iPhone Pick: Urbanspoon

While it has yet to actually be used to determine our choice of dining, I have played with Urbanspoon enough to see that it is at least a great way to browse local eats. Basically you shake (or push the shake button) and the location, cuisine type (Asian, Italian, etc) and overall level of expense randomize jackpot style to make a choice for you. It works great in Chicago, I can't really confirm for other, or non, metro areas.

Game Play: Civilization Revolution Demo

There's a whole subset of games I've always respected but never really got hooked on. Strategy games often come under this heading as my strategy gaming hit something of a high watermark with X-Com and has been in drift ever since.

I played the original Civilization back in college (yes, I'm old) and it's practically the poster child for such games with me.

Civilization: Revolution has managed to change that for me. Sure, the hardcore Civ fans may complain ad nasuem about ... stuff. Honestly I don't know what they'd be complaining about since I don't really play the "full" version of the game. Civ:Rev does not, however, feel watered down or truncated. It feels streamlined and accessible. It doesn't feel oversimplified, just manageable.

More to the point, there are great little points during the game where you can get a thrill outside of the normal strategy routine. Berating former allies is always fun for a laugh, but I think my favorite was when I uncovered a tank from the Knights Templar and took it aboard my galley.

Sadly the demo ended about two turns later, but c'mon - tank. Knights Templar. Large wooden boat. How is that not awesome?

For Sunday: "Bringing Down The House"

From Snopes:



The driver and his 10-year old son were apparently (amazingly) fine.

Wii Motion Plus

I watched the part of the Nintendo E3 presentation where the Motion Plus was demonstrated. My first reaction is gee, thanks Nintendo - I really needed another accessory (or peripheral as I would call them, but The Girl mocks me so for it). I've wrist straps, plastic jackets, plastic steering wheels, numchucks, and a charger. I'm eyeing that darn balance board too. Now I've got to get some little dongle too? Does Nintendo make games or just video components to justify some weird plastic fetish someone seems to have.

And watching the Reginator drive a jet ski by leaning forward and twisting his wrists real fast doesn't help that "Wii gaming makes you look like a jackass" feature either.

But of course, the Wii Motion Plus has a very redeeming feature. It will finally give you that lightsaber game you've been craving to play. The real one, where you'll have duels and everything.

Which is pretty awesome.

iPhone Tip: Mail To Blogger

Sometimes I'm so dumb I could slap myself. Thinking that an app that would make it easy to upload posts and images to Blogger was missing from the appsphere, I started looking into way of making a native app do just that.

And then remembered that you can setup your blog to accept email posts quite simply in the settings and that you can just attach images that way. Quick and easy.

HDTV: Evening One

If there was ever a night not to have a somewhat contentious condo meeting about finances, it would be the night of the day your fancy new HDTV arrives. For most of the afternoon I looked on as the new TV merely stared idly at me, wondering what the hell it was doing on a floor without any fancy graphics to display. The old 36" RCA stared idly onward.

As a gadget addict, I rarely maintain the same electronic gizmo for more than a handful of years. Record setters include the PS2 and my old Toshiba DVD player - now both replaced by the PS3. However, nobody has anything on the RCA. I got it shortly after college after landing my first real job working on State Farm's then nascent intranet. That TV has seen girlfriends come and go, the dotcom crash, 9/11, our wedding and a truckload of digital entertainment. Now it waits to be pick up by and hopefully used by a happy family for what I will guess may be more years than anyone would suspect.

By the time we got everything cabled up it was about time to go to this meeting, but I did manage to see GTA IV as it was intended. Details about Liberty City cropped up everywhere, HUDs were perfectly readable and it seemed God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

When I got back, The Girl and Leepus had been throwing virtual people in PAIN enough to start what was referred to as "a vendetta". Once again, details about the game popped into full view that we could barely make out before. Words on signs, details on models, that kind of thing. As Leepus tried to escape the vibrant phosphorous glow of the set, I pulled up fl0w and it was simply hypnotic compared to when we played it last, at the RCA's going away party.

Yes, I held a going away party for the TV. And while on that note, it's true that the title of this blog is now officially an anachronism. But so is "carbon copy" and saying that we should "tape that show while we're gone", so the name will remain the same.

We ended the night watching The Amazing Screw On Head, which the PS3 upscaled quite wonderfully. We tried to push through all of 300 off Blu-Ray but eventually high def fatigue set in.

I'll have a post about the general purchase logic that when into the TV later.

GTA Comes To DS ... Wii next?

I've been largely ignoring E3, but this tidbit that a DS version of the Grand Theft Auto franchise is inbound reminded me of a question:

Why wouldn't Rockstar, with one of the most popular game franchises on the planet, be putting considerable resources to getting it on the most popular platform on the planet? Surely a Wii version can't be far behind.

For Sunday: Dead Space "Lullaby" Trailer

Update: Apparently this trailer was banned by the ESRB and only released in Europe.

iPhone Games

What are people playing off the fancy new App Store anyway? I've heard horribly mixed things about the flagship game, Super Monkey Ball. It also occurs to me that some people may have to embrace a two fold app offer - one that is free as a trial and one that is pay. Getting people to pay a couple bucks off a screenshot can be risky business, as my old cell phone can attest.

I have three projects in mind now, but only one with any code to it. Now I just need time, time, time...

Some Catch Up

Everything has been about three shades of insane lately. The Girl and I have escaped at a friend's behest to the upper reaches of Wisconsin. My cell phone is even on vacation. My brain might be able to reboot at this point.

