Do not, under penalty of me beating you three ways from sunday even think of wasting and I mean wasting your money on this crap.
it doesn't understand resolution, apparently I decided that I could only display the screen at the lowest definition of the attached screens, even though it managed to identify the fact that I was plugged into multiple monitors (hint to developers - when multiple monitors are present, assume that they each are capable of independent resolution choices).
Then there's the audio... or lack thereof. Once the pre-rendered scenes complete, I hear nothing. Best guess is that it redirects audio to /dev/null, although it's most likely that it's going to one of the ~25 audio sinks of vista.
whine, pants, realistically, I have played a sum total of 5 seconds of this game, and I feel cheated.
Everyone talks about the calm before the storm. It's true that things seem hella quiet just before all hell breaks lose, but the reality is that once the storm is gone everything is quiet again. This is of course, excepting all the extensive property and personal damage that will have happened around you. After all, I mean the actual world.
I have had my own little storm, and have come out of it feeling quite calm. The storm was worth it to find out just quite what the calm was like in the first place.
It's all a bunch of abstract statements, but the end product is a happier Mr. Pete. And I can get more cake now. Yummy cake! I am obsessed!
Ok, who's bright idea was it to create the delete[] operator. I know that deep down, you may possibly, perhaps, in a million damned years, want a separate destructor for array as opposed to individual items, but bear in mind this isn't the damned slab allocator you're dealing with once that happens.
Oh, you say, but it knows that because this is an array of objects it will invoke the destructor for each object. So what, I have 4 bytes here that says you should not make me be concerned for that.
Once we've passed from the bounds of single-threaded, linear applications, it becomes difficult to maintain such fineries as reference counts and guarantees that we actually are damned certain that we're the last owner of an object.
Hey, C++, I'm looking at you passing references around like chocolate. Yes; I'm damned aware of all the ways that allow you to keep the reference alive - smart references and all that.
COM - i(f*king)unknown. Oh yeah, that works all right. And if you believe that, here's a memory manager I've got to sell you.
Messages. That's pretty much it. Everything goes through the message (including the object). That keeps things simple. If you need to pass something back it has the object as well.
Incidentally, this rant was brought to you by the letters A, K and Z and the number 14. After all, it's not prime.
Well, the mac doesn't get BSODs it gets a slightly differently colored grey screen of death. Thankfully I had saved before yanking out the plug for the external monitor. It greyscreened on me with the multi-lingual press the power button for a few seconds message on-screen.
I mean really guys, this is grade-A simple stuff, people should be expected to plug these things in and out on a regular basis so it shouldn't be a kernel panic level issue when something goes wrong in that case.
At least you get a 'graceful' video driver restart when things go horribly messy on that platform (unlike XP where you just have a brick).
Ok, I ponied up a wodge of cash for a ps3 and a few games (and paid the tax for a few movies too). I got Uncharted:Drake's Fortune and Assassins Creed (grammar note: this is a creed that covers all Assassins, so I think the apostrophe should come after the s).
Well, Uncharted is just fun. I'm still a newbie to controller based gaming, but over all, I am impressed. The puzzles and combat just seem to work well; mind you I'd be hard pressed to find that many mercs on any one island. You would need to pay them a hell of a lot of money to stay once they start getting killed with any degree of regularity. Reality aside, it just works as a game. The visuals are great and the game play is well paced and just combines to give us a good experience
Not so Assassins Creed. Booooring is probably the best expression for it. Boring in the same way that performing the same, repetitive missions time and time again gets really damned boring. You get to the city, save the person in distress and then sneak in in the company of a bunch of monks. That's the only way in. Then once you get in you have to perform a minimal set of a handful of styles of missions in order to get to the real mission.
You can go everywhere.... so bloody what, it doesn't help in the complete absence of variety in the missions.
The visuals are great... No, they're good, put a few more pixels on Outcast and it would probably beat Assassins Creed hands down.
For a company like Ubisoft who have produced an excellent run of 3D games in the Prince of Persia series (which got boring, but made up for it in the puzzles) I am stunned that they could produce such a band title. I'm left wondering if they were just scared to produce something that had a bit of excitement in it due to the fact that they set it in a contentious time period (which even then is a huge cop-out, god how I have another rant stored about that).
Oh for another Beyond Good And Evil, Damn, that game is a milestone that needs to be shown to people as an example of how to make a game that reaches out to the player.
I'm just wondering when Apple will be shipping the SDK for the ipod touch/iphone. Just being nosey really. I've veered away from jailbreaking it simply because I don't want to end up with an expensive brick next firmware update.
They say February, but of course remembering that the Leopard launch being the end of the month it could be anywhere up to the 29th.
Another thing I'd like to see is the UI guidelines. I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to reading design guidelines, simply because there are a lot of good points in them. Mind yo, you should not be slavishly obeying them, as, after all, they are only guidelines, and not commandments.
On guidelines, I'm get miffed with applications that require the use of the mouse to accomplish things. Vista's keyboard usable everywhere is a charm to use, even while it's gobbling up all those cpu and disk resources with the indexer.
I've heard of large asset caches, but two fricking DVDs worth of game? that's just ridiculous. I had to do some serious housekeeping on the machine to get that amount of space back. I really need to do something about my serious lack of space on the box at the moment.
Internets help me!
I was booking the flight to visit my sister in the UK in the next few weeks when I encountered some of the fun changes to the way this airline works. Every check-in bag must be paid for, which I vaguely remember some stuff on a consumer affairs program on the radio over the last few weeks. I need to fly into Heathrow as it's the easiest airport to deal with for visiting the sister, so I'm pretty much stuck with the fungus. I did check out bmi, but they're a euro more expensive when tax is included. I should have booked earlier :)