T=Machine

Someone at work forwarded around this article/manifesto about how “Great story is the Holy Grail of gaming”. I read it, and replied that I found every single paragraph had at least one stupid claim or ridiculous statement in it, and that overall the manifesto was basically a load of ****.

It was a Monday morning, maybe I overreacted. Maybe not. Anyway, someone asked me to explain more specifically what I was objecting to, so I write a quick analysis of the first three paragraphs. I was going to go through the whole first page, but realised that even after just one sub-section, it was clear the rest of the thing isn’t even worth reading (I did read the rest of it first time around, of coure). I thought it might be good to post here, mainly because I object to people spouting crap about game design. There’s also a blog post where you can comment about the article. This is all in my own humble opinion, of course, I expect you have your own opinion…
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Filed under : bitching, computer games, games design

4 Comments »

I’m seriously fed up with the mediocrity (you could use worse words; I’m being civil here) of most MMO publishers’ patching systems for MMOs. The very least you should expect as a player, even back in 2001, should have been something akin to the PS3 / 360 patching systems today: the most basic “fire and forget” - you try to play the game, it does a background download, then popsup to tell you when to click to finish the install. That’s *it*. No more.

So, how should it be? Well…
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Filed under : bitching, computer games, games design, massively multiplayer, web 2.0

4 Comments »

I’ve been using FF3 and FF2 in parallel for the last month, and FF3 has some cool features that definitely make life better. The most noticeable so far is the new address-bar, which has finally been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Until now, it was still using the very very basic (and > 15 years old) system of when you start typing a URL, a plain list of potential textual matches comes up with rather arbitrary sorting AND only matching if the URL starts with IDENTICAL letters as you’ve typed.

NB: this post is mainly to give a kick up the ass to those of you who “haven’t noticed” yet that Firefox 3 is available and that it kicks ass, and that you should switch to using it ASAP ;).

e.g. if you type “t-mac” into the address bar, http://t-machine.org would show up in the list of potential matches, but http://server.t-machine.org would not. Argh!
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Filed under : bitching

6 Comments »

I found Scott’s blog the other week, and liked it.

So, I added it to my feed reader.

Now, I’m removing it, because the way he’s got his RSS setup - http://www.hartsman.com/feed - is unreadable (literally - only the first 100 words or so of each post is included, the rest is all missing).

Incidentally, this is why - after many years of using the site as a primary news source - I no longer read Gamedev.net (feed) : a site that resorts to hiding its information and news behind extra links, sacrificing usability to gain advertising money, is not one I have time for. There are plenty of people who’ll provide the info I want in an easy manner, without this jumping through hoops.

Sigh. I have a feed reader to read feeds, not to get a “free sample of your brilliance” that I then have to go to a web browser to be allowed to actually read in full…

Filed under : bitching, web 2.0

4 Comments »

I just tried to upgrade Wordpress to 2.5, and the whole blog broke; when I got it half fixed, I couldn’t login as admin any more and instead got the following error - and here’s how to fix it:
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Filed under : bitching, maintenance

2 Comments »

Travelling to Helsinki with British Airways, 24 hours before the flight I received an email telling me that “Online Checkin is now available” and providing a link to check-in online.

So, from my blackberry, I tried the link. It’s broken - it runs some buggy javascript that ends up redirecting to the britishairways homepage (probably because someone is using a 10-year-out-of-date hacky “what is your web browser” check instead of writing the page properly), and then does something I haven’t seen in years - an infinite redirect to the same page. I left the browser for about 5 minutes, and it was constantly redirecting for all that time, as fast as it could load the tiny HTML fragment, around once every 5 seconds.

Sigh. I tried again, this time from Firefox. Now things worked fine, and it picked up my flight automatically from the code embedded in the URL they’d emailed me. Great.

Only, after clicking through a series of pages - I want online checkin; yes, I want it now; yes I’m ready to checkin; yes, I’m the only passenger / have all other passengers with me - it goes to an error page saying:

This flight does not support online checkin. Please checkin when you get to the airport.

So … what was the purpose in sending me that email in the first place?

If they hadn’t bothered, then I’d never have found out that their website is broken, and I wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to do an online checkin process that they don’t allow for flights to Helsinki. Even better, I would never have found out that the email address they sent me the email from has an auto-responder saying “we never read any emails sent to this address, please use http://www.britishairways.com for any support queries”.

Of course, the original email doesn’t say this, and the address isn’t something obvious like “noreply@”, so I’d written them a proper complaint and given them the details of their broken site. All of which they proceeded to automatically delete.

Verdict: BA’s hamfisted attempt at using the internet has shown not only their incompetence, but also their contempt for customer service. It’s also created a desire in me for online checkin, shown me how easy it COULD be, if I were flying with an airline that supported it. All in all, they’ve gone out of their way to use the internet to persuade me to stop flying with them in the future - and I haven’t even got to the airport yet! Definitely a case of Web 0.1…

Filed under : Web 0.1, bitching

1 Comment »

I upgraded Firefox only a few days ago (I didn’t get a choice - it was set to autoupdate, and updated when I was halfway through doing an install on my new computer; it broke most of the plugins I was halfway through installing because the new version wasn’t backwards compatible) and now a new upgrade just appeared. I wondered what could necessitate such a sudden new upgrade, so I clicked on the “View more information about this update” link in the dialog box.

This took me to a page which said nothing other than:

“Stability Update:
This release corrects a problem that was found in the previous release, Firefox 2.0.0.10.”

WTF? How did that even seem to them to be a reasonable explanation? So, I sent them some feedback. Which will no doubt get filed in /dev/nul

Someone at firefox needs to reconsider the messages they’re sending out. It’s as bad as Microsoft in the bad old days of System Updates that had no reason beyond “critical”, or “this update is necessary to ensure your copy of windows continues to function correctly”.

Considering how dangerous updates are for the user (c.f. the fact that the last one nuked most of my plugins :(, and there’s no way to downgrade - for some reason, they don’t support that, and they don’t allow you to download old, working, versions, only the latest, even-if-its-broken, version), this approach to forcing them on users without explanation is both antagonistic and irresponsible.

/me is now forcing firefox to “never” upgrade, and will refuse to run any more upgrades of it.

I’m sure this is the complete opposite of what they intended, as my machines will now theoretically be vulnerable to every security flaw that comes along, but I think I’ll use MSIE 7 as my main browser, despite it’s many flaws, and stop using FF for everything except testing, rather than suffer more of this stupidity from the Mozilla Foundation. I never thought they’d manage to force me into the hands of Microsoft :).

Filed under : bitching

4 Comments »

(do you have fuzzy text in Outlook 2007? hard to read fonts? System settings for fonts broken in Office 2007? Help is at hand…).

You have to do a couple of things to fix the one bug, and I had to find all the different parts of the solution in different places, so I put them all together into one post here.

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Filed under : bitching, fixing your desktop

2 Comments »

WordPress still has the worst UI for editing posts I’ve seen in years. It can’t even handle adding H3 tags! (you have to add them in source code, the visual editor doesn’t support them, and it’s got bugs if you try to then edit from the visual view afterwards)

Filed under : bitching

1 Comment »