A Gamer's home is his castle
Posted By Jeff On October 1, 2008 @ 9:45 pm
*may or may not include princess*
I don’t know about you, but Pac-Man seems to constantly have an impact on my life. It may come in the form of a T-shirt from a friend or just me eating random dots off the ground. But after a long day of chasing ghosts, wouldn’t you like to just put your feet up? Me too, so buy me this footstool thanks.
While you’re at it, buy me this medal for being epicly old skool too. Console Wars Veteran
Pizza Vending Machine!
Posted By Jeff On September 26, 2008 @ 1:43 am
Are you sick of eating the same crap out of vending machines? Does your cafeteria have…less then appetizing menus? You need to install a Wonder Pizza vending machine!
This first-of-it’s-kind machine will serve you 9″ pizzas in 2 minutes flat. Is that amazing? You betcha! Not only am I going to file it as a suggestion at my place of employment, I might have installed in my apartment (seriously I will, don’t question me)!
Check out the video here, it’ll make you hungry or you’re money back.
Seto no Hanayome
Posted By Del On September 24, 2008 @ 12:46 am
Seto no Hanayome – The Inland Sea Bride
Nagasumi Michishio, a young middle school student on a trip to visit his grandmother at the beach with his family, is drowning only to be saved by a mermaid. As if almost drowning wasn’t enough of a hassle, according to mermaid law if a person sees mermaids true for they must both be executed. Luckily for Nagasumi the mermaid who saved him, Sun Seto, has decided that in order to save both of them she wants to marry him. Sun’s father, the leader of a merman fish gang, is overly protective of his only daughter and He is constantly trying to kill Nagasumi so that he can “protect” his daughter.
Seto no Hanayome is a pretty good shounen Manga with a good mix of comedy and ecchi material to keep readers happy. There is even a pretty good anime adaption of the Manga that started in April of 2007. Seto no Hanayome is a good Manga that has a solid plot with great art.
Google Chrome
Posted By Jeff On September 8, 2008 @ 2:10 pm
Finally, Google has released a browser!
“I don’t really need a new browser, I finally have Firefox working exactly as I want it to” is going to be the first thought through many people’s minds and to be truthfully honest, I’m still kind of feeling that way now even after checking out the eye pleasing Google Chrome.
At first glance, this thing is simply beautiful, because it’s so beautifully simple. They removed all the clutter and open space that seems to built up around the buttons, helping to trim it down a lot. They also removed the menu bar up top and replaced it with two buttons beside the address/unified bar. This gives it a clean look.
The address bar has been turned into the unified bar, which allows you to type an address, search and also has suggestions. This is useful I guess, But Firefox does nearly the same thing and to be honest I don’t think I’ll be searching for “www.irbl” anytime soon. This feature may need a bit of tweaking.
One of the nicest parts about Chrome is that they’ve decided to move the tabs to the top of the page (giving it the old ‘At Ease’ look from former macs), which makes it really spiffy looking. You’re able to drag these around to order them how you like, and even drag them out to be open in a new window (though other than being able to see the web page tiny and being dragged around looking like a cool folder, I can’t see myself finding a real use for this). This simple rearranging of the tabs is the largest improvement I can see for most users.
Also, it seems they decided to rework how the browser functions. In simple terms: Each tab is it’s own program, within a program. For example: In the past when 1 tab would screw up and crash in Firefox or IE, the whole browser would crash. What Google claims is that if 1 tabs screws up in Chrome, you’ll be able to continue using the other tabs without any interruption and just the problematic tab will be closed. They’ve developed a task manager (nearly identical to that in Windows) for each tab. In fact, while writing this I got the oppertunity to put this to the test.
