One of the complexities of a game like Aces High is knowing what plane to use. Spitfire, Me109, Mustang, Corsair, Zero, or Yak? There is all kinds of data floating around the ‘Net to help, but it was never brought together into one place.
I recently happened across a neat PHP/XML-driven Flash charting package which looked like it could display all this information in a concise manner. So I whipped up a site to allow players to compare up to 4 prop-driven fighters in Aces High.
Some of the information is pretty interesting – some planes don’t compare as well as you’d expect, and some are quite a bit better than people assume. Part of this coding exercise was to come up with a standard way to describe the plane-set, and provide a semi-modular way to add new data sets. This allows more information to be easily added to the system as it becomes available.
I’ve installed the Lazyest Gallery component to hold the various graphics I create for GonZoville.
Drupal 4.7 was released earlier this month. It’s hard to know where to start describing the changes but it looks pretty damn awesome.
This probably doesn’t matter much to people not in or from the Boston area, but New England is pretty sentimental about its sports heroes. Flutie was barely 5′ 10″ yet every time he stepped onto the field he was a threat. Even when he was over fourty years old competing against players who were toddlers when he started his professional career. He made magic happen and everyone on his team believed that victory was somehow possible.
There’s also a sentimental “rightness” with Flutie retiring with the Patriots. He came home. His last play was the first drop kick in the NFL since 1941. Somehow that’s fitting too. He had a great career and was always a stand-up person. Never making excuses for his height, never whining about the way the media treated him – he just went out there and proved everyone wrong every week.
Below is the article from patriots.com about his retirement and his career.
FOXBOROUGH,
…
For some reason I kept remembering Bush saying he hadn’t seen “Brokeback Mountain” from some press conference a couple months ago. Well, with gas prices at $3.50 per gallon while Big Oil is making record profits, and quadruple-digit layoffs still going on, this little Photoshop parody of the movie seemed apropos.
