Delayed Weekend Rant
Work on the revamped site has been going pretty smooth so far and I've really enjoyed the time spent on it. It's amazing how quickly hours can fly by when scripting. Concentration has a funny way of bending one's perception of time sometimes. It's been pretty beneficial actually, solving a few problems on my own site has lead to ideas that have helped solve problems on the job. It's also helped me get used to JQuery, which we've decided to integrate into our next site version... but more on that in a later post.
I'll say this about being a professional web developer: It's not so much about what languages you know, but rather what problems you can solve. Granted, being well versed in HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Javascript, SQL, & etc is a vital groundwork, but the majority of the work is figuring out the logic behind the code. How the various pieces and technologies will work together to achieve the desired result, or the logic behind a 'glitch', is often a much larger task than the actual programming.
Non-technical people will often assume a computer has the ability to make logical assumptions. A+B obviously equals C, so people assume the computer understands this connection. People sometimes fail to realize a computer knows nothing about A, B or their relation to C unless explicitly told. Likewise, people often fail to realize a computer doesn't record data for later analysis unless explicitly told to do so. I suppose one could say that when we as geeks have created the illusion of computers having abilities such as these, we've done our jobs well.
House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return
The first time I played House of the Dead 2 was actually back in '99 on a Japanese Dreamcast, sometime before the American launch. Gore, zombies, and dismemberment (with green blood, if I remember right) had me hooked, though I never actually managed to finish it or to play any of the other titles in the series.
I think my main gripes with House of the Dead today are gripes with the arcade nature of it. Like many arcade ports of the 90's, It feels designed to drain quarters rather than achieve balanced gameplay. It doesn't help that the excellent Umbrella Chronicles came along and simply made a better on-rails shooter. Weapon selection, better reload mechanics, checkpoints, and so forth are all sorely missed here.
These games have simply aged badly, though not quite to the point of losing the fun factor entirely. Sadly, the Wii version isn't improved in the least. None the less, SpaceKitty and I managed to to blast our way all the way through both with enough replays... (and a little help from WiiSave.com) I'll take Umbrella Chronicles any day of the week, but even with all the flaws, House of the Dead still makes for a good weekend rental.
