As of last night, Nintendo has deemed me fit to be a 3DS Ambassador! What does one have to do to get into this elite club? Why, simply purchase a 3DS before the $80 price drop! Wait, that's not a good thing at all.
Due to sluggish sales, Nintendo has dropped the price of the 3DS by $80 to $170 (which is well worth it, honestly) after about six months of sales. It's unfortunate they had to do it, but I think it was completely expected with Sony announcing the PS Vita at the same $250 price point. $80 was more than I would have expected, however. At any rate, anyone who accesses the 3DS eStore before some date I forget is automatically made a "3DS Ambassador" and will eventually get 10 NES and 10 GBA games to download to their 3DS. Nintendo hasn't released the full list, but what they have (although the language suggests that it might be subject to change) looks like some quality, albeit a lot of stuff I've already played. It's a nice gesture, and one they didn't have to make, so I'm glad they're doing it. Still, I think I'd have rather saved the $80...
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
On the playlist
It's been awhile since I've talked about games. Part of it is that I'm not sure what I have to say it particularly interesting or new. The other part is that I haven't really been in the mood to write much of anything. The final part is that I don't think I've played anything really substantial in awhile. So here's a bit of an update.
Ms. Splosion Man
As the title would suggest with its slight reference to Ms. Pac-Man (whose only difference, as we all know, is that she has a bow on her head), Ms. Splosion Man is the sequel to developer Twisted Pixel's 2009 game, Splosion Man, which was something I loved the hell out of when it came out, playing through the single player, and getting through most of multiplayer over the course of a couple days staying with a friend in Orlando on vacation. All that said, so far, Ms. hasn't quite captured me as much. It starts off much harder than the first game, which, while not that big a deal, can be a bit frustrating at times. There's some new gameplay features that I'm not sure were really playtested particularly well, or if Twisted Pixel ever stopped and asked "Is this fun?" As an example, within the first couple levels, you're put on a sequence of jumping from flying car to flying car, with a fall being fatal. It's not terribly difficult, but Twisted Pixel put so much work into animating the backgrounds and camera changes, that it can sometimes be difficult to tell where you are and what you're able to actually jump on. Ms. Splosion Man is, essentially, a pink stick figure, and every time you explode, she gets obscured in the blast. Combine that with controls that are maybe not quite as precision as one would like (and I'll grant that blowing up maybe shouldn't be easily controllable), and there's cases where sections are a lot harder than they really ought to be. Not that I'm complaining too much. I do really like the game, but it has some flaws that were either not apparent or simply not there in its predecessor. Twisted Pixel has also included several unlockable full motion videos, as seems to be their trademark gimmick, including an intro video for their proprietary BEARD engine. I'd recommend anyone interested to check out the first game first. It should be cheaper, if nothing else. Both are available on XBox Live Arcade.
Bastion
Another downloadable title, Bastion is an action RPG with some interesting gimmicks. For one, the whole game is narrated by another character, often with a dose of humor. If you start breaking everything in sight, the narrator says something along the line of "The Kid spent some time just raging at the world," but nothing repeats as far as I can tell, thankfully. The game world sort of grows around The Kid as he walks around. A level might start on a single platform, from which you walk to a path that flies up from below (you can fall of edges pretty easily). The art is all 2D sprites, done in an anime-inspired style, but with a very attractive watercolor aesthetic. The music that plays throughout is similarly really, really nice, and the narrator's voicework is really great (which is a good thing, since bad voicework would kill this game). All that said, it's been really repetitive so far. I'm not sure how much more I'm going to stick with it.
Child of Eden
This is the Kinect game I was waiting for. Child of Eden is the "spiritual" sequel to 2001 Dreamcast game Rez, one of my all-time favorite games. I put spiritual sequel in quotes, because there's no doubt that this is a story sequel, for what little story actually meant in Rez. The gameplay is similar, but not identical. Rez only offered a single way of attacking enemies (well, okay, two if you count the special weapon thing): target them, then release to fire. You could tap to attack, but it didn't make much difference either way. Child has this method, as well as another rapid fire attack that works better on some enemies than others. As I implied above, I got a Kinect for this. Rather than use a controller to move a reticule, playing with Kinect has you move each arm for each weapon, but only one at a time. I'm not really sold on the thing just yet. It seems to have trouble discerning one hand from the other sometimes, and it doesn't seem to add a whole lot to the game. It does turn down the difficulty, I am told. I haven't actually played more than the first level, but I'm trying to take it slow, since I know it's going to be a short game. And gosh is it pretty.
