Filed under: Uncategorized
I’m starting to think that Nintendo wants it’s Wii console to fail, even before it was launched they took a massive gamble not to significantly upgrade the hardware of the machine from their previous platform, the Gamecube, and invest instead in a novel controller. This gamble however paid off and the Wii now has a massive install base. The challenge Nintendo now has is to keep those people interested in their platform, keep them feeding the quarters as they used to say.
The modern day equivelent to feeding an arcade machine 10p’s all day is downloadable content, be it in the form of Rock Band’s downloadable songs, XBos Live’s Live Arcade or extra missions for games like Grand Theft Auto. So far the Wii has been really dissapointing as far as online gaming is concerned. Wikipedia has a list of all the games that support WiiConnect24, but I don’t count sharing scores as online play, and many of them are not available outside of Japan.
The latest game to shun dlc & online play is Rock Band, but here in the UK at least it seems they’re going to try and recoup that lost income by massivly over charging for the game itself in the first place. Even at Game’s discounted prices, it’s still twice the price American gamers pay.
Apart from the cost of the game, I’m not being too harsh on Harmonix/EA here because I feel the problem is the platform’s, with it’s feeble amount of storage and complete mess of a friend system that requires each player to know 2 – 12 digit numbers for every other player in the game in order to be able to play against each other.
For those of us who still watch TV in the more traditional way, these shows all start with new series this weekend:
- My Name Is Earl
- Dr Who
- Battlestar Galactica
I’m still a whole series behind on BG, and I didn’t even realise that they’d made a new Earl … can’t wait.
Now we just need a Series 3 of Heroes, one that doesn’t suck.
What shows are you waiting to watch, apart from those?
Filed under: development, ebuyer, opinion, webdev | Tags: ebuyer, Furniture Village, tesco, threshers, w3c
According to a report by the Retail Bulletin, web stores must achieve better accessibility for their customers, much like bricks and mortar stores do.
This caught my eye because it mentions Ebuyer, and they rank pretty poorly, but then when you read the article in full, it’s not immediately obvious what they are measuring and they make no mention of how they gather their data, or asses the websites conformance to W3C’s Conformance level A (I assume that’s what the final column means.) The Error Occs column refers to some kind of error, javascript errors? html errors? schoolboy errors?
Does the meta data being “ok” mean that it has some, or that it’s relevant to the site? You have to assume they mean the meta header tags, which Google ignores completely. They might mean the content type & language settings maybe.
Finally they have an “Exact Overall” column, how they come up with this figure is a complete mystery. Tesco comes top with 8.04, their meta data is ok, they have no errors and all their pages meet W3C conformance level A. Thresers however comes 10th with 6.09, they fail at meta data, have 2 errors and 40% of their pages don’t meet conformance A. Further down the list is the Co-op, they are Ok at meta data, have 9 errors and only 19% of their pages don’t meet conformance level A yet they score just 3.56 and come in at #50. Furniture village has no pages that meet compliance, fails the meta tag test, but has no errors, and gets a score of 4.85.
Anyone beginning to notice a pattern?
No? Good because neither can I. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the “Exact Overall” score and any of the individual tests.
The site makes a very good point that high street stores have to meet certain accessibility standards, so why shouldn’t web stores? But when their own ranking system puts a Net-a-porter at number 9 with no pages achieving compliance level A, can you really take them seriously?
Filed under: God, humor, i can haz cheezburger, lolbots, lolcats, lolgeeks | Tags: God, humor, lolbots, lolcats, olgeeks, thinkgeek
Even God hates LOLcats. I still don’t get them, they’re still not funny.
Stubblog 