Dark Recesses

I still haven't been paid for that website. Maybe the cheque is waiting for me back home.

At work the Senior Leadership Team are making noises about transferring all the authority over the school website to me. Currently the guy who build the website still holds the FTP passwords and all that, so major changes have to go through him. I can make minor alterations and additions to the website thanks to some content generator pages he made; they were originally implemented so that any member of staff could edit their department's page. Of course, staff just come to me to get things changed.

If I do get all the administrative rights to the website, I might end up redesigning it. I've never worked with .ASP webpages before, and that's what my maybe-predecessor has used. I'd redesign the site itself, take away the content generator (since no one except me uses it), and probably have a mental breakdown, but be left with something I'd be more confident with.

The considerations I have to apply, though, are a) that's a hell of a lot of work, and they're probably not going to pay me; especially since the whole matter of transferring authority arose because they don't want to pay a bill for changing the colour scheme. And b) my successor (when I get out of this dead-end job) will have to know what he's doing (i.e. be fluent, or at least passable, in HTML and CSS... maybe even JavaScript if I keep learning it).

Right now I don't even want to think about building a website of that size.

Ever played Penumbra: Overture? The demo was pretty damned tense. As a first-person thriller-horror-adventure-puzzle game it worked for me. I really don't understand anyone who thinks it can't be an adventure game if it's not a side-scroller (You can't get ye flask!). The same goes for the stuborn mules who refuse to see Morrowind or Deus Ex as an RPG because it's not isometric.

It's scary and, for the demo's short duration at least, fairly slow-paced. I watched the trailer and would like to see more. Just the trailer for the sequel, Penumbra: Black Plague, gave me shivers.

Then I tried the demo for Twin Sector. Urgh. I didn't even finish it. Perhaps the full game would be different, but it feels much more like an amateur mod than a professionally polished game. One very annoying element was the game's movement speed. Moving around the game world is slow, as if struggling against a current; it makes you feel as though you've constantly got the walk button held down or something.

The level design was abysmal. Some corridors don't even go anywhere! You walk down one branching path from a t-junction only to find yourself staring at an undecorated wall. Even worse was the inability to tell scale from a distance. Things are either too big or too small; nothing feels as though it is the right size.

Sometimes the scale changes when you aren't looking. A perfect example of this is when you're dropping down an elevator shaft in the demo. On the upper floor, the wall's texture ends and tiles at about seven feet, on the lower floor it tiles at four feet which means there is no way for you to judge distance until you land on your face at the bottom of the shaft.

For a game with a lot of gameplay involving jumping and falling, that's a major flaw. You can't even see your avatar's feet or body (except her ever-present hands, which gives me the impression she walks around like an undead monster in an old b-movie). I don't remember seeing my own shadow either. So a sense of scale was thrown out of the window.

The script seemed poorly written too. The voice actors I heard were pretty flat, and what little I saw of the main character didn't draw me into the story at all. She reminded me of April Ryan from Dreamfall.

Since I've downloaded demos for Batman: Arkham Asylum, Penumbra: Overture, and Twin Sector, I guess two out of three being pretty impressive isn't bad. Gives me something to think about if I want to get another electronic distraction to keep my entertained.