Archive for July, 2006
Humans: a virus with shoes
Today’s utterly depressing news story:
Social workers found four children shared their home with 22 dogs and lived in “appalling conditions” after one of the youngsters began growling and displaying dog-like behaviour at school, a court was told yesterday.
…A 35-year-old woman and a 60-year-old man, who cannot be identified to protect the children’s identity, were each jailed for 70 days yesterday.
Don’t read the linked article if your faith in human nature is shaky.
Game likes Wii (with photos)
[Via Digg]
Why SUVs?
As part of my day job I keep an eye out for interesting virals, so I’ve just watched a Greenpeace anti-SUV ad. It’s pretty complacent and I suspect, preaching to the converted: the idea is that if you drive an SUV, people will shit in your tea. I’m only paraphrasing slightly.
I’m no great supporter of SUVs - they’re a menace round here, although I’d also point out that the knackered Volvo 940s driven by the local enviro-weenies pump out considerably more crap and burn considerably more fuel than some SUVs - but environmentally they’re no worse than many big cars, and a quick shufty through department of transport figures shows that cheap flights pump out almost double the amount of CO2 per passenger mile than cars do (lorries are worse and trains are best). And of course, aviation fuel isn’t taxed the way car fuel is.
So why don’t there seem to be any ads aimed at people who fly EasyJet?
That’s me in the corner
I’m not a particularly ambitious person, but for years and years I’ve wanted to have a column where I can bang on about sod all - and from this month, I’ve got one in .net [which, post-redesign, is gorgeous. The mag, I mean. Not my bit] And you know what? I finally saw it this morning and my immediate reaction is… I’m absolutely shitting myself.
I don’t really know why, because obviously my name’s been attached to everything I’ve ever written (and while it’s scary to see your own face on a printed page, quite a few mags run writer pics and terrify their readers with my increasingly shiny head). It’s completely illogical to be scared, then, but that doesn’t stop me from bricking it.
I suspect it’s because I buy most magazines for their columns, so for example while I reckon Edge is a great gaming title I’d probably stop buying it if the columns disappeared. So now I’m not just comparing myself with other freelance writers, but with the writers who are responsible for me spending an awful lot of cash on dead trees. And of course, I reckon they’re all much better writers than I am - so if I want to keep doing this, I’ll need to raise my game accordingly. I’ve written two so far and believe me, I’ve written entire books in less time than those two 500-word bits of blah.
Still, it’ll impress my mum…
When bouncy castles attack
TWO women were killed yesterday when a giant “bouncy castle” broke free from its moorings with 30 people inside it.
The huge inflatable - half the size of a football pitch - shot 50 feet into the sky above a busy park and flipped over in mid-air.
Microsoft admits: the Zune “iPod killer” exists. Hype time!
[photopress:zune_logo.jpg,full,pp_image]
Microsoft has finally confirmed that its iPod-killer project, Zune, exists. Engadget has a good write-up of what we know, what we think we know and what we don’t know for sure, and the insider blogs have already appeared: ZuneInsider and Madison & Pine.
It’s all very interesting. More hype here and here.
Damn NDAs
I’m doing something interesting tomorrow, or at least potentially interesting. Unfortunately I can’t actually say what it is until afterwards, because I’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement. But there’s a hint here: it involves Sony, a tower block, explosives and paint.
Prey: an insult to Xbox owners? [Update: nope]
Apparently 70-odd-percent of Prey’s sales have been on Xbox 360. Unless I’m very unlucky, that means there will soon be a lot of pissed-off customers.
Games occasionally freeze. I know that. But 26 reboots in an hour? The further into the game you get, the more buggy it becomes - and in the final levels, you’re lucky to get 30 seconds of play before it locks up again. It doesn’t seem to be a particular combination of moves, or enemies, or anything like that; it’s apparently random. It makes me wonder: did the developers actually test the game all the way through, or was it rushed out to hit a deadline?
In a budget game, the bugs would be appalling. In a £50 game, it’s unforgivable.
Update, a bit later…
Hmmm. Might be a hardware problem and not a game problem. I’m looking into it.
Update, later still…
Hmmm, again. Googling leads me to quite a few others who’ve had the same problem as me, and the culprits have been suggested as faulty discs, faulty drives, overheating xboxes or xboxes heading for complete and catastrophic hardware failure. I’m not convinced. If it were a faulty disc then the problem would happen at the same places each time, surely? If it were a drive, then other games would be affected (they aren’t). As for overheating, I played the game for six hours solid the other day without problems, and the temperatures were much, much higher than they were yesterday - when I gave up on Prey after an hour. And as for complete, catastrophic hardware failure… I bloody hope not.
Update, a few days later
Looks like a faulty disc, or a duff pressing at least (the disc surface is immaculate): booted the Xbox from cold, launched the game and went “woah!” as an orchestral score blasted out. First time I’d heard it, and then I remembered the reviews saying Prey had an orchestral score. So there’s something off there. Naturally, the game crashed ten seconds later. Now for the dubious joys of Amazon’s returns policy…
Update, 27 July
Ah, the perils of blogging: the problem has now spread, so while before it was just Prey it’s now affecting all my Xbox games. Microsoft reckons that I’ve got a hardware fault that’s causing the console to overheat, so off to MS it goes. It turns out that Prey wasn’t the culprit, but the messenger.
Time Trumpet
Armando Iannucci’s at it again…
Heh heh heh.
This week’s Private Eye has a cracking quiz answer from the Weakest Link:
Q: What is the name of the force that keeps the moon in earth’s orbit, stops us flying into space, etc etc etc?
A: Delta Force.