Google is stretching out it's boundaries as far as it can, and rumors started a few days ago that Google is on to build a full scale social network modeled after Facebook.
Google started digging into the social internet some time ago with Google Buzz, a very sweet concept of integrating status updates into GMail, but i'm not sure how successful it got as I don't use neither Buzz nor Twitter. Now Google is making "Google me" which is now a confirmed and high priority project. As far as I learned, Google assumed Facebook's growth would slow in time, and now they are pretty scared and set up to regain lost ground.
Isn't this move a bit late? I mean I know Google can offer way better services, servers and so on then most other companies out there, but this is all about popularity and public interest, which is already focused on Facebook. If their scheme works, there's going to be a really nice social network war out there, although I seriously doubt that.
Anyway, Google Me is definitely going to come out pretty soon and we'll all see what big, high priority social monster they are now building.
Wednesday 30 June 2010
Tuesday 29 June 2010
Prince of Persia the Forgotten Sands - review
I'ts been a while since Ubisoft released a cool Prince of Persia game, but they came back with Forgotten Sands... which is more like a spin off the series.
The game, which is 99% unrelated to the previous games from the story perspective, shows the story of a prince (nameless, as usual) who visits his brother (Malik) to become a great warrior, The story is pretty linear and mostly predictable, except for a few turning points which change the prince's objectives, but that's about it. You know who's your ally, and who's your enemy, and who's the idiot charging and causing all your problems and "moral difficulties". The game is supposed to take place between Sands of Time and Warrior within... but it doesn't really make any sense, and could be another series all together.
The bad part - Combat.
Prince of Persia 2008 made a horrible mistake of having only boss battles with really cool combos, but it SUCKED big time. Now forgotten sands brings you a whole bunch of like 40 enemies to fight at once, which is awesome... but the combo system is gone completely. You still have kicks and slashes, but they no longer tie into combos. There's just one combo I figured out, 4 slashes and a power slash => double power slash... which is not that great anyways.
There are some cool enemies who appear towards the second part of the game (summoners and "epic" summoners) which create undead sand monsters or powerfull undead sandmonster (have no ideea how they are officially caled) and if not taken care of early, they can keep you busy for some time. They are also the most annoying lesser enemies because they knock you down if you stay close for some time.
There is a fun part about the combat though. You can bounce on sand monster heads. Sure you can slash them in a failed way from up there, but it's way more fun to jump around from head to head = )).
The awesome part - Acrobatics.
Acrobatics have been upgraded way beyond anything Ubisoft has thrown out on the market (as far as i played). The idiot moves from PoP2008 (like ceiling run) have gone out and they kept to the old approach of jumps, ledges and wall runs. However, they added 3 awesome acrobatic powers.
Power 1 - Freeze.
You have dozens of watter jets, pillars and curtains of watter that you can solidify at will. Even if it sounds dumb, from a gameplay point of view it's amazing. You have watter jets coming sequentially from the wall and you have to freeze and unfreeze them while you're in the air and jumping between them and wait for them to change position while you're in the air. You have to go on a frozen jet and unfreze to jump through a curtain and freeze again to land on another jet and so on. It's just epic.
Power 2 - Dash (I'm sure it's called differently).
This allows you to dash toward an enemy and kill him. You can't really use it in combat, but that's not it's purpose. It's not that amazing as the Freeze ability but it looks pretty fun to jump from vulture to vulture in mid air.
Power 3 - Memory recall.
Razia, the djin helping you, gives you her memories of a certain section of the kingdom you're fighting in and so you can recall sections of it one at a time and use them as ordinary acrobatic platform elements and, as the game says, see the former glory of the kingdom in ruins. This is not that great as the freeze ability, but it works the same way, except here you tap to recall a section whereas you hold a key you freeze.
The brilliant part. Towards the end of the game you have to use all these powers together and (if playing on a PC) you have you left arm jammed on directional keys, freeze ability, jump, roll (same button for dash) and memory recall and it feels just awesome (too may times I've used this word here, but for the acrobatic part of the game it fits perfectly.)
The soundtrack.
This is again really good, but i still think Stuart Chatwood would have done a better job (see the other PoP soundtracks... especially the Warrior Within one).
Overall.
