- Yesterday's server crash was an internal problem with one of the components we use. It actually fixed itself while I was asleep. (Either that or I sleep-fixed it and went back to bed and don't remember).
- I've spent much of the day playing Assassin's Creed, generously lent to me by a friend. I'm enjoying it enough to continue playing, but I can see how people have been able to criticize it - my main problem being that the logic behind when enemies will or will not attack you seems frequently arbitrary. It's entirely possible that the logic is very clever, using witness accounts or something, but no effective information is conveyed about what's going on so all I get is a sudden "He's an assassin! Get him!" when I thought I was safe. Filling the countryside with guards that I have to ride past slowly to avoid alerting is really annoying, too. Still, I've just reached Acre and will plough onwards.
- On a related note, I've been playing a bit of Worms on Xbox Live Arcade - it's a decent port, though I could swear they've screwed with the worm-worm collision physics, and it's missing my favourite baseball bat [sad]. Still, it's Worms, so hurrah! I discovered to my dismay that the 1 month free trial of Xbox Live Gold that comes with my Elite 360 only applies to newly created accounts and not the one that I created some time ago, so I've created a temporary account for use over the next month and am looking into buying a card from a game store because they don't take debit cards, the bastards.
I said that this was related. Yes. The AI in worms - it's totally un-fun. Every move seems to be a choice between "perfectly targetted bazooka shot" and "completely inexplicably dumbfuckery," with the 'difficulty' of the AI determining the proportion of the two move types. There are many better things that could be done, including - as with AC - better conveyance of why the AI does what it does. Textual taunts from the computer would be a great start: "Albert: Try a bazooka up the bottom, Bonemant!" really shouldn't take much to implement and would go a long way towards muting the 'wtf' factor of the dumbfuckery shots. - I've also been playing quite a bit of EXIT. Situations 1 through 3 are all finished with perfect scores; I believe I'm working on getting situation 4 to a perfect score before continuing. It's a very smart little game, artistically interesting, and though it has a few control issues (would probably be much more suited to the Wii) I'm still going to be happy to keep on going for quite a long time with it.
- I've finally gotten my university course into some degree of organisation. I'm doing four modules this term, which makes it my busiest one to date, but two of them appear to be covering largely the same material which will help immensely. I've got all the lectures, classes, practicals and work items set up in Windows Calendar now, so I should end up taking much better advantage of the resources the University is providing for me.
I think that's all for now...
Bastards.