Ms. Splosion Man
As the title would suggest with its slight reference to Ms. Pac-Man (whose only difference, as we all know, is that she has a bow on her head), Ms. Splosion Man is the sequel to developer Twisted Pixel's 2009 game, Splosion Man, which was something I loved the hell out of when it came out, playing through the single player, and getting through most of multiplayer over the course of a couple days staying with a friend in Orlando on vacation. All that said, so far, Ms. hasn't quite captured me as much. It starts off much harder than the first game, which, while not that big a deal, can be a bit frustrating at times. There's some new gameplay features that I'm not sure were really playtested particularly well, or if Twisted Pixel ever stopped and asked "Is this fun?" As an example, within the first couple levels, you're put on a sequence of jumping from flying car to flying car, with a fall being fatal. It's not terribly difficult, but Twisted Pixel put so much work into animating the backgrounds and camera changes, that it can sometimes be difficult to tell where you are and what you're able to actually jump on. Ms. Splosion Man is, essentially, a pink stick figure, and every time you explode, she gets obscured in the blast. Combine that with controls that are maybe not quite as precision as one would like (and I'll grant that blowing up maybe shouldn't be easily controllable), and there's cases where sections are a lot harder than they really ought to be. Not that I'm complaining too much. I do really like the game, but it has some flaws that were either not apparent or simply not there in its predecessor. Twisted Pixel has also included several unlockable full motion videos, as seems to be their trademark gimmick, including an intro video for their proprietary BEARD engine. I'd recommend anyone interested to check out the first game first. It should be cheaper, if nothing else. Both are available on XBox Live Arcade.
Bastion
Another downloadable title, Bastion is an action RPG with some interesting gimmicks. For one, the whole game is narrated by another character, often with a dose of humor. If you start breaking everything in sight, the narrator says something along the line of "The Kid spent some time just raging at the world," but nothing repeats as far as I can tell, thankfully. The game world sort of grows around The Kid as he walks around. A level might start on a single platform, from which you walk to a path that flies up from below (you can fall of edges pretty easily). The art is all 2D sprites, done in an anime-inspired style, but with a very attractive watercolor aesthetic. The music that plays throughout is similarly really, really nice, and the narrator's voicework is really great (which is a good thing, since bad voicework would kill this game). All that said, it's been really repetitive so far. I'm not sure how much more I'm going to stick with it.
Child of Eden
This is the Kinect game I was waiting for. Child of Eden is the "spiritual" sequel to 2001 Dreamcast game Rez, one of my all-time favorite games. I put spiritual sequel in quotes, because there's no doubt that this is a story sequel, for what little story actually meant in Rez. The gameplay is similar, but not identical. Rez only offered a single way of attacking enemies (well, okay, two if you count the special weapon thing): target them, then release to fire. You could tap to attack, but it didn't make much difference either way. Child has this method, as well as another rapid fire attack that works better on some enemies than others. As I implied above, I got a Kinect for this. Rather than use a controller to move a reticule, playing with Kinect has you move each arm for each weapon, but only one at a time. I'm not really sold on the thing just yet. It seems to have trouble discerning one hand from the other sometimes, and it doesn't seem to add a whole lot to the game. It does turn down the difficulty, I am told. I haven't actually played more than the first level, but I'm trying to take it slow, since I know it's going to be a short game. And gosh is it pretty.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Adventures in custom Android ROMs
One of the nice things about Android is that it's open source, meaning developers can take Google or the phone manufacturer's code, hack it however they want, compile, and install on their phones. And if they're nice, share it with the rest of the world. Depending on the phone, this can range anywhere from simple (the Google Nexus phones) to impossible (any of a number of locked-down phones). The LG T-Mobile G2x falls on the latter side of that, requiring a couple simple tools to get it rooted and ready to install a new OS. Doing so requires wiping everything, but there's, again, tools to back everything up.
From there, it's a matter of finding and installing a custom ROM. The major repository for these is xda-developers.com, a huge forum of hackers working on dozens of phones from every major manufacturer, though more popular phones might have their own sites set up just for them. Naturally, not every ROM is going to be the same, but they generally offer improvements in speed, stability, and battery life over the shipped OS (at the cost of some convenience with updates, as well as voiding the phone's warranty, although in most cases, it's easy enough to return it to a state where it's impossible to tell it's been hacked). I find it kind of hilarious that this is the case, considering these are unpaid hackers doing it for fun, more or less. One or two of the major ROMs might make enough to live on, but that's about it. Most phones have many to choose from, although many of them, but a good number of those start with just one: CyanogenMod. From what I've gathered, the lead developer of the project, hacker-alias Cyanogen started on the original HTC G1 and has been working on the Android OS ever since, across a number of phones, and has recruited a number of other developers to work on phones he doesn't personally own. One such phone is mine, the G2x. It doesn't have a stable release yet, but I've been running the nightly builds since the early teens without many issues, and it continues to get better, currently at #89, though I think once a stable release is out (which might be sooner rather than later, since a release client was released a week or so ago), I'm just going to stop there.
