I haven’t played CoD 4: Modern Warfare II just yet. But on a dull Sunday afternoon a few weeks back I thought I’d give the original Modern Warfare another play-through. I was reminded of two things about the game whilst doing so: firstly, it has some awesome and amazing cinematic sequences. For instance the nuclear bomb detonation in the US Marine campaign:
The second is that like many a good action film, it’s quite dumb. Many levels require you slaughtering respawning enemies over and over again while you wait for a helicopter or a timer to countdown. This gets really painful and chore-like after you fail two or three times. If only there was a little more strategy to the levels: working out how to solve a difficult level is rewarding when there’s some strategy involved. When it’s a bit of luck after the upteemth attempt, it’s just anticlimactic.
Online strategy game Evony has already made a reputation for itself with its wildly inappropriate and inaccurate banner ads.
I played Evony once, for about ten minutes… not long, however I played enough to be sure it’s not a Leisure Suit Larry-style game set in Middle Earth (although maybe there’s some mileage in that concept).
Previously the blatant cleavage shot of a buxom stock photo model was a favourite Evony ad, but I think this new one takes the cake. What does this haute couture model have to do with a medieval strategy game? Sex sells I guess.
One of the many great things about Steam is its range of cheap classics. I downloaded Commandos 2 a few weeks back and even though I’ve already finished the game before, it’s been lots of fun playing it again.
One part of the game that stood out this time around is the subtle yet brutal level of cruelty available to the player. I’ll gloss over the ability to shoot penguins and seals, as I think the options available with captured German and Japanese soliders is far greater.
There are a total of eight commandos: each with different abilities. There’s the thief, the sniper, the spy and the diver… it’s all fairly obvious what each one does. Using their bare hands or objects like wine bottles, it’s quite simple to walk up behind an enemy soldier and knock them out. Once that’s done, you can tie them up and steal their equipment — and uniforms.
But what do you do with a bunch of gagged, bound and naked enemy soldiers? Well, the possibilities are endless it seems.
The Google Blog has a recent post entitled ‘Overview of our Accessible Services‘. Last time I looked at Google’s search code (which was only last week actually) I remember it being a particularly messy mix of invalid HTML and table soup (but this is Google: who for some reason are exempt from producing structureless mark-up on their main website in the 21st century, unlike almost everyone else on the planet). Read the rest of this entry »
Channel 4’s 4oD was down last Friday night at 11:30pm. This really isn’t that surprising it was just after the latest episode of Peep Show had aired, and I imagine thousands of people over the UK were wanting to watch it after getting home that evening.
Thankfully it was up again on Saturday morning and I downloaded the new episode without a hitch. Of course until I tried to watch it around 12pm, when quite possibly everyone else burned the night before were attempting to download the episode yet again.
Now this is where DRM (and bad design on the developer’s part) really bugs me: the video file was on my hard drive somewhere in some mystical format and location, but without being able to connect to the 4oD site, I couldn’t watch it. Madness. Surely it’s easy enough to change the service so you can watch downloads offline, but if this was a torrent download (or any regular download) then this offline business wouldn’t even be an issue.
In similar news, the BBC’s iPlayer is coming later this year, apparently.
Looking for hotels tonight on Radisson Hotels website and I quite literally got stuck. Trying to select a date range, the pop up date picker conveniently hides behind the big flashy Flash banner like some shy child cowering behind a parent’s leg.
Manually entering dates is also frustrating as some part of the Javascript intermittently clears the field when changing focus between the fields. Initially I honestly couldn’t get a date in. I’ve since tried again and it worked (barely). Just as well there’s a fairly obvious Reservations link in the top bar.
By the way, anyone know of any good hotels in Calgary?
I’m very excited about the fourth series of Peep Show. I’m also quite excited about being able to watch new Peep Show episodes on demand from Channel 4, something which they’ve been advertising quite heavily (their service being called “4oD“).
So I checked out the on-demand service yesterday after Angela had missed last night’s episode. I remember how easy it was catching up on Extras series two last year: just go to the BBC Two Extras site and click on ‘view latest episode’. Very easy.
Well, perhaps not quite a redux on my previous Live Mail post, more just a recent observation.
However, as I said in the last post, I am still compelled to check Hotmail now and again as I still have a few emails of importance coming in between the far more steady stream of spam. Clearing my inbox today I noticed the Live Mail team have changed the way the inbox interface is laid out. The main difference is that the checkbox for each item now shares its place with the new mail icon:
Basically both icons toggle depending on whether the email is new and/or selected. In practice this is just really bemusing to use. If you want to select messages to delete or move, there is no obvious checkbox. When you work out they’re hiding between mail icons (emphasis on hidden here), the actual task of selecting the check boxes requires a high degree of accuracy: the checkbox is sitting on anchor block linking to the email message, so if you’re slightly off target with the small checkbox you end up opening a message as opposed to selecting it.
And my last gripe is that the checkbox/mail icon column doesn’t line up with the master select checkbox in the top left corner. There is actually room for the checkbox to sit next to the mail icon and be underneath this master selector. Wouldn’t that make far more sense?
I don’t know what the rationale behind the design of this is, but the caveat here is that this is a beta product after all. Although I made that point in my last blog entry as well, after pointing out Live Mail was purely IE6 (now IE7 as well). Windows Live Mail now loads in Firefox 2.0, although load is a pretty abstract concept:
24 errors/504 warnings? Nice.
And for the record, Live Mail is still long way off the simplicity and usability of Gmail.
