Who said February was a short month?

I’ve been fairly busy at work recently and only been making minimal posts onto koffdrop.com. I suspect you’ve noticed that.

Games-wise, I’ve not been playing much. I’ve had a stab (literally) at the God of War 2 demo and, I’ve got to say, it lives up to my expectations. There’s a fairly cool “Road to E3” documentary on the demo which gives a little insight into what it’s like trying to get something like a demo together for a big event. There will be more of these style of features on the final game (a 2 disc release) and I’d encourage any potential ‘developers are lazy’ critics to look at how shattered Cory Barlog is in this video (or in any recent appearance). Crunch time is a killer!

Anyway, to cheer some of you up and in keeping with the positive news of a DS sequel to Ouendan (which will, I hope, retain the best parts of Elite Beat Agents without the insiped track selection) I offer you the complete soundtrack to the original Ouendan game. Don’t kill the server please.

Whilst you’re here you can have a look around my little discussion area. It’s different from the sort of layout and featureset you may be used to – but that’s very deliberate.

Finally, you’ll have noticed that, due to popular opinion, my older theme is back in place.

I’ll be making an interesting discussion point soon – honest.

TGFC WTF?

Hacked

Koffdrop.com finally hits the zeitgeist!

Yes, I know I’ve truly arrived once my site gets hacked. I noticed some strangeness a little while back and today I checked things out and everything was gone! Yup, all the files that make up the site, all my hosted files, all image files – the works!

Not only that but my site admin panel had been changed – effectively locking me from my own site.

Fortunately, my host is not only extremely helpful but very thorough in his work. He’s been able to provide me with a lot of information relating the the trail of breadcrumbs the wiley little scamp left.

What I find highly suspcious is the rather blunt methods used. A mass ‘delete’ was done of all my unprotected files.

Most interestingly my last two posts – the one laughing at the tantrums thrown by Zelda fanboys and the one belittling a community that was taking itself far too seriously – both those posts have been mysteriously deleted from the database that holds the koffdrop.com site data.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

An apology to Segamak

Segamak,

You’ve made numerous constructive comments to koffdrop.com and they have consistently failed to appear on the site.

This is because of an over-zealous WordPress plugin the filters out spam comments for me. The plugin is called Akismet and works very well – if I didn’t use it, this site would be flooded with spam comments! However, automated systems for spam always have one or two instances where they either let something bad through or block a legitimate commentator.

It is the latter that has happened with your comments and, for that, I apologise and would like to say thank you for adding your thoughts to my ramblings. I appreciate all comments and I make it a policy not to withold any (except for spam!) as I’m just as happy to print comments from those that disagree with me as those that don’t.

Although I don’t recall you and I ever chatting directly to one another I’d like to make up for the bad treatment your efforts have received and, as such, would like to mention the Segamak Gaming Community. I can say nothing bad about it!

No hard feelings I hope!

Newsbites

Yes, another skin. There’s no artistic reason to this change – I just managed to tinker about with the old one, break it and decide I couldn’t be bothered to fix it.

I’d like you to take a glance at the sidebar on the right of the site and focus on the column called ‘Newsbites’.

Newsbites are a sort of cherry-picked newsfeed from yours truly. I’m a big fan of using RSS to gather news and have a lovely piece of server-side software that does that for me based on the feeds I’ve subscribed to. Whilst reading up on the new entries to my feeds I can ‘publish’ certain ones to a sort of output feed. This feed is what makes up the Newsbites and is stand-alone feed in it’s own right (you can subscribe to it by using the in the shaded title area)

Longtime readers of this site may remember some tinkering I did that pushed lots of newsbites into the content area of this site. I decided to stop doing that as koffdrop.com was becoming more like some random games blog than the sort of place that had any sense of individuality.

So, whenever you visit, check out the Newsbites. Everytime I collect my feeds I push the stuff that catches my eye into Newsbites. So it’s quite likely you’ll find something new in that area each time you visit.

If you have any suggestions about RSS feeds you think might interest me then please don’t hesitate to let me know.

R.I.P. reBlogging

As may already be apparent by the frontpage of koffdrop.com, I’ve decided to do away with reproducing news items from my collection of site feeds.

Apart from anything else, it takes away from the site and removes most of the personality – that it’s a site about Koffdrop – and swamps it with newsbites that make it seem like some random pickings of some games blog.

Although I’ve been pretty quiet of late I do have some important news to deliver next week. Important to me anyway 🙂 Some readers will already know what this news is. Suffice to say my mood has improved recently.

A quick warning and a recommendation – Don’t buy the new Tomb Raider game. It’s a massive improvement on the older games and really invigorates the franchise. However, it’s astoundingly short. Shorter than the very short King Kong game. Enjoy it but rent it. The recommendation is Outrun 2006 on pretty much any platform. If you love racing games, if you love Sega, if you love Outrun or if you just want a racing game that reminds you of the sheer fun and exhilaration that driving really fast around impossibly pretty scenery can be, then get this game.

