eRepublik: The New World
Have you ever wished that you could live your life all over again? I have!
The idea behind eRepublik is that you can create an account and live it day to day as you would in real life. Boring? Nah.
After inital sign up you’re forced to pick a job and horrible wages and work. Sucky? For now. After you work two days you’ll level and get something a little better as well as join the army and train. At level 5 (I think it was 5) you can participate in any wars your country is in. Eventually you can vote for political parties and what not as well.
Personally I’m still pretty newb at this, but looking into the future of the game with user-created political parties, different countries and regions and fluctuating economies it can hold a lot of potential. A key factor that interests me is that the game is based on real-time logic, so those with more time on their hands won’t overrun the game.
I’d recommend to give it a try for a week or so, see how it plays out. I like the idea of being able to represent my region. Look me up while you’re there, name is Egen.
IRB: Site reconstruction
Hey guys, I’m going to be redoing I R Blogging over the next week or so to make it better. Some of the changes that are going to happen involve:
A) A new layout: The one we have is falling apart and being held together with plugins and duct tape.
B) Complete removal of plugins and addons: We’re going to start fresh. I’m going to take out anything that might be causing the site to run slow, or be unorganized. This includes revamping the search tool to allow me to see exactly what you guys want and target posts better to what you want to read
C) Retagging: I’m going to try to make my way through every post on the blog and retag it. This will enable you to find related posts quicker and faster.
D) New logo: It’s been almost a year and we still don’t have one. I’ll try to fix this, if you have any ideas feel free to shoot me an email.
Thanks for hanging in there, Jeff.
Movie: Role Models (Review)
Role Models is a good example of what a true comedy movie needs to be: Funny. I’m not exactly sure where this genre has been hiding the last year or so, but there has been an evil being trying to masquerade as one. It’s about time that Comedy return to slay the dull and Role Models is just the one to do it.
The plot of Role Models involves two friends, Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott). Danny’s girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks) breaks up with him, the guys break some laws and are assigned to community service. Their punishment was to take part in a mentoring program lead by Gayle Sweeny (Jane Lynch), ex crack addict and quite frankly pretty insane. Danny gets paired up with a role-playing knight of LAIRE named Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), and Wheeler gets the joy of hanging out with the foul mouthed 10-year old nightmare that is Ronnie (Bobb’e J. Thompson).
This movie comes off as a simply fun movie. The characters are well written and there is enough of a consistency of humorous parts that the movie never seems to settle down. Development of the character relationships flowed smoothly, without ever missing a beat that this movie is supposed to be funny (a rare thing lately). A good combination of banter between the characters lead this to it’s success, and a few shoots of Scott getting hit in the nuts didn’t hurt.
Though fairly new to the stage, Thompson and Mintz-Plasse (yes, he was McLovin’!) did a fantastic job and if nothing else may have even cast a shadow on the veteran acting skills of Scott, Raul and Lynch combined. I can only look forward to seeing some more greatness out of these two.
Overall, I was really impressed with this movie. Being that comedies are by far my favorite genre out there, it’s nice to see that there are actually still some people working in Hollywood that are willing to put some effort into making one solid movie instead of trying to squish it together with another one (ie romantic-comedy) to get a bigger audience. If you build it well, they will come. And did I mention they dressed up as KISS?
Final Score: 9/10 ‘Almost as good as seeing her whispering eye’.
Movie: Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Review)
Steve Carr’s Paul Blart: Mall Cop, starring King of Queens Kevin James and hottie Jayma Mays, comes off as a pretty funny movie in the trailer. Fair warning, it’s not.
The whole idea of this movie is that an overweight failure of a security guard is caught up in an organized crime in the mall and has to stop it on his own. Throw in a crush on a kiosk worker and low blood sugar and you have yourself a movie. Unfortunately, they forgot to include good writing with this story line, which leaves the movie with a hollow half-assed feel to it.
The acting itself really wasn’t that bad, but the characters just didn’t have enough substance to carry the movie. If they weren’t going to give us a hardcore decent fulfilling plot, at least give us some character background or slapstick humor. Given that these are the top two factors needed for a successful movie of these genre, it’s fair to say that the mark was missed on this feature.
