Red Dead Redemption, Alpha Protocol, two recently released video games. Countless others too. What do they all have in common? The lack of a quick save feature, and only being able to save the game on various checkpoints and/or special locations.
Now, especially for such sandbox style games where your decisions matter (be they shooting people in Red Dead, or choices in the dialog system of Alpha Protocol), I can understand not having a quick save feature. I remember the times when shooters on PC still had a quick save and load feature that was always active. I also remember killing an enemy, quicksaving, killing the next enemy, quicksaving, getting spotted by a camera when I was supposed to be sneaky, quickloading, not getting spotted by the same camera, killing the next enemy, and quicksaving again.
I can understand why developers don’t want that to happen. And as a player too. It takes the challenge out of the game. Shenmue didn’t have a quick save feature for that matter either. While you could only save your regular game in your house, at the same time it did allow players to save all the time when they really needed to save right now. The only catch? It was a “save and exit” feature. As soon as you used the save-anytime-anywhere feature, the game would exit after saving without being able to play further. Perfect when you look at the clock and it’s 1 a.m. again and you need to get up in the morning. And all the other times when you just want to exit (and of course save your current progress, not the one from the last checkpoint) the game right now and not play the 15-30 minutes till the next checkpoint / chance to get to the saving location.
I can’t understand why there isn’t a single game since Shenmue - that didn’t have a quick save feature - that included this save and exit functionality. It would be such a simple and elegant solution for the “when do I let the player save” question.
Matching my last post about those annoying anti piracy ads, I’ve found this gem in the depths of the web. A short AMV by Doki Doki Productions. It’s called Plunder Propaganda and it’s a hilarious spoof of the usual ads:
A high quality version is available at AnimeMusicVideos.org (after a free registration you can download each and every AMV on the site, which are tens of thousands).
While browsing one of my favorite webcomics, xkcd (a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language) I stumbled upon a sideproject of its author. The project are 3 minimalistic (in terms of design, not content!) websites which have only one goal: to find out The Funniest, The Cutest, and The Fairest pictures of all the internet.
A noble goal you might say, but what on these sites is different than all the other countless funny-picture-websites? Well first of all there are no comments, and not much design around the site. On all three sites you get a white page with a little introduction text and then 2 pictures at random, and you click the one you think the funniest, cutest, fairest. A system in the background registers all clicks and makes a ranking out of them.
And even if you are not particulary interested in the ranking of certain pictures, the sites still offer longtime fun and amazement in those boring hours. And while I really got good laughs out of The Funniest the pictures I adore most are from The Fairest because it shows absolutely awe-inspiring nature pictures.
While you can argue if this is funny…
…you can’t really argue that this is an really fair picture:
There’s good promotion. There’s epic promotion. And then there’s promotion that sways you to take initiative yourself.
The last kind is probably the best one, because when you talk about and think actively about a product, whatever it may be, you are more inclined to remember it than if you just saw an ad on TV while zapping. And “thinking about” brings me back to the topic at hand:
I can’t imagine a better promotion for a blog. Because what do bloggers need? Computers. Better yet, Laptops so they can blog wherever they are at the moment. And if the Laptop is shock resistent and weatherproof that is just a huge bonus.
The only thing you have to do to have a shot at the price is blog about the contest. And even if you don’t win, you get a free link back to your blog from the Thinking Blog, which has according to the site, more than 1600 subscribers and I-don’t-know-how-much daily visits. So it’s a win-win situation!
What are you waiting for?
P.S. The line “a winner is you”, which was voted fifth worst video game line ever, is from Pro Wrestling on the NES.
All it takes is a good or just innovative video, to get the fans going in making their own interpretation of it. And sometimes the mockup of the video is even better or at least more funny than the original, as with this example:
Step 1: Take a rock video
Step 2: ???
