I did something I haven’t done for years recently: I bought Official PlayStation Magazine UK for the demo disk. No particular reason except now having a job I’m not so worried about the price of a magazine…

I was glad I did. It has two demos of games that look really cool (and they’re already out).

The first is Fahrenheit (although it was renamed before the launch - search GameSpot for Fahrenheit and it comes up). You control a guy who has just done a murder and you have to (basically) escape from the police. But it is so much more than that. Firstly, the genre is closest to point-and-click adventure à la Broken Sword, except it’s in 3D - you just move near objects and push the right analog stick in different directions to do different context-sensitive actions. Another point is the emphasis on story - you get to see things that are happening elsewhere that you wouldn’t normally know about (like the cop approaching the door of the men’s room where you committed the murder) if it is good for drama. Finally you get to control most of the important characters throughout the game (although not in the demo).

The second one is Shadow of the Colossus, a third person action adventure. All you have to do is go through the game killing these huge Colossi (they look like something out of Lord of the Rings - large walking bear type things. I mean large - they start out about the size of a house and get bigger). And that is literally all you have to do. No piddly bad guys in between, just the Colossi. The game gets away with this apparent simplicity with two (related) features: Firstly how you kill them is not that obvious. It generally involves climbing up them somehow and stabbing them but there’s usually more to it. Secondly the platform aspect of the game is amazing. The most important part is the “grip” feature. Basically you can hang on things (think Prince of Persia) and while hanging you can jump around and hang on other things. This is how you climb the Colossi. The physics engine for this is close to perfect. As the things move around trying to swipe at you your character swings around, ends up hanging with just one arm (so you have to wait for him to get his bearings and grab with both - all the while you’re grip strength lessens) and all sorts of cinematic type sequences occur. On the demo I managed to get all the way up to its head, got throw off and ended up hanging off its nose…

So go out and by them… I think I will.

Just as an update, the interview I had before had an odd outcome. It was a success but they didn’t have a position for me. In the meantime I got another interview with somewhere else.

Within three hours of the end of the interview I got an email offering me the job :D

It gets better: the following morning (less than 24 hours later) the original place call me and offer me that job too :D I took the second one.

Sorry to seem obsessed :P

My opinion of learning a language with the Michel Thomas CDs has improved - as well as the “Complete Course” 8 hour sets you can get the “Advanced Course”, an additional 5 hours designed for people who have done the first 8. Although I think he only does it for French and German…

13 hours of material. Considering the density this begins to rival Pimsleur’s 50 hours (only available for Spanish and German).

He also seems to have lead an amazing life, albeit slightly less amazing than he claimed. But still. Go read about him on Wikipedia.

Version 1.0 Gold of Galactic Horde went live today. Top new feature would be the Universal War. I think it’s top because I helped write it :)

Although I think Universal War is a bit of a strange name - makes it sound like a war that is compatible with everyone or something…

I picked up Michel Thomas’s 8 hour German course from the library today. And it’s cool. It might even be better than Pimsleur. The learning idea is basically the same as Pimsleur with no writing and no memorizing but the format of the audio itself is different.

Firstly in Pimsleur I’m guessing they use voice actors reading out a script for both the English and foreign speech. In this Michel himself talks. Also this is not scripted word for word at all. I’m assuming he has notes of some sort to keep him on track and there may be judicious editing that we don’t hear, but basically everything is presented as is.

This is an important factor considering exactly how the lessons are presented - as a private lesson with Michel and two students new to the language. The benefits of this are you hear the sorts of mistakes people make (ranging from slight pronunciation problems to missing out a word to saying something completely different or nonsensical). It also makes it quite funny since (in the German at least) one student is clearly doing better than the other).

It loses out in ease of use though. Pimsleur comes with built in pauses, with Michel you have to pause it yourself. It does mean though that 8 hours of Michel is denser than 8 hours of Pimsleur.

One final not is he has a slightly unorthodox order of teaching but one that makes sense in some ways. For example the (almost) first thing he teaches is “Do you want…” (“Wollen Sie”) which is normally left until quite far along because of the complication of modal verbs and their effect on word order. There are at least two advantages to this: first it gets the students used to the whole verb-at-the-end-of-a-sentence idea and secondly he focuses on words that are similar in English and German, and most modal verbs are (muss - must; kann - can).

Overall it’s cheaper than Pimsleur, £70 in bookshops. Another glaring advantage is that I have actually seen it in bookshops, even W. H. Smiths. My usually suggestion applies hear though, get it from a library. Most libraries will order books from other libraries for a nominal fee (my local library charges £2.50 but they had it in themselves anyway).

The final drawback is it is only available in four languages: German, Spanish, Italian and French. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if versions starting from something other than English are available (French -> Spanish for instance).

Oooh, Feedburner have put my new Item Age feed flare unit thingy on their 101 Flare Ideas for a Better Tomorrow page (#10).

It lets you display the age of an item in a Feedburner feed in a nice human format (17 minutes old, 4 days old) etc. It’s really dead simple but I figured Feed Flare might be useful and it was good idea to practice before writing something really cool.

You can see it in action in my feed.

Ooh, I checked another site of mine and suddenly noticed it had a PR of 4, instead of none.

For a long time my earnings with Google AdSense were very erratic - now they seem to have settled down. In fact for the past week I’ve gotten the equivalent of almost exactly $0.01 per impression. Now all I need is more traffic :)

P.S. Google spellchecker corrected “Adsense” to “AdSense”…

According to Reuter’s “Oddly Enough” Iranians have renamed Danish Pastries when sold locally. They will now be called Roses of the Prophet Mohammad.

Can anyone say freedom fries?

Apparently Iran is holding a competition to find the “best” cartoon depiction of the holocaust as a test of Western principles and ideas of freedom of speech.

Firstly I’ll make my stance on freedom of speech clear. With rights comes responsibility. Although I think that people should be allowed freedom of expression and that people should be allowed to draw cartoons of what they like, that doesn’t mean that I think it’s necessarily a good idea to. A lot of unpleasant situations in the past have arose because of freedom of speech ideals.

On the other hand killing people for saying something you don’t like could rarely, if ever, be justified.

If Iran (or whatever newspaper or person came up with the idea) goes through with their plan, the outcome will be fairly obvious. There will be condemnation of the cartoon(s), people will say it’s an insult to the millions that died as well as those who lived through it. Despite all that I’m fairly sure you won’t see Iranian embassies burnt down nor death threats against the cartoonist or publisher.

Whatever argument there might have been that the cartoons were wrong has been completely overshadowed and rendered insignificant compared to the response. As I was told when I was at school: “If you have to shout, you’ve probably already lost the argument.”