Past Links

A Link to the Past

There really is no better top-down adventure game out there. Even though Phil and I might quibble about the meaning of 3D, what we cannot quibble about is how amazing this game is.

So I started playing it again tonight. It really is a masterpiece, and it also sits in stark contrast to the huge, monster, cut-scene enhanced games that are found today on home consoles and the PC. This is coming from a person who loves Bioware’s games and is really looking forward to Mass Effect 3.

However, there is something refreshing about fast-scrolling text just pointing you in the general direction of where you are supposed to go and then getting out of your way. If you have a chance to play it, or many games from this era, give it a shot.

Not a Skyward Sword Rebuttal

My friend Phil Wels posted his 12 Egregious Sins of Skyward Sword over on his blog and I promised him that I would post something of a rebuttal.

This really isn’t a rebuttal.

First of all, I’ll agree, for the most part, with numbers 1 through 8 and 11. I don’t really see how you can disagree with them. I tended to just ignore those things for the most part and enjoy the game without really thinking about them until he brought them up.

I will, however, post my thoughts on the other three.

9. Ghirahim

He’s strange, I’ll give you that, and I kind of liked him because he didn’t really seem to be all there. Yes, he was not your standard “let’s all destroy the world” bad guy … but I guess I didn’t see that as a bad thing. He was a little goofy and just off, which I think added some color to the game.

Finally, when you find out that he was really nothing more than Demise’s sword, it all seemed to come together, in my mind at least. He brushed off Link because Link wasn’t really a part of this … he wasn’t supposed to be there. Much like a person brushes a fly off of his arm and doesn’t think much of it, so Link was thought of as well until the very end.

Overall, I like the “off” bad guy. He is not Ganondorf, however.

10. Wii Controls

Overall, I think that you’re either going to like them or you’re not and there really is no way around that. I had my fair amount of do-overs when attempting to navigate areas with my beetle or seemingly needing to get my bearings straight before I would aim at something, but I think that is the price you pay for working within 3 dimensions.

The ease of movement that a top-down game provides is lost when you both narrow the focus and add a dimension of movement (such as aiming or the beetle). It took me a while to figure out that I really needed to just make tiny little adjustments and if I did some big … I could expect failure very soon after.

The same could be said with all of the controls. While the Wii Remote Plus is good, it is not going to be as good as you want it … no current motion control system out there on any console is going to be. They are always going to be trying to guess what you wanted to do and sometimes they are going to fail.

Overall, I found the controls more than usable and a great step forward over Twilight Princess. One thing I am fairly certain of is that this is going to be the control scheme for the next batch of console-based Zelda games. Much like Z-targeting is now a “thing” for Zelda, motion controls are in that same category.

12. Item loss when “continuing” after death

You can always quit and then load the game over again. I like the added degree of difficulty if you decide that you just want to rush in again.

Maybe I’m just a glutton for punishment.

In Conclusion

I know that Phil and I are going to talk some more about this game in the future, and I look forward to doing so. I know that I can always count on him to find things that I would otherwise have overlooked, and the things he listed were definitely annoyances that I had at different parts of the game.

It was just those three that I really had any quibble with.

Categories
Life Technology

Why No Google Apps

Last year I moved my main email address from a generic Gmail account to my own domain. The reasons were many, but the main gist of it is so that I will control my email no matter what happens with a service provider.

In the past I had signed up for my first email account with Yahoo, then Hotmail, then finally Gmail. Having my email under my own domain name allows me to switch providers for whatever reason while still using the same address. It also gives me more control, which I am a fan of when it comes to my online life.

However, I moved to Google Apps instead and that created a number of problems for me.

  • ANOTHER Google account of some sort … which included work, my Gmail account, my business, and then my personal one
  • Google having access to my personal email, which wasn’t a problem for my conscience in the past, but was becoming more of one
  • Google’s mail is not your generic IMAP account with folders, they do a lot of other stuff
  • Google has begun limiting Apps accounts and might do so again in the future

Now, the Google Apps service is still superb, and as I have said before, it is good enough that I think it has killed a good portion of the hosted email business, but I still wanted to move to something else.

Well, for now, that “something else” is Atmail Cloud. As of earlier this evening, both my business and personal email (along with This One Podcast) is now going through Atmail Cloud. They have been wonderful so far and are still working out some kinks in the whole thing, but their support has been superb. I’ll write up more about Atmail Cloud later.

So I no longer have a personal or business Google Apps account and this has simplified things nicely. Now I can enjoy Google’s services without thinking about which account I should be using. I now have only one (my old Gmail account) … and that mail is already forwarded to me.

Categories
Technology

A Twitter App Decision

As I posted before, I have been looking for an app to replace Tweetie/Twitter for iPhone 3.x for a while now and I think I’ve finally stumbled upon it. While it might not satisfy every need I have, it does everything that I need and then some.

So, with the announcement of an iPad version, I’ve settled on Tweetbot as my Twitter application of choice for iOS.

With version 2 for iPhone and the new iPad version, Tweetbot really has taken the lead in the Twitter client arena. While I have not tried out Twittelator Neue (what a strange name), I have settled on Tweetbot both because it fits my needs on the iPhone and has an iPad app that is beautiful and functional.

I recommend that you give it a try for yourself.

Categories
Life

Skeptical of Free

In the tech world I see three basic categories for “stuff”:

  1. “Stuff” you pay for
  2. “Stuff” you don’t pay for
  3. “Stuff” that is open

Item 1 and 3 I tend to gravitate towards. For the first one, I feel like I have at least a little bit to do with its longevity and that the company or person at least has some motivation to treat me, the customer right. I paid them, they need me to do that and to get other people to pay as well.

“Stuff” that falls into Category 1 include Instapaper, Harvest, Tweetbot, my Apple stuff, Reeder, Textmate, etc.

I also trend toward the third category as well, mainly when it has to do with my development environment and the tools and libraries that I use. In this case, the person (or persons) was “scratching their own itch” and a community has grown up around this thing where there are a bunch of people scratching itches and hopefully some of those itches I might need scratched … well, this fell apart a long time ago.

‘Stuff” that falls into Category 3 includes (but is not limited to) Ruby on Rails, Ruby, WordPress, Apache, Ubuntu, Vim, etc.

I don’t want to come out too harshly against the second group here, but I am increasingly skeptical of that “stuff” that I don’t have to pay for or that isn’t open … or at least that I’m not explicitly paying for with my own money or that isn’t completely open source.

“Stuff” in Category 3 would include (but once again is not limited to) Facebook, Google Search, Google Apps (and Gmail, and most Google services), Twitter, etc.

It’s not that they are not good services (even though I have my gripes with Gmail and Google Apps at the moment), it is that I am not sure what value I actually have to Google. Am I a valued customer or am I something they are looking to monetize. It seems that most of the “whiz bang” startups at the moment run into the same issue: they get a ton of users and then need to “monetize” those users somehow.

The easy, no thought, no-one-gets-fired-for-choosing-IBM decision is to slap ads on it and then increasingly try and leverage the data you have on the users.

Perhaps the simplest, most forgotten way is to build something that is worth paying for in the first place!

Google garners something close to 95% of its revenue from ads. That’s an icky number to me, but I’m a strange person. If a company is that reliant on a single revenue source, what happens if that source “dries up”? I don’t know what Google will do when it happens (or if it does), but it will be interesting to find out.

I am more comfortable paying for something. That might make me weird, but I’m very skeptical of free.