Step 3a: Make a similar song and video referencing oversold and former popstars instead of living-on-the-edge rockstars, and use image samples instead of real video footage to make is look poorly done, but focus on the lyrics:
Step 3b: Use the exact same video, but add characters from a game to it, and write a song about the game:
Sometimes people get on your nerves. That is perfectly fine, not everyone will always have a real good time with everyone else. But when your roommates and coworkers become a major source of your frustration, sometimes you just have to vent. And the blog Passive Aggressive Notes is a witness of such actions. The guys over there hunt all the notes that stressted out people write for their neighbords, roommates or coworkers when they are fed up with their action. Such nice notes include:
Oh, how passivly aggressive!
The website Dumb Little Man posted 20 Tips for More Efficient Google Searches recently.
While most of the at least I have known long enough, they may be new to some not as well-versed with google or boolean operations in general. Anyhow, I still learned a few new tricks to get better results there, like using the tilde (~) for similar words or using double-dots (..) as a num-range indicator.
Lifehack.org wrote about 15 cool Firefox tricks. While half of them, like keyboard shortcuts and making the icons smaller via the view-menu are rather obvious, and at least by my definition, not especially cool, other like speeding up the fox via HTTP-pipelining and limiting Firefox’s RAM usage are really helpful in configuring the browser. In the same vain is the tip for writing Firefox to the harddrive when minimized so it does not use any more RAM at all - that one really is neat!
I am pretty much swamped with work right now, programming the interface and protocoll for our new machine, doing the system administration stuff (as there is always something wrong when Windows systems are involved) so I’ll keep the posts short and witty for a while. But the long stuff will come back too, I promise.
Sometimes you just have to wonder in what order newsstations and newsmags put their respective news. Not that there aren’t enough newsworthy stories happening all around the globe every day, with people (still) getting killed in Iraq, Dafur, etc. and all the political stuff that happens around the clock.
But somehow CNN probably thought it would interest much more people to hear about “Sheryl Crows toilet paper square”, “Heather Mills tumbling out of a dance show” or that a suspect bolted out of a local court room “hollering for mom”.
I never really thought of CNN as one of the best news around, there are lots of better informed ones, and especially more objective ones. But this frontpage just screams “boulevard tabloid” to me:
We all knew the Master Chief from Halo was badass. As was Samus Aran from Metroid long, long, before him. Now the time has finally come for the two to battle it out in a big city brawl. And to make things worse the hive is also swarming there.
So much for the “story” of this brilliant machinima. What really made my jaw drop here is the animation which is top-notch. Never before have I seen such fluid and perfectly choreographed fighting in a fan-made game video. There are a few scenes reminiscent of the Matrix action, but other than that it looks very original. As if the fight between Master Chief and Samus wasn’t enough of brilliantly choreographed styling, when the two have to team up against the hive they let hell loose upon them, double-team style.
I just wish that you would actually be able to do all these crazy moves in the video games!
Sorry for not updating in a while but I’m really stressed completely at work since a new project started last week, and we got meetings and stuff all over the place… gotta drive 2 hours to another one tomorrow 6 o’clock in the morning… *sigh*
Anyway, I saw the movie 300 a few days ago, and while I really wanted to like it, the best thing about it I can say is that the action was very cool. Story- and character-wise I would have anticipated more from the creator of Sin City.
But nontheless, this edition of VG Cats is genius, mixing Mario and the probably most-shown-scene from 300:
The guys over at JibJab got some great new animations going. As always, they parody political (mis-)happenings. The first one, “What we call the news” shows how TV news humbly started in the ’60s and what they have become today. The second clip “Nuckin’ Futs” is a summary of the events in 2006, sung by children.
Sit back and enjoy the show:
But the franchise isn’t coming back to CD-ROM games (or DVD-games nowadays), now it is a free online flash-game in your browser. Sweet!
Cookie, You don’t know Jack’s moderator of old is back with it too, and he is as witty and as cruel if you answer a question wrong as ever. Each week a new episode is released featuring several questions, including a DisOrDat as well as Jack Attack round.
