While reading some mail I received from Gamespot this morning (Subject: Download and play Flatout 2 today), I noticed two new items to the right of the actual mail. Gmail seemed to pick up the “today” in the subject line, and added an “Add to calendar” link, and also picked up a physical address from the mail, and added a “Map this” link.

That’s pretty cool I think!

Screenshot:

Tags: Gamespot, Gmail, Add to calendar, Map this

I couldn’t believe it!
Not only was Viva Piñata so damned addicting, but also, addicting is a word! (haha, no really!)

But let’s not discuss what Oxford would and wouldn’t put into their English Dictionary…

Viva Piñata (how do you type that squiggle on the n anyway? I had to copy and paste…) is a seriously, *seriously* big time sink. Remember when the first SimCity was released and you received on a freshly copied 360k floppy disk back in the 90′s? And then proceeded to play it, for hours on end, only to end up with a city that’s running itself into the ground, and then you start again, but *this* time it will be better? Remember that? Viva Piñata is 10 times worse, which makes it 50 times better.

On the surface, the game would never attract me, or most adult gamers, unless they’ve read something about the game, and know what they’re getting themselves into. The game is colorful, and, dare I say it, cutesy-cutesy. The game features over 60 animal species, all (almost all) with a possibility to be changed in color throughout the game through experimentation. Some species can be fed certain things to actually evolve into other species. Helpers help out, bad guys spoil the fun, and you get to breed (and, in one specific case, cross-breed) species of piñata. Fun fun fun.

So what’s the aim of the game? Create a thriving, living garden, and manage the fauna and flora in it. Sounds simple? It’s not. Far from it. Different species fight with eachother, ruffians and sour piñata come and spoil your day. There’s a storyline in there somewhere, that gets unlocked as time goes by, but I haven’t read it. I don’t think many people do. Oh, and there are many, many achievements to be unlocked, and lots of blocks that need ticks next to them. Do you have a Squirrel visiting outside your garden? Tick. Have you enticed the squirrel to come visit in your garden? Tick. Did you entice said squirrel sufficiently to actually stay in your garden? Tick. Have you romanced two squirrels? Tick. Are you a master romancer for the squirrels? Tick. Tick. Have you managed to find what to feed a squirrel to changed it into the three possible color variants? Tick. Tick. Tick. Now do that for every species that happens to come along to the garden, all the while making sure they don’t get eaten by other piñatas, or become unhappy and run away, or get beaten into little bits of sweets (Hey, they *are* Piñatas after all…) by one of the bad guys…

Scratching under the colorful surface of the game, you’ll find an enthralling, interesting and massive management sim. Each Piñata needs micromanagement to be able to get them to do anything. This is not a bad thing. It helps the game along quite nicely. You need to plant seeds, water them, and fertilize them if you want them to become really huge and bare more seeds, or flowers, or fruit in the case of fruit trees. Soon you’ll find yourself playing the game for hours on end just to breed that last Quackberry (duck for you uninitiated), or trying to entice that Doenut (a member of Bambi’s family) into your garden with sufficient amounts of long grass, wondering why it’s taking so long for the day to end, then realising that it’s been night and now it’s morning again, and you’ve played right through the night. As I said. Addicting.

And big. The game is big. There will always be something to do, something to try, and something to grow. “I wonder what happens when the duck eats a water-lilly flower. OH MY GOD! IT TURNS PINK!!!” is something that will happen every now and again. What’s the use of a pink duck? Nothing really other than to entertain whoever is playing the game. And in our house’s case, it’d be the woman of the house that’s claimed the Xbox 360 and the TV forever more. Or, at least, until she becomes a master romancer for every single one of the species in the game. Argh, I’ve lost the TV!

Seriously though, Viva Piñata is an extremely enjoyable game, and the subject matter of breeding, or romancing, is totally safe for kids. Xbox.com has an article by XboxDad on the suitability of Viva Piñata for kids. Good read. The game itself also has a short video on it. There is even a Viva Piñata TV series, which has several episodes for download, free of charge, via the XBox Live Marketplace portal.

Fun for the whole family, to play and watch, Viva Piñata is a must addition to any Xbox 360 game collection. And by looking at the online screenshots of the game, definitely appreciated better on an HDTV, which sadly, I don’t have.

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Tags: addicting, Viva Piñata, Xbox 360

WOW!
This is awesome!
I’m so looking forward to seeing this!
I signed up immediately! Go on, add your name to the list to get mail when it finally launches!

The guys over at Re-Inventech wanted to run a press release on the

Gaming console that is capable of reading and playing games from three of the world’s most popular gaming consoles has finally been developed

called the Phantom HP.

The site says the console will be able to play Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo (?) games. That would be so cool, except, it’s not true.
I call bullshit!

Here’s why. (Thanks to the guys on the take2.co.za forums that helped with the investigations…)

The domain reinventech.co.za was registered only 10 days ago, by a company calling themselves MLS IGroup (Pty) Ltd, on behalf of a Gerald Yepp (in turn from a place called In Detail Advertising. The domain is still to be paid.
In-Detail Advertising’s site says their philosophy is to “to create RESPONSE DRIVEN ADVERTISING that wins you business”. Added to that, the reinventech site has a single form to add your name and e-mail address to be notified when the console will launch. Double bullshit.

