So, what’s it like? Well take a look (Sorry for slightly skewed angle, I was using a desk stand for the camera and couldn’t quite get it parallel to the desk.)

The home screen of this OS 1.5 Cupcake based device has three panes, to the left you see my central default pane. The icons will be as you would expect from other touch based devices giving me quick access to my most used apps such as twitter, facebook, GMail and the browser. But also note the widgets for the calendar and BBC News, those are live updating panes that I can have displayed in amongst the usual application shortcuts. Very nice indeed!

Also, see that switches app icon in the top right? That right there is a very nice shortcut into the power draining features for quick and easy access to the screen shown on the right where they can be turned on and off with a simple press. That’s an example of some of the clever things built in to the phone, however this being an open source platform it’s really encouraged app developers to spend some time and they’ve come up with plenty of fantastic solutions, many of which are completely free, far more in fact than I expected.

Take for example the XBOX Live tracker on the left here that I’ve setup with a few of my live buddies for testing. This gives me both an overview and notifications of my friends activities even when I’m not on the XBOX, perfect! Now I should miss out less on fun when I spot someone has booted up LEFT4DEAD and can go jump right on in. Some of the other free yet brilliant finds so far are Andro Wall, which will scour Flickr for set search terms to find replacement wallpaper for your home screens, which use a single wide shot that slides in parallax with the icons. Compare Everywhere, one of many barcode and search application that are proving popular on the iPhone also. Then there’s the augmented reality app LAYER, which upon firing up displays a live video feed of your surroundings and lays over the top say all Pizza places in 3 miles of your current location. As you hold the phone up infront of you and pan around, you can see the location markers of any results from Google Places right in your view. OK so that’s pretty geeky, but also really cool, the future is here.

Then there’s the apps you don’t mind spending a few dollars on, such as DoggCatcher over there, a podcast management suite which can download, organise, and playback both audio and video podcasts, whilst also providing access to an text based entries within the same feeds. Really nice. And shares many of the features I had become accustomed to on the brilliant BlackBerry app, PodTrapper.

All in all things are looking pretty good on Android, the OS 1.6 is out now and hopefully will be made available to me via o2 or Samsung soon, and 2.0 is already on the horizon, bringing some of the next gen controls you would expect such as multi-touch. For a good read on that head on over to Android Bloke where some of the exciting feature are highlighted.

It’s still pretty new to me, but so far I’m real excited to have such an emergent OS in my hands and have high expectations for the coming 18 months!

Tattoos

Can you pay money for someone to put art on your body? Certainly.

Would I ever do so? Probably not .

Will I defend someone’s right to do so (within reason): Absolutely!

That said.. anyone who buys any single item from the avatar marketplace forfeits their right to complain about The Sims Addon Packs!

Overclocking is a process by which you tell PC components to run faster than they otherwise would. As you will have seen PC’s will have a speed rating such as 2.5Ghz which define how quickly they can run computations, the higher the number the faster they can get things done. These speeds are not set hard though so you can tell them to run at a higher speed, however the faster something tries to run the more power it requires, so you can only push it so far before you need to send more power (volts) through the component. With power comes heat however, and heat is the enemy of all computer components, so you will often find overclockers replacing the standard cooling elements with more advanced setups designed to excel at heat removal.

If you are interested in this subject and would like to learn more, and live in the UK, I highly recommend the monthly publication CustomPC which you can find in any decent newsagents, and also the associated website www.bit-tech.net

I started to get worried, thinking maybe I had just pushed the card so hard for so long it was finally giving out on me. It was at this time that the XBOX 360 came to stay and so I didn’t put much thought into my PC gaming for a while, and the card was fine in Windows/Linux for desktop use so I neglected to do anything about it for some time.

Eventually I wanted to return to a little PC gaming, and thinking that maybe what was happening was that the Heastsink and Fan (HSF) had maybe come loose, or the Thermal Interface Material (TIM) had dried out I figured I would give this ageing card one last look over to see what I could salvage. What I found was the result of 2-3 years of neglect of my card. The entire air-flow enclosure was clogged with dust and debris, no wonder this thing couldn’t stay cool the amount of cool air actually getting to the heatsink must have been minimal. While I was in here I figured I would remove the whole structure and apply some new TIM, as I had some spare AKASA Silver-3 lying around.