CyanogenMod 7, the current version is based on Android 2.3.4, the most current release from Google. From there, the team makes a number of under-the-hood changes to the OS, as well as adding some rather nice features such as a "powerbar" (toggle switches for various things such as wifi, the LED, and so on) to the notification pull-down, "phone goggles" (set your phone to not let you call or text people after a certain time without solving math problems - yes, this is for those drunk dialers out there), as well as a whole host of new settings to further tweak the system to one's liking. Most importantly, it made my phone seem noticeably faster over stock. They've managed to keep the useful T-Mobile apps like wifi calling and visual voicemail as part of the OS, as well. All in all, it seems like a significant improvement over what was originally on the phone, even if it takes a bit more to manage it (I update maybe once a week, which takes about a half hour total).
Besides CM7, I briefly tried out Eaglesblood, which touts itself as the fastest ROM available. It seemed very snappy, but it had a pretty big issue in that it wouldn't properly mount my SD card when connected to my computer. I may have fixed that when CM7 started doing the same thing, but at this point, I'm not sure I want to bother wiping everything and starting over, even with backups all taken care of. I am, however, looking forward to the upcoming MIUI release for my phone, which looks like it goes in a completely different direction for Android. It looks almost like iOS, which isn't a bad thing in my book. But that doesn't have a set release, so we'll see when it comes around.
On Android, in general, I'm not 100% sure I'm sold yet, and this is multiple months down the line. It's still nowhere near as polished as iOS, and Google seems more intent on adding every feature they can think of than cleaning up what they have. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's definitely a very Google way of thinking. I'm curious to see what they do with Ice Cream Sandwich, and I may snag whatever the next Nexus phone is, since that line is the purest Google experience possible. We'll see. I may just go back to an iPhone if for no reason other than that Android phones seem to be getting bigger and bigger, which is exactly not what I want.
From there, it's a matter of finding and installing a custom ROM. The major repository for these is xda-developers.com, a huge forum of hackers working on dozens of phones from every major manufacturer, though more popular phones might have their own sites set up just for them. Naturally, not every ROM is going to be the same, but they generally offer improvements in speed, stability, and battery life over the shipped OS (at the cost of some convenience with updates, as well as voiding the phone's warranty, although in most cases, it's easy enough to return it to a state where it's impossible to tell it's been hacked). I find it kind of hilarious that this is the case, considering these are unpaid hackers doing it for fun, more or less. One or two of the major ROMs might make enough to live on, but that's about it. Most phones have many to choose from, although many of them, but a good number of those start with just one: CyanogenMod. From what I've gathered, the lead developer of the project, hacker-alias Cyanogen started on the original HTC G1 and has been working on the Android OS ever since, across a number of phones, and has recruited a number of other developers to work on phones he doesn't personally own. One such phone is mine, the G2x. It doesn't have a stable release yet, but I've been running the nightly builds since the early teens without many issues, and it continues to get better, currently at #89, though I think once a stable release is out (which might be sooner rather than later, since a release client was released a week or so ago), I'm just going to stop there.
CyanogenMod 7, the current version is based on Android 2.3.4, the most current release from Google. From there, the team makes a number of under-the-hood changes to the OS, as well as adding some rather nice features such as a "powerbar" (toggle switches for various things such as wifi, the LED, and so on) to the notification pull-down, "phone goggles" (set your phone to not let you call or text people after a certain time without solving math problems - yes, this is for those drunk dialers out there), as well as a whole host of new settings to further tweak the system to one's liking. Most importantly, it made my phone seem noticeably faster over stock. They've managed to keep the useful T-Mobile apps like wifi calling and visual voicemail as part of the OS, as well. All in all, it seems like a significant improvement over what was originally on the phone, even if it takes a bit more to manage it (I update maybe once a week, which takes about a half hour total).
Besides CM7, I briefly tried out Eaglesblood, which touts itself as the fastest ROM available. It seemed very snappy, but it had a pretty big issue in that it wouldn't properly mount my SD card when connected to my computer. I may have fixed that when CM7 started doing the same thing, but at this point, I'm not sure I want to bother wiping everything and starting over, even with backups all taken care of. I am, however, looking forward to the upcoming MIUI release for my phone, which looks like it goes in a completely different direction for Android. It looks almost like iOS, which isn't a bad thing in my book. But that doesn't have a set release, so we'll see when it comes around.
On Android, in general, I'm not 100% sure I'm sold yet, and this is multiple months down the line. It's still nowhere near as polished as iOS, and Google seems more intent on adding every feature they can think of than cleaning up what they have. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's definitely a very Google way of thinking. I'm curious to see what they do with Ice Cream Sandwich, and I may snag whatever the next Nexus phone is, since that line is the purest Google experience possible. We'll see. I may just go back to an iPhone if for no reason other than that Android phones seem to be getting bigger and bigger, which is exactly not what I want.
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