I’ve mentioned to people before, Adobe is at a critical point here. They can choose to sit on their arses and ignore HTML5, which will steamroll Flash when it does come into play. Or they can choose to do something better with it. Adobe’s strategic advantage will be that they have control over the progress of the Flash platform, and they need to use that to quickly make itself relevant in a HTML5 world.

In the meantime, HTML5 is certain to replace everything else Flash is known for. Video, minimal animations and transitions for websites through CSS3 and Javascript, offline storage and rich applications. Flash needs to find a new niche to remain relevant (not surprisingly it will probably need to solidify its position as a browser gaming juggernaut) and they should be able to do that quickly without the need of a new web standard taking years to ratify, and browsers to uptake. They may even manage to do this without HTML5 gaining significant market share.

Pro-Flash campers need to see this as progress in web technologies and use the right tool for the job, not stick to their hammers for screws.

Anti-Flash campers need to see that Flash can still be a crucial technology on the web, and stop trying to mold HTML5 into something so complex that even it itself becomes a crutch on the internet, in the fool’s hope of crippling Flash with a “Anything you can do, I can do better” charade. K.I.S.S.

In essense, stop this senseless Flash hate. Killing Flash will not get rid of ads, or popup videos, or get rid of browser vulnerabilities. Yes Flash Player is shit on non-Windows systems. Yes it has vulnerabilities. But those can be fixed. Focus your energies on getting Adobe to fix shit, not on Flash.

Anyway If you’re reading this, Adobe, the ball’s in your court at the moment. Show me what you can do.

Well, there IS a way, although it is rather hacky. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t do the trick!

Lets say you have an inline element with the following styles

However, you suddenly realise that in order to apply a width to an element it has to be a block element. So, instead of changing your stylesheet and refreshing the page, type:

Press Enter, and the additional style gets added!

Quite simple, but annoying if you didn’t know about it. Hope this helps anyone out there using Chrome for their development.

Perhaps what I saw this weekend was the result of a extremely tumultuous year for everyone. Companies simply don’t have the confidence to slap down thousands of dollars at events anymore. Not events with such a low street-cred level anyway. All we have left is the hope for a better eGames Expo next year.

Read on for Images!

Unfortunately, my worst fears were proven accurate. There was absolutely nothing new to see on the 2nd day of the event. This meant that I had crawled through the eGames Expo (excluding the Digital Lifestyle and Careers events) in less than 4 hours.

What did I do on the 2nd day? I decided to get hands on with some of the lesser known games being displayed.

FairyTale Fights

Fairytale Fights is your typical top-down hack and slasher ala Lego Starwars. You play as a cutesy inhabitant of a fairytale land, but while the characters may look cutesy, the combat certainly isn’t. It doesn’t take very long for the screen to be filled with blood-red … blood splattered across the soil. Certain fatality attacks also result in a close up of the death dealt to the poor (and maniacal) creatures that charge at you like lemmings seeking an early judgement.

Gameplay, however, is quite disappointing. Don’t seek anything more than a button-mashing experience. While the game is quite amusing to watch for a short while, the novelty of it quickly grows old, and the rest of the game feels more like a WoW grind. And since the game isn’t very 13+ friendly, it wouldn’t be very suitable for your kids either.

Conclusion: Bargain bin. Its only redeeming feature might be the inclusion of cooperative multiplayer, which allows for “innocent” friendly-attacks, perfect for ongoing rivalries. Though, you may as well go back to Super Smash Brothers for something more substantial.

That’s all I can write about tonight. My internet connection decided to throw a tantrum, and its 3am in the morning. I doubt I will have more to write after tomorrow, so expect pictures from the event instead!

Ubisoft – Various

Ubisoft took center stage with a 360 degrees exhibit right in the middle of the building, with only the Microsoft Xbox360 caravan taking up the rest of the attention (whatever little attention there could possibly be on a Friday). With the exception of the new Splinter Cell, I got a bit of hands on with upcoming games Avatar and Assassin’s Creed 2.

Avatar

Ubisoft had two different setups for people to try; a normal setup with an Xbox360, and a more private setup with an Xbox360, and a pile of 3D Glasses! There’s no question which kiosk I had to try out.

The immediate impression I had when playing the game was “Wow. It sure is pretty”. If there’s any reason why you should get this game, its definitely the graphics. Vivid vibrant colours, combined with gorgeously designed monsters were only made more enthralling when they jumped right at me through the screen. I wouldn’t be surprised if “4D gaming” becomes more popular as the technology advances in the future. Just keep a bucket handy, for people prone to motion sickness; after 10 minutes I began to feel lightheaded and put down the controller.

