Many months ago I noticed that after paying by Chip and Pin in a Threshers store, the staff swiped the card under the counter, away from where I could see what they were doing, and without telling me what they were doing. In retrospect I should have reported my card as possibly cloned, or at least asked what the hell they were doing.
I’ve noticed this behaviour at another Threshers store too, this time the staff tell me that their ’systems require it’. It’s good of them to tell me this, but I have no idea whether this is actually true! This is exactly the kind of behaviour you’d see where an unscrupulous member of staff is skimming card details to be cloned, so we’re right to be concerned.
A friend of mine saw this happening last night, which prompted me to email Threshers to find out exactly what’s going on. They should clearly tell customers what they’re doing, and at the very least have the swiping done in plain sight.
When Threshers reply to my email, I’ll post it here to get this cleared up.
[update] I thought it’s worth mentioning that the main reason I’m concerend about Threshers implementing this practise is that it effectively legitimises the action of using chip and pin, and then swiping the card away from sight, which is exactly what card skimmers rely on. A great example of an anti-pattern in action.
Toki Tori is a cutesy puzzle game where you touch the screen to move the the fluffy yellow protagonist around a graphically pleasing environment, avoiding Bad Things, and collecting a number of Good Things. When you have collected all of the Good Things, some kind of wierd yellow portal appears (for reasons I have not yet fathomed), and sucks away your character, ending the level.
It’s not a bad puzzle game actually. There’s several environments, each with several levels. You are given a number of special moves per level, such as teleportation, building bridges, moving blocks, freezing bad guys, and no doubt more I’ve yet to discover. In some ways it reminds me of Lemmings. Oh how I loved Lemmings..
It’s currently only £1.19, which seems a bargain for a game that’s polished this well. It’s a small sum considering this game has given me a good few hours of gameplay so far, and I’m only about half way through.
IGN gave this 8.5, and an editors’ choice award. I’d have to roughly agree with that; it’s definitely one of the better games I’ve played on the iPhone, but it’s just a little bit too cutesy for me.
F.A.S.T (Fleet Air Superiority Training) is a dogfighting game for the iPhone that I downloaded a few weeks back. It’s got some pretty good visuals for an iPhone game, and the controls seem to work reasonably well, using the accelerometer for movement.
However, I’m really really bad at it, and regardless of how many times I play it, I just can’t seem to stop getting blown to smithereens by enemies missiles. God alone knows how you’re ever meant to get close enough to fire the cannon.
Ah well, it does seem like a good game, if only I could get past the 3rd level. I’d say this is mainly due to my incompetence, rather than bad game design or controls
The book comes with a CD-ROM containing PSDs and PDFs of 12 different robots, and 2 scenes. You can edit the PSDs to create your own colour schemes, and obviously print to larger paper should you want to create some larger robots.
I can see potential for making some of these and adding some amusing electronics to them. Will I ever have time to actually do this? Who knows. I’d certainly like to, but what with setting up my own company, I haven’t got much spare time at the moment.
Charles Cecil, creator of Broken Sword, told me that the atmosphere surrounding Flash and iPhone developers right now reminds him of the mid-1980s, where the new avenues and platforms open to developers were yet to settle and there was a sense that anything might be possible
I didn’t know this either:
I learned a few things I didn’t know before, such as the revelation that Half-Life 2’s artists wrote three supporting pieces of fiction for every location on the game, one describing what happened there two days ago, one two weeks ago and another two years in the past. “This historical record (which ran longer than the entire story for the game) gave every location in the game a sense of place, history and verisimilitude,” said Viktor Antonov, the game’s art director, “something far more nuanced and rich than simply slapping some graffiti on a wall.”
Next year I have to go to Develop. It’s right on the doorstep!
This is a little old now, but definitely worth checking out if you’ve got an interest in Flash or gaming. It uses Flash to stream console games to your PC.
The game itself is instantiated on a remote server, and the video is streamed to your PC. You need to have nothing installed other than a browser and Flash Player. If they can find a way around lag then this is absolutely stunning..
Since I was young I’ve always been interested in the weather, no doubt instilled by my father’s experience at the Met Office. I fondly remember poring over cloud charts, and having isobars, warm fronts, and cold fronts explained, although I must admit I haven’t retained much knowledge of that. When a storm-chasing colleage of mine recently showed me Weather Pro, I was rather taken by the satellite and radar views of Europe. Sadly no isobars here, but there are rather nice animated satellite and radar maps:
It’s also a pretty handy gague of the weather each day, with a forecast for your location every 3 hours:
I’ve recently found this app very handy, what with our typical unsettled British summer! My iPhone wakes me up in the morning, I check Twitter, check BBC News, check my email, check the weather so I know what to wear, then get up. I’d be lost without my iPhone..
So in summary, Weather pro is OK. It’s nothing special, only covers Europe, and the satellite and radar views are chronologcally a little short. It does the job though. I wouldn’t mind finding a better weather app. If you know of one, let me know!
I have a real soft spot for scrolling shooters, even more so for ones with spaceships and big explosions. I think this comes from playing Xenon 2: Megablast literally hundreds of times when I was young – it was the most impressive game for my Dell 316SX – a 386 running at an almighty 16Mhz with 640K RAM. The music was divine – considering my computer didn’t have a soundcard, just the onboard speaker. I’m still amazed how they managed to get Xenon 2 running on a machine like that. The Bitmap Brothers were real heroes of mine; Gods of game programming.
Anyway, this post isn’t about Xenon 2, it’s about the absurdly named “Space Deadbeef“, a side-scrolling shooter by Yuri Yashuhara of IDP. It’s a great looking game, and the gameplay is reasonably satisfying. Where it fails is the control of the player ship. I like the idea behind the mechanism, but it doesn’t quite work. Movement is dictated by the vertical position of your finger on the screen; you can only move vertically, which is rather odd. Firing depends where you touch the screen – if your finger is over your ship, you can build up a powerful blast (similar to R-Type), or if you swipe your finger over enemies, it locks on a number of missiles that are then fired when you release your finger. It kind of works – but doesn’t feel 100% right. The game is also too short, it’s just one stage which you can play over and over again, with it getting tougher each time.
Despite the negative comments about the control of the ship, it’s definitely worth downloading, as it’s absolutely free, and a good taste of what’s to come on the iPhone.
On a final note, I honestly think the iPhone would really benefit from an additonal controller for gaming, as some types of games just don’t work well on the iPhone. I hope we’ll see an official one soon – perhaps it could include an extra battery too..
It’s been many years since I’ve done any soldering, and to be fair I was never that good at it, so it was good to have an expert on hand to show how it’s done.
Mitch had a few kits with him for sale, I bought a Mignonette game kit to help me practice my soldering, and a Brain Machine kit that I’ll put together soon. I had a go on one of the pre-built Brain Machines, and they are very strange..
Here’s another great game for the iPhone: iBomber! You play the part of a bomber in the Pacific in 1943. It’s top-down, and movement is controlled by tilting the iPhone. Bombs are dropped by hitting the ‘Bombs Away’ button. There’s a number of different powerups you can collect by touching them. The aim is to destroy pretty much everything. Ships, submarines, aircraft carriers, planes, AA guns, fuel dumps and so on.
There’s several levels, with achievements for each one. I’ve played a good few hours of it, and it’s definitely worth a paltry £1.19.
Iestyn.net - Iestyn Lloyd's blog about Flash, Unity, ActionScript, programming, development, Brighton, gaming, robots, photography, and other random things.
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