Spontaneous Monotony

Well it seems that in my essay-writing exploits last night I failed to notice that the graduate endowment is gone (after the SNP drafted its death warrant in June). Ah well, gives me  an excuse to get the utterly fabulous February 29th in my blog. What’s more puzzling is that Neo Labour and the Tories (no surprises there) voted against, on the basis that it wouldn’t reduce student  poverty. I know that bending the truth (not to mention the expenses rules :p) is in vogue in Neo Labour, but I fail to see how they can claim that reducing the financial burden on every single student by over £2200 (about a fifth of the average total debt per student of £11,000) will not reduce student poverty. We should all be happy - once again we live in a country committed to the principle of free education, and (even better) we no longer live in a country run by Neo Labour con artists.

Since the beginning of December I’ve had limited computer access due to the clowns at Komplett somehow managing to lose a huge desktop computer. Now my replacement machine has arrived from Cyberpower (with added hilarity since the free Cyberpower tshirt has AMD logos on it unlike my computer :P) so I should be back to full blogging service shortly

Red Alert is my favourite strategy game of all time. In fact, it’s up there with Final Fantasy VIII as probably my favourite game full stop. The sequel at the turn of the century was good fun too - now it seems that there’s a third Red Alert game in development for the same platforms as C&C3 (PC, PS3, 360). Given the hour I can’t post anything substantial, but here’s some highlights culled from the EA press release:

• Follows the three-side structure seen in the C&C games since Yuri’s Revenge. The sides are the Allies, Soviets, and Japan.
• Beta test entry (no word whether it’s automatic ala Crackdown/Halo3 or a lottery) for people who buy C&C3 Kane’s Wrath or the double pack for the PC
• Naval combat - always a staple of the RA games and ommitted in C&C - is included
• The more sci-fi developments of RA2 - dolphins, attack blimps etc. - return. Also: ARMORED BEARS.
• Did I mention? ARMORED BEARS!

When one of their longtime editors was fired after giving a prime advertiser’s game a mediocre review score, fans deserted Gamespot in droves. Now there’s been another screwup - not on the same scale, but still showing the complete lack of professionalism at the site critics christened ‘ca$hwh0re’. Lost Odyssey, which coincidentally does not have any advertising on Gamespot, was slaughtered in their review for ‘loading times exceeding 60 seconds’ (I paraphrase).

Now that the game’s out (in the US at least) many users are posting on Gamespot’s forums pointing out that the loading times are perfectly fine - about 10 seconds being the longest, typical of any 360 game. Gamespot have claimed that the discs Microsoft gave them are different from the retail copies, but to be honest that in itself is stunningly poor form on Gamespot’s part. They should have made sure that the game had begun pressing for retail distribution - and that their copy was retail equivalent - before they even wrote the damn thing.

Apple (the computer one - suppose it needs stating given BBC Chav News’ blanket coverage of Paul McCartney’s divorce) recently varied its trademark to cover:

toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games

The fanboys (and, more depressingly, some proper tech news sites) have made the quite superhuman leap from this to the assumption that Apple is making a games console - ignoring the far more plausible conclusion that Apple has simply amended their trademark to reflect the fact that the iPod now plays games, and prevent anyone from using ‘Apple’ to market any competitor devices.

Aside from the basic principle that the most obvious reason is usually the correct one, there is a very big reason why Apple wouldn’t make a games console: they have no real games experience. When Microsoft decided to make the Xbox in 2000, they already had behind them several years of making the OS of choice for games developers as well as making a great number of computer games themselves. Apple has neither of these. Most of the games on OS X are ported after-the-fact by the likes of Asypr, or run the Windows version in the not-really-brilliant Cider emulation layer (for those who haven’t heard of it, this is little more than a Mac port of the Cedega emulator which does the same job for Linux*.

I fail to see how Apple can jump from this state of affairs to making an honest-to-Jebus games console. Leaving aside the lack of games experience, Microsoft had to sink billions of dollars into the Xbox program to get it off the ground, and Apple would be starting from scratch in the same way - though without the huge cash reserves a behemoth like MS has at its disposal.

*Let’s not get into the whole Wine Is Not an Emulator argument, it’s tiresome and misses the point entirely. The central purpose (certainly of Cedega - there is more of an argument as far as Wine itself is concerned) is to run programs which have been compiled for Windows, on Linux - the job of an emulator - rather than compiling Windows source code in a Linux-compatible fashion.