Web 3.0

The next step in web development has been claimed to be the semantic web, sounds great but I think we’re a few steps away from that. The next step I believe will be to integrate web services seamlessly into our user experience, essentially making them part of our everyday lives without gluing us to the screen with 789 tabs open.

Enter Ubiquity, the command line interface that lets you use all web service functions from a standard browser window. Check it out, the example video will blow your mind.

http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/

Little Big Planet is not that original

Games have been under attack for a long time from gamers and game media for being unoriginal. Developers have been harassed for not trying new things while developing costs keep increasing forcing publishers to stick more and more to the tried and true formulas.

A few noteworthy games such as Spore have broken this mold and have been, rightly so, highly acclaimed for innovation. Another greatly anticipated title that is applauded for innovation is little big planet. Media Molecules astonishingly universal cloth toy platform game that is more then half level editor.

I need to be honest here, without ever playing LPB I’m in love with the game. I’ve preordered it with a bundled PS3 just to play it as soon as possible. Something I’ve never done before. But is it really that original?

Actually no. But that doesn’t matter, because the thing is that it’s the gaming press that is highly unoriginal.

The reason I’m kicking the press is that, while LPB looks like it’s going to be a great game, the innovation that Media Molecule is bringing to the table has absolutely nothing to do with the game part of LPB at all. The innovation is that they’ve sliced the world editor into the gameplay itself and making it (hopefully) fun to create and share work. The game itself is more or less just a cooperative version of Mario. But in the package is all the freedom and never ending entertainment that we are used to finding in blogs and on youtube.

I have high hopes that Media Molecule has pulled this off, creating the first MMO “game platform” platform game.

Warhammer Online guild

I started a guild in WAR yesterday. So far I’m pretty impressed by the fact that there is actually incentive to do so in WAR. Guilds level up and give skills and features for all members to brag about.

This might be the first guild/convergence/corporation/whatever that I actually feel inclined to be active in. More on this as it develops.

Cloud based computing

The cloud based computing term is thrown around a lot on the web these days. While we wait for a completely cloud based computer to be released (www.cloudo.com) we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. This is my rundown of how I solve the common everyday problems.

I bought an Asus EEE pc. It’s great, it’s small, it has battery life and a full qwerty keyboard. The biggest problem is the OS (xandros) which I can thankfully replace with a proper one (ubuntu, xp is to slow). But it still doesn’t have the kind of power I’m getting used to while at my computer.

Sure for office work I mostly use google documents, and for storing images (if I needed to) I have picasa or flickr or oosah or a million other services. But what I really want is a place to put all those things that I want to keep with me. Bookmarks, notes, files and so on. Google had most of these needs covered with google bookmarks and google notebook, but Google have yet to release their fabled online drive. And they also messed things up when they released Chrome, which is a great browser, that doesn’t support it’s own products such as bookmarks!?! Way to go Google, your age is showing. Is this the first step towards becoming Microsoft? Seems to be.

But lo! Saving the day a small upstart called Drop Box smashes into my life and makes things work. Drop Box is a small program or online interface that lets you sync a folder on your computer with an online storage space. It runs in the background, doesn’t take up any RAM (a lot of bandwidth though if you handle a lot of files) lets you sync the folder to an unlimited number of computers (windows, mac or linux) and has no file size limits. Sounds awesome? It is.

But whats the catch? Well, drop box is still in development and you can only sign up for 2GBs of storage… Sure, their free and that’s great. But I was hoping for more. This is a service I’d be happy to pay for though.

Warhammer Online first impressions

The highly anticipated MMORPG Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is finally launched and I have, as most of you, started playing. Right now I’m stomping through Blood Mountains (at least I think it was called that) as a fierce and funny black orc, screaming and yelling as I rampage around and kill anything I see.

My first impressions of the game are really only threefold:

1. Polish

I didn’t play the first release of WoW so I can’t compare with it. But I can compare WAR with Age of Conan, Vanguard and Tabula Rasa. It’s kicks ass in the polish department. WAR feels complete, I have yet to see any bugs and though some animations and quests are a bit jerky at times they don’t subtract a whole lot since they’re never really believable in an MMO anyway.

