That’s pretty cool I think!

Screenshot:

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

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

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

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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Anyway, on to what the 27dinner was all about, what happened, and who did what. Firstly, Guy didn’t pitch. Work related reasons. Tsk. I didn’t see Leon there either. Tsk-tsk! (OK, I just noticed he removed himself from the list…) Others I saw was bje, nbm, Bryn, Alan, other Alan and Ian. I met some interesting people, some of which are Tania, Johan[n], Jonathan, Heidi, Sarah, Carlos (briefly), and about 3 other people from Quirk whose names I forgot as soon as it was mentioned, you know how it goes…

There was some socialising beforehand, outside the door, on the top level, bottom level, middle level, all over the place. We ended up listening to a bunch of people yacking about topical stuff. Except for Graham from Stormhoek. He related the history behind Stormhoek, and why Stormhoek is really part of the blogging community. OK, so maybe that was topical too, but I didn’t catch much of the story I’m afraid. I’m not a big wine drinker. Allthough, the glass of Stormhoek wine I had (I forget the name…) wasn’t half bad. Dry white I think.

There was this lass called Verity (A talented artist I must say) that told is her story, which involves selling CDs for her album… Which she hasn’t recorded yet. Yes, novel idea. Selling a product before it’s made. It’s working. Nice on-the-way-to-success story. She also sang some songs, nice local sound, nice voice. She’s good. And good-looking too…

We also heard about affiliate marketing and how to make money using an affiliate network, from a rather short lady going by the name of Shelly, who was there from a company called Traffic Synergy. Interesting talk on how to monetize your (blog-) content with more than just adsense (which, let’s face it, is what most of us end up sticking onto our blogs to get a couple of extra bucks… I’m yet to make my first $100 from the adsense on my blog. Can you see how popular it is? Heh.). Shelly, however, has one of those voices that one expects from a marketing person. Not a bad voice, but a marketing voice nonetheless. I’m not a big fan of marketing people. The rate amongst estate agents and telecoms monopolies in my books. But Shelly made some really good points, which I will take with me to work, and possibly even on my blog too. Thanks Shelly!

There was a gentleman that chatted about what roll the Mobile internet will play in the internet’s future, sorry dude, I can’t remember your name, I don’t think I caught it. Anyway, he made some good points about where mobile is being positioned, and where it will play an important roll, but then also had comments that included “Yes, it is expensive, but if you ignore the cost” or something along those lines when talking about 3G and HSDPA. No, sorry, you can’t ignore the price, because price is what rates the affordability of a product. It’s useless to you and me if there’s this really awesome, really fast mobile internet solution out there, if it only comes bundled with your R1000+ cellphone contracts, or if you end up paying exorbitant fees like R20/mb of traffic. What’s the frigging point? No, we can’t ignore the cost. He also mentioned that WAP will still be a viable delivery medium for content to endusers for at least another 4-or-so years. This may be true, but that will also be driven by what the phone manufacturers end up putting into their phones. If Windows Mobile 5 takes off in a big way, the phones will have Internet Explorer on, and WAP (and the whole WML thing) will be useless, and you won’t need to have a specific WAP version of your site, ‘cos the phones will be viewing your normal site anyway. And besides, with sufficient CSS-fu, you can make a mobile version of your site run off the exact same URL as your normal site. No need for this stupid .mobi TLD. It was a dumb idea to begin with. Stop it!

Dave Duarte from Cerebra also chatted about stuff, and at 1am, I can’t remember what. He’s quite a character though… Actually, I think he hosted the whole thing. haha.

We also heard from Guy Lundy, who also really talked about things non-topical (topical being what the blogging community wanted to hear, not what the speakers wanted to tell us…), he mentioned an e-mail he sent to 15 people that then pyramid-schemed itself ti “millions of people”, and the books he’s sold etc. Yes, we get it Guy, you like South-Africa. Yay for you. I like it too. Guy’s talk sounded a bit too much sales-pitchy though…

After that the Stormhoek guys auctioned off some t-shirts, some poor sod paid R350 for a white t-shirt with some black writing on. And then it was on to more socialising and paying the bills. Apparently there was a rather big shortage of paying customers at the JHB 27dinner… Shame on you people!

Anyway, it’s almost 1am, and I have work in 5 hours. I hope you enjoyed my summary of how I experienced the 27dinner, and I’d love to experience another one, but not if it’s at an expensive place like this, really. It cost me R200 in total for me-myself-I to have supper and a couple of drinks. And no dessert! Tania said Spur, which brought on a “Yes!” from Jaco, and a *groan* from Neil. Heh.

Anyway, bedtime.

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Tags: 27dinner, Relish, Stormhoek, marketing, Mobile

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

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

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

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

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