Blogs I’ve Burnt My Hand

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2010/04/01/i-ve-burnt-my-hand/

 

I remember when I slammed my hand on a hotplate and had horrible burns. Had to have it inside a plastic bag for the first few days. First thing I did when I got home? Tried and succeeded in playing Day of Defeat: Source through the bag.

Such an addict.

 

I had a fairly bad cut on my right hand along the knuckles and needed some stitches for it. Some of my Guitar Hero scores from my time off work then are still on my local score tables.

 

There were a few months after my son was born where he would only go to sleep while being carried. I learnt quickly that I could play games to pass the time, but needed games that could be played with just one hand while I supported him with the other. I found old games to be best at this - things like Fallout where you could easily play with just the mouse.

 

Ironically, since writing this blogpost my bandages have been taken off and my hand is back to normal!

 

Was it worth the burn for awesome jerked chicken?

 

It's a schooner!

 

The food WAS delicious, yes.

I've even bought some leftover cornbread in with me today...

 

first thought: Fermi?

ovens are dangerous, especially those electric oven with hot resistors on top, i burnt my thumb on that once.

 

I bet it's had an impact on your jerking aswell.

/I'll get my coat...

 

one handed games.... Monkey Island?

 

Around one in ten British males are red-green colour blind, and I'm one of them. We outnumber wheelchair users by around ten to one. Whilst I see everything from buses to buildings designed for ease of wheelchair use, it's extremely rare to see anything designed for ease of colour-blind use. Car park meters which say "Insert coins and press the green button" are probably my biggest annoyance (I get my change refunded and no ticket about 50% of the time- and that's a major pain when I've spent two minutes trying to remember, let alone type in, my wife's car's registration number), closely followed by my Top Up TV schedule planner which has different on-screen instructions for different coloured remote control buttons depending on which sub-page I'm on (I have to learn it off by heart - second button from the left to confirm deletion).

In games, for the big names, colour blind players can be treated pretty well; Team Fortress 2 has teams of Red and Blu, easy to distinguish. Sometimes the design is good but the instructions are bad; instructions for Far Cry 2's diamond-hunting GPS says to watch the green flashing light- I've no idea which one is the green light, and even though I can only see one flashing light, for all I know that might be a red flashing light and I worry that there's another, green, light I can't see. Thankfully there are usually other cues such as sound or symbols.

Then there's the nigh-on impossible games. Torchlight, step forward. Whilst I can play this and have fun, apparently to really advance I need to look for items of a specific colour. Well, I can't. I'm getting enough enjoyment out of Torchlight to justify it's recent £3.75 special offer on Steam, but if I'd have paid full price, even at only fifteen quid, I'd be demanding my money back.

Thank God for discounts and try-before-you-buy demos.

You'll have noticed I've only talked about action/shooter games. To be quite honest I've given up on RTSes. I last played one about seven years ago and it was the usual mess of gazillions of tiny little coloured men/symbols/flags, none of which I could distinguish with any accuracy. I recall one medieval RTS where I not only couldn't distinguish the two opposing sides, but I couldn't even tell the soldiers from the trees. I can't imagine that this has got any better now that every blade of grass is rendered too.

Half Life and Quake wall switches that flip between red and green can sod right off, too.

Now I could understand this failure to accommodate disability if we accounted for a teeny tiny percentage of the developer's customer base, like, say, registered blind or amputees. But one in ten blokes? Having two daughters, I'd love to believe that this is a sign that games companies are targeting the female demographic (girls generally can't be colour blind, the genetic defect is almost entirely male and almost entirely white). But really, it's just a sign that the companies don't care. I mean, how much money do they save by designing a texture that is red/green instead of red/blue? Are blue pixels expensive?

It's not just the PC. I've also got a Wii. I have no idea whether I'm playing Mario or Luigi. Rubik's World is a bit hit-and-miss too.

Hey corporates, it's this simple. I have a nice enough job that I have to pay 40% tax. Cater for me and you'll get my money. Don't and you won't. You want to discriminate against ten percent of white males? Probably best not tell your shareholders about that.

 

Grab a bottle of Water-Jel gel for your home first aid kit. I think Boots probably stock it; but if you're cooking, fixing exhaust pipes, juggling fire, it should be close at hand.

 

Something witty about crabs. Probably toilet humour.

 

It's true that it's rarer for females to be colour blind, but it does happen. The colour blind gene will now be carried by your daughters as it goes from father to daughter to son and so on.

My Dad is red/green colour blind, so I carry the gene. Not sure if it's the same with your girls as it is with me, but I can see what you're meant to see and also what a red/green colour-blind person would see when they use the Ishihara colour tests. It confused the hell out of the opticians when I was a child. They'd ask what number I could see and if it was one of the ones with two numbers (one for colour blinds one for normal vision) I'd always ask which number they wanted as I could see two. Your daughters also have a higher chance of being tetrachromats too. Which I really want to be tested for as the basic tests I've done so far show that I am. I am also bitchin' at colour matching. Oh and red/green colour blindness does have a bonus, you guys can spot camouflage soooo well

Anyhoo... back to the games for people with disabilities thing, I am really hating this new trend for 3D. I only have vision out of one of my (awesome) eyes, so 3D glasses just mess everything up for me. It's almost as bad as when those Magic Eye pictures were the in-thing. If you don't have stereoscopic vision, forget it. Almost forgot, being a cyclops means that games with dodgy fov can really mess with me too and give me motion sickness quite quickly. I couldn't play HL2 at all as it made me soooo ill. Changing the fov and refresh rate helped, but I think it was too late and I associated HL2 with being sick :/

 

Crab battle!

 

*puts hand up*

Same.

 

Novint Falcon anyone... You guys reviewed it, Valve like it and now it has a nifty pistol grip add-on!

 

I too am red/green colourblind but not to the same extent; I can still see red and green but if there is a lot of one colour in my view I wouldn't be able to see the other. For example, I wouldn't be able to spot a cricket ball in a field.

Luckily this doesn't tend to have too much effect on my gaming but I find it can be quite difficult to tell light green and yellow apart. I make do