A bit of housekeeping though:

EA dropped by to say that they are having a sweepstakes to promote Dead Space wherein you win a copy of all the movies the creators felt influenced the game. There are a hundred sci fi and horror titles in the bag (see list) so statistics say there has to be at least three you like.

Alexander from Avatars United wanted to pimp, well, Avatars United, one of the fancy social networking type things for online players. He was flattering enough, so pimp I have.

I've been looped through several emails now about the fact that Slamdance Games will not be in existence this year. There's some grass roots effort to get it running in someone's garage or backyard or whatnot. Personally a bit mixed about this as I'm certainly of the opinion that the more community around indie gaming the better, but I'm still way on the other side of opinion that Slamdance was in the wrong last year concerning the whole Super Columbine Fiasco and can't help but think there's an ounce of irony here. The competition that turned its back on a game because it was too risky for sponsors now can't find the sponsors it apparently needs.

Probably needs a reboot too.

More App Store Notes

There is literally a storm pulling out of the Chicagoland area - which fits my general mood perfectly. Yesterday was a blitz of information regarding all things iPhone as everyone at work ramped up to full speed on support Expense2GO. It was crazy - we had thought nothing would really happen until morning broke over in Pacific Time ... but soon enough blogs were full of information about how to not only find the App Store in general, but download the 2.0 firmware update as well.

Apple has now apparently released the official version of the firmware and so we're off to the races. My morning will be poking at a few known bugs and small enhancements.

For the record, my hotlist of iPhone apps are currently:

AIM
No brainer

Pandora
The Girl was quite envious when she saw the Music Genome powered radio stations playing off our stereo system.

Advent
OK, honestly a really clumsy way to play the classic text game Adventure - but I give it points for geek cred. Course if you really want geek cred, I guess the lightsaber emulator is a good way to go...

This is my "free" hotlist. Haven't had time to poke at the non-free apps. It is weird to see how the pricing jumps from app to app, however. I swear there are a few out there which are little more than rebranded Apple samples selling for a couple bucks a pop. I've also downloaded the Facebook app, haven't tried it yet - but nobody really needs me to pimp that.

We're going to be heading to Door County for the weekend. I would love to spend time working on my own iPhone project - but we'll see if the brain is functioning to that capacity. If you're going to be in the greater Chicagoland area, I recommend our original plans: The Windy City Rollers, our original plan for Saturday until lured by the concept of a fine country outing.

App Store Open: Meet Expense2GO

Apple's App Store for iTunes is open, although if you haven't had access to the beta OS I don't think you'll be able to do much with it just yet. The app we at work have been pounding is called Expense2GO. It's a receipt manager for Salesforce.com users which allows you to organize receipts by report, take pictures and upload them to your org.

We're looking for people interested in continuing to test the app if you should actually be reading this and fall into the above category.

There is an extremely healthy number of apps launching with a decent amount of diversity. I'm not sure if a platform launch has been quite as successful at mobilizing a developer base before. Just the list of free apps is fairly impressive ( thanks Kottke ).

In a few hours I would expect the 2.0 OS to be available and after that you should be able to download apps and give them a whirl. For those of us already on the latest beta of the iPhone OS, it seems to work OK.

Veidt Enterprises Advertising Contest

My spy network must be on a smoke break, because I had to read about this in The Onion of all things, but apparently there was a contest for the upcoming Watchmen flick to create Veidt Enterprises commercials - some of which will appear in the film.

Channel Flip Helps Get Your Mac Game On

Katharine is either a Mac geek or plays one on TV, and does a wonderful job of covering major issues with gaming on that "other" platform. She covers the basics, gaming on a Windows partition and even gaming gaming with Crossover. And all this with an English accent.

On a side note, I'm quite excited that Blizzard in continuing a tradition of Mac dedication by having an OS X version of Diablo III ship with the Windows version. It is a lot more than I've come to expect than some other companies I might mention...

Sony's Bad Week, More on PC gaming, etc.

Apparently the firmware fix for that firmware update will be arriving sometime this week. This is of course the flipside to modern console gaming - that in an attempt to upgrade the experience the company accidentally causes you to reformat your box. I haven't heard anyone personally running 2.4 with the problem - but it's clearly not a simple issue.

I can't tell if I'm crazy for the trophies or not. Achievement systems in the games I've played (Metroid, Team Fortress 2, PAIN, Half-Life 2) vary slightly in implementation but all reside in that somewhat neat category without being mind-blowingly addictive or whatnot. I'd rather see Sony kick up the internal framework for matchmaking about five notches. Currently they're only nudging Nintendo out there - which isn't saying much.

I will admit that we're spending a lot more time on the PS3 than the Wii these days. This will definitely change as we've finished GTA IV for the time being and eventually PAIN will release it's kung fu grip on our adrenal gland. I'm a little concerned that the lovely white box will start to feel like the DS does to me right now - a brilliant piece of hardware with a truckload of users and only a handful of Nintendo developed titles worth playing.

Just got an email last night from an old friend that he's gone and purchased a new gaming PC. He was actually part of my anecdotal evidence of the decline of PC gaming - a fellow PC diehard from the wayback days that had picked up a 360 for his gaming jones. I'll have to ping him more to see why he's swung his way back - but I'm guessing because out of his real genre faves - FPS, RTS, and MMO ... only the first is fully realized on consoles and he was never crazy about the controls.

Still winding down from a crazy work week. More on the HDTV purchase impending.