The Clan of the Cave Bague

This is an old comic strip but, as I refer people (for values of people usually equal to programmers) to it at least weekly, I reckoned it should be immortalised here. Oh – as well as being old, it’s also the Best Cartoon Ever(tm).

Well, here it is.

Ahem – anyway, multiple entries today. But not really in the order they were played. First off, a bit of “The Thing” on the PS2, which I used to own on the xbox and never got round to playing. It seems ok – some nice psychology things going on, but seems like a fairly basic squad based shooter.

Next up was a bit of World of Warcraft. Haven’t played for aaaages, but I reopened my subscription in blind panic cos, much though it annoys me, I don’t want Trollbert and friends to go away. Anyway, had a rampage through Arathi Basin (as you do). I think it might be worthwhile grinding my way to 48 because 47 vs 49 is just too much.

Then there was Smarty Pants on the Wii. My missus seems to develop a particularly vicious competitive streak with this type of game. If I use the provided mechanics to alter her questions, I’m “cheating” and when she does it “I deserve it”. Anyhoo, she defeated me fair and square, and thank god for that too – if I’d won I’d never have heard the end of it

Then there’s Hoshigami on the DS. It’s really nice – it’s still light compared to FFTA but it’s a lot of fun. Except I’ve just realised that characters who die are gone forever, so there’s a bit of thought involved in working out how to keep the end of a battle running long enough to give my res character enough time to bring back the fallen. Fun, though.

This was a bit of a surprise! I haven’t posted anything on it yet because I’m “only” six hours in and I’m still waiting for all the bad things the review sites moaned about to kick in. Which they haven’t. At all. Thing is, gamespot, eurogamer, all those guys, complained that Hoshigami is a bit rubbish due to being too hard. They then went on to rant about the game’s balance and all kinds of other things.

Personally, I suspect the game was reviewed by either a Final Fantasy Tactics fanboy, or someone who is just rubbish at this type of game. On discovering they’re completely crap at it, they’ve just repeated everything that was said about the PS1 original.

From my own perspecitve – it’s ACE! It’s obviously not as good as FF:TA, but then that’s a kind of high bar to set. But it’s a similar type of game and, in its own way, is just as compelling even though it doesn’t have quite the same scope.

What it does well, though, is give an indication of what FF:TA will be like when it eventually arrives for the DS.

In a recent report, the European Union commissioner for information society and media made a breathtakingly naive statement in support of DRM, mere days after consumer pressure has managed to convince the mainstream music publishers that applying arbitrary restrictions to users use of the music they’ve bought is a bad idea.

The last thing the anti-DRM movement needs is knee-jerk trendy European legislation attempting  to plaster a “one size fits all” DRM “solution” (more than likely Microsoft based) onto a system which is only now beginning to work.

Defective by Design have an open letter on their site and I’d recommend that anyone interested in avoiding having their digital music tied to a specific platform signs it.

An Open Letter to Viviane Reding.