Looking forward to picking this title up on its due date of Friday 20th September. Over the last month the demo has proved immensely popular at work; there’s something about the level of immersion that makes every lunchtime an essential step back in time to WWII.
Surprizingly for me, it’s the first time I’ve looked forward to a PC release in… well, ever, really!
Fingers crossed the full game is even better than the demo – that and it works over my poxy dial up connection too.
I decided to make the new design live. I’m kind of done tinkering with it, and since I’m the only one who gives a shit anyway it seemed a shame just to keep messing with it until I was sick of it and went off at a tangent.
Amusingly, as I was posting it live and re-naming the files, I discovered that the design from the turn of the year still works at winter2002index.php – complete with the funky Dukes of Hazzard style sheet I done! Neat! By that token, the design I’ve just replaced will still work at summer2002index.php. Someday I’ll have to set them all up as a gimmick of some sort, as you can view the current news and stuff through the older designs which would be a kind of cool way of seeing how the design changes the mood.
Since I’m feeling kind of cynical of late, I’m suspecting there are a few folk who will scoff and mock my “design skills”, whatever they are, so in the tradition a top designer I’ll explain the new look:
The sunset represents the end of the current season – the dusk of a whole lot of change in my life with hopefully more settled times ahead. It could just as equally be a sunset – the begining of a new chapter for that matter. The font chosen was just something that took my fancy and the fade of red and blue are just two colours that I like. As for the squares, well, they’re just freakin’ squares and if so-called graphic designers can get away with putting pointless bollocks on an image then I’m damn sure I can too.
And the arrow?
Fuck knows – but all the hip designers plaster their stuff in arrows, so maybe I’m being minamilist by having just one.
Welcome to the revolution!
While clicking away with no particular place to go, I ended up at the SRH corporate site. Not entirely sure how I got there, but I wasn’t really surprized to find a whole new site had replaced the one I created in December 1999.
Of course, that’s unremarkable – at least, not as remarkable as the fact that it took them so long to replace it. However, it had been the last online site that I created. Since leaving SRH in March 2000, I have not had one single online project that I created from the ground up.
All I’ve done for the last two years or so is intranets. Intranets and more intranets. Big ones, small ones, some medium sized ones too. But every single one of them is locked away behind a company firewall – hidden from the public view. With some of them that’s probably just as well, but with a couple I’m quite proud of the fact I put them together. Sadly, all I have to remind me of the effort is a screen grab in a few cases.
That leaves WipeoutZone and this place as the only fragments of evidence left in cyberspace that I create websites. And you know – I used to be a contender… oh yes – 17 sites on the go for SRH at one point – every one of them created by me and every one of them live and open to public scrutiny.
Sometimes I miss living on the edge ;o)