Shawn Elliot sums it up nicely.
I was literally screaming at my iPod listening to this week’s 1up Yours podcast. I think I spent half an hour venting to my brother about it and Metal Gear yesterday. I should have recorded it because I am struggling to write it up here.
Suffice to say Shane Bettenhausen and Ryan Payton don’t get it. They are in a bubble that resides up Kojima’s arse.
I find it hard to read game reviews these days, not just for the appauling hyperbole Shawn points out, but for the whole meaningless nature of scores and the subsequent arguement that ensues. MGS4 just highlights the immaturity of the entire enthusiast press be it Edge, IGN or whoever.
Play the game, critique it, done. Your scales and scores are meaningless.
As for MGS4, my opionion can be summed up in one sentence. If I wanted to watch an overly long and overly complex movie I’d go do that, I don’t need a game to do that for me.
I have been shopping around recently for a network attached storage device to see if I can come up with a better solution than my current linux server. One of the main features I am interested in is automatic volume expansion. Basically if I insert a new hard drive the NAS should just handle it and I won’t have to do anything.
Devices such as the Drobo and the ReadyNAS NV+ offer implementations of this but at £400 to £500 without any drives included makes them ridiculously over priced. So I looked back at my linux box and wondered what could be done in software.
The much hyped Sun file system ZFS offers these features and more but with it only being on Solaris and a Linux port not even close I ruled it out a while back. Then I remembered that FreeNAS is BSD based and that ZFS has been ported to FreeBSD 7. Well it turns out that FreeNAS is currently based on FreeBSD 6 but they specifically mention in the roadmap that ZFS support will be coming soon.
So now I just have to wait a bit and soon I will be able to build my own free software alternative to the overpriced Drobo.
It’s a huge undertaking but the Windows UI Taskforce are trying to detail every single UI bug in Vista. Just looking through the list serves as a reminder to how half arsed and rushed out the OS was.
The fact that there are still Windows 3.1 style widgets in Windows Vista is unforgivable, it’s the kind of thing that makes it feel cheap and mashed together when using it.
I have been running this blog for several years now and it was starting to show. In short upgrade after upgrade to wordpress had built up a ton of bloat making it fairly unusable for me and eventually led to the RSS feeds braking. To this end I have spent the last 2 days rebuilding the site from scratch and feel I have now reached the state of the existing site. Please let me know if there are any problems.
PS Wordpress limit XML imports to 7mb. Mine was 15mb. Now imagine how fun it is to trim a 15mb XML file - not good.
As much as I hate Sky, I hate ITV even more. And today is no exception with the announcement that ITV HD will be a Freesat exclusive. So rather than rolling out their channel to the largest established HD platform in the UK (Sky HD) they choose to go with the unproven service that just launched.
There is no technical need for it to be exclusive to Freesat. It all comes from the same satelite orbiting the Earth regardless of which service you sign up for. BBC HD which is available on both proves this. As far as I can see the only thing they need to do is maintain two EPG formats - thats it.
We all know how well it went the last time ITV were a platform holder (hint: horribly) and it looks like they are well on their way to screwing things up again.
Not that I watch anything on ITV.
Here is my progess so far. Been hitting it hard 
I have been saving this rant since last week due to the blog issues. I still think it’s relevant.
When I read this blog post by the BBC’s Darren Waters last week I started to get very angry. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it I can make a cool rational judgement - something I suggest Mr Waters tries.
“The BBC’s announcement of a deal with Nintendo to put the iPlayer’s streaming service on the console makes something of a mockery claims by Sony and Microsoft that their consoles are the true multimedia machines.”
I don’t care which side he is on but the fact is that he and the BBC should not be taking sides. It’s all very well to brag about how amazing your online video service will be on the Wii but it’s another thing to shit all over Nintendo’s competion. It’s called impartiality buddy.
Now to the techie meat of the issue. Any browser that supports the latest flash can play iPlayer content. So that’s why Wii and PS3 support is on the way - they have browsers. The catch is that this is the low quality version, the high(er) quality video must be downloaded. Unlike that BBC blogger I have a PC connected to a large screen and attempted to watch Doctor Who via the flash player this week. It looked horrendous. I couldn’t watch it. The same video I couldn’t watch will be what is offered on the Wii and a download option can never be implemented that platform.
People don’t mind watching YouTube videos on their PCs in tiny windows but when you stretch it out on a huge screen they will not be impressed.
Warning! This review of Mario Kart Wii might be considered pretentious, overwritten, unreadable and harmful to your health.
Bad Journalism! As written by Edge Magazine.
It’s Mario Kart people, not Bioshock.
[via Andy via IM]
Since the upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 this site seems ok from where you are looking but is rather messed up behind the scenes. It has been widely documented on the Wordpress forums that there is an issue with TinyMCE and the WYSIWYG interface. I have the issue and like many people with the same problem cannot resolve it using any of the methods described to me. XML-RPC in Mars Edit also seems to be broken. The only thing that seems to work is ScribeFire in Firefox. I’ll be using it until Wordpress is fixed. Let me know if there are any problems.
The time was right for a new venture so here it is, my new collaboration with Andy Griffiths is a site dedicated to Steam news and information that we like to call 
![Futurama - Bender's Big Score (with Limited Edition Lenticular Sleeve) [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61THJCbOxwL._SL75_.jpg "Futurama - Bender's Big Score (with Limited Edition Lenticular Sleeve) [2008]")
![Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511PW90lDhL._SL75_.jpg "Futurama - The Beast with a Billion Backs [2008]")
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