I always find it quite insulting when the United States flag gets used as an icon for ‘English’. Technically it shouldn’t even be the British flag, but really the English flag. But you don’t often see that do you?
And considering there are more Portuguese speakers in Brazil than Portugal, why not show the Brazil flag for Portuguese (if you’re being consistent with the use of the US flag).
Or… just don’t use flags to illustrate language. Ever.
I’ve been working feverishly away on this project for a while. It’s still technically beta, but here it is: World Cup Predictor. Plug in your World Cup match predictions and see who you think will win…
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.
Some more on the wonderful Evony banner ads at Tokyito and Coding Horror.
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.
This post is just for Google really: introducing Shaun van Oorde-Grainger‘s spanking new website, Delusions of Grainger. Get it? He’s not just a pretty face.
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).
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(Alternative title: My-quest-to-watch-Peep Show-as-soon-as possible- as-I-almost-certainly-miss-it-every-Friday).
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.
Peep Show wasn’t quite that easy.