[Brox] Back from France

Posted by Broxter on Aug. 7, 2008, 3:31 a.m.

Well first of all I must thank all of the people who left comments for my first blog; I’m very grateful for being given such a nice welcoming. I never thought I’d get as many as 14 comments and nobody actually slated me for anything! If you want to see the response I gave to your comment, then look at the bottom comment for my previous blog post.

Summer Holiday to France

As you may have guessed from the blog post title, I’m back from France, which means I now have a lot of catching up (and blog post reading) to do. We went to the west coast of France after getting a ferry from Dover to Calais and it was pretty hot in the first week, with a high of 33 degrees Celsius (as it read in the car on the dashboard) and so I enjoyed the holiday quite a lot. I spent many hours hanging around the pool and I played some table-tennis quite bit, I also played tennis and played badminton almost every day. If you were wondering, I went with my family. After being away from my PC for so long, I was actually struggling to type quickly as I had forgot the keyboard a bit =D, but I’m back to normal now… Anyway, it was a good break from all things GM-related.

Euros, Kilometres, Tolls, Badly Placed Signs, French Language, Drivers in France, French Number Plates, Driving on the Right (Wrong) Side of the Road…

When I went on holiday to France I realised there were many things that did my absolute head in!

Euros

Oh my God, they so do my head in! Why oh why oh why doesn’t every one just use Great British Pounds, as the currency it’s so much easier!? And the coins look way better, Euro Cents just look cheap and the 1 Cent coins are pretty much worthless - they’re nearly equal to 0.8p or 1.6 Dollar Cents. =D Well I guess I had some rubbish arguments there, but yeah…

Kilometres

I’m not too annoyed by these, but it’s really annoying when you see a sign in France and you realise it’s in kilometres and then you realise that you’re going to have to look very closely on the speedometer to know what the speed limit is (only of course if you drive a car from a country where miles are used as the foremost distance and speed unit). Yeah, so it’s really annoying and everything >_>. I don’t know why I’m even saying this ‘cause I don’t even drive a car =D.

Tolls

By far the most annoying thing about France is the freaking Tolls. They rob you of your Euros for going on an Autoroute that if you don’t follow you end up in some strange country road with a tractor bobbing along in front of you. If my sources are correct, the M6 Toll is the only Toll road in England, and useful it is as it actually prevents you from getting stuck in a traffic jam and only costs £4.50 for a car, whereas it was about 23 Euros when we used the autoroute to get some place that you can’t pronounce without a degree in French…

Badly Placed Signs

What is France’s problem? Have they got some sort of law that says you can’t put the signs in a useful place!? You wouldn’t believe the amount of times we had to turn around because we simply couldn’t see the sign that told us the correct direction (if it wasn’t for the AA Travel Planner we would have been lost forever, probably). For instance, there was a roundabout where we needed to take the 3rd right, but the signs that actually told us weren’t even in front of the roundabout and were placed in such a position that the only way to see the signs coming from the direction we came from would be to smash into an oncoming car, get out of the car after apologising to the person’s car in badly spoken French and then walking around the whole roundabout for about 10 minutes…

French Language

Is it really that hard for everyone to just learn English!? Je suis anglais! Sacre bleu!

Drivers in France

They are so impatient! I hadn’t even walked over half of a zebra crossing when a car started revving up and then almost knocked me over…

French Number Plates

Why so many numbers!? You’d need the memory span that doesn’t exist to remember the amount of characters on a French number plate (a maximum of 8 characters). Also there is too wider range of character styles; I really don’t see how the French police cope with reading the number plates, but oh well, why should I care?

Driving on the Right (Wrong) Side of the Road

Yes this does my head in to the max!

Yeah, so there’s not much I like about France and its roads but yeah…

The Unofficial Game Maker Magazine

I can reveal to you that the magazine will definitely not be released this August. The reasons for this have been outlined in my previous blog post, I have only done half a page of what I hope will be a 40+ page publication, so you can see that I have a lot of work to be done to get it finished. There’s no new more news to say about the magazine except that I will be exclusively revealing the new name of it in a blog post soon, so watch out for that.

Competition 03 Game Entry

A teaser screenshot will be coming soon, but I’m getting limited for time now =0! 17 more days and my game will hopefully be complete, but I will have to work extra hard (good job I have 3 more weeks off school). I’m currently working on the sound effects and it’s proving quite difficult to get hold of some good ones. Any suggestions for websites for sound effects and stuff would be extremely helpful.