Putting it all back together and running though some benchmarks, I pushed my card way back up to speeds I hadn’t had in play since the card was new. I was once again able to get some decent frame rates even at my newer monitors 1920×1200 resolution, at least in Vales Source engined games that rely on a lot of CPU grunt, and for other titles I could run at 1280×800 with plenty of AA and AF to keep things looking nice.

So have I learnt my lesson? Probably not, but next time things start to play up a good bit of housekeeping will be my first line of defence!

Republic: The Revolution - Tank Defiance

Once such game is Republic: The Revolution. A strategy game of politics set in a fictional ex-Soviet Eastern Bloc country that is now controlled by a corrupt dictator whom you have sworn to overturn. The advantage this game has over a lot of older games, from the point of view of playing it now, is that it’s graphics settings featured a ‘Totality’ setting that was way beyond the capabilities of 99% of PCs available when it was originally released way back in 2003. This allows a modern day play through using graphics which still look decent, if lacking in some of the more whizzy graphical effects, however for a game such as it is they are more than serviceable. What’s amusing is this is pretty much the same thing that happened with Crysis, however there people called the developer out for creating a game so over the top graphically. Maybe they just needed to rename the settings from Ultra, or whatever it was, to ‘Future’.

The game runs on a turn based day, and each of your characters can perform up to three actions each day. Various tasks can be assigned such as Head-hunt, survey, investigate, however each person is only skilled in a couple of these, and indeed these skills can be leveled up as they gain success. My main character in the game always seems to excel in influence which is based on your responses to a series of questions at the start of each game, and I focused my original head hunt on a wealthy number two, leaving me somewhat exposed on the Force front, however hopefully I can make up for that later.

Once you start investigating the areas of the city you will uncover both people who you can attempt to recruit to your cause as well as location that can be useful for various activities just as interviews and rallies. And basically that is as far as i ever got with the game in the past. I had some weird bug on my old system which made the game eventually grind to a halt when in the 3D mode, however having been through 2 PC systems since those days I’m hopefully I might get to actually play the game properly this time, and at least get a real feel for it rather than just a taster.

I’ve always had the feeling i was missing something special with this game, it will be interesting to find out over the coming weeks.

This time I’m talking about our shared enjoyment of the Lego games over the years, and how they stand out from a lot of other games that advertise themselves as co-op games.

So I was hungry for a new game that I hoped would truly show to me what the 360 was capable of, and the game I thought would fit the bill in my case was Gears of War 2.
I hadn’t played or even seen anything of the original Gears, and coming from PC shooters I thought it would be a good litmus test for my ability to transfer to console gaming, a kind of best hopes, but worst pitfalls situation. OK I could have picked an RTS if I really wanted to test things, but that would have just been kicking a console in the nuts!

Upon unpacking the 360 from it’s regeneration chamber and hooking up it’s HD capable inards to the trusty Samsung LCD and Yamaha Soundbar it was Gears 2 that I first slipped into the drive tray. Well, after I had played around with this apparently new NXE UI for a few minutes to ground myself. It was clear within the first few minutes playing through the tutorial that what I had on my hands was a very polished product, even my WASD fumbling fingers managed to get Marcus walking in the right direction, and even looking where he was going not to mention actually able to shoot stuff at the same time. I then proceeded to blast my way through the campaign on Normal mode reveling in the visuals, and really loving the chunky weighty movement the game appears to excel at.

It was at this point that Linda showed an interest in playing also, so I put my solo campaign on hold and we kicked off a new save with her taking Marcus and I shifted over to Dom. Here the game took on yet another level of fun as we backed each other up, grabbing each others downed backsides as required and working as a team to take down locust after locust. Admittedly Linda was on easy, whilst I was once again on normal, however we found working in co-op we really had a great time without ever getting stuck for long and success saw us swapping roles to take on the campaign at a higher level.

However we didn’t get far with this attempt. My old school friend who is known around LIVE as Woodoggies introduced us to Horde mode. What followed was an achievement hording run through all the multiplayer maps and modes, followed by quickly snapping up the two map packs and running through the achievements for those too. In fact pretty much anytime we are on at the same time Gears 2 will get rushed into the machine for some Horde experience point grabbing. All quality games are enhanced by a decent online mode, whether thats just a co-op campaign or full blown multiplayer modes, and Gears 2 in Horde mode is probably a perfect setup. The early levels of each of the sets of 10 waves are calm enough to allow you to idly chit chat about what ever whilst the last few require you to knuckle down and concentrate on sticking together and working at taking down the enemy, before again relaxing back for the start or the next set on 10 waves. It’s a great combination of social interaction and some core gaming.

