The first feature to be ported from the old version of NekoFever.com has been completed. It’s the full story of how I came up with this web handle that no-one except me seems to get the reference to. I guess nobody’s quite l33t enough for me.
Visit to Southampton Echo
I had a visit today to the Southern Daily Echo as part of my course today, and I have to say I was very impressed with it. It’s not the dingy little office that you imagine for a provincial paper.
In amongst a cluster of industrial estates, it occupies its own compound complete with two of what look externally like warehouses – one is a printing facility and the other is the actual Echo office. We couldn’t go into the printing area because the insurance company didn’t like the possibility of forced amputations, but the office itself was a combination of plush management offices (seriously, they were like the ones you see in movies – all floor-to-ceiling windows, mahogany, and leather recliners) and an absolutely cavernous open-plan newsroom that could easily contain a few hundred people with their own terminals. It even has its own archive library.
It hasn’t made me any more inclined to work on a newspaper, but it’s certainly improved my perception of them. I can’t imagine what the facilities of a bigger national newspaper are like.
Panasonic DMC-FX2 Impressions
I’ve had a few days to play around with my new camera, the Panasonic DMC-FX2, and overall I’m very impressed. The first thing I should say is that I’m not hugely knowledgeable about the technical side of photography, despite that fact that my father is a photographer who thought digital photography was a form of blasphemy until a while ago. Therefore these impressions are from the perspective of someone who wants to pretty much point the camera at something and take a picture. I can handle tweaking ISO settings and choosing which flash I want to use, but that’s as far as I’m going.
When I was shopping for a camera my specifications were simple. First of all it had to take nice shots – I’m not technical with them but I know a good photograph when I see one, and it had to take nice shots, or at least ones that would need minimal tweaking to look good. The second was that it had to be small since the main purpose of buying it was to take it to Japan and the last thing I want to do is cart some great beast around with me just so I can take some snaps to send home.
I knew that the DMC-FX2 fit the bill, having played around with the 5-megapixel DMC-FX7. It was certainly very small and the image quality is about as good as you can get from an ultra compact without spending vast amounts of money – I only spent just over £200 on the camera and a 1GB SD card to go with it. The picture gets slightly grainy in low ambient light when it sets itself to ISO 400, but that’s inevitable in a camera where you can’t tweak some of the more advanced settings. In good light or within flash range pictures are detailed and give natural colours, and when I tested the macro mode I was amazed with the amount of detail that it captured.
Reviews of the camera have generally been positive and I can appreciate why. If you just want something to drop in your pocket and take some nice pictures with you can’t go wrong with this or its bigger and more-expensive brother, the DMC-FX7. Just make sure to get a bigger card than the included 16MB one: they might as well not have bothered with that.
Resume and Court
Just in case you happen to be an editor from a prestigious magazine who wants to pay me lots of money, you can now find my resume in the About section of the site.
I had my second visit of my course to the Crown Court today and apart from being more interesting than last time it only reaffirmed my conviction never to work on a provincial newspaper (tomorrow I have a visit to the local newspaper, so we’ll see what I think about it then). I’ve spent about six hours total in court and I’ve yet to see a verdict delivered, and they never seem to get anything done. The entire thing just seems grossly inefficient; a place for ostentatious people with cauliflowers on their heads to go and argue semantics. I thought the justice system was supposed to be accessible to the normal person?
When Did Games Magazines Stop Being Fun?
The advent of the Internet as a viable form for the gaming media to exist in has been the biggest shake-up of our section of the industry since Pong, with the main source of information to the consumer changing from being static monthly magazines to the dynamic and interactive (not to mention mostly free) Internet. What I want to know is whether or not this quantum shift is what’s responsible for the metamorphosis of most magazines from fun reading into stoic Edge clones.
Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t bashing Edge. They’re one of the few publications that I trust with where my £40 goes and they do a great job of filling their little niche. In fact, they’re now the only games magazine that I buy on a regular basis (in addition to my subscriptions to IGN Insider and GameSpot Complete). My complaint is that it seems like every magazine is trying to be them.
Rewind ten years or so: I was buying Super Play, Nintendo Magazine System, and Gamesmaster every month and looking forward to what would become N64 Magazine. None of them had any illusions that games were high art and they’d make jokes and interact with the fan base, as well as have features that I still enjoy going back and reading today – pragmatic features on import gaming or creating a fanzine and tongue-in-cheek ones about things like gaming recipies or a gamer’s first visit to Japan. I still have my magazines on my bottom shelf and I can still kill a couple of hours by digging out a favourite issue and having a quick read.
Now the Official PS2 Magazine is a £5.99 advertorial, Official Nintendo Magazine has been shit since it changed from the NMS format, gamesTM is one of the most blatant Edge clones around (they’ve even manipulated scores based on Edge’s), and even the surviving magazines aimed at a younger audience like Gamesmaster have tried to realign themselves with teenagers. Edge are the only ones who consistenly write with conviction and intelligence.
Maybe it’s the fact that as many gamers are adults as are kids today, and it makes sense to cater your magazine to the ones with the disposible income, but something doesn’t have to stop being entertaining to be grown up. We need a well-written magazine for grown-ups that’s less Newsnight, more Have I Got News For You.
If It’s In The Game, It Was In Last Year’s Game
EA have, in my opinion, been a threat to the games industry for a long time. They’ve been known for their endless rehashes, sequels, and expansions for years but recently things like the EA Spouse and the purchase of the NFL and ESPN licences have only compounded the animosity that some areas of the gaming community have felt for EA. Even as real competition in the form of Ubi Soft has emerged, EA have constantly been attempting a hostile takeover, neutralising the threat to their growing monopoly.
I make no secret of the fact that I detest EA, and will now actively avoid their games at every turn. The ones that I’ve bought have been buggy (Battlefield 1942 still has bugs from launch after over 1GB of patches) and obviously rushed to deadline, and they’ll squeeze every last penny out of every franchise they have by pumping out cynical cash-ins on the brand names. I won’t even pirate their stuff because I don’t want to pollute my hardware with it. The kind of homogenisation that they practice and their gradual monopolisation is going to be nothing but bad for the industry and could destroy its chances of being taken seriously as an art form.
What really pushed me over the edge to write this was a story today on Happy Puppy that we may be looking at $70 EA games in the next generation of consoles. For the people who celebrated the fact that Madden would be the only NFL game after Sega’s ESPN series made serious inroads into the market, this will be your reward. ESPN sold for $30 but without that competition EA has no reason to compete on price. Madden is usually an early system seller so the manufacturers need it on their launch calendar, and people are going to have to pay it because there’s no other choice. It might only be speculation at this point, but I’ll bet that their stuff won’t be $50 anymore.
I have a feeling that this won’t be my last rant on EA for the forseeable future. Just wait for what delights E3 will bring from them…