And then I did a bit more work and created an alternate version! Little bit of color changing, fixed some stuff with the text, worked on the shadows a bit more, added a bit more with the grid. Hope you like it!

Sonic the Pop Star

Remember Sonic? I mean the good ol' Sonic, back on your genesis? You remember how catchy the songs were? You do? OK good.

Now lets look at Sonic 3... Some of those bad ass tune were worked on and written by none other than Micheal Jackson! Peep the kotaku article about it here.

I personally think that is just plain awesome. Just as long as no one plays that drowning music or I will have to beat them.

Also, some designer needs to be promoted for the 15 anniversary Playstation Logo, because that design is beautiful.

Usability Test

For my usability test, I figured why not do a site that has a ton of features and that most college students use every day?

Facebook!

1) Log in (I assume everyone has a FB account and knows how to log in...so not really a good question).

2) Send a message to a friend.

3) Change the bumper stickers application from publishing to your wall.

4) View your friends' phonebook.

5) Create a new Friends list and create a businesses list.

6) Edit your privacy settings to limit what that businesses list can see.

7) Upload a new photo to an existing album.

8) Make that photo your profile picture and tag yourself in that picture.

9) Make the photos page the first page your see on your homepage.

10) Go play some bejeweled blitz for taking this quiz! :D

Hope that was a good usability test. It covers some lesser know, harder to find stuff in facebook that really maybe should be easier to find, or at least in my opinion!

Free!

Free: The Future of Radical Price is a book by Chris Anderson.

And guess what, you can now download the audiobook for FREE from wired. Yeah, it's pretty awesome.

This blog post is taking the place of my kotaku one for the week

due to sheer epicness. I was linked to the article on Wired, which you can find here, off of another blog, JrockNYC. Even if you arn't into jrock, or don't even know what it is, I encourage you to check out his blog. Go, who owns the blog, is an excellent writer and posts tons of great content spanning all sorts of entertainment.

But back onto Free. The book was brought up in class once or twice and it's sat at the back of my mind for a while. Once I saw this link, I knew that I wanted to check it out. After listening to the prologue, I new I had to listen to the rest. I am currently half way through the book and enjoying every minute of it. It is a great listen and if you haven't read it yet I suggest you hit up the link and check it out.

Check out my website!

http://students.uww.edu/vonhadenar26/150

Right now I am thinking about doing a website for my friend's company, or at least work on the basic idea of it. my final idea is to do it in flash, but I have no experience in flash so far and that will probably have to wait till Christmas Break. So for now I have just come up with a simple layout. Obviously, the colors and such are not what they would be in the final, but it gives a good idea of the basic layout. The company, Theory Clothing, revolves on t-shirt and clothing design based around extreme sports. With that I will adjust the colors and pictures as such.

Team Fortess 2 for $2.49

The title says it all! Are you serious?!?
Steam had TF2 for download for $2.49 for a few hours yesterday. That's a price drop from $19.99. I don't know why you wouldn't buy this game for that price!
Since now the deal has passed, now you will probably just be kicking yourself XD

The Future of the Classroom

Minimum Specs

Blogger was down for a bit yesterday so I was unable to get my blog post up...
But, I am now going to respond to this article about the minimum PC specs for Modern Warfare 2.
System Requirements
OS: Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 (Windows 95/98/ME/2000 are unsupported)
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.2 GHz or AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor or better supported
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Graphics: 256 MB NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT or better or ATI Radeon 1600XT or better
DirectX: Microsoft DirectX(R) 9.0c
Hard Drive: 12GB of free hard drive space
Sound: 100% DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
Internet: Broadband connection required for Multiplayer Connectivity. Internet Connection required for activation

Buy minimum, they must mean playing this are 800x600 at like 12 fps. Because hell, my laptop has trouble running the original modern warfare, and it's double what the minimum for MW2 is. I think we need some real number out here.

Does Miyamoto Measure Up?

Blah, not to much news in the past few days that really jumps out at me. So instead I am going to talk about this quirky article about Miyamoto's fascination with measuring things. This article give us a little incite on the Mario creator. He like measuring stuff. He like guessing stuff's length and weight. Pretty weird, but pretty amusing all the same. I've found myself doing that every one in a while too. Even video game genus's are a bit weird :)

I can has Geotag?

For whatever reason I can't get my images to appear. So I will just throw up a link here. The map should have show the pics, but oh well.

Katamri Forever

So the new Katamari game is out for the PS3 this month, and Kotaku has their review of it here.

Essentially the game is more of the same. Nothing really new has been added to the series, other that a few little features like the ability to jump (which is kinda neat). The Japanese title for the game, Katamari Tribute, is far more fitting for the game because it takes a lot of old levels from old games and puts them in this one. The graphics are very sharp for the style, but the game still suffers from the camera problems that it always had.

Overall, if you have been playing all the katamari's before this one, this will probably be pretty boring for you. If you are new to the series, however, this is a great place to jump in and enjoy the fun.

The Future of Email

New Super Mario Bros Wii

Does the new Super Mario Bros Wii play itself? That's the idea that this article article is addressing.

It appears that Mario's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, is telling us that the new mario game for the wii will have a feature that will allow the game to play itself. "if a player is experiencing an area of difficulty, this will allow them to clear troubled areas and take over when they're ready."

I'm kind of saddened by this new feature. Half of the fun of Mario is the difficulty and the enjoyment that you get from clearing a level. This obviously seems to be an attempt to bring in more casual gamers, and you can opt not to use it, but to me, it feels like Nintendo is really making the extra effort to make the casual gamers feel more accepted and the hardcore gamers feel more and more alienated.