Other reasons that may spark the neurons to think “Hold it!”, could be:

• Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will never let the reverse engineering of their consoles slide, legally.
• The Phantom console on the reinventech site looks suspiciously *exactly* the same as the Phantom Console from Infinium Labs, that never saw the light of day.
• Two of the members of Re-Inventech’s surnames are Hott and Price, which is suspiciously similar to a site of In Detail Advertising called hotprice.co.za
• It’s too damned close to April Fool’s Day.

Starting a bit early hey guys?
Honestly, I wonder if Gerald Yepp *really* thought it was going to work?
Or, maybe it did work. Something like this has the capability to become rather viral.
And, to those of you reading this far, don’t, really, don’t fill in that stupid little form on their website, ‘cos chances are they’re using it to harvest email addresses…

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Tags: Phantom, reinventech

I just read on Tectonic about the Mail & Guardian’s latest little venture called Amatomu.  It’s basically a South-African technorati.  I think it’s well-timed for the market, and it will show all South-African bloggers in one place, which I think is good.

Especially with the the publicity the Geekdinners and 27-dinners are getting as of late…  Who knows, maybe I’ll get more than 5 visitors a day.

One thing I was wondering was why it was not a .co.za domain…  Seeing that it is a South-African focussed site.  I see they also have the amatomu.co.za domain pointing to it, but the logo specifically says .com  *shrug*  Who am I to talk eh?  My blog lives on a .org

On a side note, I’m trying out a new blog update doodat called Deepest Sender.  It’s a Firefox plugin and allows you to select text and/or a link and send it to your Blog.  Similar to WordPress’s PressIt bookmarklet, but it supports a bunch of other blog software like blogger.com and others.
So far so good, it has a fairly simple wysiwyg editor with a live preview option, and supports something called FoxyTunes, whatever that is.

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I just got back from the 27dinner at Relish in Cape Town.
Nice venue, expensive food. Big bowls, not a lot of food in said bowls. I had a Thai something Fillet salad for R50 as a starter. Whoa. Too much green stuff in there. Didn’t like it much, but then, I’m not really a salad person. The fillet was nice though. Main course was pork something, with crackling and delish garlic roast potato mash. Yummers. But that was the food.
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Tags: 27dinner, Relish

I recently did a review of the Logitech MX Revolution mouse for www.ioltechnology.co.za.
What I neglected to do before the review went live though, was use the mouse on my MacMini here at work. If I did, the mouse would have received an even higher score than it did, as the Logitech software for Mac OSX is absolutely awesome. And that doesn’t apply just to the MX Revolution’s setup, but even to my dinky old Logitech optical mouse with 3 buttons and a scroll wheel.
The software is so much more intuitive than the Windows equivalent. It allows you to easily change the setup of each individual button, for each individual Application if you really wanted to. I found the very useful for changing (especially) the scroll-wheel’s behaviour between applications, and also the back/forward buttons. For instance, in Firefox I want the scroll-wheel to scroll very quick if I so choose, but in for instance Thunderbird, scrolling up and down through my message list shouldn’t fly through the messages. Back and forward buttons in Thunderbird should take me to the previous and next messages, etc.

The Logitech software just handles this all beautifully. If you run Mac OSX and you’re thinking of what mouse to use other than your Might Mouse (let’s face it, when it comes to number of buttons on a mouse, more is better!), then definitely consider a Logitech mouse…

Tags: review, MX Revolution, Logitech, OSX

This is very nice indeed.
Vodacom, MTN and CellC are all on the dropdown list for when you enable notifications for events.
This is just so cool! Thanks Google.

Click on Settings -> Notifications, and at the bottom of the page is the section to setup the mobile notifications.

Hehehehe, I wish we had a local ThinkGeek equivalent here in South-Africa, ‘cos ordering from them is horribly pricey.

My latest favourite would-like-to-have-for-novelty-purposes is their Desktop USB Missile Launcher.  That’s just cool man!  Pity that it requires 3xAA batteries though, not sure why.  AA batteries are typically 1.5V each, so the three will give the thing 4.5V in total.  A USB port can give 5V, so why not just get the current from the USB port??  Odd.  Either way though, it’s still damn cool! 

Technorati Tags: batteries, gadget, launcher, missile, thinkgeek, USB

I just came across this article over at IOLTechnology.co.za about (currently) the 4th post popular video on youtube.

Here it is:

I didn’t find it that funny. What I did find funny though, was that Kevin Smith responded to it with his own spoof of it:

Damn I love that guy! hahaha.

Tags: youtube, Kevin Smith

I recently wrote a review for the PC game El Matador, and it was published on the fine, fine tech site IOLTechnology. I don’t think I can republish the review here on the blog, so just click through to the site if you want to read it. Even though I gave it the score I did, it’s still an enjoyable game to play, but has limited lifetime though. Thanks to the guys at Megarom for supplying the game.

Tags: review, El Matador, IOLTechnology