Author: Rob

Rumble Racing

Wednesday July 11th 2001

What a barrel of laughs this one is! The souped up cars look fantastically over the top and the racing is even more so, with passive and active power-ups and an insane AI for the computer controlled cars.

The game comes into its own in two player mode, where you can co-operate as a team and take on a 6 of the generous selection of cars in the game in various championship rounds. The difficulty curve is about right, although some races rely on you making three perfect circuits of a track and the leading AI car having a bit of a crash at some point.

It is all fast and furious fun, though and the pace you have to keep up over three laps is mind melting in some cases. To quote my team mate: “I forgot to blink again!” is something quite easily done in the heat of battle and trance-like concentration you’ll need on tracks such as The Gauntlet, Surf N Turf and Outer Limits.

The only downsides are the fact it’s pretty easy to complete all the championships – there isn’t GT like depth in this title. Sometimes having to rely on a fluke victory to open up the next level is very frustrating – try needing to finish second in an absolutely torrid race only to have it ripped from your grasp by a slightly misjuded final corner – it makes you swear and look to the heavens in desperation!

If you’re holding out for GT, this title deserves to sit alongside it on your shelf – as I said, it doesn’t have the depth, but the fun-o-meter is off the scale and the Twister effect has to be seen just to see how good it is.

Erm, I was at an… em, Cold Fusion… em, seminar

Wednesday June 20th 2001

Today I went to a free Cold Fusion seminar in London. It was held by Macromedia, who have become the corporation behind the server side technology since their merger with Allaire in May.

I’ve never used the language before, although I had a rough idea of what went on, but I can say that I was very impressed by how easy it was to create database driven pages very swiftly. Certainly it looked much quicker than what I use, PHP – although that’s to be expected when PHP is free and Cold Fusion has a 1200 dollar price tag for the development studio alone.

Most hilarious though was the part of the seminar when the constantly Ummming and Emmming “Sales Engineer” showed a slide that had Cold Fusion doing a db query and output in four lines of code compared to 20-odd lines in PHP. It was total bullshit, as the CF code had no error handling, graceful failure, or page formatting code in there when the PHP code did – yet the Sales Engineer was presenting it like for like.

I pointed this out – saying I was slightly annoyed and that he didn’t have to tell lies to convince me that CF was a great looking product. Several Ummm’s and Emmm’s later he admitted that it was wrong to compare code from one language with that of another, and that the ASP code they showed was slightly bloated too. So why did he do it!?

The Art and Science of Web Design by Jeffrey Veen

Tuesday June 19th 2001

Book cover Proof, if it was needed, that you cant please all of the people all of the time and that there’s not much point in trying to, either.

Veen’s book falls between two stools – those just starting out may find his passion for standards a little disconcerting. While veterans like myself will find that he barely scratches the surface of the processes involved in producing a standards compliant design.

I wouldn’t have minded a chapter on dealing with clients and the logistics of playing the chess-like games that ensue when a client thinks they know better than the professional designer they’re employing. Just like the manufactured pop stars of today who are trained to deal with the media, a fresh young developer needs to know how to handle themselves in a client facing situation. Failing to cover this important subject is a bit of a missed opportunity and although dry, it’s a just as important in delivering a design as CSS.

I’ll probably pass this book on to someone who is just starting out, as it does carry a shed load of common sense that many of todays bright-eyed wannabe designers seem to lack. Like why you shouldn’t copy the fame-whore design sites and stick a 200K image laboriously crafted with Photoshop filters on the front end of your site.

When it comes to site design, Veen seems to deal more with the logical workings than the aesthetics, something I found disappointing as I’d been expecting the “Art” of the title to compliment the “Science”.

It doesn’t take someone who’s grossly pedantic to spot that there are a few typos and missing words in the book, but I wouldn’t say it detracts from what is a very readable tome.

To buy this book from Amazon UK – click here.