So wherever you are, be it at work, at home or even at the beach, go to www.youdontknowjack.com and play a few rounds of this great game, you might even learn something (you will laugh, that is for sure).
Superman and Batman discuss Supermans cheesy actions. Especially the comment “Made out with Lois a little bit, flew out into space, smiled for the camera” when Batman asks what Superman was up to made me crack up.
Did you know that there used to be a large forest swastika in germany, where some foresters planted larch trees in a pine area so people flying over it would see the swastika? Have you ever heard of the little austrian town of Fucking? Have you been to the penis museum in iceland? Seen the tree that owns itself? Did you know that the pin that holds the rotor to the mast of some helicopters is called a Jesus nut?
Students at the University of East Anglia in the UK are working on the Wikipedia online encyclopedia as part of their degree course. Wikipedia has recently divided academics when a US university banned the site because of fears that students could reproduce content from it without checking its accuracy. But there is hope when a project such as the middle east course embeds Wikipedia into university courses with tasks like “edit eight articles and then write your own article concerning the subject”.
Gmail is just great. I seriously could not manage my daily emails anymore without the conversation view it offers, and of course the best thing is the powerful labeling/taging capability. Instead of moving your mails into specific folders, you just assign (one or more) labels to them, so one mail can show up in more than one of the virtual label folders. This is a great way to organize your mail, and I still struggle with the normal IMAP email I have at my new workplace, at least there are a few extensions, particularly GmailUI for Thunderbird that make the free mail program at least behave like gmail (it uses the same shortcuts with the extension and archiving is also done in the same way, although labels still are missing).
But back to gmail itself: There is even more to it, you can use it as your personal nerve center, doing things such as: Using gmail as a personal database, getting real-time news updates, bookmarking, calendar and todo lists, and even write blog entries via mail.
M. I. T. Almost everyone interested in computers or technics in general will have heard those 3 magic letters. MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Only a few able are allowed to study there every year. But now you can at least be like the little mouse watching in the classroom: MIT OpenCourseWare enables everyone, and even without registration, to view and download the lot of MIT courses from the last years. Even the student presentations and audio and video files from teachers are available there.
The courses they provide are manifold: ranging from “Aeronautics and Astronautics” through “Music and Theater Arts” to “Writing and Humanistic Studies”. A great opportunity for everyone that wants to learn new and exciting stuff!
… would normally be out of our reach. Yes, you can argue that about 4 million people are going to have sex just now, 15 million are sleeping in their bed, and around 9 million are surfing the web just this moment. Don’t sue me on these numbers, they are completely unrelated, and everyone knows 96% of statistics are made up on the spot anyway.
If you would like to take a look at what random people from all over the world are doing just now, the new fad when it comes to publishing your thoughts online might be Twitter.
It’s a sort-of-blog where you can register and then answer the only question they ask you there, over and over: “What are you doing?”
Then you will see yourself in the twitter timeline together with what all the other user have done or are doing at the moment. More or less another service mankind didn’t really need to surive, but a fancy thing nontheless. I like to give the site a visit whenever I am bored on the net, i.e. when I’m at work.
Having trouble keeping up-to-date with your favourite weblogs and/or news sites? Don’t want to install just another program to read those handy RSS feeds almost any website has today?
Then maybe RSSfwd is for you. It’s a service where you just have to enter a feed and an e-mail address and the magic is right on its way to you: From now on you will get the updates on the selected feed as e-mails - especially handy if you got sophisticated labels and filters in your mail application (web Gmail that would be for me) so your feeds get automatically categorized and archived.
And because I mentioned filters and Gmail, a quick and last aside: Using Gmail to… [ExtremeTech article]
As they say, the best advertisements come from Britain. As I say, the best comedy comes from Britain, too. These 2 ads show that they can do both. The Johnny Walker “Android” one is a little bit melancholy but it does feature a strong message to the viewer - as does the “Get a Mac” ad, but the latter carries a much more comedic undertone. But watch for yourself:
Men vs women. Testicles vs Mammaries. Drying with a towel the size of a small state vs making a shampoo mohawk. It is always the same with the eternal gender struggle. But more often than not the very differences between us are a source of comedy. As in this little video:
DJ Wiij [prounounced deejay wee-jay]: the original bluetooth wireless dj control setup using Wiimotes.
