The Firefly universe is to get an MMORPG: hotness shiny =). I may finally have a reason to start playing an MMOG.
New Copyright Law FAQ
The amended version of the stupidest copyright law ever has a FAQ to clear up “misconceptions” – remains stupidest copyright law ever. The hand of RIAA/MPAA is quite clear in this. Also, Ruddock is a bastard.
What Cricket?
I genuinely feel sorry for the English; it’s not like they’re that bad, actually. Any other side in the world, they’d do fine (probably), especially if they put this much effort into it. It’s just that the Aussies are just that little bit more arrogant, that little bit more self-believing, that they’ll put in those last hard yards the English just can’t scrounge up, and they beat them.
I think it’s cricket that’s suffering; I don’t really want to watch it any more, if every script ends with “Australia wins”. I can’t stand how arrogant and unsporting they are about it.
Going Backwards
I’ve hard enough of the Hemmingway design. I originally intended it as a way of provoking me to write more per post, but it’s ended up making me write less because I didn’t have the big things to write, or I just wanted to jot down a quick line. So it’s back to the original design while I work something out. Probably to be soon replaced by K2 as a bridge to something more “me” again.
Country naming test
How well can you identify countries on a map? I struggle with the African, South American and former USSR Central Asian countries. My score: 70 (via).
More Photos
Nice, Monaco, Barcelona, Paris, Stonehenge, Bath, Windsor Castle, Amsterdam, Grad Training and Parties in London photos all up =) Just London sightseeing to go!
Sony Ericsson W850i
I’ve had this phone for just over a week now and the verdict is in: It’s good. But, and there’s always that inevitable ‘but’, it’s a little bit of a disappointment.
The Basics
The basic features of this match basically any other phone out there on the market today. Bluetooth, 2 megapixel camera, slider, fairly funky looking overall package. The ‘hook’, I suppose, is the Walkman branding, which Sony Ericsson is pushing as its ‘youthful’ models, trying to hook into the MP3 player market. Well, they got me, because I was considering a replacement for my temperamental iPod, and seeing this phone meant I could reduce two, maybe even three devices to one. It’s got fairly good battery life, with 3 hours talktime, 8 hours Walkman play or a week’s worth standby. It’s also got flight mode so that you can use the Walkman on a plane.
The Walkman
When Sony announced the Walkman series, I imagined something like an MP3 player that had phone features shoe-horned in. The reality is that it’s nothing more than a dedicated music playing application on the phone, with a well-integrated music-file navigation. The phone comes with a 1 gigabyte Memory Stick to store the tunes, supporting up to 4GB. Coming from a 30GB iPod, that’s a crash-to-earth scenario for me, but while it forces you to think of what you want to listen to when transferring, the flipside is that it’s simpler to just go to the music and hit play. The transfer software isn’t too crash hot, but it does have the advantage of supporting drag & drop.
The Walkman interface is simple – perhaps too much so. Making playlists is easy, but while you can move from one song to the next, you can’t fast-forward within a song. The ID3 tag display is static, which sucks for longer song titles. The other major gripe is that the radio function is a separate application, which makes no sense to me.
The Standard Bits
The 2 megapixel camera has Sony’s camera expertise behind it, making it easy to use, but it remains underwhelming – I suppose nothing beats a proper lens. The 4x digital zoom is a lie – it’s only there for the VGA resolution (the lowest). So much for leaving the camera at home as well. The video player software is alright, much like the Walkman in that it doesn’t allow you to fast-forward, but I’ve already watched a couple of episodes on it. Wonderful way to waste time on the way in to work.
It’s got Java (with a couple of fun games), Bluetooth 2 and the other standard connectivity stuff, with triband and 3G (UTMS), so it’s a worldwide phone to boot. I mean, the advertising includes stuff like ‘SMS! Calls! Video Calls!’, but those kind of things aren’t features so much as functions that phones without them wouldn’t be modern phones at all.
One cool undocumented feature is that it can charge via USB, which means one less charger when travelling if you’ve got a laptop.
The Disappointments
The phone has an RSS feed reader, and reviews praise its browser software, but the network has crippled many of these features, forcing you to use only their services and sites unless you want to pay through the nose, leaving the phone feeling artificially limited. The problem here is not the phone, but it is a package that you get sold and I think they could do so much better.
It’s not that it’s a bad phone; it’s a good phone, and indeed is more or less at the cutting edge of mobiles today. Unless you’re going for a ‘smartphone’, it’s got pretty much anything you’d need. The slider is also cool, but something I’m going to have to get used to, as is unlocking keys are two years with a flip-phone.
The problem, though, is that once upon a time the bleeding edge of mobiles moved. Every time you upgraded, you’d discover a raft of new features to play with – the last time for me, it was colour! it had a camera! it played MP3s! Sure, it didn’t do the camera or the MP3s very well at all, but it had the features. This feels much more like an incremental upgrade – fixing things which didn’t work well, adding nifty features which are well appreciated but nothing special. I suppose some of the focus has shifted to the wonderful world of smartphones, but they remain a little too bulky for me, with features that i could use but could also do without.
I’m happy with the upgrade, happy with the new features, and more than happy to lose the bulk of my old phone. I just can’t help thinking that innovation left the industry a while ago.
ed: what I have come to realise though is that as a cross-over device, this is perfectly capable of replacing a camera, an MP3 player, an FM radio and a sound recorder all in one little package, not to mention the already diverse range of uses a mobile phone has. If you look at it that way, it’s actually pretty useful =)
Ashes Test 2 Begins
Ashes Test 2 in Adelaide begins; England names unchanged XI, world baffled. England to bat though.
Italy Photos up
Rule of Rose-coloured glasses
The ‘family’ lobby is at it again, with calls for Australia to follow the lead of the Europe in forcing the removal of the game “Rule of Rose“, which puts the player in the shoes of a girl whose world is shaped by a bunch of other girls, the ‘bullies’. It’s a twist on the survival horror genre, but otherwise appears to be entirely devoid of truly original content or technological advance. In summary, were it to have been released without any fuss, it is likely it would have quietly flopped without a trace.
What angers me each time there’s a call for games like this to be removed is the catch-cry of those baying for the blood: won’t somebody please think of the kids? The assumption is obviously: it’s a game, it’s played by kids. The truth is, however, the average age of PS2 (the platform the game is published on) gamers is around 21, last I heard – some years ago at that. And we already have a hugely restrictive censorship regime which judges games far more harshly than movies. The interactivity makes the case for this to occur in some instances, but if the existing system were to be applied to movies, many of the current ‘MA’ rated movies would effectively be banned. It’s a double standard which will increasingly get even more glaring over time as games approach movies for style, graphics and general flair. If the classification system isn’t working because parents are getting kids the games anyway, then it’s not really the games or the classification we should be blaming, but perhaps the parents.
Rule of Rose was pulled by the publisher following bad publicity in the UK and Europe, where the mayor of Rome called for the game to be banned. The media’s comments suggested the game was full of torture, brutality, s&m, and among other things generally encouraging of bullying. The family lobby here has seized on this, and the pulling of the game, and twisted it pleasantly in their own direction. However, you play as the victim, so your goal can only be to free yourself – something I can only consider a good thing. Clearly, without investigating it one iota, they jumped a passing bandwagon and hope for the best. This frustrates me very, very much.
Rule of Rose would probably have gone unheard of in my neighbourhood, but since it’s been highlighted as something controversial, now I want to try it – giving this game far more credit than it deserves. The “family” lobby needs to grow up with its views on gaming and understand that those kids who were showing off their Ataris have grown into mature adults, but still want to play games occasionally.