Put aside the pretty graphics, however, and I couldn’t help finding it all but familiar. In fact, I couldn’t help but draw similarities between Avatar and Lost Planet 2:

• 3rd person view? Check.
• Squad based action? Check.
• Huge mechas? Check.
• Even bigger indigenous monsters? Check.
• Control Points? Check.
• Gungho marines type characters? Check.

I feel that Lost Planet had a much more interesting game. Its “Shadow of the Colossus” level encounters were much more interesting compared to what was essentially a “point, shoot, reload” game in Avatar. There was nearly no need for any of the “skills” available (such as the call airstrike skill), since I could accomplish the same thing with just a rifle. Of course, there could be alot more of Avatar that I have not seen.

Conclusion: Its pretty. But its going to be as revolutionary to gaming as Avatar is to Movies. No harm picking this up for a quick playthrough, but I wouldn’t hold your breath for anything Bioshock epic.

Assassin’s Creed 2

Before I go on, I must stress that the build Ubisoft are displaying at the eGames Expo is apparently the same as the build at TGS 2009, so there isn’t much more I can add to that. I do regret playing it, however. Experiencing numerous bugs and issues put a dent in my enthusiasm for the game, but I’ll try to keep that in mind as I write about it below (while trying to ignore the times Ezio fell through the floor, or crashed the demo)

The thing that I was most concerned about was the combat system; the first Assassin’s Creed suffered from an incredibly simple combat system that resulted in what was basically a “wait, counter, kill” routine. Assassin’s Creed 2 tries to remedy this by introducing a few new features such as Multiple Weapons (from swords and hidden blades to halberds) and multiple enemy types (light, and heavy guards). You also have the ability to disarm opponents, or grab them for physical attacks (to their weak points for massive damage). I quickly developed a modus operandi, involving me grabbing rooftop archers, directing them to the nearest ledge and throwing them off.

Unfortunately, other than the points above, the combat still suffers from the same problem its predecessor had. Most of the time was spent countering opponents attacks for a quick kill, while for the Heavy Guards I could simply sheathe my weapon (with the “realtime weapon change” feature)  to get the option to disarm your opponent. A guard fully clad in armour is still defenseless without a weapon, which makes for an easy kill, although sometimes it was also possible to perform a fatal counter attack accompanied by the extremely gratifying kill sequence.

Conclusion: since the build was too buggy to really judge on, I’ll have to hold out for more opportunities to try the game. I’ll probably still get it when the time comes, though.

Microsoft – Forza Motorsport 2

Microsoft decided to set up multiple kiosks all demoing Forza Motorsport 2. I spent a good deal of time trying to beat the daily record (1:45 on Laguna Seca) before ultimately giving up, but that gave me a lot of time to get some impressions on the game. Unfortunately, Gran Turismo 5 did not make an appearance, and the closest I have to it is Gran Turismo 5 for the PSP, so without a real reference any proper comparisons will simply have to wait. That, and it made me feel like a really inferior driver.

2K Games – Borderlands

The booth had a sign, warning people of violence within its confines. Inside were a couple of kiosks dedicated to Borderlands, while there was a single kiosk for NBA2k10 (which I appropriately ignored).

At this point, the only little information I had heard about Borderlands was:

• a mash of FPS and RPG.
• apparently, a censored version (ala Left 4 Dead) was distributed to Australian Gamers by accident.

The game felt alot more like an RPG compared to a first person shooter. Or, to put it bluntly, Borderlands is what Hellgate:London would have been if it had been set in a post-apocalyptic desert, rather than a post-apocalyptic London (and, actually finished). A bullet hit results in a small number indicating the amount of damage you’d done, while a little damage indicator appears over whatever is within your cross hairs.

In the end, it didn’t feel like my type of game, and as a result I didn’t spend very long with it.

Closing

A few games were sadly missed today. Considering that the eGames Expo is being billed as the “Biggest Video Games Expo in Australia”, it is an extremely good indication of the state of the gaming industry in Australia. In fact, if you disregard the numerous education institutions setting up camp at the expo, there was only 1 (that’s right, ONE) Australia based games-house (Imperial League’s Primary Clarity) that I could find. De Blob’s Blue Tongue was not present, and neither was last year’s participant Infinite Interactive (who make the Puzzle Quest series).

Sadly, other blockbuster publishers did not set up exhibits, despite their participation in 2008. There were no Activision booths (absolutely dumbfounded, especially considering the local launch of DJ Hero). EA also did not make an appearance, apparently seeing no additional need to promote Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Another staggeringly bad decision was from Sony; from a 8 kiosk exhibit in 2008 to quite literally not being there at all, allowing the Xbox360 to attract all the limelight.

Here’s hoping I see them on the weekend.

That is all for me. More when I get back from Day 2!