A very interesting application for the Wii remote controller indeed. Check out the technique and features over at the site DJ Wiij.
They are using a freeware application called GlovePie, that is able to recognize the Wii remote controller as an input device for the computer, and with that program they than control the (digital) turntables. There are a few scripts already available for GlovePie, and it features much more than just the Wiimote, e.g. Gamepads, Joysticks and even VR Gloves.
Just if you are wondering what the banner above this line displays, it’s the Google logo in braille. Anyway, I am using Google mail since about half a year now, after a presentation at a friends place convinced me that sorting mails by conversation is extremly convenient. The only not-so-good thing about gmail is that is does not support PGP encryption. But there are some clever plugins (mostly javascript) that enable the webmail to do even more than it normally does:
First, there’s the complete collection over at GmailTips.com and a very interesting guide I found on another blog - Hack Attack: become a Gmail master. The latter site, Lifehacker is especially nice for so-called geeks and in general everyone who wants to be more efficient when using their computer.
The Guinness book of records sure has some strange records in it, like putting 60+ cigarettes in your mouth at the same time and such feats. But this one sadly tops them all:
That kind of deadpan humor happens when dynamic pages get created with database entries sometimes. I don’t think that anyone who wants to “break” this “record” would first announce it to Guinness…
I already wrote about how funny the 30-second Bunny Theatre from Angry Alien Productions are almost two years ago. I almost forgot about the sheer craziness that evolves when bunnies re-enact famous movies, and when they don’t have more than 30 seconds time to pull off the particular story. So without much further ado, I’ll just take you to the latest entries from the troupe:
The most laughs I definately got out of the Star Wars one: not only does it feature outtakes which no other of the features has, but there is a short frame of the famous Cantina, and the bunnies hum the cantina melody - how sweet! And of course the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs ones are great too, especially the scene with Butch, Marsellus and Zed from the first one. Here all the bunnies have to say after the humiliating scene is “We cool?” - “We cool!”
LiteStep, Sphere XP, GeoShell, I have tried lots of alternative shell replacements for the user-unfriendly and unefficient Windows Explorer. As an aside, I still cannot figure out, why Microsoft has to make explorer.exe the shell, file manager and browser - if one of them crashes it will pull the others down with it into the data abyss. Anyway, I was never truly satisfied with any of the shell replacements - Talisman was too slow and clunky, LiteStep (while being probably the most-customizable of them all) too bug-laden, Sphere XP too funky and GeoShell was on the side of LiteStep. Also there is always the problem when you have a system crash or need to reinstall the OS, all your flashy desktop features will probably be lost in oblivion, and some applications and especially full-screen ones don’t work too well with the shells.
But now I may have found revelation where I did not suspect it - the data storage folder on the netdrive of my new workplace. The name of this little application is Desktop Sidebar. It is not a shell replacement, rather a shell enhancement. A sticky sidebar for the left or right (or anywhere else) side of the desktop which is highly customizable. Although it isn’t Open Source it still is Freeware and doesn’t come with any spyware attached. On the website there is also a community place with lots of useful plugins and skins.
This sidebar is just like a regular application that can be loaded when Windows starts, but it also can fully replace the standard taskbar if you choose to. I for myself really like to have a neatly ordered space on my desktop where I see if I got new mails (and from whom and about what those are), control Winamp, check the latest news, blogs and comics via RSS feeds, play a little sudoku, and of course - manage up to 4 virtual desktops, which no “cool” shell should miss.
So if you are generally interested in making your workspace more efficient (and stylish if you like) you should give the sidebar a try.
