Marketing, Tech, Web, Gaming, TV and Coffee
You try to help out a sales rep taking photos for their competition and this is the thanks you get…
The show was the Brasilia Barista Challenge which was a great success and a lot of fun.
For you coffee geeks you can have a go at the barista quiz with questions from UKBC judge Paul Meikle-Janney and put together by yours truly.
Just a bit of a moan really, being a bit of an old school xbox gamer, I had been looking forward to a bit of shooting and driving with Call of Duty MW2 and Forza 3.
Now I have both of these games and I will state they are both great and improvements from the their respective earlier counterparts.
However, they have both changed one simple point which although is not game breaking, really manages to piss me and my gaming colleagues off.
Starting with COD MW2, as the lesser of the crimes, they have stopped you using party chat in TEAM deathmatch.
The reason stated is it to combat cheats who party together and spot for the opposite team, fair enough, but I don’t think the ends justify the means.
It’s a like the old adage of trying to crack a nut with a sledgehammer, I think THEY need to remember that it is just a game that we play for enjoyment and personally one I don’t prefer littered with the various racists, idiots and screaming kids we now suffer in game chat.
Surely a simple solution would be to not allow parties to be on opposite teams, therefore eliminating the ability to cheat and allow myself and my friends to return to our more serene(ish) party chat.
For Forza 3 I have to admit to being a little bit more annoyed.
Keeping an eye on the various hype and news prior to Forza 3’s release, one of the promised features was the custom game settings for multiplayer, which is all I’m really interested in, allowing to you set the game how you want and race it against the world.
These setting are there as promised, but only available in private games, not public like Forza 2.
Why take this out??
Sure they have added multiplayer hoppers, those these seem to not have a huge amount of choice and definitely don’t allow me to set the game how I want and let the world come and play.
Having only 5-6 people I regularly play xbox with (stop having kids you fools!), getting a group together is not entirely easy and genuinely looks like this game will find its way from my desk to The Shelf™ where games do not return from.
What this also means for Turn 10 the games producer is that I am unlikely to purchase any of their Downloadable Content (DLC) at its generally ridiculous prices and will think twice before buying Forza 4.
If they had left these popular features in I would be singing their praises and would have my credit card to the ready when the next car/map/track/gun pack became available.
Of course if they fix said issues in a future patch, then I sure all can be forgiven. nudge; nudge;
ps: the comments below were before I had tried to set up a public race as we had a full party online, see how much better that made it…
Just thought I would drop this in here. Picked up my copy of Forza 3 this last weekend and spent the rest of it racing friends until the small hours.
The above image is a screenshot of an Merc SL65 AMG (going a little too fast for the next bend) taken in game and downloaded from the Forza 3 site.
I won’t bother with a review, simply if you have an Xbox360 and like racing games then get it, if you don’t, well don’t.
I often get asked to do a different design and image based jobs and was offered a real tough one this last week.
A rental house in the South of France needed photographing and someone need to fly down and take the shots.
Ah well, it’s dirty work but someone has to do it 
I’ll leave you with the view from the lounge that I had to ’suffer’ this last weekend.
Click the image for bigger
Been a bit busy at work recently with various promotions on the go but one thing that arrived that was a little different was a naked portafilter.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, most I would guess, a portafilter (also called a group handle) is the metal handle that attaches to an espresso machine and contains the filter you put the ground coffee in.
The coffee is extracted through the filter and comes out of one or two spouts at the bottom into your cup/glass.
Take a look a the espresso machine next time you’re in your favorite coffee shop.
A naked portafilter is the same handle but with the bottom and the spouts removed so you can see the coffee being extracted.
This makes for a great training tool, but better than that, it simply looks fabulous, what as I have seen decribed elsewhere as espresso porn.
Below is a photo I took of the best extraction I managed on the day, extra points if you can spot the subtle branding placement.
Marketing? Who me?
Naked Portafilter (Click the image for bigger)