dropshock

Recently Richard persuaded me that I could not comment on liking, or in this case disliking, something without actually having tried it in the first place. He really must have caught me on a good day or just one where I could not be bothered with being my usual stubborn self because I gave in and agreed to read a few volumes of Fullmetal Alchemist. I also agreed that if I disliked this series then I would try at least one other so that I had manga a fair trial before fully dismissing it.

Well I have read, rather slowly to Richard’s dismay, the first volume and some of the second so I thought I would post what I think so far, mainly because I am giving in (yet again, something is wrong here!) to the demand for me to update the blog with a new post.

I have tried to read a few chapters of some of the books that Richard has taken to college before and never really been able to understand the way that most manga reads from right to left. I usually get confused at how you are supposed to read comics that read from left to right so trying it the opposite way just confused me more. However once I actually took the time to try it out I soon got used to it and was up and running in no time. I got into the first volume and was rather surprised at how short it was, I hate to admit it but I actually wanted to know what happening next. The storyline is not bad and is much better than I first thought, Richard really can not describe things well.

Overall the whole manga thing is not as bad as I first thought and I was wrong to dismiss it as a kiddy thing. However, I am still not sure that I could claim to actually like it until I have probed further into what is on offer.  I can think of many worse things than passing time by reading manga and I will continue trying it for a while as promised. This being said I know one thing is for sure, and that is that I will not be buying any manga myself. It is simply far too costly per book for how much entertainment they provide. Even with the slow speed at which I read, I could easily read a volume in an hour or two and that is just not value for money to me.

Here’s hoping that my trying of manga and posting this update will keep Richard off my back for a while.

Java Pong Clone

Some of you may know that I am currently at college studying for a BTEC National Diploma for IT Practitioners in Software Development (what a mouthful). One of the units on the course is “Game Programming” which we recently started and for the first assignment we had the choice of using one of the game skeletons that the tutor provided or creating our own game from scratch. As I feel fairly confident at designing and implementing a program in Java using OOP concepts, I decided to make a clone of the very cool classic arcade game “Pong”.

Creating the game went fairly well with no real hiccups along the way and I am very happy with the outcome. So much so that I have decided to upload the game, source code included, to share it with anyone who cares. The game requires the Java Runtime Environment 1.5 or higher which can be downloaded from http://java.sun.com/ and anyone running JRE1.5 should download the version of Pong compiled especially for that release. The pre-compiled game and source code can be found at http://dropshock.org/unit12/Pong although it is worth noting I have not yet had a chance to upload the latest source.

Please let me know what you think and give me some constructive criticism. I feel the game came out really well considering it is the first bit of programming of this type that I have done.

I finally gave in to a few requests from friends to revive Dropshock and get a personal blog again. Admittedly this has taken me far, far, too long to do, but here it is.

So what will this blog be about? Well, to put it simply, me! That sounds very egotistical, but as I am interested in a few different topics hopefully the blog will reflect my interests and not just myself.

Hopefully I will find something to blog about soon so why not subscribe to the feed and stay tuned! =)