wee doors banging

I was lucky enough recently to be invited (by DDNI) to lunch with Trevor Dickinson, the man behind the company behind the latest “next generation” Amiga computer, the AmigaOne X1000.

In January this year I went along to a past pupil’s night at Grosvenor High School, an alma mater of mine, in Cameronian Drive, Belfast. The old school buildings were being pulled down and new buildings erected on a site in Marina Park just behind them. Yesterday we were all invited to go back to skool again and take a look around those brand new buildings.

In previous instalments of this blog, I’ve questioned the apparent lack of science fiction television programmes aimed at adults made in the UK, singling out the evergreen Doctor Who as an example of such a show that is aimed squarely at children and teenagers. Having said that though, the fifth series of the new Who has just finished its run and I must admit that this particular adult enjoyed it very much.

You are a bird. Some pigs have stolen your eggs. This makes you angry. You are an Angry Bird. Thus goes the largely irrelevant back story to Angry Birds from Clickgamer and Rovio, an iPhone game I’ve been playing a lot lately. Like, really a lot.

Angry Birds has been a huge success, selling half a million copies in the first month alone. This, I think, is down to the design cleverness that lurks beneath the polish, cutesy graphics and simple mechanics. No matter what you think of the game itself, if you’re in the games business then you could learn a lot from it’s design.

For this UFO: Enemy Unknown fan it’s been a long wait for a sequel. Sixteen years long. So you can imagine how terribly excited I got when I read 2K Games’ announcement that they had a brand new X-COM game in production. I thought my wait was finally over, but then I read on a little. They’re making an X-COM first person shooter?!