In the meantime, when not playing online, Linda and I even went and picked up the original Gears and have completed the campaign on there twice so far as well. It’s clearly not quite as polished as Gears 2, with the engine several times getting key enemies stuck on graphics forcing us to restart from a check point, but the same underlying love is clear to see.

I can’t be sure if it’s purely that Gears 2 was my first game on a new system or whether it’s that it is such a truly solid triple A title, but it’s certainly eaked out a special place in my gaming history that places it up high amongst the other stand out games that make up the background against which other games are measured.

So be sure to check out my contribution, which is a republication of my 6 month of XBOX piece from a month or so back. Please hop on over, checkout the article and then subscribe to both the website and the podcast

The very name put me off for years. Not the cast part, which had long been associated with broadcasting, but that first part.. the ‘pod’ It was all so Apple focused, many probably thought the only way you could listen to these downloadable audio bites was on an iPod, and whilst I was well aware of the many and various methods that I could use to enjoy these shows I resisted purely on my dislike of all things fruit based.

Of course the only person I hurt by this was myself. I had cut myself off from the , albeit unknown, joys of downloadable audio content. Something had to give eventually and I believe it all started with Google Reader which I have long used for my RSS subscriptions. At some point I haven’t taken the time to research they added an inline audio player for podcasts, and so I could start to pick up on these programmes without even obtaining any specialist software to do the downloading/streaming for me. It was a small start, but it was enough to get me interested and the usual snowball effect eventually found me paying for an application for my BlackBerry which would download and playback the episodes I had chosen to follow.

However all of this is coincidental. These tools and connections would have been totally overlooked if it wasn’t for one fact: Podcasts are an excellent channel of information. You see things have changed in recent years for all of us. We read far less on printed media than ever before and far more via websites and other forms of screen based media. The problem here is that we are training our brains to skim read most of it due to the huge amount of information available. Anything more than about two screens of text and you are likely to skip on to the next article, or not even start to read it in the first place. The is an excellent read over on The Atlantic entitled ‘Is Google making us stupid’ which I highly recommend reading which ironically is long enough for most people to ignore, but it sums up these thoughts perfectly.

So with text based information becoming a quick read where is one to go for that in depth lengthy discussions on the topics that matter to us most? Well of course you can see where I am going here, else I’ve just raised a very good point in a completely unrelated way! Podcasts have become that ‘unskipable’ form of information for me. I can happily listen to a show for it’s entirely, and most of the shows I listen to are 60 minute plus, without ever feeling like it’s taking too long, or wanting to move on to the next thing. Maybe it helps that my interests lie in the technological arena where the idea of pod casting is far more common place, but over the past few months I’ve managed to find myself some truly great shows which now accompany my every car journey, infrequent work out session or pre sleep chill out.. though that can lead to problems when a topic sparks my mind and I have to get up again to draft up a blog post, which is how this very one all started

So having said all this, what are these unskipable shows that are now enriching my life? Well let me through a few titbits your way.

First up, in the area on video gaming, which is my most avid interest there are a few shows I would like to mention. Top of the choice are The Digital Cowboys A UK based show hosted by Alex and Tony which manages not only to have a solid base format but also brings in some really great guests to give their opinions on the weeks topics and to answer the famous 8 questions.

Secondly a show I found out about via Digital Cowboys, GameHounds which manages to be wonderfully professional and yet totally independent at the same time. The interhost banter is really fun, and they still manage to actually talk about gaming news at the same time.

Finally for gaming, but by no means least Gamers with Jobs is a show I occasionally used to pick up when I only listened via Google Reader, and is actually responsible for pointing me towards Digital Cowboys.. it’s all rather incestuous really I suppose.. or I guess viral to give it a web 2.0 spin.

Outside of gaming I also pick up a few shows that interest me, such as the BBC’s Material World and Friday Night Comedy and recently I’ve even ventured into the world of video based shows such as the excellent CarPool and to return to gaming CO-OP

I can thoroughly recommend any and all of the shows I’ve linked to here, and you’d do well to add them to your listening lineup, or if you are like I was but a few months back and have never even given a podcast a chance, these happy few should soon see you bitten by the listening bug and reimerced into the in depth world.