1. Real Fiction

One of the things I liked best about the movie is that it is truly believable. For nearly 2 hours the audience is held in a state of suspended disbelief, and I never felt like I was watching just “another science fiction flick”. You don’t see Humans treating the aliens like gods, nor are these aliens a benevolent all-knowing species. Instead you see humans abuse and mistreat their wards, while the aliens scavenge and steal whatever they can get. The main protagonist isn’t a hero of some sort, and it is easy to relate to him emotionally. In the end, you truly feel that the events you see in the movie could very well be reality, if aliens do arrive on Earth.

2. It’s not perfect

The plot suffers a little at some points, though these are just some minor pickings. There is not much explanation from the aliens’ point of view; where did they come from, why did they arrive on Earth and so on. Early in the story it appears that the aliens were unable to depart from Earth, due to some unfortunate incident (for example, the loss of a command module which turned out to be a small flying craft instead). However, at the conclusion of the film, an alien manages to pilot the Mothership out of the planet without much trouble. I cannot find any possible explanation for this, and as such, this seems to be a gaping plot hole. Furthermore, there is not much explanation about how the humans and aliens are able to communicate at all, though that seems to be one of those things which would be too troublesome to explain.

3. It’s pretty graphic

The film is definitely not one for the kids. Dismembered body parts, mutilated corpses, and exploding bodies feature prominently throughout the movie.

4. It’s pretty too

District 9 has very nice special effects too. While on a meager budget of $30 million, a major proportion of it seems to have gone into the special effects department. However, the effects never seem over the top and you aren’t bombarded with pretty lights at every turn. Exploding body parts are always enjoying to watch, and the weapons feel alien yet realistic at the same time.

5. Don’t make a sequel.

I do not have high hopes for a sequel. For such a story, where much of the background plot is left to the viewer’s imagination, a sequel leads to a temptation to explain away gaping plot holes left by the first film. Furthermore, it is hard to present the same message from the same source material without the whole thing feeling like its all happened before. The documentary style story-telling would not work again, for sure. For District 9, the best ending is the one invented by ourselves.

Did you like the movie, or do you think it was pretentious? Would you like to see a sequel, and what do you think will happen in it? What do you think about the plot holes? Are they left by Neil for us to fill in the blanks, or are they just oversights in the writing department?

All your comments are welcome!

Update: dear reader Dim suggested I put the trailer in this post. Here it is!

While starting off as rather innocent, the advertising gradually became more and more risque, and people started taking notice (mostly by laughing) the ridiculous attempts to attract their main target market to play their game. Mainly by sticking a woman on the image, showing a bit of flesh, and adding a few “insinuating” taglines. Just see for yourself how hilarious these ads have evolved.

Ad Images were taken from Coding Horror.

Whoa! Admittedly, they are trying to promote their product by causing a stir in the online sphere. But that’s not why I’m writing this post today.

I’m here to advertise the just-as-exceptional (and even better) game Plants vs. Zombies, by the good people at PopCap (of Peggle, Bejeweled fame). These guys obviously have a great sense of humour on par with the great guys of Valve, as is evident in these ads.

Images found via Google Images.

This is some free advertising from me. The game is great, so if you have not played it already, I suggest you do so (my Lord). And for the guys at PopCap, keep up the good work.

By the way, no you do not get to see any zombie breasts. Thank goodness for that.

The result? The next version of Google 2.0, as reported by Mashable.

It is evident that Search is the foundation of all of Google’s online strategy, and in order to stay profitable it has to stay on top. And now Google has generously allowed the general public to preview the development build of its dominating search engine.

While searching for me, there are no immediate differences in the results. I did, however, notice that the previous version of Google could not find my facebook profile (rather strange, I think), where as the new version had listed me under an expandable list of results from Facebook.

Regardless, it is an exciting (and often scary) period to be involved in the development of the internet as we know it. Be sure to hop over to http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and give it a whirl!

Personally I feel a little mixed about it. Obviously, any interest in the specifications from the IE team should indicate some level of consideration towards standards compliance, which is always a welcome sign. However, judging by some of the feedback given by Adrian Bateman I can only feel that the IE team continue to fail to understand what I feel are some of the goals of the HTML5 specifications.

New Section Tags

I take particular issue with the first feedback, regarding the proposed section tags.

It’s not clear why these new elements in particular are necessary. Those
that use HTMLElement for their interface provide no extra functionality
beyond <div class=”xxx”> or <span class=”">. If they are necessary, do
we know if this is the correct set? Are there any missing?

As I understand it, the reasoning behind the new tags is based on Semantic-HTML; HTML should be able to provide meaning to its content, and relationships between content. In HTML5, we can write up a simple website template like so:

How do we do this currently?