It's a great game and a bit short. I give it a 8.7/10 for the Acrobatics and Soundtrack. I it deserves less because of the way too easy click, click, click combat (even on the highest difficulty which is marked as Normal), but I really loved jumping around and acrobatic powers amazed me more than I expected. I strongly not recommend playing it on Easy because even the acrobatics are simpler.
The game, which is 99% unrelated to the previous games from the story perspective, shows the story of a prince (nameless, as usual) who visits his brother (Malik) to become a great warrior, The story is pretty linear and mostly predictable, except for a few turning points which change the prince's objectives, but that's about it. You know who's your ally, and who's your enemy, and who's the idiot charging and causing all your problems and "moral difficulties". The game is supposed to take place between Sands of Time and Warrior within... but it doesn't really make any sense, and could be another series all together.
The bad part - Combat.
Prince of Persia 2008 made a horrible mistake of having only boss battles with really cool combos, but it SUCKED big time. Now forgotten sands brings you a whole bunch of like 40 enemies to fight at once, which is awesome... but the combo system is gone completely. You still have kicks and slashes, but they no longer tie into combos. There's just one combo I figured out, 4 slashes and a power slash => double power slash... which is not that great anyways.
There are some cool enemies who appear towards the second part of the game (summoners and "epic" summoners) which create undead sand monsters or powerfull undead sandmonster (have no ideea how they are officially caled) and if not taken care of early, they can keep you busy for some time. They are also the most annoying lesser enemies because they knock you down if you stay close for some time.
There is a fun part about the combat though. You can bounce on sand monster heads. Sure you can slash them in a failed way from up there, but it's way more fun to jump around from head to head = )).
The awesome part - Acrobatics.
Acrobatics have been upgraded way beyond anything Ubisoft has thrown out on the market (as far as i played). The idiot moves from PoP2008 (like ceiling run) have gone out and they kept to the old approach of jumps, ledges and wall runs. However, they added 3 awesome acrobatic powers.
Power 1 - Freeze.
You have dozens of watter jets, pillars and curtains of watter that you can solidify at will. Even if it sounds dumb, from a gameplay point of view it's amazing. You have watter jets coming sequentially from the wall and you have to freeze and unfreeze them while you're in the air and jumping between them and wait for them to change position while you're in the air. You have to go on a frozen jet and unfreze to jump through a curtain and freeze again to land on another jet and so on. It's just epic.
Power 2 - Dash (I'm sure it's called differently).
This allows you to dash toward an enemy and kill him. You can't really use it in combat, but that's not it's purpose. It's not that amazing as the Freeze ability but it looks pretty fun to jump from vulture to vulture in mid air.
Power 3 - Memory recall.
Razia, the djin helping you, gives you her memories of a certain section of the kingdom you're fighting in and so you can recall sections of it one at a time and use them as ordinary acrobatic platform elements and, as the game says, see the former glory of the kingdom in ruins. This is not that great as the freeze ability, but it works the same way, except here you tap to recall a section whereas you hold a key you freeze.
The brilliant part. Towards the end of the game you have to use all these powers together and (if playing on a PC) you have you left arm jammed on directional keys, freeze ability, jump, roll (same button for dash) and memory recall and it feels just awesome (too may times I've used this word here, but for the acrobatic part of the game it fits perfectly.)
The soundtrack.
This is again really good, but i still think Stuart Chatwood would have done a better job (see the other PoP soundtracks... especially the Warrior Within one).
Overall.
It's a great game and a bit short. I give it a 8.7/10 for the Acrobatics and Soundtrack. I it deserves less because of the way too easy click, click, click combat (even on the highest difficulty which is marked as Normal), but I really loved jumping around and acrobatic powers amazed me more than I expected. I strongly not recommend playing it on Easy because even the acrobatics are simpler.
Wednesday 23 June 2010
GoogleCL
I've just installed GoogleCL.
GoogleCL allows you to acces some basic functionality on blogger, youtube, picasa, contacs and calendar. I'll keep this post short because i have no ideea how this is going to work, what title this post will have (like will it be the first line of this file, or the title parameter i will give to the function).
I've written this in a .txt on my computer and uploaded through GoogleCL. I hope I will be amazed by the result but right now I don't know what to expect.
So..... here goes nothing. Enjoy everyone!
[Edit]
So it turned out as expected, but i changed the font... gotta set this one default though.