This fact cuts deep though, for these are the very problems console gamers have leveled at Windows gaming for years and I have previously fought off and tsk tsked away as frivolous as any one who knew what they were doing could get these games to play well. But when the very things you must rely on to get this level of control are not even available to me then I’m left without a defence. Had my graphics card have been incapable of playing modern games then I could put it down to a lack of investment in my rig as PC’s will always demand a certain amount of continual money sinking to stay on their game, however knowing I can get this to work fine back in XP frustrates me greatly.

What all this means is that Windows 7 is now gone from my PC, not to return until such time as my current graphics hardware either fails or can no longer deliver an acceptable gaming experience and I replace it with the then current £150 option.

In the meantime it’s back to WinXP for my gaming, and for day to day use I’ve made a return to the warm and inviting shores of a Linux desktop courtesy of the extra friendly Ubuntu distro. 20 minutes to download the ISO file and load it to a USB stick, then another 15 to install and I was up and running with a truly modern looking OS that detected my graphics, monitor native resolution and even the on-board sound and network connections without me lifting a finger And I’m even posting this blog entry from newly discovered Drivel, a blogging client for Linux.

Sometime my love for ‘penguins’ is multifold

Following the recent upgrades I made to my machine I’m hopeful it will cope, especially with my graphic card’s new found life, which I still need to blog and will involve some public humiliation, so that should be fun.

PS I’ve blogged this from the BlackBery so forgive any spelling mistakes, I haven’t worked out how to get the spell checker working when in the wordpress web pages yet, should probably just type it up in the memopad and copy paste the thing thinking about it!

Recently Giant Bomb added the ability to track your gamer points, and WoW characters for those still infected, on their site with the added feature of having each achievement graded in rarity based on your fellow gamers on the site. (Being a US site meant any points in a ‘soccer’ game fared well )

Now they allow you to track your Steam achievements the same way, which for myself who likes to buy any PC game I can on steam is very nice indeed. So I have now replaced my two separate tags with a single Giant Bomb based graphic which is both cleaner for the site, and nice an joined up.. or mashed to be all web 2.0 about it.

Nice work guys, keep on innovating!

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve always been a PC gamer. That platform of a never ending release cycle, that would laugh at the idea of ten years and consider ten months a ‘constraint’, constantly straining at the edges of what can be done, pushing the limits that actually make console gaming possible. Now that said I’ve owned a Nintendo device since the N64, but I could justify that for the top notch first party releases that were never going to come to a PC.. at least not without the dubious world of emulation.

My view was that anything the XBOX could do could surely be done just as well on a PC. After all the XBOX was just a PC in a box, sure it was cutting edge when released, but by this time the technology has seriously moved on. PCs do exist that can actually run Crysis, just. Anything else would be easy. I was even put off more by the games which found their way from the console to the PC, I found them poor relations and badly implemented. Hindsight now shows me that this was lacklustre ports, even the acclaimed Bioshock turns me off in it’s PC incarnation.

What I hadn’t been prepared for, what you can’t actually get a feel for until you are actually in there is how joined up the whole experience is. Sure I use X-Fire and Steam on the PC which can link me up to other players who are playing the same games as me, but it’s an option addition, a nice to have that a large number of PC gamers just don’t bother with. On XBOX this is a part of the whole thing. Linking up with other players is about more than just the odd bit of multiplayer. It’s a competitive, cooperative, social, true community, bring people together not just to play, but to interact. It’s something you can really feel a part of, and which makes you better for it. Or rather it can, whether this environment turns you into a more complete gamer or just some arsehole who gets a kick off beating up, virtually as it might be, other gamers is down to your own mental makeup.

And so it is I find myself six months later with a game collection two thirds of my Wii game collection, which has had years to establish that lead, with plans to expand it further well bedded in. The system which I planned purely to play a couple of multiplayer games on with the couple of friends and family members has become just that only several times over. It’s opened my gaming world to new friends and communities that have come as  a very welcome addition, no doubt helped on by the explosion in use of Twitter during the same period. The XBOX has become my go to system for gaming, and for creating some new shared experiences with my fiancée and friends which really is what life is all about. The PC has become far more of the versatile communication tool that it always has been, and will be for a long time to come. Sure I still play my RTS games there, for the mouse has yet to be bested for the intricacies of those game mechanics and I have a large enough PC game collection to keep me going back from time to time. However even some of these games, the likes of Bioshock and Mass Effect I’m contemplating selling and re-buying for that games console I avoided for so long.

