Sep

30

Roomania!

Filed Under Football | Leave a Comment

He’s only 18 years of age. He hasn’t played competitively in three months. He’s got the burden of living up to a 27 million pound price tag. He’s making his debut in front of 60,000 expectant fans.

So what does Wayne Rooney do? He produces the first hat-trick of his senior career as Manchester United thrash Fenerbahce 6-2 in a Champions League Group D match at Old Trafford. (Reports: BBC, Soccernet, Guardian, ManUtd.com.)

(We’ll ignore the Guardian reader who mischievously suggested the 18-year-old’s first hat-trick came at a Liverpool house of ill-repute.)

In the unlikely event you’re unimpressed by that achievement, I point you to David Meek’s assessment. Meek’s been covering Manchester United for 46 years and he says Rooney’s explosive debut was better than Beckham’s, Best’s, Law’s or Cantona’s.

The Old Trafford crowd were chanting “What a waste of money” with tongues firmly in cheeks but I’m fervently hoping Rooney doesn’t end up squandering his talent the way others did.

Sep

30

D&D meets the BSOD

Filed Under Games | Leave a Comment

CRPGs with a /. twist.

Sep

30

Who shot first?

Filed Under Comics | Leave a Comment

If life hands you a lemon, you make lemonade. Case in point: the trial of Han Solo. It’s the single best thing to result from that Greedo-shoots-first muck up.

(Link obtained from MeFi.)

(For a look at why that change was stupid, see the 10 other things Solo shot first.)

Sep

30

Bugged

Filed Under Games, WBC3 | Leave a Comment

Infinite Interactive, the developers of Warlords Battlecry 3, describe the design process of the game in a series of articles on IGN. (The articles are linked on Infinite Interactive’s site.) I got a kick out of Lead Designer Steve Fawkner’s anecdotes of oddball bug reports he’s received for past games. A sample:

If I unplug my network cable, monitor, mouse and keyboard while a multiplayer game is synchronizing, the game hangs.

Sep

29

The docs are in

Filed Under Games, WBC3 | Leave a Comment

What a difference a day makes.

I was bemoaning the lack of documentation in Warlords Battlecry 3 yesterday and I discover today my complaints were being addressed.

Infinite Interactive’s site is back up today and while there’s still a paucity of useful material right now, it’s a start.

I particularly liked the overviews of the races in the game. There are 16 playable races in total and casual gamers are unlikely to become familiar with each race’s strengths and weaknesses without these write-ups. There are only three races covered at the moment — Knights, Plaguelords and Dwarves — but it’s a start.

There’s also a map pack consisting of the four maps used for the IGN preview. Hopefully, more maps will be made available in the coming months.

In the pipeline are several utilities including a hero data extractor and a music editor. Neither sound exciting to me but intriguingly, the utility download page also promises “many other things that haven’t even come across your minds” will be released in the coming months.

It’s a shame Infinite Interactive didn’t bother to create a unified reference document with everything updated to reflect changes made in patches but one player has taken the initiative to do just that. The 103kb PDF file is a work in progress — it’s missing unit data right now — but again, it’s a start.

Next Page →