I never did anything with crapparking.com, but some rather more resourceful people have created I Park Like An Idiot, which is just great.

(hat-tip to Cheesy Robman)

I know the Best Thing Ever Awards aren’t due for another 6 months or so, but frankly it’s going to take something pretty darned spectacular to be SlickEdit in the category of Best Linux Application Ever. Basically, it’s Visual Studio, but for Linux. For the last 8 months or so, I’ve been developing using a sort of cobbled together not-very-integrated environment consisting mainly of gvim (which is still wonderful, incidentally, just not for writing large C++ projects), gcc and gdb. This is a somewhat painful process for someone used to the Visual Studio F7-to-build, F5-to-debug, all in one development environment – and yes, I know you can use things like ctags and get gcc to output its errors to a buffer in gvim; I tried it, and it made me want to stick pins in my eyes. It just didn’t work.

Fortunately, it seems that the developers of SlickEdit felt the same way, and have basically copied Visual Studio and brought it across to Linux (and Solaris, Irix, MacOS, Windows and nearly every other OS in the world). It’s like scales falling from my eyes. I’ve got a classbrowser. I’ve got integrated debugging. I’ve got compile errors I can click on that take me to the appropriate place in the code. Tab completion. Code refactoring. The works. It’s wonderful. Unfortunately, it’s also $284 a seat, so I’ve got some persuading of the people who hold the purse strings to do, but hopefully the increased productivity (if today is anything to go by, anyway) should make it more than worth it. The fact I can do all my coding/compiling/debugging from within a single environment makes life so much easier and I’m not having to constantly make mental leaps between applications so my workflow is much smoother.

There’s a 15 day trial on the website if you fancy trying it out, too. I heartily recommend it.

“No-one does Champagne like the French”

Well, er, yes. There’d be a reason for that.

Dear Sir,

My name is Jack, the sales representative of SkyB Co.,Ltd.
I recommend the SDL DPSS 532nm green laser to you.
They are equipped with Temperature control,high reliability, high stability,
high efficiency, low noise and excellent laser beam quality.

Well, if I ever need a SDL DPSS 532nm green laser, I know exactly where to go now! How useful is that?

Fahrenheit is shaping up to be one of the most interesting games in a very long time. Quantic Dream’s first game, The Nomad Soul was a highly ambitious, intriguing and daring game – one which fell short of its targets in a number of areas, but one which deserves serious accolades in terms of what it tried to do, and which is well worth playing in spite of its shortfalls. Plus, it had Bowie on the soundtrack, which is always a good thing. Anyway, it looks like Fahrenheit is set to continue with the “ambitious” trend Quantic Dream started with The Nomand Soul; I only hope this time, their vision doesn’t outstrip what development budgets and hardware constraints cut slightly short in The Nomad Soul.

Loathe as I am to link to link to the Temple Of Videogame Lies, this struck me as mindbogglingly stupid.

Meaningless name. Just seeing/hearing the name tells you nothing about the game.

Unlike, say, Halo. Or WipEout. Or Metal Gear Solid. Or… Yeah, you can’t have a succesful game unless it’s called “Driving Simulator 17” or “Shooting People With Guns And Then Stealing Their Money And Using It To Pimp Your Car” or “Italian Plumber Princess Rescue Simulation”.

Oddball hero. Doesn’t the boy have horns? If so, this game has the same problem that the Oddworld games have, a quirky hero that’s hard to relate to.

Yeah. I mean, I really got into the role of a faceless, nameless space-marine from the future in Halo. Touched me deeply. I felt I could really relate to an upper-class Englishwoman with hyperinflated breasts and a prediliction for ancient treasure in Tomb Raider. I felt deeply emotionally affected when the little fat man with a big nose in dungarees and a red cap ate a mushroom and grew to twice his normal size.

Short game. Probably a victim of rental, and gamers just wanting more for their money

Because everybody loved the way Bungie added extra-long corridors and made you double back on yourself in Halo to artificially lengthen the game. And nobody bought Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, because that single player campaign was just too damned short!

Non-compelling subject. This may be the heaviest anchor. Ico seems to be a generic fantasy, save the girl story without anything buzz-worthy to sell it.

Gran Turismo 4 seems to be a generic racing game; just get to the finish line first, without anything buzz-worthy to sell it. Halo just seems to be a generic first person shooter; just kill all the aliens, without anything buzz-worthy to sell it. Tetris just seems to be a bunch of squares; get lines and they disappear – how boring does that sound?

Point is, you can make any game sound bland. Ico, on the surface, looks like a generic fantasy; fine, lots of games look generic. But, like all great games, it’s got far more depth than it first suggests.

Kid’s game. This ties into the previous point, but it also stands on its own. To Joe Gamer holding the Ico box in his hand, it looks like a game for kids. There is no obvious coolness to the concept.

See that? That’s the Ico box art. Look at all those big-eyed cartoon characters! Look at the zany bubbly writing! Look at the bright primary colours! Look at… Oh. What was your point again?

This article was written by the CEO of 3D Realms. This company has had a game – Duke Nukem Forever (strangely, they chose to avoid the name “Big Sweaty Bloke With A Cigar Shoots Aliens And Goes To Strip Joints”, instead plumping for something much more ambiguous) – in development for what must be getting on for a couple of millennia. Screenshots were being produced as our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was walking the earth, this game has been in production for that long. Dinosaurs remember the early magazine previews. Until they actually finish the damn thing and release it, I don’t think he’s actually in much of a position to criticise other people.

And anyway, if, after all this, DNF does turn out to be a commercial failure (and, let’s face it, history does not tell a pretty story – *cough*Daikatana*cough*), he’s going to have egg all over his big, stupid face. And I will laugh all the way back to my PS2 and I will play ICO all over again, because it is a sublime and wonderful gaming experience, and no clueless, mouthy American guy insisting that it was a really bad idea can change that.

Sunday morning, shortly after awakening, feeling slightly worse for wear.

“Naomi?”
“Yes?”
“Last night, at Shaun and Liz’s?”
“Yes?”
“Am I going mad, or was there a rabbit with black floppy ears hopping around in their flat?”
“Yes, there was a rabbit.”
“Oh, thank God for that. I thought I’d imagined it.”

Owing to busyness, I’m only about halfway through that accursed Potter book. I’ll be back once I’ve finished it.

So, cycling to the post office to post a card, I pass Woolworths selling Harry Potter for £8.99. So, that’s my weekend sorted now, then.

The Burninator is upset because the BBC didn’t use the word ‘terrorist’ in their news reports about the London bombings. Well, specifically, he’s annoyed because they used it at first, and then changed it afterwards. A few other people (including Burninator UK) have made similar comments.

Inevitably, you know what’s coming next. I don’t agree with them.

Now, look. I’m not going to say that I think these people aren’t terrorists. I’m not about to condone their actions. I don’t even think that I’d honestly be particularly bothered if the BBC had left the word “terrorist” in their reports. But that’s not the issue here.

The issue is one of unbiased reporting and use of inflammatory and loaded language. To call these people “Bombers” is accurate, and doesn’t represent any judgement about them on behalf of the BBC. To call them “terrorists” means that the BBC are stepping beyond impartiality, taking a position, making a judgement about these people, and that’s not what their job is. The old maxim that one man’s Terrorist is another man’s Freedom Fighter is very true, and it is not the new media’s place to make a judgement call on which is which.