Fab rightly reminded us that it was Press Start Studio’s very first birthday! (it actually was 2 days ago, fortunately unlike your average girlfriend a company tends not to whine as much with this kind of things)

A Nexus One would have been a very fitting gift for this little association of ours, but I was far too busy staring at the only 4 booth babes of the Mobile World Congress to attend the Google conference and missed the free giveaway party (one of them winked at me so definitely worth it).





Twin Blades has some fans out there, and every now and then some of you guys take the time to send us your thoughts about the game, what you like the most and what you’d like to see improved. Today we’ve received an email from Richard S. and it ends like this:

“I bid you all the best of luck in future creations and thank you for creating this still entertaining game.”

This makes a nice gift. Cheers Richard, always heartwarming to read such sweet stuff (even though you are no booth babe).

So we’re working on this superb piece of hardware to port Twin Blades onto which happens to be a very expensive prototype sent to a handful (probably a couple handfuls) developers in the world and we signed such a restrictive NDA to get it that only by having read this I must ask you to grab the nearest scissors to cut your tongue, burn it and send the ashes to their legal department.

We had this prototype, and we couldn’t do anything with it.

The device required a firmware upgrade, and fortunately there was a detailed tutorial as to how it should be done. Jeff carefully read the instructions (coders aren’t like us humans: they read manuals before encountering problems) and did the deed, only to see the bloody thing reboot halfway through because it didn’t have enough batteries.

It bricked, bricado, kaput. Spent half an hour pushing all the buttons only to find himself in front of the same blue screen of death.

While we didn’t miss the opportunity to mock the time of his youth he wasted attending medical college instead of flashing PSP firmwares like everyone else, somehow a couple hours later in a leap of faith of biblical epic proportions Jeff managed to ressuscitate the object.

So here he is all happy and all, telling about his miracle on the uber-secret developer’s forum and naturally someone else who also bricked his prototype asked how he did it, and those are the steps from his recollection:

‘I yelled, slammed the door and went to the kitchen to smoke three cigarettes. When I came back, it turned on just fine.‘

If you ask me the man deliberately omits to mention the beheaded chicken we later found in the kitchen sink. The difference between a good coder and a great one? Tech-voodoo.

We are well aware of that, and are actively trying to fix the issue without having to plugg it off out of shame.

Thus there might be weird messages, error codes and even -god forbid- random French words in the days to come, if you find yourself contemplating such unpleasurable experiences please report them at info [at] press-start-studio.com stating your browser and operating system.

Apologies for the inconvenience, its gonna get worse before it gets better.