Just recently I found a website which offers “free” cellphone games for downloading, without any subscription added. I put the free in quotes because usually when it comes to software for cellphones, smartphones and PDAs nothing is completely free of charge. Anyway, the name of the site: GameJump. The premise of the site: Offering free cellphone games with the presumption that advertisements will pay the bills.
So I got there, all psyched up about all the free games that are about to happen to my new cellphone, and although it was not exactly what I expected, it was a pleasent surprise non the less.
When I thought “ads pay the bills” I thought there would be a lot of pop-ups and annoying banners on the website where you download the cellphone games. But there was just the usual one or two banners per page. Flash-forward to downloading the first game, Ghost Hunter RPG (a little roleplaying game with turn-based battles á la Final Fantasy) - you don’t have to register on the site, you don’t even have to specify your carrier and phone number. There is the option to do so, and then you will get your game sent to your phone ASAP, but the second and third option provide safer results: getting a link that you can surf to with your cellphone to download the file directly, or just downloading the file onto the computer and sending it to the phone via USB, bluetooth, etc.
So far, so good. I entered the quick-link into the phone, and moments later I had the game saved on the memory stick.
Upon first starting the game came the great revelation then - the game wants (sometimes, not every start) to shortly connect to the internet in order to load an (picture) advertisement before you’ll play it.
That information really took me by surprise because I haven’t seen such a business model before. And I have to admit, although I hate aggressive advertisement, this one is alright - no flashy screen, no sound, just some message from your “sponsor”. And with todays competition on the cellphone market (at least in europe) GPRS transfer prices aren’t high anymore, so downloading a simple picture won’t cost more than sending a simpleSMS.
So, for everyone who is disgusted by the horrible subscription fees that Jamba/Jamster & Co charge, but is still interested in pastime games, GameJump may be a very wellcome alternative.
Until then, may your MP3 ringtones not give any eldery person a heart attack upon ringing.
Yeah yeah, World of Warcraft, the greatest timesink since women, just recently got an addon. And it is even more addictive than the old program. Everything seems to be not easier, but not as time-consuming as it was in the original. Blizzard really tried to up the ante on quests, instances and the world itself. Instances are faster, there are no more 40 man raids which were an administratorial catastrophe most of the time, and much more little fancy things that make life in Azeroth and now the Outlands easier.
But because every RPG addon needs a new class and/or race, and Blizzard decided not to add a new class, there are two new racees which seem to be kinda forced into the World of Warcraft timeline. Horde got Blood Elfs and Alliance got Draenai. While the Blood Elfs where there from the very beginning in the timeline, the Draenai were not, and they sure as hell were not nice noble warriors of light, there were (and still are, as can be seen in the outlands) demons.
And I for one don’t think demons ought to be Paladins. Well neither are Blood Elfs per se, but the unofficial title for Elf Paladins is Blood Knight, so at least from a fluff view that is almost correct.
But the backstory of the Draenai… is another matter, one which Dark Legacy Comics put into view much better than I could describe it with words:
This guy, Frank Caliendo of MAD TV fame, is just freaking hilarious. His impersonations of famous people like George “Dubya” Bush, John Madden, or even Chris Rock on Scooby Doo, are among the best, if not the best, I have ever seen. And they still make me laugh after having seen them like 10+ times. Too bad you can’t buy the whole DVD from his site without a credit card, because then it would be on my shelf ASAP.
The site Retro Junk has a good listing of TV commercials, show intros and such stuff from the 70s, 80s and 90s. So a real box of treasures for everyone that grew up in that time period. God, how I loved the Turtles and Transformers intros, and now I am able to watch them again finally!
I found this little Flash animation very funny and entertaining. In its heart it is a advertisement for Hitachis new harddrive technology, but it is deliciously executed, and you even learn something about harddrive techniques in general!
Just in case you didn’t know already: When someone talks about Google News, they probably aren’t talking about the Newsgroups Reader (formerly known as Deja.com) but the real and new Google News Beta.
