Over the weekend I did battle with a hulking thorny behemoth.  However it wasn’t in any computer game, it was the blackberry bush that has taken root behind the BBQ in my backyard.  Because I am renting my home it’s my responsibility to maintain the garden, something which I loathe.  You can imagine my joy when I noticed thorny tendrils sprouting from my garden in an attempt to cover the planet not unlike The Red Weed in "The War of the Worlds".

So armed with an array of vicious looking garden implements I went into battle on Sunday for three hours; looking at the backyard now one would think that I had been victorious.  However the blackberry is only sleeping under the soil, waiting for the right time to burst forth and take a small child in the night.  My master plan is to wait for the blackberry to sprout again and then liberally dose it with a specially formulated poison before it can take hold again.  If this doesn’t work I have a sealed envelope containing my scorched earth policy that will only be used as a last resort.

I was eating my lunch today and reading some forums before when I encountered a piece of stupidity that pinged in my brain like a U-Boat on sonar.  This whinge is often bought up in reference to games that have been in development for a long time, but ultimately fail to impress.  I believe the example in question was Too Human.

The poster had expressed the opinion that since the game had been in development for so long, it was surprising that the developer had managed to mess it up give the amount of time they spent on it.  What absolute rubbish.

Here’s the thing about software development, time does not necessarily equal a good product.  A five year development cycle my involve three years of producing prototypes that end up being totally unworkable.  When you mix this with the problems the gaming industry has, such as having to create their own tools and differing asset definitions across engines then suddenly five years doesn’t seem like a long time.

People have remarked that with all the time that has been spent on Duke Nukem Forever (DNF) that it had better be the best game ever; when it actual fact the code and assets in DNF are probably no more than five years old.

But we can’t let the truth get in the way of a good joke.  After all it’s hard to make yourself look good when you play computer games obsessively.