Chaotic Tortoise | David Hing's blog for ordinary geeks

Giant Red Bull chases after tiny Redwell for reasons

August 14, 2013 by Ding·Comments Off

Update: Red Bull has backed down, on the proviso that Redwell doesn’t put its name on energy drinks.

Redwell’s beers. Or wait, is it Red Bull? I’m so confused!

Red Bull, the mega-brand behind the caffeine/taurine/tastes-a-bit-like-death-filled energy drink as well as massive amounts of sports sponsorship including fully owned sports teams, a hefty F1 sponsorship deal and extreme sports sponsorships including its own air race has issued legal warnings to small Norwich-based microbrewery Redwell Brewing.

The mega-brand is worried that there will be confusion in consumers between itself and the micro-brand and has demanded that Redwell changes its name, Redwell being a small business with eight people working there.

This might seem like an odd thing to get fired up about, but it strikes me as corporate insanity and I’m clearly in an easily rattled mood.

Oh look, it’s a blog

January 31, 2013 by Ding·Comments Off

I’m sure a lot of you have been saying “gosh, you’ve been awfully quiet over there haven’t you?” and you’d be right, I have been quiet, at least on this particular digital outlet.

I have been writing on a very regular basis at my old haunt Bit-Tech. I write something news-like over there pretty much every morning and even have a regular column on their blog. You can click here to see the David Hing Bit-Tech blog archives. Not only am I writing there which is of course a massive draw for anyone, but the other guys writing for the site are uniformly excellent.

I’m also no longer working at M&M and am instead working in digital marketing for an insurance company. Although I was initially reluctant to cross over to the “dark side” that is marketing, the work’s pretty good, the company is Not Evil and they let me write crazy things like this from time to time.

I’ve got a couple of projects in the works once again, most of which gaming related, and I’m tempted to write a little bit about them although I find actually writing about a project is the fastest way to kill it off for good, so I’m a little reluctant to talk about the game that I am making and have got quite far with. All I shall say is that it is set in space and I no longer recognise half the code I’ve actually written.

Additional Notes:

Fun fact: It’s really rather difficult to post something on a blog that has been dormant for as long as this one has. If you go through my archives, you’ll find quite a few posts that basically make excuses as to why I haven’t posted for a while.

There’s even a sub-category of that type of post whereby I comment on the fact that there are a lot of posts where I apologise for not posting for a while.

Self Portraits

July 5, 2012 by Ding·1 Comment

I have a belief that anyone trying to create anything will inadvertently create self portraits of themselves over and over again without even realising.

I have started working on some pixel art for a new project and was very proud of some alterations I made on my ‘Ding sprite’ from Ego to make him a low level dungeon-crawling adventurer.

I thought that looked pretty good, until my girlfriend noticed the following things:

1) That’s probably closer to my actual hair colour anyway.

2) I appear to be wearing that particular tee-shirt today.

Right down to the V-neck.

Score one for extra confidence in a theory, lose one for falling back into artistic self-insertion habits.

Batman: Arkham Asylum Review

July 4, 2012 by Ding·Comments Off

Why yes, I did just post a review for a game that’s three years old. That’s either post-modern games journalism or post-relevant games journalism.

This review originally appeared on X, a site I now pretend I never created. You can read my full review below the fold.

I’ve always been a big fan of the Dark Knight in almost all his forms. That Batman has seen so many variations baffles and intrigues me.

Although my taste may indeed have been tempered by the fact that I was a teenager and didn’t know any better at the time, I would highly recommend the No Man’s Land series of graphic novels. They have an interesting if not far fetched setup with Gotham City cut off from the rest of the states and being carved up by the wide variety of Batman villains, it puts well known characters under unusual stresses, and the ending…well, it’s disappointing. The point is there were some great moments there, some extraordinary artwork, a few gems of good story telling and the first two volumes were probably what pushed me off into the deep end of trying to draw my own comics, be that for good or ill.

iOS Game Review: Niko

February 7, 2012 by Ding·Comments Off

iOS Game Review: Niko

Niko is a platformer from Habbo Hotel creators, Sulake. It is worthy of comment for two reasons: Firstly, it has some level of integration with Habbo Hotel, a hugely successful and popular virtual world that has been one of the innovators of micro transactions and secondly, it resolves a lot of problems that platform games have on a touch screen device.