There has now been a non-trivial upgrade to Wordpress, hence the jump in version number. Haven’t explored the new stuff yet, but if there is anything that looks odd then add a comment to this post.
UPDATE: The sidebar widgets plugin (the official one) seems to be broken at the moment
Yes, the UK’s obligatory TV tax (euphemised as the ‘licence fee’) is being forced down the public’s throats for another six years. The BBC is bleating that the new level of £151.50 is ‘disappointing’ and will lead to ‘some quite tough choices’.
Sorry, but it is £151.50 too high. In this day and age, in a free market economy, nobody should have a significant sum of money forced out of them by the state to pay for a company whose products they are not interested in buying (the BBC’s own research showed that a majority of people would not pay towards the BBC if they had a choice)
If the BBC provides the high quality content that its supporters claim it does, then it should have no problem attracting subscribers and/or advertisers. No company, no matter how much some people like it, should be able to use the state to force people to buy its products.
External links
This game has been hyped massively. The preview videos made it look a bit like a cross between BF1942 and Red Alert. Well, the multiplayer demo is now out on Xbox Live and, to be honest, I’m not impressed.
The graphics are good, but they aren’t astounding like Gears of War, PGR3, Oblivion etc. The gameplay isn’t terribly exciting – planes are difficult to fly as effectively as the AI does, and ship-to-ship combat can be boring at times. is actually less exciting than it was in BF1942. Submarines might be kinda fun to play, but since I don’t have the faintest idea how to pick which units I want to play – more on that later.
The multiplayer lobby takes a rather irritating approach that results in noobs being able (through ignorance or malice) to prevent the game from starting. Yep, you guessed it, a ‘ready’ button. It would have made a lot more sense for the host to start a countdown (e.g. 30 seconds) after which anyone who had not chosen a slot would be assigned one randomly. That way, people who didn’t know what they were doing would get to play the game instead of being kicked, and players who do will not be delayed by noobs.
The shipyard play is the most dull, fuckwitted, utterly stupid concept ever used in a game (yes, that BMX game has been stripped of its crown). You play as… a shipyard. Yes, a building, an inanimate object. Now, if these had been done properly they would actually been really interesting to play. Maybe deciding when to launch destroyers or cruisers docked at the shipyard, or launching patrols of PT boats. Maybe even manning the large number of gun emplacements around the shipyard. But no. All you can do is stare at this building (you can’t even watch someone else) and hope that someone takes pity on you and gives you a ship or a squadron of planes to play with. Well call me a noob. Seems that you can launch ships from a shipyard, you just press down on the dpad :-[
Maybe it’ll grow on me, but I’m not preordering on the evidence of what I’ve seen so far.
You might have noticed the severe lack of posts over the past couple of weeks. Don’t worry (or, depending on your POV, celebrate) because I’m not going anywhere, I just have exams at the moment which are taking up most of my time. Normal service will resume at the end of next week.