The Grumpy IT Admin

There are a number of real annoyances about computer games for me. I am not a spotty teen cyber punk but more of an occasional middle aged gamer, what I want from my games is entrainment, a good story line, nothing too difficult or involving multiple key combinations or wave after wave of bad guys or a big baddie that requires 2 million hits to kill off at the end of each level. Boss fights are boring at best and mostly an irritating interruption to the narrative, if you must have them then offer an option to jump them or make them easy on the easy mode, preferable think of something different. If developers are going to offer an easy mode then make it easy, if you have some combat system make it simple and easy to use. If hand to hand combat is a minor part of the game don’t make a big thing of it or require huge combos to achieve a kill. I am a PC gamer not a console gamer and it still amazes me when a developer ports a game from a console to a PC and does stupid things like us...

Well for me just about everything. Over the years I have been on courses by Microsoft, Cisco, Altiris, VMware and Palo Alto and they all pretty much follow the same formula. The instructor has a PowerPoint presentation or 3 which are printed out and given to you as a manual, the instructor reads from this, repeating what is written and then depending on how good they are adds in some real world stuff and bits to assist you learn, at the end of a module there is some practical work for you to do that is often a step by step guide on how to to do something. So what is wrong with all this? Well lets flip this to a different topic of learning. Swimming. If you wanted to teach someone to swim would you sit them in at the poolside, show them some photos of someone swimming with a brief explanation of what they were doing? Then put them on a plank in the water so they didn't sink and let them read a bunch of words on how to move their arms like the person in the picture? For me t...