Stupid Marketing Decisions

This month's PC Zone has a review of an update to Perimiter, a Real-Time-Strategy that they were very nice about a couple of years ago for differing from the standard RTS tropes.

So I downloaded a demo for the original game, to give it a go. Only to discover that rather than releasing a tutorial level or two they just chucked in an actual level of the game. Which is different enough from other RTS games I've played that I managed to merely click on things at random for a few minutes before being wiped out.

This bears very little relation to anything I'd call "fun". The game itself may well be amazing - but I have no way of telling, other than clicking on things repeatedly until it starts to make sense. And the website doesn't have any useful tutorial information on it either, limiting itself to "Here are some vague terms and shiny pictures."

What a wasted opportunity.

Property Markets

Just throwing around some figures and briefly considering buy-to-let. It makes _no_ sense in Edinburgh, as far as I can see. Monthly rent for a decent place like this is £900 for a three bedroom place. Wandering over to a mortgage calculator, I note that for £900 mortgage repayments I could borrow about £130k, on a £160k place. Which would not get you anything like as nice a place as that, nor as close in.

Baffling - is buy-to-let as poor an investment elsewhere in the country?