Near the of last week, I got hold of the Black Edition of Assassin’s Creed 2. That was a mistake. The game is far too much fun (read the MiniGamesReview here), and it also managed to slow down the work I had started last weeek on our WordPress theme.

The WordPress Theme seemed like the best idea to try and get the feature we want into our existing WordPress theme.  We are working on incorperating the MiniGamesReviews twitter game reviews into the BigGiantCrayon website, and add it in way that will allow the viewer to easily locate they game they to read about.

We have recently been working on a new internetshop for Den Kinesiske Koebmand using the free open source ecommerce platform Magento.

As you can see the BGC has grown quite exponentially over the last few weeks, from just a couple of us posting nonsense and  some work related items.  We have grown to include several new individuals each with their own field of expertise which includes but isn’t limited to Music production, Photography and web application programming. We hope to keep growing as things progress and invite more and more unique people to our network.
Watch this space as we grow into the unknown.

Well it has finally happened, and yet it’s not finished. More changes will be occurring daily, but now all the theme changing has stopped. There will be word changes, maybe even menu changes, but this the theme we are sticking to.

Have you ever been into a shop, and wanted to know what the ‘internet’ thought of a particular game/movie.  Well now if you have a web enabled mobile phone (or a pc and you just order stuff over the net), then you can join our new twitter feed called MiniGameReviews.   This feature is where we ‘try’ to review both games and movies inside the twitter 140 character limit.  It might not work, but we thought it was a good idea at the time. So wish us luck.

Over the next few days, you might click on BigGiantCrayon and things might look different for a few seconds, then when you refresh again, it’s all back to normal. You are NOT mad (well you might be, but that is a different thing altogether ), BigGiantCrayon is changing. I will tell explain more over the next few days.

Yesterday it occured to me, that we – by we I mean anybody who develops anything for browsers on the internet – are too nice when it comes to IE6. I know that some of you out there will laugh at that statement, but just breathe in deeply and give this a thought: Can you honestly say that you have never bent over backwards, adding hacks and seperate stylesheets in order to make something look or function the same in IE6 as it does in the modern browsers?

Anyway, to get to my point I have to mention peoples behaviour these days. More or less all of us own and use a mobile phone, and we use those phones to browse the internet more and more.

Now take another deep breath and think about the following: Is there anyone out there who expects to be able to browse the net, see beautiful sites, and have all the functionality these sites can offer, from a Mobile phone that is 8 years old? We all know that we need a modern mobile phone like an iPhone or a phone that uses Android, or a similar OS to be able to get all the wonder.  Anyone who uses an older device will know, and never expect to be able to have the same functionality when browsing the net as users of the aforementioned products.

Then why are we expecting all that wonder from inside IE6? And why are developers still, to this day, going out of their way to make sure their products work and look fine in IE6?

As for the developers I think I may have at least a partial answer: if we see a modern internet site with lots of beautiful functionality and lots of little widgets that all work in IE6, we think that a huge amount of work has gone into making that site. If our sites work in IE6 we can claim the following (which in itself feels rewarding): “works in IE6 and above”. If that is the case, then developing for IE6 has become a sign of quality. We see the “works in IE6″ as a quality stamp. We check the other developers sites and go: “It may be beautiful, but it doesen’t work in IE6!” and see that as a sign of lazyness or worse.

Honestly! How can developing for an old, and in many ways obsolete browser be seen as a sign of quality? I don’t think the majority of IE6 users expect the sites they visit using IE6 to have the same functionality as they would have if wieved with a modern browser, just like the users of old Mobile Phones don’t expect to be getting the same functionality as the iPhone users have.

So is it us, the developers, that keeps the much hated and scorned browser alive? The above reasoning points to that statement as being a, if not whole, then at least partial truth.

If you are using IE6 go here or here to get a modern browser

Watch Trailer. WANT. WANT.WANT.WANT.WANT.WANT.WANT.WANT.

Can’t stop. trailer to watch again.

I want to be Batman, not the real Batman with all the heartache and pain, the death of parents type Batman, all the years of dedication, training self torture and sacrifce.  I mean Batman, the Batman that goes around beating up bad guys, with his fists, the Batman that can swing about in the rafters, hanging from a beam to grab a bad guy, real him up to the beam, hang him there, and move onto the next one.  The Batman that scares the bad guys. The Batman that is just so cool. That is the Batman I want to be.

You might have worked it out, I downloaded the demo for Batman: Arkham Asylum.

It’s now on my must buy list.

Well, EA & Dice have done a grand job.  I have very few problems connecting to servers, so I can now play BF1943, and just incase you have not bought it yet, it’s brilliant fun.  Get into a squad, and go and capture some flags, drive some jeeps, fly some planes and then make sure the enemy sees the bullet from your guns.  ENJOY.

Gamertag udoh on the xbox360 if you want to add me.

Currently Learning: Scout and Infantry (BF1943) and anything that shoots bullets in CoD4  ( lvl51)

Well, yesterday morning I was very excited because of the release of the Brand New Battlefield 1943 for our Xbox 360.  What is there not to like about this idea, a cheap 1200 MS Points Battlefield game for the Xbox 360.  But my excitement turned to disapointment.  because EA/DICE and Microsoft managed to completly mess up the release of this game.  First the game wouldn’t appear in the Xbox Marketplace, then when it did, it would not download, I kept getting ‘server unavailable’ messages, I read everything I could on http://majornelson.com/ and there are lots of people who had either got it, and got stupid amounts of lag or couldn’t get it.

I finally got it this morning, and I couldn’t even connect to a game.  Considering that the Microsoft Marketplace is a paid for subscription service, why it is so crap sometimes, I have used free services that are better than this, what exactly are we paying our xbox live gold subscription for?

This morning I tried log onto the xbox site to change my profile, and once again, ‘service unavailable’.

Bad work Microsoft. You should hold companies like EA to a higher standard than this, they make you look bad.

That’s one of the PC’s down for the count for a while it seems ( 0x0000007f error ) .  It looks like it’s the graphics card, but why the No Keyboard error when the PC switches on.  None of these things are easy.

Just got some MS Points, and bought the Big Surf Island for Burnout Paradise, it’s really good, the jumps are just awesome.

Still can’t put down Call Of Duty 4 on the xbox 360, don’t know what it’s doing right, but the Multi-player is just so very addictive and just very good fun.

But basically, that is about it for the last weekend, which was just a good fun time.