whilst drinking a beer or two. Remove a bunch of porn some asshole put on the site (thanks MB), respond to more PMs.
- 10:00-12:30 - Realize I'm kinda bored and really should be working on that new web site and head back to the office, where I find that Ethan is online doing the same thing from home. We trade compliments/insults at each other over our respective work and I get another big page laid out. I jam the tunes super hard-core since no one else is around.
- 12:30-1:00 - Watch an episode of Samurai 7, which I'm strangely very much enjoying.
- 1:00-2:00 - Check the traffic stats for the previous day, which are good. Check GB before I go to bed, get lost on the boards, then decide to write this blog because it might be interesting and I always feel guilty for the Euros that get second dibs on the boards.
Added by snide on Oct. 30, 2008
comment |
friend |
ignore
This post relates to:
Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel ,
Fallout 3
Giant disclaimer: I've only played an hour and a half or so of Fallout 3. This is just a quickie impression.
Only ToEE had a better turned based system the Fallout: Tactics
There is little in the way I can describe my absolute love for the Fallout games. For a turn-based RPG nut like myself there are very few moments in gaming where I was more happy then when I was messing with my pip-boy. I loved the setting, the humor, the story and the general breadth of the game. What I loved the most about the series though at the end of the day was the combat. So much so that I consider Fallout: Tactics, the combat focused later game in the series, one of my favorite games of all time. Yes, you heard me right, I love
Fallout: Tactics.
So, as you can imagine I've had some big expectations of the game. I was actually very pleased Bethesda got the rights to the brand because I very much enjoyed Morrowind and Oblivion. Morrowind specifically gave me goosebumps when I'd walk into a new town for the first time. Things couldn't be any better...
Today I purchased Fallout off Steam even though I knew I couldn't really play the game heavy until the weekend. The intro level is ok, it reminds me a lot of Oblivion, and to be honest everything about this game feels like Oblivion. That's ok I guess, we knew that coming in. Then I got to the combat... and the cockroachs (are you serious Bethesda, just make them fucking rats why don't you)!
...
...
...
This looks great, but completely breaks you out of the experience
VATS is horrible. Real time aiming with real time missing, even though you are pointing at something is horrible. I know it's an RPG, remember, I'M THE RPG GUY, but sheesh, this is just a tad silly. I'm very very afraid not only will I not like Fallout, but I'm worried this combat system will bother me so much, that I'll become an old man and bitch about the better days of gaming. The days when PC games were released with PC interfaces, not consolified, dumbed down, big font style menus. And the days when an AP system was for... you know... deciding how many things you could accomplish in a turn.
What this game needed if it HAD to be in 1st-Person was a combat system ala
Wizardry 8. For those that didn't play that game (many did not) you moved your party of players (all 6 of you I believe) as if you were 1 person in a FPS view. When you'd encounter an enemy, the game would switch to turn-based mode and would play the same as any other TBS game, with the action taking place in the view of that character.
This mish-mash in between shit is very bad. The real time version sucks, and the paused version sucks.
On a positive, the world is obviously Fallout and I could see myself playing through the game even if the combat continues to be this horrible, but right now I'm pretty scared I'm witnessing my worst fears.
I'll report more later, but if you're looking for an RPG vet's opinion... right now I'm a little worried.
Added by snide on Oct. 27, 2008
comment |
friend |
ignore
This post relates to:
Barack Obama
No, not
Baraka, but
Barack Obama. We checked it out and it looks legit. I also noticed when I checked out the page that it had been vandalized (uncool dude). This also brings up the question of whether or not people should be attached to games simply because they show up in ads. My vote would be no, but I'll let the community fight this one out. What do you think? Should a dynamic ad in a game count as a reference in a game?
As an aside, check out
Political Base, Whiskey Media's political site / blog. Before Jeff came over, most of us were working on that site. It's got some cool functionality like the ability to view how people in your area contribute to campaigns. For web geeks, you can also see how much our editing system has progressed since those days.
on Nov. 26, 2008
on Nov. 26, 2008
on Nov. 25, 2008
on Nov. 25, 2008
on Nov. 25, 2008
on Nov. 25, 2008
on Nov. 21, 2008
on Nov. 16, 2008