All in all, Mall cop seems to fall short of being a comedy as I only found myself with one chuckle the entire course of the movie (which was also in the trailer, go figure). The only real entertaining thing that I found was that on an episode of King of Queens Kevin James was forced to shave his mustache because his wife said he “Looked like a motorcycle cop”. Oh how things repeat themselves.
Final score: 3/10 ‘Buy this from the dollar bin when it shows up at the dirt mall’.
Games: No More Heroes
Right off the bat, this game is SO not a kids game. If anything, No More Heroes
UBI Soft’s No More Heroes’ gameplay is a typical beat ‘em up, but with a very adult-oriented theme. Instead of trying to save a princess, you’re killing other assassins so that you can be number one. That’s it. Along the way, you’re forced to do odd jobs like collect coconuts and mow lawns to earn money so that you can enter the battle against the next ranked assassin. This keeps the game from getting too boring too quick. (Imagine his resume: Travis Touchdown, Assassin and part-time lawn mower)
The style of this game is strange at first glance as it seems to have a choppy-anime’ish look. After around 15 minutes or so, they seem to smooth out and you realize how incredibly amazing the look of this game really is. The dialoge between characters in the cinematic scenes are fantastic and incredibly witty. However, during the game the taunts get quite repetitive, and could use some fine tuning (even if that just means being removed completely).
The controls are generally just push the button or hold the button down to attack. You can either attack with punch/kick and wrestling moves (B) or with your bean katana (A). an interesting twist on the controls though is that for wrestling moves you have to move the wiimote and nunchuck in the same direction to do the attack. Also with the beam katana when in a draw, you draw circles to win it. It’s strange, but to be expected for the Nintendo Wii. Overall fairly easy controls to get used to.
One of the coolest things about this game is that he has a cell phone. Whenever you get a call on his phone, your wiimote vibrates. When you push the button to answer it, the voice (other person on the phone) comes through on the wiimore speaker, not the TV speakers. So you actually have to hold the wiimote up to the side of your head. Strange? Yes. Entertaining? You betcha!
Though only about 1/3 of the way through the plot, I’m having one problem with this game when it comes to the missions. If a mission is failed, you can not simply ‘retry’, you have to go all the way back to where the mission was picked up, get it again, then go try the mission once more. This is frustrating when it takes you 10 minutes to travel between the two locations. Though the missions are pretty easy for the most part, it would be nice if they didn’t waste my time with the odd one that I mess up on.
The game is fairly cheap to pick up (Amazon has it for $20) so might be worth adding to your collection. Given that 95% of the games currently out for the Wii are targeted at family/children this is a nice change. I’d recommend it if not just to be able to say you own it, it’s right up there with Conker’s Bad Fur Day for N64.
My Experience leaving Kingston
Leaving Kingston at 9:13am, I was expecting to be in Toronto by noon. Sadly, that’s not the way it worked out. Let me lay down the timeline.
7:50am – Woke up on time, so far so good. Already packed even!
8:15am – Called Modern Taxi to request transport to Via Rail train station.
8:30am – Called Modern Taxi again about taxi.
8:40am – Realized mobile was out of credit (this comes into play again later)
8:50am – Modern Taxi shows up! Back on schedule, woot.
9:03am – Arrive Via Rail station, check baggage and wait for train. Train is 15 minutes late, so check email from station.
9:30am – Train arrives, board as normal. Still confident about schedule! Though peeved that train wi-fi is iffy today, confident this won’t hurt day.
~10:40am – Big bump. Wi-fi dies totally.
~10:50am – Train slows, then stops. Odd, but being a railroaders daughter, I don’t question it. A stopped train is better than a train moving when it shouldn’t. 
~11:00am – Via Rep announces that a CAR hit our TRAIN. Will be detained indefinitely.
11:47am – Arr Bellville, ON, approximately 2 hours from Toronto. Train was meant to be in Toronto at this time.
12:30pm – Via Rep announces OPP are speaking to engineers and will be detained at least another half hour, possibly more.
12:45pm – Train cleared by OPP and allowed to continue. Approximate arrival time in Toronto, 2pm. (How the math worked out on this I’m not sure, but
During the time we were stopped in Bellville, the Via personnel on the train were very polite – one even stopped to explain to me where Bellville was in relation to Toronto after hearing I wasn’t from Ontario! Beverage and snack service continued during stop time, and free snacks were handed out.
