Please note, we’re shifting mail providers just now, so if you send an email and it bounces, please wait a couple of hours and re-send. Thank you.

Update: This should be all working now, if not please comment here. For those interested, we shifted to using Google Mail over Dreamhost’s internal email; mostly because that was the interface I used most when browsing, but also because it means Dreamhost isn’t a single point of failure for us. If DH is down, people can still mail me, and if Google is down, I can use this blog or DH mail as a backup.

We have a winner! Got to love that Potatamoto guy.

Pete and I have been banging our head against tools, makefiles and cross-platform compilation this last week, along with a continuing spree of unit tests. Barco time is sucking up my 9-5 day, but I’ve been working while commuting, and doing paperwork in the evenings. Speaking of which, its time to figure my way round our first VAT return.

Game of the week has to be the Battlefield 2142 demo – big stompy mechs in a combat scenario = much squishing and crunching of bones. Fantastic!

Greg Costikyan announced the other week that the site is now ‘real’ (i.e. bugs are now proper bugs, and not just beta flaws ;-)), so I’ll drop in a link here.

I’ve been browsing the site, and found a bunch of games I want to try, which is surprising, given my cynical take on games these days. Not a lot of time to try though, so I think it may have to be relegated to the 30 minutes on the bus in the morning (I’m at Barco for a brief spell).

I’ve been playing Defcon (available through Steam) a bit – lovely classic game, simple concepts but which combine together to become radically complex when played. I can’t even begin to get my head round some of the strategies needed to be a good player, so I settle for massive early strikes which makes me think I’m doing well, only to be crushed mercilessly by the retaliatory strike. D’oh!

Also got the Battlefield 2142 demo yesterday for a quick blast – looks good, and a decent successor to Battlefield 2 (which has also sucked away some of my precious gaming time). I’ll probably pre-order it, although I’ve got to order a Wii first. Hopefully the rumours of increased production rates are true and the queues for a console will be diminished. Big slap in the face to Microsoft and Sony if that’s true – normally the news is that production rates are less than hoped. I’ve given up bothering on Sony’s continuing stupid press releases and general fumbling of the ball, you can find that elsewhere.

Randomly bumped into one of the few people I’d lost touch with since VIS on the bus last week – Jonny Dobson the director/head of programmer/etc. Still in the industry as an independent (Insurgent Games with Craig Hunter), keeping busy doing consulting work. Yay for a Edinburgh games success story.