I’ll still always be a PC gamer of course, it’s the platform that still delivers some of the most interesting and diverse gameplay styles anywhere, although I will admit some of the iPhone/Touch games coming along are a challenge to this. However even with the opportunities offered by XBLA, PSN and WiiWare there is no easier way than making something for PC, and just placing it out there on the internet. You can control your own distribution, maximise your return. Of course what you don’t get is the visibility to the market, there are just too many ways for people to find new things on the internet which is where the power of the consoles enclosed marketplaces can be a boon.

I realise that this whole post reeks of the evangelical spiel of the newly converted, however for me, right now, it’s how I feel. It’s why I’ve left it six months before I made a real stand about it, assuming any honeymoon period will have passed, my excitement and interest in this years E3 pretty much confirmed that I had moved into a new era though. Who knows where I’ll be in another six months, maybe by then there will be a BluRay based system joining the fold, that’s when I’ll know things will never be the same again!

Today however I came across a Firefox plugin that takes things a little bit further, and better still it doesn’t set about replacing Google Reader, but on building upon it. That’s not to say you need to be a Google Reader user to make use of this tool, but if you do not only will your feeds be synchronised with it, but even your read count, stars and shares are all there too.

But the real nice thing about this plugin is it’s presentation. Replicating that of a well designed print magazine and presenting it on your monitor screen. Now you could argue that print media is on the way out in many cases, so why take your design from them? Well they’ve been working with a human ‘interface’ for years now, finding out the best blend of text sizes, colour schemes and layouts. Sure there’s room for individuality to enter into the equation but the basics are well laid down. And Feely clearly takes it’s design from these. It that familiar design that really catches my attention. I feel I already know how to use this tool, it feels like home.

The range of preferences on offer is extensive, and far too numerous for me to go through here. But some of my favourite parts are being able to still share through Google’s shared items; directly tweet from the interface; the three overview modes of Cover, Latest & Digest; retrieving of related Twitter and YouTube links.

For anyone who makes good use of RSS I fully recommend you check this out over at Feedly.com and see what you think. I’ve even taken to recreating all my feed tags on Google to better suit this new design ethic, abandoning the scheme that has served me well for many months now as mentioned here. Of course this is all still new to me, and it could all just be first day fanboyism but every so often, that turns up a quality item.

Now the Architect release, which for those not up on CoH news allows players themselves to create missions in the game, selecting locations, NPCs, and I believe awards, for other players to experiance, is out. I’m tempted to boot it back up, purely to look into this potentially important point in MMO development.

Of course opening up a game to user created content, as the likes of Little Big Planet has done, will always lead to a huge amount of crap, but amongst all this effluent you’ll inevitably find some complete gems. Making sure these gems can be sifted out of said crap is the real key to making any system such as this a success, so I’ll be interested to find out what rating system, or other method has been implemented. Gamasutra are already writing up articles on this but there’s nothing like experiencing it for yourself.

Gamasutra – News – City Of Heroes’s Mission Architect Births 20,000 Arcs In First Week

Looking at some of the screen shots on the teaser site, it’s looking like it might be more of the same with an vastly updated engine, the original feeling pretty dated even when it came out if memory serves. And this can only be good news. If they manage to recapture that perfect balance, bringing back the same sound track with maybe some in character new additions this game is sure to find it’s way onto my system when it comes out.

Tropico 3 | Kalypso Media

Welcome to Area 5. Respect the Game. – Blog – CO-OP 0105 — Indie Special — Roundup of the best of the IGF

One of the problems with coming late to a console, as happened to me with the XBOX360, is there is a huge selection of games to cherry pick from. Even if you just stick to the best of the best the variety is impressive. So it is that in the sort time I’ve been an owner I’ve managed, even though I stuck to ‘good deals’ to amass 13 quality titles, 15 if you count Arcade even though Worms came with my memory card.

Now this is not a huge number, and probably sounds small to most of you, but given the few hours of gaming I actually get in most weeks, combined with the fact I still play on the PC, and to a lesser extent the Wii they are all standing far from completed, in fact judging by achievements I’m not even 25% into most of them.

Therefore I think I have to bring my buying of new games to a halt for a while, I need to work out what a ‘manageable’ number of unfinished titles is for me, and wait until I’ve cleared down my ‘Pile of Shame’ to an acceptable level.. thinking about 6 games or there abouts.. maybe. I may spend some time soon putting together a page for each system, PC, XBOX, Wii with games lists and progress, though on the Wii that could be quite a list since it will include Gamecube titles. Added together we’re probably looking at close to 50 games there on just that system.

I may be here for some time!