Beijing 2008

Yay! The Olympics are back on the screen! It’s one of my favourite sporting events and Great Britain & Northern Ireland are looking good this year with plenty of good athletes and such.

Formula One

Werhoo! I came back from France to see that Lewis Hamilton, although finishing 5th in the last race, is leading this year’s championship! Go Lewis!

Tour de France

Mark Cavendish is a legend.

Round-Up

Yep, a bit random this blog post, but I’m pretty sure I typed enough =). Anyway, I’m off to play some games on YoYo! Please leave comments like before!

- Broxter2

Comments

Grand-High Gamer 16 years, 4 months ago

1. Because England doesnt have ANY tolls >_>

2. How annoying,they've actually gone completely to the metric system instead of some bastard metric-imperial lovechild.

3. Phazon Yoshi is in France right now.. but you're not him and that makes me sad :(

Siert 16 years, 4 months ago
F1ak3r 16 years, 4 months ago

To address your question in the end comment of your last blog, the "feature creep" is what happens when you keep coming up with cool-sounding ideas and adding them to the game, until you have a bloated, unfinishable mess which is nothing like you originally intended it to be.

Polystyrene Man 16 years, 4 months ago

Hey, I was in France a couple weeks ago!

I talked to some French girls (in French) and they asked for my phone number. 5 years of foreign language has finally paid off!

Bryan 16 years, 4 months ago

Euros

Oh my god, why doesn't Britain just use fucking euro's just like the rest of europe?

Kilometres

Metres are the offical international unit for distance, so get the fuck out with your miles.

Tolls

Agreed lol.

Badly Placed Signs

I think they are still obvious, but yeah.. Last time I went to france I'd say they are better places to put the signs

French Language

The french are proud, proud of their country, proud of their language, don't take it away from them.

Drivers in France

Yet again, I agree with you. But france isn't even that bad, I find Italy even worse.

French Number Plates

You don't have to remember the numbers at all, the people who give you tickets will :P

Driving on the Right (Wrong) Side of the Road

Actually, people in britain and ireland drive on the "wrong" side of the road. I'd say >80% of all countries drive on the right side.

You guys should change around :) consistancy ftw!

Anyways, it seems like you had a nice holiday :)

Cesar 16 years, 4 months ago

wait, there's a 1 cent euro? I never got one when I was in Paris…

French Language:

When I was in france, most people spoke english >_>

French Number Plates:

Actually, the french plate numbers are much more efficient than any others, considering the first 3 numbers are for an area code, so then you really only have about 5-6 numbers in the license plate, plus the area code

mattthew_h 16 years, 4 months ago

I doubt that we will be releasing issue 5 in September!

I have already written 38 pages so far, I think that we are almost done?

Better get writing Broxter!

Broxter 16 years, 4 months ago

Grand-High Gamer

1. No England has the M6 Toll…

2. Haha…

3. I'm sorry :'( I'm sure Phazon Yoshi is a great guy.

Siert

Thanks. Some actual usefulness here. I'll check 'em out in a bit. ;)

F1ak3r

Oh okay. It's probably the opposite of that right now lol. I can't think of much stuff to put in the game. :D

Polystyrene Man

Haha, good for you! I never bothered trying, although I have being doing French for 4 years and I'm doing a GCSE for it.

Bryan

Euros - Yeah, you're probably right. But I love the cute little pounds :).

Kilometres - Miles will never be destroyed :o.

Tolls - Yep.

Badly Placed Signs - Yep.

French Language - I suppose it is part of their culture…

French Drivers - Well I haven't been to Italy - I guess I'm lucky :D.

Franch Number Plates - lol, yeah…

Driving on the Right Side of The Road - I think all the countries in the Commonwealth drive on the left (Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Ireland etc.). And I think it is better than on the right, more natural if you like.

Yeah, the holiday was good :).

RawrSpoon

Yeah, why wouldn't there be?

No, you imagined that because you love the English language so much :).

Whatever you say >_>…

mattthew_h

Well if it released in August then I will not be contributing to this issue as I have too much work on my hands at the moment. Sorry about that.

Grand-High Gamer 16 years, 4 months ago

The M6? That'd explain things (goes past where I live).

Cesar 16 years, 4 months ago

1)I know some french, enough to get around

2)My main language is Spanish, not english.

Both of your points have been destroyed.

Also, my WINTERS have averages of 33 degrees Centigrade. Summers get outstandingly hot.