Very luckily, the woman in the car that hit the train was shaken up but not hurt. From what I saw, Via Rail acted very responsibly in their reaction to this situation, and as per their policy, offered a 50% discount off your next fare with your receipt. This doesn’t help me in the slightest as an American citizen visiting Ontario, but I appreciate it nonetheless. I was told by a member of staff I can request a refund for my wi-fi purchase since it was down, which is a plus in my book.
All in all, when this situation started to unfold, I was prepared to write a scathing criticism of Via Rail, as I was certain they’d find a way to cock up the situation the way amtrak so frequently does. However, I have nothing but good things to say about the company and their staff and will continue to travel Via Rail on future trips to the “Great White North” and will recommend it to friends as well.
NOTE – I had a flight out of Toronto at 2pm. Managed to talk US Airways into changing it to Wednesday, January 21st at no charge to me, which goes to show that american airline companies aren’t all bad! Would still prefer to fly Air Canada, but eh, maybe next time. 
Cheers to my brilliant friend that booked me a hotel room for the night on Priceline.com for $50, you’re fabulous!
Tools: Live Labs Thumbtack
At first glance, Thumbtack from Live Labs looks pretty interesting (see video below). It’s supposed to allow you to highlight anything on webpage, copy it, then paste it on to (essentially) a virtual cork board. My first thought was “great, I can use it when collecting ideas for content to blog about”. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite live up to my expectations.
For the purpose of testing Thumbtack, I decided to imagine that I was planning a trip to Egypt. I was able to copy text, so I could get an idea of the terrain and what the weather would be like. I even managed to copy the lyrics to the national anthem. However, when I tried copying a picture, I was told “Your browser security settings have prevented us from accessing your clipboard. Please paste again by pressing ctrl + V”. Doing this doesn’t allow pictures.
Examining further into the issue, it seems you can only copy and paste text using Mozilla Firefox. To be able to do anything further, you must be using Internet Explorer (IE). On top of not being able to copy images, when pasting it doesn’t even keep format of the text copied, it is often unformatted.
Thumbtack does allow users to publish and share their notes, however given that it is simply just text at this time if fails to be of service. If I have to email them a link to text, I might as well just email them the text itself.
A simple conclusion is that this service falls short of being useful, just as Google Notebook was before support was canceled. If you truly need to keep notes, just use notepad.
Games: Battle of the Bands
As promised last week, today we’re going to take a look at
Battle of the Bands
At first glance, this game looks like it can be a lot of fun. Well, it can once you get past the lack of content in the game itself. Lets have a look at some of what the game has to offer:
- A decent variety of songs (of course, no where near some of the more costlier games on the market)
- The joy of rhythm based games without the need to have any extras hanging around
- A quirky variation to the plain old ‘hit the notes and you win’ formula
Battle of the Bands offers some classic favorite songs such as Black Betty and Jungle Boogie; mixed in with some fun songs like Feel Good Inc. by the Gorillaz and Blitzkrieg Bop by the Ramones. Though the songs are few, they’re good to play.
Unlike some of the other rhythm games, Battle of the Bands uses only the wiimote to hit notes (left/right/down/stab/shake). It’s a fun concept, though a little tiring on the wrist at first on some of the higher difficulty levels. Also, if the wiimote is tilted it often doesn’t hit the note. Once you get used to this though, it’s a fantastic workout for your wrist.
Above all else what makes this game worth playing is the presentation itself. The game is one big battle, so you’re always in a versus mode against either an AI or a Player. Each band gets to choose a style of music, for example country and hip-hop. While playing, if the country team is in the lead the song which they’re playing will be done in a ‘country version’ (IE redneck accent and banjos). As the teams battle, the song jumps between the two bands’ type. It’s a riot when the types are conflicting as they switch seamlessly.
Another cooky part of this game is that you can attack the opposing player. Teams get the option of 3 weapons to use, all with different steak counts. Once a team has a streak to the length of the weapon, it will fire causing the other player to miss a beat if not blocked (hitting B). It’s quite off tilt to have a battle of the bands where you can shoot lightning at the drummer on the other team, but a blast none the less.
Overall, I can understand why this game is so cheap (I got it for $15) because though the concept of it is amazing, the final execution of it is lacking. If they had access to a larger library, or even if they had more modes or unlockable content it may have made it a little more interesting. For what the game is though, it was worth the cash and I’d suggest it to any music lover out there if not only for the music player feature that allows you to switch between styles without having to actually play the game.
