JordanH.net

Announcing the Awesome Contact Form…

For the last week or so, I’ve been buried away working on a secret project. Today, it’s been approved on the CodeCanyon Marketplace and I hope that the hard work has paid off…

Introducing the Awesome Contact Form – it’s a class-based, PHP contact form which is pipsqueak-easy to setup and comes with a ton of features – including sending an auto-response to the sender, two anti-bot measures (a CAPTCHA and a human-verification question), field filters and custom error  messages. You can also set a success message or use your own. It’s built for customization and integration, and doesn’t force you to stick to the default fields or make you edit the core code to make it work how you’d like to.

And on top of all this, the script comes with an extensive user guide, covering the installation, every configurable option with examples, and tutorials on how to get the most out of your script.

So what are you waiting for? You can get a copy today, it’s only $8 from CodeCanyon

Jordan

Modern Warfare 2

I’ve been playing quite a lot of Modern Warfare 2 a lot since Christmas. As has been reported in the media, the game has smashed sales records – in part, due to its addictive multiplayer mode. However, after giving the online a good playthrough and reaching the first prestige, there are some glaring problems with this sequel:

First of all, the matchmaking system is abysmal. It is downright awful. Whereas in Halo or Gears of War, you would get paired with other gamers also looking for a match, MW2′s matchmaking servers just drop you into an existing game where there’s a spare slot. So lo and behold, not only do you get put in a match halfway through, most of the time you’re on the losing team because people tend to leave when things aren’t going their way.

Also a major problem with the matchmaking is the game connection distance. If IW’s community manager is to be believed, then the game automatically picks a session with the most ‘optimal’ connection. How then, is it possible that the only games I end up in are distant matches with USA players, when I’m pretty damn sure that many gamers in the UK are also playing MW2′s multiplayer…

The second big issue I have with the multiplayer is the weapons imbalance. The secondary weapons are just too powerful at short range. What happened to the good ol’ days with a pistol, not over-powered Akimbo Model 1887 shotguns (or for any dual-wielded shotguns for that matter). The amount of people who take to camping at the top of stairs with those buggers is unbelievable.

As a gamer who paid for the game on release day (despite the high prices), I think Infinity Ward/Activision have a moral right to sort out the botch job of a matchmaking system already there. Either overhaul it completely or give us some options for it – possibly the “Local Search” option featured in Treyarch’s Call of Duty: World at War.

As far as the over-powered weapons go, I can live with that, but it’s irritating when you feel cheated out of a few kills because someone is just sitting in the corner tapping both triggers when you run through a door. Having said all this, I still think MW2 is a good game, with an enthralling (but short) single player campaign and some extra sprinklings of co-op alongside. The multiplayer just needs a bit of work so that it can live up to its predecessor