A Royal Wedding
I really didn’t have any interest in the Royal Wedding, why would I? I’ve decided that I will be watching but it isn’t because I suddenly have any interest or have been sucked into all the hype (unbelievably I seem to have avoided it all). No, the TV will be on (in the background) because it’s an event and like all live events Twitter has made it a new form of entertainment. I still have no interest in what’s happening but I’m really looking forward to hearing my social circle discussing it. It’s not just Twitter, Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes are doing a live commentary on ustream, which is perhaps the strangest thing happening today. So as with X Factor and many other live events I’ll be only watching because the technology has allowed a global water cooler moment without having to wait until the next day and I’m fairly certain when there are reports of high viewing figures nobody will mention this.
Is That It?
Portal 2 came out this week, it sounds great and I want to play it but, like nearly all games I’ll be waiting for a price drop. £50 is a lot for a RRP, (even if nobody is selling it at that price) but I’m annoyed because people are complaining about how few hours play they’ll get for their money. What happened about quality? How about worrying about the quality of game you’re getting for your money.
Nearly all games are too long. I can’t remember ever finishing a game and thinking “is that it?”. The original Portal was great because it maintained such a high quality throughout, at the end I was still pleased that I’d enjoyed playing it so much to worry how much it had cost. I loved Red Dead Redemption but I would have loved it even more if it had half the missions and didn’t take up so much of my time. Epic Mickey is highly flawed but I’m liking lots of things about it, I’m halfway through but in terms of gameplay I think I’ve seen it all, I want to carry on to see the art design and complete the story but it already feels like a chore.
If games were shorter I’d be able to play more of them. It may cost more (but if you’re short of money most games are available for less than £20 very quickly) but at this point in my life it’s a shortage of time that is the problem.
A Simple Framework
For many reasons I’ve been wanting to develop something new and from scratch for quite a while. Mainly because most of the coding I do seems to be tweaking existing code or copying and pasting existing structures. After reading a few different tutorials on building a MVC Framework I thought I could join every developer and their dog and have a go at building a framework of my own. It was intended as an educational exercise for myself and so I’ve kept things as simple as possible, especially for the first version. It’s not an MVC framework as I haven’t yet included any support for models. At this stage it’s Controller Action View but it is more or less working now. I still need to finish it off and then decide how practical it is to actually build something with. Who knows, I may then even release it for scrutiny from others.
In true He-Man style here are a few things I’ve learnt (or rediscovered) in the process:
- mod rewrites may well be working but just redirecting to the wrong place and producing page not found errors
- setting <base href> won’t work in IE if you have invalid html before it (during debugging)
- There’s no need to use DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR constant (I didn’t even know it existed) when building paths as a forward slash will work in Windows
- You can use reflection to check the number of required arguments when dynamically calling functions
e.g.
$method = new ReflectionMethod($controller,$action); $requiredArgs = $method->getNumberOfRequiredParameters();
Dead Rising 2: Case Zero
Dead Rising was the reason I wanted to own an Xbox and like many I didn’t like the game when I first started playing it finding it far too frustrating but it grew on me and become on of my favourite games. Case Zero was released to bridge the gap between the first and second games but really just acts as a prequel to the sequel, introducing the new character and offering up a reminder of the game mechanics.
It works really well, on my first playthrough it reminded me of all the things I hated about the first game: the clunky controls (although they are better), dying and having to repeat yourself and not really getting very far at all. The thing about Dead Rising is that you have to play it multiple times and with each playthrough you piece together a little more and eventually work out how to do it all in one run. It’s a shame that this Groundhog Day approach can’t be worked into the story (but that would be stupid) because it feels like bad game design. It seems to work though, perhaps because this “demo” only takes 90 minutes you want to play through it again and try to bring everything together. How well it will work in the full game remains to be seen but it left me wanting to find out.
I’m Posting (nearly) every week in 2011!
I really liked the idea of a this challenge to blog once a day or week for all of 2011. When I read about it at the start of the year I wanted to join in but I was really busy with Keswick Film Festival and didn’t feel like I had time to commit. Once the festival was out of the way I quietly tried blogging every week and so far have managed to keep it up.
This week I have written something but it doesn’t make sense to publish it now and so I thought I’d announce my late arrival to the challenge instead.
I know it won’t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, awesome and wonderful. Therefore I’m promising to make use of The DailyPost, and the community of other bloggers with similar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can.
If I’ve managed to take a photo every day for the past eight months I’m sure I can write something every week, but like the photos I wouldn’t expect anything too amazing.
The Blog With No Name (Yet) 