Now Google News really is something cool and serious at the same time. What it does is gather headlines from around the globe (or just your local area, whatever you tell it to gather and sort them into their respective ressorts. And so, when you read a headline on Google News, the link will take you to the page the headline comes from, like Time or Spiegel or others. But the real clue is that there are also links for all the other sites that have that particular headline and and article about it.
And this brings us to freedom of choice and freedom of information. In these strange times too much people only get their news and therefore their options from CNN or other big stations. But those of course only represent that the majority in the country (the Bush cabinet in case of CNN) wants to see and hear. So if you have the choice of reading the same news on like 20 different stations, you can gather the truth for yourself and really make up your own opinion.
I just read an interesting article about Google. Seems that google puts some serious cookies on your PC which expire sometime in 2030. Normal Cookies have a lifespan of a few days or weeks. Although Google is big in the ad-business it is far from a “nasty” company (like lets say the Bayer Pharmacy group which invented heroin and morphium) - and anyway there isn’t any real alternative to Google.
So in the end, read the linked article and make your own decision if you will use Google freely in the future - I for sure will, because if any company got some data from me, I would have it to be Google.
Did you know that this building ist taller than the Petronas towers, the Sears towers and the Chrysler building put together? In your face, rest of the world!
Ever wondered what would happen if He-Man met Superman? You can read for yourself over here. Of course I wouldn’t assume that somehow some unknown writer just got stuck with his ideas, so naturally he just let two heros clash together against a foe of one of them…
I just found the South Park Studio V2 where you can make a version of yourself South Park styled. This is what I would probably look like if I hanged out there:
You are Chamomile Tea.
Your an original! Helpful to anyone in need and always willing to lend a hand, you take action but not through violence, people listen to you for you have a knack for giving wonderful advice! Many look up to you and you try your best not to let them down. You have many friends steadfast or no who consider themselves lucky to be near you. You may have been hurt in the past but you dont let that stand in your way! You have a wonderful outlook on life and try to see the good in people which is an awesome gift!
You sure know the times when you come around somewhere with only your Laptop with you, half an hour or so sparetime while you are waiting for the bus or train or whatever, and you don’t know what to do with those minutes. Todays link, the Home of the Underdogs has a sheer endless amount of old and new games, be it some quick action, long advantures or just your good old puzzles. Especially if you don’ have the latest hardware (or just some old office PC who doesn’t play any now-buyable games at all) you should check out some of the Underdogs’ games because they have real gems there!
If you ever didn’t know what to watch, or just got some minutes or even hours without something really useful to do, just watch yourself some music videos, anime episodes or other short & longer movies at those free video-on-demand sites:
If you don’t know it yet, you have to check it out: Google News. Google does what it does best, meta-crawling the web, this time for news around the globe. When you see an article about something interesting there, there are always links to like 20 other sites that had an article about that particular newsflash.
So with all the news from different sites and headers you now really can get an objective view of things, not only the one view that your local paper throws at you!
I always was a defender of the Opera Browser, although it isn’t freeware as Mozilla Firefox is. But I always loved some key features of Opera, like the mouse gestures, the option to save your windows and tabs when you close the browser and others. This was what really prevented me from trying and using FireFox.
But now, lo’ and behold, I switched to FireFox, because every feature Opera can throw at you FireFox can now emulate, or even evolve. So to make the long story short, here are some links for FireFox extensions that make it behave more like Opera:
All of you around the globe should check out FM4, the #1 austrian alternative radio station, now also sending around the world via a live webstream. It’s got everything from interviews with global players to reports about the war in iraq (and yes, it IS war, not a conflict), life-style, and of course lots of great music. The only thing that is has not, luckily, is Britney Spears, Madonna, and all those mainstream shit.
And the best thing, everything there is in english!
and sort them into their respective ressorts. And so, when you read a headline on Google News, the link will take you to the page the headline comes from, like Time or Spiegel or others. But the real clue is that there are also links for all the other sites that have that particular headline and and article about it. 
RSS syndication
