Author: Rob

Game on!

Tuesday February 26th 2002

I’ve got so many games on the go at the moment it’s mad. First up is Wipeout Fusion – I’m a bit biased there, but I’ll sum it up by saying it’s the fastest racer ever and it looks great!

Next up is Ace Combat 4 – brilliant stuff, brings back Top Gun in a big way and the atmosphere is great during the tense missions and dog fights. The graphics are almost photo-realistic in places, and the menus and loading times are sensational. Top marks!

Jack & Daxter follow on behind, pushing a whole load of polygons in their journey over a fabulous looking fantasy land. It does smell a little like Crash Bandicoot… well, a lot actually, but it’s heaps better than Crash because it’s more open. If you find something that’s a pain to do, the chances are you can go and do a load of other things instead, and that’s great game design.

Now on to Rockstar’s State of Emergency – it’s crap, avoid it at all costs. Ok, to be fair, if you loved the missions in GTA3 where it was really frustrating and you lost your life just before you completed them then this is up your street. Even more so if you love games with scewed up camera movement, ‘cos in SoE it swings from your back to your side and round to your front without any logical reason while you’re getting a kicking from 8 riot police. Not fun and not a very good game either.

Dropship made it out of the packaging long enough for me to play the training level. It looked good, but it’s a little less playable than Ace Combat 4, so I’m leaving it ’til later.

Airblade on the other hand is still in the celophane. I have Tony Hawks’ 3 and I another take on the theme doesn’t really appeal to me. Could save it for a rainy day, I suppose.

Bob Bremer on BT

Sunday February 17th 2002

Having worked with BT as a client, I can vouch that it is the lumbering monstrosity of a company that it’s presumed to be. It really does not know its arse from its elbow – there are so many divisions and layers of red tape that it’s frightening. Which could be why the company even remotely thinks that it owns the technology behind hyperlinks and is trying to prove it has a patent over the very glue that binds the internet together. Visit the site of Bob Bremer, the father of computing, to learn more.

I hate being ill

Saturday February 16th 2002

There. I’ve said it. Four days I’ve had a sore throat now, and I haven’t enjoyed one moment of it. When I was little I’d get to stay at home, wrapped up in a blanket on the sofa watching terrible daytime TV. No matter how crap the TV was or how ill I was, I would secretly revel in the fact that I was at home, seeing life that would normally go by while I was stuck in a class room.

Then at around six pm my mother would come home from the various jobs she seemed to have when I was little, always with a bottle of Lucosade or Fergusade (?) for me. That was the hallmark of being ill for me. Well, it was the hallmark of having my mother convinced anyway – I noticed she wouldn’t turn up with any if she had any doubt about the reality of my illness. If I was lucky and ill enough, she’d present me with one of the orange bottles that went sticky the second you removed the cap. You didn’t even have to pour any before your hand would be glued to the bottle and the see through orange wrapper that surrounded the bottles in those days.

I haven’t had any Lucosade or similar in ages – maybe that’s why it’s taken longer to shake off this sore throat/cough combination that looks like it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Or maybe it’s not the lack of the sickly fizzy potion. Maybe it’s because I went to work instead of staying at home on the sofa wrapped in a blanket watching terrible daytime TV?

If I’m being honest, I have to admit that I didn’t have the best sickie record in my first 20 years on the planet. If I had so much as a runny nose I would turn it into full scale black death with some clever acting that would have made Ferris Beuller doff his cap. Now I seem to be a different animal – I’ll usually keep working in the hope that it goes away without too much worry, thinking that if I ignore it it might just go away.

Anyway – I’m trying my best to do just that, by surfing the good web developers pages and converting this site to XHTML. Hopefully the distractions will work – I never have liked lemsip and having had a grand total of four in two days I’ve realised I’m never likely to endorse it either. Yeauch!