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 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.

You can use the nifty Kübelwagen to run them over (or tanks, Jeeps and trucks).

Or, just burn a bunch of German officers with a firebomb.

I think The Weinstein Company could’ve easily rebranded Commandos 2 as ‘Inglourious Basterds‘ and made a fortune flogging it as merchandise. It’s a great game with wonderfully illustrated settings, and as illustrated, a wonderful freedom that allows you to do awful, awful things to people. That is if you’re that way inclined: the game itself encourages you to sneak around and do as little killing as possible and evade detection, but it’s entirely possible to go at it like a Tarantino film.

However you want to play, Commandos lets you. And that’s what really makes it great, even if you can do unspeakable things to a bunch of defenceless German or Japanese soldiers. If you really want too. Just leave the penguins be.

According to Google’s TV Raman, their top two ‘accessible’ services are their main web search and the new Google labs accessible search. The rationale?

Web search: Result pages include headers to delineate logical sections

Right, that’s good and all, but it doesn’t really excuse the dozens of tables that have no summaries does it? And headers really don’t magically make a page accessible.

And as for the new Accessible search:

Accessible Search: Promotes results that are accessible.

I haven’t played with this search enough to see if it does promote accessible results (I’m sure it’s a good service), but again, Google’s own code is a mess. It’s better than the main Google search, but still has huge amounts of inaccessible code.

You should never claim your site is accessible. Code for it as much as you can, test it as much as you can and show you conform to WCAG, but never claim it’s ‘accessible’. And even if you do, at least make sure it passes some automated tests: unlike Google, who barely scrape in at Priority 1.

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.

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?

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.

After having to run a Windows Update (which I do regularly anyway) and download some dubious looking DRM add-on for Windows Media Player, AND the latest .NET framework, I was then able to install the 4oD client (oh, after a reboot or two). After another step (signing up) I was able to download the episode. Finally.

To be fair the 4oD service looks quite promising: TV on demand as well as movies, but I’m really not sure about the whole process it takes to get it running. Sure it’s in its infancy, but the experience here really wasn’t particularly good. I’d tolerate a small install on my PC (emphasis on PC here: 4oD is purely Windows Media Player/IE-centric), but why is this service so desktop-focused? Back to the BBC example: I’m only ever a few clicks away from viewing a new episode of a new show. Sure 4oD does have some features to make up for the heavy install factor, such as download management and being able to ‘download for later’, but it’s simply so far away from the ’seamless’ exercise I and many others have become used too with the likes of YouTube and Bittorrent.

But at the same time, I think it’s great Channel 4 has set this service up. They’re miles ahead of ITV and Five (who don’t appear to have any type of on demand service) and also the BBC when you consider the breadth of their offering: 4oD gives you access to the last weeks entire broadcast program for free. It will be interesting to compare 4oD to the BBC when they finally launch a service like this of their own, which will hopefully be far more platform independent.

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.