Unreal Tournament 2003

I weakened. After two days off work with some dread lurgy, I was going completely stir crazy, so I wanted a new game to wile away the afternoon.

The most noticable difference from the original game and the demo is that some of the levels are VAST. Unfortunatly, this accentuates the bots' ability to aquire long-range targets far quicker than a human can.

And as for their movement... I have just seen a bot on a bombing run map throw the ball, switch to translocator, fire the translocator disc, and translocate just as the disc and ball intersect. This allowed it to cover ground about twice as fast as if it just ran. I wouldn't mind if I was playing on "sicko hard bastard" level (where I'd merely admire the programming skill of getting the bots to do that) but I was playing on "I'm not a complete wimp, but go easy on me, OK?" level. I expect the bots to be less than l33t with the movement skillz.

The other thing I've noticed, particularly on CTF and BR maps, is that once a bot gets on your tail with the Link Gun, you are dead. At a range of 2 yards, they do not miss. Period. There is absolutely no way to shake them, not even for a fraction of a second, nor to open up the gap between them and you. Their reaction is instant and perfect. Again, on high difficulty levels, I'd expect this, but not on level 3 out of 7.

Update:
Having just read what purported to be a "readme" for the forthcoming patch to the game, it mentions adding a "reaction time" parameter to the bots, as well as fixing "rotation rate to aquire targets". Sounds good :)

Just Seen: Richard III

[IMDB]
I was laid up at home feeling like death warmed over, so I curled up on the sofa with large quantities of comfort food and a DVD.

For those who don't know the plot (I didn't, really, before I watched it) our titular antihero murders his way to the English throne, then gets his just desserts. This interpretation is set in a mythical 1930s England, with Richard as a Hitler figure rising to power. Like most of Shakespeare's tragedies, practically everyone ends up dead, often messily.

Normally it takes me a while to do the mental gear-shift to follow Shakespearean dialogue, but here it just worked. I think this was mostly due to the exemplary work of Sir Ian McKellen in the title role, bringing more life to the part than I've seen in many productions of the bard's work. Several other members of the cast did their stuff, too, notably Annette Bening, Jim Broadbent and Maggie Smith. Though with a cast like that, I'd be more surprised if they weren't damn good.

I particularly liked the transition from the relatively benign World War 1 British imagery of King Edward's reign to the blatantly Nazi imagery of Richard's brief period on the throne. Yeah, it's not subtle, but as those who know me will verify, subtle doesn't work on me :)

[edit: this may also be of interest]

students vote for free stuff shock...

Well, it's not quite that simple. The Oxford Union reckons that free music downloads are not damaging to the music industry. Hear, hear.

Recordable CDs are eeeevil.

This was sighted on slashdot a few days ago, but it's starting to get wider coverage.

It's the tale of what happened when an independent musician tried to sell his own stuff on EBay. Who, of course, decided that since the recordings were on CD-R he was an evil music pirate who shouldn't be allowed to freeload on others' work.

web design

While hanging out in some online fora, I often get into debate with someone who thinks that web design is more about making the page look exactly how you want down to the last pixel than about making the page serve its intended purpose like, say, conveying information, or selling someone insurance*. As usual, someone else has written about parts of my attitude better than I can. He's not got everything, but that's part of my core argument.

*My day job intrudes...