My review of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is available here, finally released from the half-written purgatory where I left it. Anyone who’s seen my previous comments about the game probably realises that the score was something of a forgone conclusion but I hope you still find my thoughts on the game interesting.
Monthly Archives: April 2005
UK Trade Shows
First Game Zone Live, now ECTS and GDCE. Even SCoRE, the retail arm of the industry’s annual excuse for a big piss-up, is no more. Are there any legs remaining in the UK trade show?
After last year ECTS may have been more of a mercy killing, but it seems almost inexplicable at a time when Europe is pushing up the list of the world’s biggest games markets we can’t hold a good show. Germany has the apparently excellent GC (stands for “games convention” – gotta love that German efficiency), but that barely registers on the radar of most who would prefer to wait for E3 and Tokyo Game Show where the big guns come out to play. Germany aren’t exactly the hotbed of development in, uh, development either. The US and Japan might be the spiritual homes of gaming but when so many influential developers are based around Europe – Rockstar North, Ubisoft, Rare, Lionhead, Core Design, and others have made billions for the industry – why can’t even a public show where they charge for entry be a success?
E3, apart from a handful who’ll cough up $300 for a pass, is trade-only and none of them pay for entry, but it still remains incredibly successful. TGS strikes the balance by having a day for the trade and then makes some more money by having two days for the public. Last year they charged £12 per person for access to Game Stars Live and it was packed for the Thursday and Friday (both school days) so I dread to think how many they pulled in for the Saturday…
I suppose I shouldn’t try the price of admission angle since I get into every show I can free and don’t pay them anything, but I still find it baffling that we can’t make it work. Then again I look at our trains, buses, postal service, health service, and I’m not actually that surprised anymore.
How UMD Can Succeed
I’ve commented in the past that I perhaps don’t share Sony’s vision of the PSP as the de facto standard for portable video, not least because nobody in their right mind is going to buy UMD movies when they’re only playable on the PSP and I’m certainly not because they’re not in their OAR, but Bandai may have cracked the way to make them a success, albeit still on a far more limited basis than other, more mainstream, formats.
According to Engadget they’re going to be releasing a special set for anime series Eureka 7 which will have the standard DVD package, but for ¥1,260 (£6.16) extra you can get the same thing with another copy of the series on UMD. Obviously exchange rates have to be accounted for, but I’d pay £10 or so more for a movie that I really liked in order to own it on both formats. I’ve seen Spider-Man 2 on it so I know how much better the UMD movies can look than the low-bitrate MP4 files that a DVD rip would give and although this wouldn’t increase the liklihood of me repurchasing my DVD collection on UMD I’d definitely consider it for new releases.
Internet Explorer Must Die
What better way to celebrate the debut of the new design, tweaked slightly from last night’s preview, than a rant on the bane of any web designer’s existence: Internet Explorer? If you’re using it now go and get Firefox or Opera – you’ll be doing both of us a favour.
So much has been written on the relative merits of standard HTML and the new combination of XHTML and CSS that it hardly seems necessary. If you don’t know what this is about you can read this for a comparison of the two as a medium for web design and just why plain HTML is too antiquated on the modern web. Easier updating, 70% smaller file sizes, huge reductions in bandwidth, increased compatibility with non-computer Internet browsers (a web-enabled phone with limited resolution can just ignore the stylesheets and have a perfectly legible text page, for example)? Sounds great, right? Well, this is where the issues with IE start creeping in.
Whereas everyone else is improving their support for these new standards Microsoft, with their 90% of the browser market, are holding everyone back with their absolutely abysmal support for CSS. Sites like the CSS Zen Garden (every page on the site is exactly the same basic XHTML file but with CSS controlling the layout and images) show how powerful CSS design can be, and the adoption of it is continuing to accelerate as time goes on but you can, and indeed I did many times while writing the code behind this design, write a perfectly valid CSS file that renders on every single alternative browser, only to find that it looks completely wrong in IE. Of every browser that people could be using they decide to stick with the one that doesn’t work properly…
Since writing this design was my first attempt at coding a page completely with the XHTML and CSS combination I was nearly suicidal to find that my pretty page which worked perfectly in Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Camino, Safari, IE Mac, Konquerer, and any other browser that you can imagine but looked completely wrong in IE (see what I mean here). I sat here writing and rewriting code for literally two hours before I finally managed to get the fucking thing to render correctly, and all because Microsoft wanted to rest on their laurels and leave their shoddy product as it was. It was only because Firefox and its community-driven marketing campaign managed to drop their stranglehold on the market to less than 90% that MS even bothered to start development on IE7, and you know that when it comes out it will probably suffer from many of the same bugs but with the same tabbed browsing that everything else had years ago. And chances are they’ll be credited with it, as well.
I’m a definite convert and I’ll be using this powerful combination in any future development that I do, but Microsoft need to get themselves in gear if they’re going to stop holding the rest of us back. I’ve been using Firefox for as long as I can remember (since it was called Phoenix, and the standard Mozilla suite before that) so having these new designs just work has been something that I’m used to. It’s too bad that most people don’t even know that web standards exist and are just as happy with their POS of a browser because it’s the one bundled in with their operating system.
New Design Imminent
In case you’ve noticed that the site has been dropping and giving you a random error message it’s because I’ve been testing a new design for the site. Nothing as extreme as the move from the crappy old tabular HTML design, but something that looks a bit more professional and less like the Kubrick theme that it’s currently based on while staying in the same spirit.
It’s been quite a venture to develop it for myself since it’s my first dabbling with using CSS for the design of the site (see the CSS Zen Garden to see what can be done) instead of dirty old HTML which makes for a much more streamlined page and code.
Anyway, it will go live in the couple of days. I’ve spent a lot of time looking for any bugs that need squashing but if you find any drop me a line.
Future Gives Up
Further to yesterday’s story about the OFT launching an investigation into Future Publishing’s planned takeover of Highbury, The Guardian reports that it was enough to get them to give up entirely. It’ll be the best thing for everyone.