While having 3 tabs open (WordPress Dashboard, Google Chrome Website and Worlds in Motion) I started to play one of the demonstration videos on the Chrome site. To my surprise, it decided to lag and freeze while trying to load the video. Thinking this would be of no concern, I tabbed back to the Dashboard and was shocked to see Chrome stop responding to my clicks completely. On top of having no control over my browser at all anymore (something Google claims does not happen) I was unable to pull up the Chrome Task Manager and was left here waiting to see if I was going to have to retype this review. After about 2 minutes of huffing, a pop-up showed saying the Google Chrome tab wasn’t responding, but went away again before I was able to select an option to fix the issue and Chrome fixed itself. Isn’t this what all other browsers do already? Chances are high that if a program stops working, eventually it usually rights itself. I was severely let down by the hopes Chrome would be different and actually hold true to the ‘invincible’ idea it let off.
A nice thing, though minor to say the least, is Chrome’s default start page when you open new tabs. It creates a map of your most visited sites based on your history, recent bookmarks, closed tabs and a search box. It’s simple and I know it’s been done a million times but it might be interesting to keep around for awhile before setting back to about:blank again.
A final note, I do notice that for spell check it seems to underline the words, but right clicking doesn’t give me a dictionary of suggested spellings. I hope this gets fixed because my spelling is atrocious. What will really show the power (or just hype) of chrome will be when developers start releasing plug-ins and perhaps themes. With the lead that Firefox seems to have however on Chrome in this aspect, it’s going to take some time for Google to actually become a competitor to those who already have things set up to meet standards. That said, I think I’ll give this a run at work (simple is good when you’re doing very little but doing it a lot) but until I see some progress made I’m going to stick with my loyal FF.
Twinity
Posted By Jeff On September 3, 2008 @ 10:12 am
At first, twinity seems like it’s just about virtual world attempting to play with the big boys at Linden Labs. In that sense, you’re right, but they have a trick up their sleeve: you.
Let’s start off with accessibility, shall we? Twinity requires a download to play and is currently only available for Windows. Though this is often a big concern down the road, I’m sure they’ll have something in the works once they come out of beta (hopefully). Next is price, which because of beta is free as well as they also give you some in-game currency to play with off the hop which is always nice.
One of the biggest things I look for in these worlds is creating my avatar (yes, I’m a fashion whore leave me alone) and Twinity gave me quite a shock here: you can actually import your face onto your avatar. I thought at first it would simply match the hair color, or eye color but no, It actually shapes my face onto the avatar. To be brutally honest with you when I was doing it (be it almost 3am) I said to myself “wow, that looks familiar…holy crap that’s actually my face!” does need a bit of work on that feature, but it’s off to a good start. The base selection of clothes/hair seems to be a bit limited, but I think it’s possible to have user generated stuff so I suppose it’s not that big of a deal.
The next list is things to do. My main interest is often creating a ‘home’ or ‘apartment’ and Twinity isn’t too bad at that. I was able to create a place that is going to charge me 47G (in-game currency) a month which isn’t too bad given that I was given 3000 when I signed up. Users have the ability to choose layout of the place, the style (apartment, office, cafe, etc) as well as location. It was the location here that shocked me, as they’re real places. I chose an apartment then for skyline chose Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Well to my surprise when I looked out the apartment window I saw the CN Tower. Now that is cool. On top of that, it has the basic abilities to wallpaper each wall, create the objects you want and has a nice list of textures you can buy as well as make and upload your own.
The interface and controls are two things that can use some work. Most of the things you need to do in Twinity involves right clicking, which is kind of annoying. On top of that, when the menu loads you have 3 different options for the one thing and none of them make a lot of sense (change texture, apply texture, change texture settings). After playing with them, you get used to them but some better wording would help, since all I wanted to do was make the walls red. The next issue is camera control, it doesn’t follow so you constantly have to be right clicking and swinging the camera around with the mouse as you walk which is annoying beyond belief. A little more user-friendlyness would be appreciated.
Another annoyance of Twinity is the fact that is a complete memory-hog and runs very slow. I understand it’s in beta, but the fact that it runs as though we were still in 1998 annoys me to the point of not wanting to play this any more. Every time I load something, I get a spinning loading icon, even if I’ve already loaded this window 3 times. A caching feature would be a nice touch.