In the first example, it is clear what each content’s purpose in the page is. In the second, not as clear. Although I have named my divs semantically to provide some sort of structure to my markup, to others it may as well have been the following:

If you put forward the argument “Well, if the divs are not given meaningful names it is the developers at fault, not the specifications” we also need to have a look at SEO as well. Spiders/Robots do not have any way of magically identifying every single possible name for your div tags. Lets not even mention names in different languages. As far as I am concerned, Spiders cannot treat your divs as separate elements with different weights; they are all the same type of element.

Semantic Markup, however, could very well be the holy grail of SEO. Spiders can treat each section differently (as an example, perhaps Nav section links could be less heavily weighted in terms of importance, as they generally link only to internal pages).

Thus, as to whether they’re really needed, I say Yes.

Conclusion

That’s not to say that the entire feedback is hogwash.

What they do get right is how vague the specifications can be at certain points, which is also understandable (HTML5 is considerably young). This puts greater impetus on editors to push for greater clarity. I do chuckle, however, at the following (coming from the browser team who’s historically been all about non-interoperability e.g. ActiveX ):

Like the <progress> and <meter> elements, we’re concerned about the maturity of the spec for achieving interoperability for a toolbar UI

Will we see any HTML5 support in IE9? At the moment, I wouldn’t put any money on it. Microsoft’s strategy has always been to stick to established standards, not fluid and volatile initiatives. All the more reason to abandon Internet Explorer completely, as it will serve only to delay and cripple HTML5 efforts.

Microsoft also has a conflict of interest in HTML5; although Silverlight has been a sort of non-event recently, it is still something that Microsoft are pushing as a new way of viewing and interacting with web applications and the web itself. HTML5 is a competitor in that regard, and while I wish to give them the benefit of the doubt, I am not confident they will not attempt to derail the initiative (given their track record) either by pressuring the group in other directions, non-support or crippled support (worst).

What do you readers think? Am I completely off the mark, completely blinded by anti-Microsoft sentiments? Do leave a comment below!

I must say I have grown extremely biased against Microsoft products, but it is hard to dismiss their continuing relevance in our everyday use of our systems. I still cannot drop Live Messenger to keep in contact with friends, nor can I stop using Microsoft Office for documents despite all the rave reviews about Open Office. Similarly, I still cannot get rid of Windows as a result of my work.

This does not mean I’m a total pushover when it comes to what I need. I was not pleased with Vista, just as I was disgusted by Windows ME. What is strange, though, is that most of the time, it is hard to identify the things I disliked about either of them. But most people still manage to express either positive or negative impressions despite being unable to elaborate on their position. This is my attempt.

Installation

Installation, I must say, is a big major improvement. The entire process was very streamlined, and apart from the lengthy copying operation at the beginning the rest of the process breezed by. Of course, I have never personally installed an instance of Vista on any of my systems, so many of the things I notice may not seem as impressive to some who are already familiar with it.

Initial Setup

The first step of any Windows installation I perform is always installing Firefox. The version of Win 7 I have is the 64 bit edition, and I’m glad to note that it copes with 32bit applications just fine. Within 10 minutes I had Firefox up and running, with XMarks (formally FoxMarks) importing my precious bookmarks, something I have not accomplished with Chrome just yet.

All of my year old hardware was detected upon installation, so there was not much needed from my end.

The first problem arose with the sound system. My motherboard (Gigabyte DS3) comes with an inbuilt Realtek Azalia high-definition sound card, for which Win 7 did not fully recognise. Which brings us to the very first challenge for Win 7 thus far: will it be able to handle drivers meant for Vista/XP?

The answer? Thankfully “yes”.

I downloaded and installed the Realtek driver/toolkit (for Vista), rebooted the computer, and fiddled with the input jack settings until sound came out of my speakers and all was good!

Memory Usage

With a Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 with 2gigs of DDR2-667 RAM, the operating system copes fine. Admittedly, I am not pushing the system terribly hard; at time of writing, I have 2 Live Messenger conversations, Firefox buffering a 30 minute episode of anime while watching a Dylan Moran dvd in Windows Media Player, and memory usage peaking at 1.2gigs.

I will be try to run some of the more intensive applications such as Flash eventually.

Task Bar

I had mixed feelings about the new Taskbar. I liked the minimalistic look of the icons, making for a less cluttered Taskbar. However, I felt the icons were too big. I use “were”, because I quickly found out how to make them smaller. So problem solved!

Unfortunately, window management is still a pain, and has not improved much. Although, I’m considered part of a minority (with a beautiful 24inch screen), it is still too difficult to organise windows easily. Granted, this has always been a problem for me, but at least Gnome had multiple “desktops” which let me organise my windows easier.

Overall

1 Day in, and I’m relatively pleased with Windows 7. Perhaps this is just the honeymoon period, where the lack of desktop and registry clutter makes for a smooth experience, but I don’t see any reason not to continue trying it out for now.