2. Gameplay

There’s a whole lot more to do in WAR then in WoW or Vanguard.  The developers behind WAR have really pulled out some great innovations in using MMO mechanics to come up with gameplay activities. Quests are sometimes logically based on other quests which I had no idea I was missing in other MMOS. For example: one of the first quests as a greenskin is to kill dwarfs found in barrels washed up on a shore under the towering walls of a dwarf keep, and thirty minutes into the game I find a quest where I stuff dwarfs in barrels and throw them off the keep. Now this might exist in certain areas of WoW or Vanguard, but I have yet to notice it if it does. In WAR, my experience so far really seems integrated into the world. Not taped on like the quests of early WoW.

Public quests work great by the way. And they are a really fun way to spend 15minutes away from solitary questing.

3. World or Setting

Warcraft is a ripoff of Warhammer, which in turn is a ripoff of Tolkien’s middle earth. That’s ok.

But Warcraft really started to invent the setting while they build WoW, so we can see the cracks in the setting design in the early parts of WoW that get smaller as the setting is refined into later stages and of course the expansion. WAR doesn’t have this problem, it’s based on an very fleshed out fantasy world that has so much story, depth and humour that it rubs of on all the people working with the world. In short, WAR feels a lot more like a world then World of Warcraft and the humour of Warhammer is everywhere, spot on, and making sure that it never gets too serious.

I’m impressed by WAR so far, I’ll be back with more thoughts on the game in a few days.

Spore

I’ve just played spore into the start of the space stage, I really like it. But it’s quite unlike most other games.

I have a few friends that’ve played spore and told me it was shallow. Even one extreme who said it was down right boring. But when I asked them why this is most of them couldn’t give me more then general arguments on the lines of “not enough to do” or “not enough of a challenge” which to me sounds exactly like the critique the Sims recieved from the gamer community and it still went on to become the biggest franchise in the history of the industry.

My own oppinion is that Spore, as far as basic mechanics go, is pretty shallow. Where in the Sims you had an abundance of choices Spore offers at best about 4. But here is the tricky part. Spore has a deep meta gameplay.

The Sims was quickly hailed to be a great way of just pushing around a doll house. That is, the game itself was really more about looking in on and affecting the lives of your sims then it was about controlling them. And the same is true about Spore. Spore is a tamagotchi for an entire evolutionary tree of a species from baceria to space aliens. But that’s all it is. Spore is not a classic game where you rank higher then others and so on. Spore gives the player unending amounts of creatures and vehicles and stuff, and basically says: go explore. Poke around, see how they interact. This is real hobbyist entertainment, I could spend countless hours with Spore if I had the time. Just like I can spend coutless hours painting Warhammer figures, or countless hours playing with a dog that I don’t have time to have.

Spore is in essence, a simulator that lets you poke and play with simplyfied evolution, don’t expect a game. This is an experience. And it is as close to a work of art as I have ever seen.

The american economy

I usually like to hold politics out of this blog, it’s a blog about games primarily and politics have only very little to do with the development of interactive entertainment.

But this clip caught my eye, the american government is basically nationalizing the two mig realestate agencies that have become the figurehead of the economic decline caused by the American war on the middle east.

Enjoy:

Anyone having problems with chrome?

I’m having some problems with google chrome:

• Some javascript web applications freeze for a second or two now and again.
• CSS color updates (for backgrounds) are really slow in some web applications (www.rememberthemilk.com)
• I can’t use blogger, it tells me that javascript in my browser has been disabled… LoL!

Anyone else having problems? Sure this is a beta, but with regards to their launch information that stated that they had better QA then any other browser application it’s really weird that these simple problems should trickle through. Or are they extremely advanced problems with simple symptoms?

Google chrome

Everyone is discussing it but I still have to mention the fact.
Google has just released Google Chrome, a web browser with some interesting features.
For example each tab in the very streamlined interface is a seperate process, quite similar to having several browser windows up at the same time. The effect is that you can free up memory without having to restart the entire application as well as one crashing tab will not crash the rest of the program.

It’s built on apples webkit and is extemely fast. It also has a completely new virtual machine for javascript which should speed up web applications a bunch. Though I haven’t seen that at all so far.

A good friend of mine said this morning: “Google is taking over the world. They’ll launch an OS soon”.
My reply was that he’d already missed it. Google doesn’t need an OS, they’ve already created one through the web using cloud computing.
Soon everyone will have a linux based netbook, the only common ground will be the web. And guess who will rule supreme with their new browser fastest on the net?

There are a lot of worse rulers mind you…