Over the last weeks I spent some time to get the blog work­ing again, after I screwed it up.  I started by mak­ing a child theme of the pop­u­lar iNove theme by NeoEase. A few days later I had to apply some fixes for Inter­net Explorer users. When­ever I had some spare time I changed a few set­tings and tried oth­ers. For instance, Opera users would see strange sym­bols some­where in the text. That’s because wp-Typography has an option named “Enable wrap­ping after hard hyphens” which adds zero-width spaces after hard hyphens. Opera evi­dently doesn’t like this, so I turned if off for the time being.

I deleted a few plug-ins and tried a few oth­ers. I now have a new con­tact form (Con­tact Form 7) and I’m quite happy with Anti­spam Bee which does an excel­lent job. In addi­tion, I edited the Embed­ded Video plug-in to enable embed­ding videos from a few more sites and changed a few para­me­ters. On the other hand, I cleaned up the Socia­ble plug-in and changed a few things in my CSS file to make the site more pleas­ant to look at. Right now, I’m plan­ning to change my theme but I’d have to take a closer look at pos­si­ble can­di­dates first, so that may take me a while.

Now that these issues are out of the way I can return to blog­ging once again. Stay tuned for more posts!

Activi­sion plans to dis­trib­ute feature-length game cutscenes as game-based movies within the next five years. Accord­ing to Eurogamer Activi­sion boss Bobby Kotick made this pre­dic­tion at the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions & Enter­tain­ment Con­fer­ence in Cal­i­for­nia. Kotick referred to Star­Craft II’s hour-long cutscenes, of course.

“If we were to take that hour, or hour and a half, take it out of the game, and we were to go to our audi­ences – for whom we have their credit card infor­ma­tion and a direct rela­tion­ship – and say to them, ‘Would you like to have the Star­Craft movie?’… and say we have this great hour and a half of lin­ear video that we’d like to make avail­able to you at a $30 or $20 price point, you’d have the biggest open­ing week­end of any film ever,” Kotick said.

So, Activi­sion wants to cap­i­tal­ize on the rela­tion­ship it already has estab­lished with its cus­tomers. In other words, they want the cus­tomers to pay some $20 or $30 for ren­dered in-game cin­e­mat­ics they can watch in the game. I mean, what’s this dude smok­ing? I can watch three films in the movie the­ater or I can buy two new Blu-ray movies for 30 bucks.

How will Activi­sion deliver the movies? Kotick didn’t elab­o­rate on that but it sounds like it’s going to hap­pen via the Inter­net. Wait a moment! Didn’t Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment do some­thing sim­i­lar some time ago? Yes! There is some­thing on Ama­zon and other stores that’s called Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment DVD Col­lec­tion. It con­tains cutscenes from Star­craft, Dia­blo 2, and War­craft 3. Well, it already worked once but I’m sure Bliz­zard didn’t try to sell you this col­lec­tion for $30.

A few weeks ago, I totally screwed up my theme and I had to cre­ate it from scratch. Of course, since I use the iNove theme by NeoEase – what’s the big deal? Back when I first installed this theme I didn’t know about child themes in Word­Press so I altered the orig­i­nal theme. When I updated iNove nearly a month ago I undid all my changes with one click. I fixed most of it within the hour by mak­ing use of child themes. Unfor­tu­nately, I didn’t use Inter­net Explorer so I didn’t see how screwed up the blog looked. I’m sorry.

Today, I’ve changed all that. It should look fine with IE once again. Prob­a­bly not as good as it does with Fire­fox or Opera but you can read my posts again. Mostly, the blog was ren­dered unus­able with IE because up to ver­sion 8 Inter­net Explorer doesn’t really sup­port “:before” and “:after” pseudo-elements. Thanks to QuirksMode for the CSS con­tents and browser com­pat­i­bil­ity which pro­vides a quick overview. Any­ways, you shouldn’t encounter any weird dis­play issues with IE from now on. Enjoy!

Almost a month ago, the in-game trailer from GamesCom made it into the net. I know, I’m late but I nearly destroyed my blog and I was on vaca­tion so I was quite busy with other things than con­tent. Any­ways, I’m back and Deus Ex 3: Human Rev­o­lu­tion is one of my most antic­i­pated games next year. For more infor­ma­tion on the game take a look at a pre­vi­ous post. The ‘new’ trailer looks very promis­ing and I def­i­nitely like the look of it:

In related news, there’s also a book planned, set in the Deus Ex uni­verse. Pub­lisher Del Ray announced in July that Deus Ex: The Icarus Effect, writ­ten by James Swal­low, would be released in 2011. The novel is about Anna Kelso, a Secret Ser­vice agent, and Ben Saxon, a special-ops sol­dier, who draw too close to the truth in a world filled with con­spir­a­cies. Of course, the pow­ers that be must silence them so that their intri­cate plans come to fruition. Infor­ma­tion is scarce at the moment but accord­ing to the offi­cial press release some char­ac­ters and story ele­ments will over­lap with the game. Accord­ing to Jim him­self, the novel serves as a “side-story/prequel”  to the game’s plotline.

I’ve never read any­thing by James Swal­low – sounds more like a porn name than a seri­ous writer, eh? (sorry Jim, I couldn’t resist) – so I’m try­ing to stay open-minded about the novel. His work record doesn’t look bad either and he’s already won the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Media Tie-in Writ­ers Scribe Award for Best Orig­i­nal Spec­u­la­tive Fic­tion. Addi­tion­ally, he has been work­ing as a core writer on the video game itself, so that should def­i­nitely make an inter­est­ing read. I’m not usu­ally into video game tie-ins but what the hell. I’ve recently aquired Matthew Stover’s God of War, so DX:TIE won’t be a first, right? Right!