Midday Sunday Mullings

So here cometh the end of a long week, or the start of an even longer week, depending on how you view Sundays. Like I care...

Well I took Meg up for her usual walk and as ever, was amazed at the tourists who today had managed to park their cars ((on Dartmoor there are stops now and again, just small areas of land gravelled over for cars to rest on...some are concreted or tarmac covered)) and had then seated themselves on deck chairs, right in front of their cars STILL on the car park. The rest were queuing up for ice-cream at the Mr. Willi Ice-cream van, which must rake in a fortune driving around the moors during the Summer. Lazy foreigners.

Waiting on lunch so I thought I'd ramble a little about nothing important. Couple of things, first of which happened this week. Some may remember mention of microbeta.net on my blog and in my ARGH! section a few times in the past. Needless to say, boy I am glad to have cut all ties with this site a long time ago! The code kiddies have finally managed to prove me and a few others right, after the rivalry, immature girly infighting and sudden realisation of their utmost crappiness conglomerated in a huge implosion. This resulted in an attempted take over of the site...then it's deletion, followed by restoration of a laughably old back-up...which ultimately resulted in a real arse kicking for the administration team...and finally everything was wiped and the domain put up for sale to the highest ((and most drunkenly suicidal)) bidder. As a punch line to what many thought would be a joke without an end, one of the old administrators has bought the domain and pointed it to his own walking disaster, though at least we're spared having to see the content beyond the main page because there isn't any. Dumbass...

Several weeks ago I completed Doom 3. If you haven't played it yet and like FPS games then go buy it! Just don't read the rest of this paragraph. In fact, stop reading anything - GO BUY IT!!! Yeah so right towards the end the atmosphere in the game is building up to something big. You don't know what, obviously, however crawling through the tight passageways you are made to feel uneasy. I know I was on the edge of my seat waiting for something to jump out at me, trying to second guess what it would be and the best way of dealing with it. Well it's then that you see this little brick in the wall bearing the iD logo and you can't miss it, this hasn't been snuck in discreetly for the observant player to discover. Well pressing it unveils a room with a PDA inside which belongs to iD-Software. It's full of emails from the development team, saying thank you to the players and their families and all such. WHAT THE HELL?! Talk about ruining the game...and honestly, for me that killed off the game. It took me a couple of days to muster the enthusiasm to load it back up and continue. This is the worst part because if you had ignored that button, you'd have turned a corner and entered the final scene...the last big boss...but the game had lost it's atmosphere no thanks to the worst made decision ever to include such a cheesy reveal in at the game's most deeply engaging moment. What a disappointment.

If I were working at iD, I'd have put in a console monitor that as you walk past, flashes up the MicroBeta website...now THAT would send a shiver down the spine of the most battle hardened of men...