If you want more information about Outrun or anything Sega related be sure to check out mySega which is currently going ga-ga over the game (and rightly so!)

ReBlogging

Hello folks!

As regular visitors to koffdrop.com will have noticed, there’s been a flurry of posts in the last few days. In fact, we’re talking over 50 posts.

What’s going on? Has Koffdrop turned into some news-posting junkie?

The answer is no. I’ve been playing with some things behind the scenes that allow me to provide a huge content-boost to this site.

Many of the posts, in fact all of the posts under the reBlogged category, are not of my creation. On my server, there is a rather clever news aggregator. All my favourite feeds are in there and I read through the news and flag anything that I find particularly pertinent to me and my interests. With a push of a button, these flagged news items get sent to the front page of koffdrop.com. The origin of these posts is always shown at the bottom of each item.

If you wish to subscribe exclusively to these cherry-picked news items you can do so by adding this address to your news/rss collector. You’ll find this address at the very bottom of every page on koffdrop.com.

If you are subscribed to the R|Mail distribution of koffdrop.com (to do so, simply enter your email into the box at the top of the sidebar on the right) then you’ll not be blitzed with 40 or so emails every time I publish my day or two’s worth of news items. Only items personally crafted by yours truly will appear in the R|Mail deliveries, reBlogs won’t appear.

Also, due to a bit of tweaking, you can expect to stumble upon streaming content in some of my posts. Any videos that I personally add (as opposed to ones added via reBlogging) will be placed under the video category so you can always find them quickly should you ever want to.

And that’s about it for now. If you have any questions, criticism, suggestions or recommended newsfeeds then I’m all ears.

Inactivity

I just wanted to drop a note to any readers of the site to say that updates will be forthcoming. I’ve been a wee bit busy lately but have another two movie posts and possibly an Opera (not the browser) post to subject you to.

My current workload, search for alternative employment and enjoyment of GTA: San Andreas are the culprits for the lack of updates. GTA on a PC with decent controls (finally!) and hardly any loading time is just too good ! 🙂

See you soon.

Moving on up

Well, it appears that WordPress (the software that drives koffdrop.com) has made a pretty large upgrade from version 1.5 to 2.0.

What does this mean to you? Very little! 😀

I believe that you won’t see any changes when you read this site and sincerely hope that nothing is broken. I’ve just performed the upgrade and everything appears to be working as it should.. ..but I’d made some tweaks and updates to the site and I suspect they may cause some interference. My biggest concern is that anyone who reads these posts via the R|Mail service may now get truncated emails showing only the first portion of each post rather the the entire post. If that’s the case then I’m pretty certain I know how and where to fix it.

One delightful feature to this upgrade is a WYSIWIG composition screen. I’m a bit rubbish at writing posts in pure HTML and the formating and layout of picture elements was a major pain.

This is a sample image and should allow me to play around with a few settings to my liking. Ignore this bit of the post as I’m only wittering on in some effort to create enough text to f-l-o-w around the image and play with formatting controls. You might even wonder just where the image comes from. Well, it shouldn’t take you long to clue yourselves up on it’s origin. I use caution though. Consider yourself warned!

Right. That should be enough simple playing. Time to publish this post and bore you all to tears!

EDIT: Looks like I still need to use my own CLASS declarations in HTML to format my picture alignments how I like them. Oh well. 🙁

EDIT2: From what I can gather, the generation of the RSS2 feed that the R|Mail emails are based on had reverted back to using the truncated posts. This has now been addressed and future R|Mails (and RSS2 feeds) will show the full post.

Think before you respond

There’s a big debate over the suitability of playing FPS games on the Revolution with equally strong arguments for and against. The problem is that it’s missing the point entirely – if the Revolution is insisting on being the brand new way to play then there’s going to be trouble. If the gamers are still thinking about playing FPS games and all those other established genres then there is no need for a revolution.

I said that. Yes, I know quoting myself on my own site could be regarded as being somewhat pretentious but I’ve very good reason to believe that a number of people who have read that paragraph didn’t digest it properly or simply have problems comprehending simple English.

To respond to such a statement by telling me why the Revolution could become THE platform for FPS games is to demonstrate an utter lack of comprehension as to what I’m actually talking about. I do have a nice little metaphor that would help explain things in very simple terms but I don’t really think I want to help these kind of people out. They either get it or they don’t.

To those of you who did understand what I said, regardless of whether you agree with it or not, congratulations! You’re officially not morons!

DISCLAIMER: I’ve assumed English is the first language of those that read koffdrop.com. This is a sweeping generalisation and I shall use it frequently. Other sweeping generalisations of mine include: moron, fanboy, IGN reader and cretin.