There was also some options and talk about making movies, but at the time of this post I didn’t have the patience to check it out given how incredibly slow in seems to run.
All in all I think Twinity may show some potential for some users who want the ‘realistic’ approach to virtual worlds, but given that is lacks the friendly approach to casual players I can’t see it taking visitors away from competitors. Perhaps further along when it comes out of beta we can decide if it will actually become a player or not.
Referral Risk x2
Posted By Jeff On September 1, 2008 @ 3:42 pm
Readers, I need your help to rule the world!
I’ve spent the past…god knows how long setting some SEO stuff up and retagging some things. Along the way I came across and older post from years ago called Troops, Fall In with a link to referral risk on it. This was cool, so it’s coming back.
What can you do? Click somewhere on the map below, it will conquer the part of the map on behalf of I R Blogging. Click a lot of you really love us. Those who help out leave a comment so I can send you your purple heart.
Ping.fm
Posted By Jeff On August 25, 2008 @ 1:07 am
Ping.fm is the best sNetwork manager EVER!
Ok, maybe not ever, but it’s really really good. Ping allows you to take tons of your microblogging, blogging, and status updating service and put them all as 1. This way you can update on Ping, and it will update everywhere (or only on 1 spot) without you actually having to go there.
What’s nice about this is that it has the different types separated, so you don’t end up making a blog post simply saying “I have cake” where as it should have maybe gone to status updating. What is nice about this aside from being able to post in one spot, with the aide of the PingPress.fm wordpress plugin I can now send out a small message to all of those networks telling people to come see my post; or in the cases of the blogging networks it hits, actually posting it (woot for posting on multiple platforms at once!)
Ping.fm is currently in beta, so you’ll need a beta key which is “vivalaping” right now. If it doesn’t work when you read this and it’s still requiring a key, comment on the post and I’ll update it accordingly.
Smallworld
Posted By Jeff On August 21, 2008 @ 8:18 pm
Smallworld is a new MMO virtual world currently in Beta out by Outsmart. Unlike many Virtual worlds, there is no downloads but also isn’t horrible 3D graphics. I made a list of the Pros and Con that I could think of. I’d highly recommend everybody to check it out, it’s one of the best I’ve seen it q very long time. With such a nice build, I’m hoping this doesn’t end up being another one that goes from Beta to Nada.
PROS
CONS
Virtual worlds timeline (with dipity)
Posted By Jeff On August 19, 2008 @ 1:27 pm
An amazingly, well put together timeline of anything relating to virtual worlds or simulations. Reading over it, there was even somethings I missed which is something to be said.
Virtual worlds timeline (with dipity)
Luupi
Posted By Jeff On August 27, 2008 @ 3:08 pm
“SOCIAL NETWORKING – THE WAY IT SHOULD BE…
Sick of superpoking? Over being a pirate? Why not just be you! From the maker?s of Habbo, Luupi is for the real people behind their virtual lives.”
Luupi is loopy? Nope, they’re completely freaking retarded.
I received an email in one of my ancient alts awhile ago from out good friends at Sulake, makers of Habbo Hotel, saying they came out with a new Facebook clone called Luupi. I pity the world it we’re letting Sulake breed. This site looks really bland (though I do like the colors and logo).
The site lets users upload pictures and videos and put captions under them. There doesn’t seem to be a huge profile option, so I think it would be better to refer to it as a FlickR clone. Aside from uploading images and giving them captions, users are able to join ‘communities’ and leave messages/chat through a ‘comments’ window which most of us know as a message board.
Users also have the option to set mottos/moods as that in facebook; Yippie.
Lets hope they have better management with this than they ended up having on happy. Keep it clean guys. And yeah, I joined just so I can put my name in for the free camera
Tags: comment, Email, facebook, FlickR, Habbo, habbo hotel, Luupi, Sick, social networking, Sulake