Welcome To The New & Improved Avalon5.com

WELCOME at last to the new look Avalon5.com site folks. There has been a hell of a lot of hours work put into this by yours truely – not all of it productive it must be said – but I’ve finally got to the stage where I can launch the new look Avalon5.com website and with it a host of new features. Read more

Site Redesign Update

THIS IS JUST A QUICK UPDATE on the state of things in respect of the site migation and redesign. I have a cool new theme in the works with some funky new features and a completely redesigned front page almost ready to roll.

I have rethought the categories and content layout completely and am in the progress of mapping this onto the new design. I know there are still some bugs and issues with the current version of WordPress, so I am going to try to sync my site migration to a new hoster and the updating of the presentation layer with the release of the patched version of WP, which I understand is a couple of weeks away.

Sorry for the mess folks, it has taken a lot of work behind the scenes to deal with the issues and work on a compeltely new look and feel, but I think you will love it once it is up and running. More as it happens…

Decision Made, Redesign & Migration Underway

OK. I’M OFFICIALLY PISSED OFF with the issues I’ve encountered since trying to update my site to the latest revision of WordPress and I’m overdue a site redesign anyway so I’ve taken the decision to move my hosting and site to a new hoster, under a Linux hosting plan, and at the same time I’m doing a complete site redesign and content reorganisation.

To put it simply I’m ripping the shit outta things here and will have it all up and running sometime soon under a completely new design with better categories, tagging, navigation and options. It’s going to be a lot of work, but I hope it will be worth it in the long run.

Right now my site pages are not displaying correctly (in WordPress terms these are the static pages versus the dynamic posts), so most of my navigation links to things like the privacy statement or my disclaimer etc. don’t work because of a bug in the upgrade.

I’m reworking all my categories, links, URLS and content from the ground up on this site first, then I intend to migrate all the content to the new setup, so please be patient while I screw with things at this end for a few days until it’s right. Then I guess I will either migrate to the new site first, get it all up and running then then upgrade the design of Avalon5, or else I’ll do the design first and then migrate into it.

Oh well – it’s never dull around here is it?

Crysis Outstanding Gaming Moment

GOOD GAMES are easy to come by these days, given the growth of the industry, the improvements in production quality and general focus on pushing the envelope again and again to keep pace with technology. Great games however are few and far between, and even when a great game is produced it doesn’t guarantee anything from its audience. Ultimately the success or failure of the game is driven not just by the sales performance but also by the cult status it achieves amongst gamers and the level and intensity of discussions it promotes online. Typically a really excellent game will have an outstanding gaming moment, hidden somewhere within it.

I have just experienced one of those outstanding ‘gaming moments’ in playing Crysis, a moment which – for me – has justified my investment in this game, because up to this point I was beginning to loose the faith and this game was falling into the category of so many other games before it; good, entertaining but nothing “that special“.

Before I tell you about this let me first clarify a few things. For starters, if you have not played this game, or you don’t want to have any information which may spoil your gameplaying experience – then don’t read any further, because in order to explain what happened I’m going to have to get into the details. In other words… SPOILER ALERT!

So what makes an outstanding ‘gaming moment’ for me? Well, it’s those elusive occasions when you’re playing a game and the combination of all elements of that game come together into something – an event, a challenge, a scene – some unique occurance that just causes your jaw to drop. It is generally accompanied by uncontrollable expletives like ‘Fuck me!’ or “You clever, clever bastards“, and it inevitably ends in a huge appreciative grin on behalf of the player for the game designers and developers, for it was their ingenuity and forethought which crafted this moment, this special unique thing within the game in question.

It doesn’t happen very often, so when it does it’s worthy of mention. Read more