I jumped on the Skype bandwagon by downloading it when everyone was (and, apparently, still is) and tried it for the first time yesterday when they offered their first free Skype day in which everyone could get £0.20 worth of credit, good for about ten minutes to any country in the world, for absolutely nothing. It certainly gained them a customer in me.

Not only is it a nice little IM client, Skype’s main claim to fame is as a VoIP program, allowing people to make free calls worldwide to other computers and calls to landlines worldwide for less than the local rate in most places. I wanted a way to call home from Japan at a reasonable price, as the alternatives aren’t that appealing:

• Airline phones at $7.80/minute
• Hotel phones at a ridiculous rate
• Payphones at about 10p/minute
• £200 on a quad-band phone and extortionate international roaming rates

With Skype I can save up my free credit which should give me about an hour of talk time, just call computers for nothing, or just pay £10 for around ten hours of time. It’ll certainly make calling back to the UK for work or play that much easier and cheaper.

I’m still playing with the program but my Skype name is, predictably, nekofever.

I have to admit that I’m very amused by the whole debacle surrounding the Hot Coffee mod for GTA San Andreas on the PC, and the sex minigame that it apparently enables. From what I can tell Rockstar had it in the game and then buried it for fear of being denied ratings, and an enterprising mod maker unlocked it in the PC version (that’s according to him on his website; Rockstar deny it). Personally I think putting out a GTA game with an AO rating would have been a great way to destroy the stigma attached to it as no retailer in their right mind would refuse to stock it, but there you go.

Anyway, what’s made me laugh is the fact that All-American moral crusaders the National Institute on Media and the Family have issued a National Parental Warning on San Andreas in light of this mod, stating that: “While San Andreas is already full of violent behavior and sexual themes, the pornographic sex scenes push it over the edge.”

Just to point out the sheer ridiculousness of this statement, in a game where you can commit the wanton slaughter of innocent pedestrians, kill police and steal their car, blow police helicopters out of the air, fly across the country to commit a massacre, engage in drug deals, etc, they think that having consensual sex at a legal age with a girlfriend is the thing that pushes it over the edge? The game is intended for over 17’s only and, although it may not be in America, it’s legal to have sex at that age in the free world. On the other hand it’s never legal to shoot random people in the face with automatic weapons.

If the parents are too fucking lazy to monitor their own kids’ entertainment it’s their problem, but GTA is adult entertainment and is marked as such. If you don’t want your kids to play it don’t buy it for them, which is presumably what you did.

How’s this for a profound lack of testing? Battlefield 2 comes out and (surprise!) it’s bug ridden and clearly unfinished. Amongst other things, it’s laggy, has a piss-poor server browser which occasionally loses all servers until you quit and restart the game, doesn’t show any names in the post-game stats, and the list goes on. As much as I like the game it’s insulting that EA thinks a game released in this state is worth £30, but all could be forgiven if the more pressing bugs were fixed quickly. When they released the v1.01 patch a few days later I was optimistic.

Not testing a retail game is one thing but not testing a patch is just idiotic. The patch fixed a handful of bugs, but for almost everyone pings went from mostly under 100 to ranging from 100 to 500, and it caused a memory leak on all servers that pretty much necessitated a restart every few hours. Call me naive, but if you’re testing it at all you’re going to notice that when you’re running a server internally. Either way, EA didn’t notice this and much anger ensued throughout the community.

What makes this debacle even more unbelieveable is that they can’t issue a fix right away because DICE have left for a holiday. It’s probably well earned with EA’s slave labour conditions, but you can’t ship a game that clearly has pressing bugs and then vanish. In the meantime they haven’t released a rollback utility or even a v1.02 patch, but want everyone to completely uninstall and reinstall the game.

Now the community is pretty much split down the middle between those who find the bugs in v1.o more bearable and those who prefer to suffer and skip the bother of reinstalling by playing with v1.01. There are around 1,000 BF2 servers showing up in ASE for me, but it’s almost a perfect 500-500 split between versions.

I fucking hate EA…

To alleviate my guilt about only talking about BF2 on the day that London exploded, everyone should read this. Dave McCarthy, a former writer for Edge magazine, was actually on one of the tube trains playing his GBA when it was blown up. It’s quite a surreal account where he was obviously shaken up but definitely worth a read to get some perspective from someone similar to us.