Rock Band 2 Update – Downloadable Content Comes to the Wii!
Today is a day that will be rejoiced upon, as millions of Wii-geeks world wide will turn their little white boxes into even more of a rocking machine.
Nintendo and Harmonix, apparently holding true to their word to have the Music Store open for business by early 2009, today released the first wave of downloadable content for Rock Band 2 wii users. This does include a number of free songs that were given to Xbox 360 and PS3 users when the game was released, as well as songs from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
Songs are available for 200 wii points, which averages out to $2.00 US per song.
A list of the songs released today in the Wii music store (free songs marked with **):
WarmUp
Time is Running Out – Papa Roach
Simple Man – Lynyrd Skynyrd
Buddy Holly – Weezer
Apprentice
Cheeseburger in Paradise – Jimmy Buffett
El Scorcho – Weezer
**Burn you down – Opiate For the Masses
The Kill – 30 Seconds to Mars
All the Small Things – Blink 182
**Crazy Tuesday – TheNewNo2
**Bounce – The Cab
**Young – Hollywood Undead
**I’m gone I’m Going – Lesley Roy
Crushcrushcrush – Paramore
Interstate Love Song – Stone Temple Pilots
**If I ain’t Got You – The Len Price 3
**Database Corrupted – Dealership
Baba O’riley – The Who
Call Me – Blondie
**Magnetic Baby – Semi Precious Weapons
Solid
This Ain’t a Scene – Fall Out Boy
**Give It To Me – Cockail Slippers
Wonderwall – Oasis
Snow (Hey Oh) – Red Hot Chili Peppers
Sex Type Thing – Stone Temple Pilots
**Ashes To Fire – Ghost Hounds
**The Feeling – Kutless
**Sons and Daughters – The 88
Rock and Roll Band – Boston
More Than A Feeling – Boston
Beethoven’s C*** – Serj Tankian
Zero – Smashing Pumpkins
**Get It On – The Chevelles
**The Time is Wrong – Tickle Me Pink
Hammerhead – The Offspring
Message in a Bottle – The Police
Moderate
Move Along – All American Rejects
Saints of Los Angeles – Motley Crue
Inside The Fire – Disturbed
Afterlife – Avenged Sevenfold
Shockwave – Black Tide
Working Man – Rush
**I.V. – X Japan
**I Wanna Be Your Man – EndEverAfter
**Like a Fool – Shaimus
Hysteria – Muse
Challenging
**Desperate Times, Desperate Measures – UnderOath
…And Justice for All – Metallica
**No Regrets – Authority Zero
Nightmare
The Perfect Drug – Nine Inch Nails
**Prequel to the Sequel – Between the Buried and Me
I’ve noticed that several songs (the one that I can think of the name to is Margaritaville) is now missing from the Music Store – it was there this afternoon for 200 wii points.
For those who are about to rock (harder), wii salute you.
Christmas Clothing
With the holidays now coming to a close, I’m sure many of you are cleaning out your closets to make room for the snazy (or fugly as it often is) new clothing that friends and family bought you this year. I know myself I got a pretty good selection this year…and a bunch of socks. I think I’ve been wearing this hoodie the most lately, love the style of it.
But like every year, you know there are some cool things you see that you just don’t get. For instance, lets start with these Freehands gloves. What makes these different from other gloves on the market is that both the pointer and thumb part of the gloves can be easily folded down. This is a great idea allowing those that need to use their fingers for things like texting and typing while outside this winter. No more need to take off the gloves (or type with your nose!). I’ll be getting a pair of these myself, they look fantastic. How about you?
But now with warm hands you need a warm head. How about throwing some top secret tunes in there as well with the Headphone beanie from ThinkGeek. What’s cooler than being able to listen to music at work? Tricking people into thinking you can hear them of course.
And last, but surely not least, you have your jacket. I’d suggest a jacket from Ardica [Via Gizmodo]. Not only do they come with built in heaters, but they can also charge your electronics while you wear it. What better way to stay warm while waiting outside the movie theater for the next superhero film right?
So that’s my quick winter recap. So what did you guys get for Christmas this year? Let me know in the comments below.
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