Nothing more in the press, as far as I can see, about the maths A-Level story. In fact searching for that story on google gives my blog entry fairly high in the results. Anyway, I had a look to see what the figures are like for 2005.

There is a slight rise in numbers for 2005:

But nothing significant to the long-term trend:

Maths continues to drift down as a percentage of all A-levels:

But a sharp rise in the number of A grades takes these to almost 40% of candidates:

(All figures for 2001 onwards taken from the JCQ press releases.)

The government's view:

The results show more young people both taking and succeeding in the traditional subjects. …

The 2005 AS and A level results show: … increasing numbers of students taking Mathematics, English and the Science…

So that's alright then - maths is up compared to last year. It's down, of course, relative to 2 years ago; and relative to 3 years ago; and 4 years ago, … in fact it's up by 0.2% compared to 1 year ago, but 40% down relative to 16 years ago. Hurray for New Labour's education progress!

(Previous discussion.)

New version now available here. This release just fixes a few bugs: the Kye now has the right number of lives, and stuck monsters are correctly animated.

Just a minor update, fixing a few bugs. Download.

Well, as usual I am right up with the times :-). I finally got Doom 3 set up on a Windows machine at home here over the summer, and have been playing it on-and-off since then. I would write a full review, but I came accross the "Director's Cut" review at GameSpy and largely agreed with it, so instead I will focus on the areas that interested me in particular, or where I disagreed with their view.

Firstly, the environment. The graphics are, of course, amazing, and the amount of detail in the level design is superb. But this is mere time and technology — what makes it work is the amount of thought that has gone into what the different levels and rooms are for. Unlike Doom 1 and 2, the rendering power now available to games is now enough to allow realistic looking machinery, so there is no longer the problem of having a level supposed to be a power station which instead consists of a chain of rooms with nothing more notable than a computer console. (In my own levels I did make one level which was a better approximation to a nuclear plant (PHOBOS3 MAP03), based on the real Sizewell A power station in Suffolk — but without the moving machinery, atmospheric noises, and no room-over-room, the industrial realism just can't be done.) Doom 3 also manages all the features that a real industial site should have: ladders, safety railings, and control panels.

Much more than the industrial architecture, what impresses me is the depth of the corporate enviroment. The offices, corporate lobbies, tannoy safety annoucements and company videos all give a real sense of a being on the inside of a big company. I see this as a great homage to all those office levels which got made for Doom 1 and 2 — except that by combining that office style with the Shores of Hell like bloodstains, corpses and other hellish touches, id has made the first office shoot-em-up levels that I have played which were worth playing. The corporate videos are good for a laugh, particularly when imps attack you while the safety video is running. And the plot, characters and PDA emails and logs create just as much atmosphere as the bloodstained walls, giving the player another reason to wonder what is going on.

Other level design innovations that are very welcome (and I mean innovations relative to Doom 2 — I have hardly played any other shoot-em-up since, so probably id didn't invent them) are the first aid points and storage cabinets. I know several level designers for Doom 2 commented that they disliked scattering health and loot around the floor — only geek computer game coders could take 10 years to come up with the idea of cupboards. (Although the gap between the realism of the physics, and the laughable biology — how do those health stations work? — is a bit of an anomaly.) And while many levels for Doom 2 solved this by putting ammunition into side rooms, there was then a problem that people could go the wrong way and having to go back and search for ammo. Solution: name the room a store room and put it in big letters on the door.

Gameplay. Well, the plot is good. The fights can be tough. Clearly the gameplay is a long way from Doom 2. The key here is that Doom 3 is a game of skill, whereas Doom 2 was tactical. In a game where the shotgun could kill most monsters with one shot, and half of the weapons aimed for you, the fighting was tactical: monsters came in large groups, and the trick was to use the speed of the Doom 2 marine to run circles around the monsters, avoid being cornered by a group of them, or take cover while reducing their numbers. In Doom 3, there are rarely large groups, but there is no automatic aiming for your cells and rockets, and not only do you have to do your own vertical aiming, but the monsters use ducking and pouncing to make things harder — and the marine is much less speedy. So it's a game of aiming skill. Personally, I am not an enthusiast for skill games — tactical games give much more varied scenarios.

The flashlight seems to have drawn a lot of criticism from some people. Personally I thought it a stroke of genius. There would be little point making a superbly detailed game if you wanted an oppressive, horrifying atmosphere — because the latter requires darkness, and darkness hides the detail. Therefore, you give the player a flashlight, which lets them see the detail, but only when they aren't cautiously creeping ahead behind the barrel of their shotgun. I found flipping back and forth to the flashlight fine, and having the flashlight lets one appreciate the superbly detailed environment. It also allows a new level of monster, the unarmed zombie, who would be useless in a well-lit world, but who is a real threat when looming out of the dark. Plus it creates great atmosphere: entering a room, to see only the lights of the computers on the far wall, and then switching to the flashlight, to reveal the bloodstains and bodies on the floor.

And that's what it is about: atmosphere. Doom 3 is seriously scary, and the atmospheric noises, supernatural phenomena, gore, and sinister plotline keep the player immersed. It's really an interactive horror movie, but with a whole level of detail and immersion that a movie could never have. The actual fights are the least interesting part, and with so little tactics and such linear level design, id have made no real effort to mask this; it's the environment that makes it worth playing.