GoogleCL allows you to acces some basic functionality on blogger, youtube, picasa, contacs and calendar. I'll keep this post short because i have no ideea how this is going to work, what title this post will have (like will it be the first line of this file, or the title parameter i will give to the function).
I've written this in a .txt on my computer and uploaded through GoogleCL. I hope I will be amazed by the result but right now I don't know what to expect.
So..... here goes nothing. Enjoy everyone!
[Edit]
So it turned out as expected, but i changed the font... gotta set this one default though.
Monday 21 June 2010
Conky - Rediscovered
Hello everyone. I know it's been a long time, but I've pretty much forgotten about posting all together : ).
It was a very nice Friday morning when I decided (again) that I don't like my damn desktop (too boring), so I started looking for a new wallpaper. After about 20-30 minutes searching (I was reaaaaly slow and didn't know what I wanted) I got here http://lyx91.deviantart.com/art/Techno-wallpaper-60142158 and loved the way the artist made that overlay over the wallpaper. It bugged me for a while, but then I suddenly realized I should resurrect conky and try to integrate it with the wallpaper.
What is conky?
Conky is a lightweight system monitor for X. It uses configuration files to gather information about window placement, transparency, fonts and other display options and, of course, information about what is to be rendered. It provides a HUGE variable database to work with ranging from battery, CPU, RAM, Swap, time data, to information about current processes, network graphs, mpd and xmms2 support (and probably a few other music players) and it even has an EvE Online skill monitor which shows how long you have to wait for your current skill to be done (PS. I don't play EvE though I could make another post about it's awesomeness). And if that's not enough, it has a few commands to execute external programs and do whatever it wants with the output.
What did I do?
I started out nice and easy and added some data on screen about the time and basic system information (like kernel version, hostname, distribution, available updates...) and placed them around that circle in the top left corner.
Next, I placed some information about the CPU usage: some CPU graphs, RAM and Swap data and a top processes list sorted by both CPU and memory usage.
Then I got to the hard part. I wanted weather forecast displayed so I started looking for some scripts to do that. After a long and winding road, i got here, found this guy who had some really cool scripts designed for conky including one made for forecasting. It required registering with some weather website and setting up some data feed from there, so no cheap hacking involved, but the script was brilliant and used some conky templates to set up the layout.
The only other problem I faced was with displaying data about the current song in Rhythmbox. Again I had to find a script, but the same guy had one so I used that.
So, this is what came out of my bored morning. I hope you like it.
It was a very nice Friday morning when I decided (again) that I don't like my damn desktop (too boring), so I started looking for a new wallpaper. After about 20-30 minutes searching (I was reaaaaly slow and didn't know what I wanted) I got here http://lyx91.deviantart.com/art/Techno-wallpaper-60142158 and loved the way the artist made that overlay over the wallpaper. It bugged me for a while, but then I suddenly realized I should resurrect conky and try to integrate it with the wallpaper.
What is conky?
Conky is a lightweight system monitor for X. It uses configuration files to gather information about window placement, transparency, fonts and other display options and, of course, information about what is to be rendered. It provides a HUGE variable database to work with ranging from battery, CPU, RAM, Swap, time data, to information about current processes, network graphs, mpd and xmms2 support (and probably a few other music players) and it even has an EvE Online skill monitor which shows how long you have to wait for your current skill to be done (PS. I don't play EvE though I could make another post about it's awesomeness). And if that's not enough, it has a few commands to execute external programs and do whatever it wants with the output.
What did I do?
I started out nice and easy and added some data on screen about the time and basic system information (like kernel version, hostname, distribution, available updates...) and placed them around that circle in the top left corner.
Next, I placed some information about the CPU usage: some CPU graphs, RAM and Swap data and a top processes list sorted by both CPU and memory usage.
Then I got to the hard part. I wanted weather forecast displayed so I started looking for some scripts to do that. After a long and winding road, i got here, found this guy who had some really cool scripts designed for conky including one made for forecasting. It required registering with some weather website and setting up some data feed from there, so no cheap hacking involved, but the script was brilliant and used some conky templates to set up the layout.
The only other problem I faced was with displaying data about the current song in Rhythmbox. Again I had to find a script, but the same guy had one so I used that.
So, this is what came out of my bored morning. I hope you like it.
Now I'm looking fore some really cool Ubuntu theme to go with this. If anyone has any ideas, please leave a comment ^_^.
Enjoy, everyone!
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