New Site Stuff

Well, its been a busy week really, although it doesn't particularly feel like I've actually DONE much. Let's see:

1) My top priority this week has been helping Spence redesign the Super Dojo. And by "helping him" I mean I'll code it and design it and he'll tell me if it is good or bad: which is actually my preferred way of working before anyone sees this as a complaint. He told me he wanted something simpler that would work on more browsers with better compatability, so that is what I'm working on.

The layout and menu designs are in place. I'm now going back through the rest of the pages from the Dojo v.4 and recoding them for the new site. Some of the code from some of these pages is almost 6 years old and is, to put it mildly, a bit obsolete in places. In fact, Dreamweaver struggled to read some of it :D

Look out for Dan's Super Dojo v.5 soon. Until then, enjoy the web's Number One Dan Hibiki site at Dan's Super Dojo.



2) Also this week I was able to get my hands on the Prey demo. As a long-time reader of pc.ign.com I'd caught snippets of their Prey coverage and they were obviously a bit excited about it. When I heard it was based on the Doom 3 engine I had mixed feelings: I never completed Doom 3 because it hurt my eyes far too much to play. Everything was too dark and shadowed and my eyes being very sensitive, it was just too much for me to deal with. Fortunately I learned that Prey wasn't going to be so visually dark, so I downloaded the demo to see what all the fuss was all about.

Normally when I play a demo I'll install it on my PC first. It has a £350 Geforce FX6800GT graphics card in it (top of the line 12-18 months ago) and tends to play most things REALLY nicely. However, because I spend more time on the move at the moment, I actually installed it on my laptop first, in much the same way I did with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (which ran badly) and Tomb Raider: Legend (which ran really nicely 95% of the time). And I have to say, it looked pretty damned sweet. I mean, my laptop has pretty decent specs for a laptop (3.2ghz P4 processor, 256meg X600 ATI Mobility gfx card, 1GIG RAM) but I wasn't expecting it to look as nice as it did. I was really impressed. It was much lighter than Doom 3, and controlled really smoothly. I completed the demo in probably an hour of play, just exploring and destroying things with abandon. The game has some really nifty features such as Spirit Walking that allows you to temporarily leave your body so that you can pass forcefields and other obstacles that you simply couldn't do in corporeal form. Its not a new idea, but its certainly new in terms of ingame implementation.

Also new for games is the much-lauded "portal technology" which is quite tricky to explain. Its kind of like the old magic gateway idea that you can see through only from one side. So there are portals to different places, and you can see through into them, and then step into them seemlessly. Its a really nice effect. At one point you walk into a room and there's a pedestal in the middle of it with a weird rocky globe suspended somehow on top of it inside a glass case. There's also a portal in the room. Jumping through, it takes you half a second to realise that not only have you been transported into the globe, but you are now miniaturised too. I found it rather amusing until I got killed trying to find my way out =D

After completing the demo on the laptop, I also installed it on my PC. I cranked EVERYTHING available up in the options menu, and the game ran without a hitch on full settings at 1024x768. Nifty!! I'll definitely be buying it when it comes out on the 14th July.



3) Nintendo DS Lite and New Super Mario Bros.

While I didn't intend for this to become a games review page, thats what I've been doing most of this week. I traded in my old Nintendo DS for the newer model recently, and was instantly impressed with the clearer screen, smoother design, and better feel to the buttons. The week after its release I picked up New Super Mario Bros, the latest 2D platformer featuring Mario Mario and Luigi Mario (yes, those ARE their real names!). And I have to say, its pretty damned awesome.

I completed my first run through of the game in about 3 days of playing on and off. That might sound bad, but it isn't really. I zipped through it for a couple of reasons: firstly, when you've beaten the game, you can still go back and explore, but the real benefit is that you can now save anywhere and at anytime, whereas before you could only save after a waypoint - usually one of the mini-forts or the Koopa Castles.

My journeys through Worlds 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 8 were pretty easy going, though they definitely ramped up in difficulty and length towards the end. What happened to 4 and 7? Well, 4 and 7 are only unlocked by beating the bosses at the end of worlds 2 and 5 in a certain way. I only managed to beat the World 2 boss in the correct way yesterday, so I haven't played much of World 4 yet.

Anyways, its really good. I'm really enjoying playing through it. I've always loved 2D platformers, and this is a great example of how to do one right!

~That's all for now~
~Dema