No more UMD for the PSPgo!

I will down do a response to the Kotaku article about, which you can read here
The PSPGo, the newest version of the PSP by Sony, is relying on only digital media. Unlike the old PSP, it will not us the UMD disk format for games, everything will be download-able through an online store. Originally, Sony planned on introducing a UMD conversion program so that people who owned games originally on UMD could convert them to play on their PSPGo. No Sony says that they will no longer be doing that, so if you want to Play your old games on the PSPGo, you will have to re-buy the game. That's bad news for anyone who was looking at getting the new Go to replace their old PSP.

In my opinion, this just adds another nail in the coffin for the PSPGo. It's more expensive that the regular version, and I just don't think maybe people will see the added benefit of buy the go over the regular PSP, so they will choose to save their money and go for the regular version.

Time for another Kotaku response!

This time it's an article on Tales of Vesperia, which you can read here.

The game, and Exclusive for the Xbox360 when it was released in August of last year, is now being released for the PS3. The big deal here is that the game was developed exclusive for Xbox, and they signed a one year contract with Microsoft. Microsoft helped the process by providing development funds and services. Sony doesn't offer those kind of services.

They say it also easier to develop for the Xbox360. So the title was made for the Xbox. Namco, the developers of the game, know that the Xbox will not sell as many copies and won't completely cover development costs. So they are bringing the game to the PS3 a little over a year later. But Sony said that they will not recognize the game unless extra content was added, so that is precisely what Namco did.

I find it very amusing that what originally have been Xbox360 exclusive games are now coming to the PS3. The Xbox is now almost become a sort of "beta" system. This is not only happened for Tales of Vesperia, but also Star Ocean IV, Ninja Gaiden Sigma and Ninja Gaiden Sigma II.

Time for a Kotaku response!

The article I read, which you can find here. This article was a top 5. The humorous part is that it was a top 5 of 10 ten lists. The first "top ten" list was, coincidentally, not a top ten, but a top 8. This list was more humorous than anything else, as it counted down the top hottest 8-but girls.

The next counted down the ten (I assume recent games) that didn't live up to the hype. They started off with Heavenly Sword for the PS3, which I very much disagree with as I happened to love that game (more so than god of war), but oh well. Some of the other games I agreed with, others I hadn't even hear of (which must mean that they must have not been toooooo hyped). Their last game on the list was RE5. I agree that the game was in fact over hyped, as I don't believe it was able to best how amazing a game RE4 was. However, it was hardly a failure and I don't think it really even deserved to be on this list, let alone in the number one spot.

Following that list was one of the top 10 problems with mmo's. As I am not an mmo player, I didn't have much basis to judge their. Although I will say that mmo's have never, and probably will never get elves right in my opinion. The number one portrayal of elves is reserved for Record of Lodoss War in my humble opinion. But over all I think that I agree with their list, on what little basis I have to judge.

Their next list may be the most amusing, a countdown of the best video game quotes, although I don't think a count down is really the best format do it in. In fact, this probably deserves it own article. Some of the best lines make it in the list, as they should. "It's dangerous to go alone! Take this." "Thank you mario! But the Princess is in another castle!" "Hey! Listen!" "Ypu have died of dysentery." "The cake is a lie" "It's super effective!" "Do a barrel roll!" And my personal favorite and absolute classic "All your base are belong to us."

The last list on the list is very timely, as the tenth anniversary of the Dreamcast just passed, a list of the top ten dreamcast games still worth playing. I played Sonic Adventure, which even with it awful voice acting and terrible story is still a joy to play, as well as Soul Caliber, which might still be my favorite fighting game. Some of my other personal favorites made it on the the list as well, such as Dead or Alive 2, Jet Grind Radio, and Crazy Taxi.

Over all it was an enjoyable read and I thank Kotaku for posting such a fun list of top ten's.

Looky here, I got a new blog just for this class, awesome!!!

Ok, so now time to get serious and write a reaction to a Mashable.com article. I'm going to take a look at an article called "Psychologist: Facebook Makes You Smarter, Twitter Makes You Dumber." Give a click here if you want to read it.

As you can get from the title, the article talks about how Facebook can be healthy for you mind while twitter can do the opposite. Dr. Alloway found that during developing a memory training program for children with that learn slower than other that Facebook helped with their memory and IQ scores while YouTube and Twitter were not. She also found that video games, especially strategic ones, can also be beneficial.

I found this article to be very interesting. I think that whether these websites can help or hurt really depends on how they are used. I would imagine that youtube could be very helpful or hurtful depending on the content that you watch. Also, I can understand how facebook could be beneficial for memory, due to all the options that the site gives you. I can't really say that if facebook has really improved my memory, but I can say that I do know a lot more about my friends as well as I think facebook has also let me know myself a bit better.

Twitter, on the other hand, I can also understand. I find twitter to be a whole lot of nothing. It is simple. It's an never ending feed of pointless (mostly) pointless information. Although I would think that if kept in moderation that it would hardly cause much harm. Also, I would think that if all you do if facebook all day that it probably wouldn't do much good for you, both mentally and physically. All in all, I think that this article provided a pretty interesting insight, it I guess it didn't really give me anything new, besides maybe a little more bit of knowledge to make fun of twitter for. :)

What Ray Kurzweil is saying about the growth of technology, in a nut shell, is that we can in fact closely predict the future of technology. This is based on what information we have already. While it is impossible to predict the outcome of exact companies or technologies, the average data you get when you look at all of them gives us an incredible smooth exponential curve that allows us to see how the technology will developed in the future.

The idea of an exponential curve is almost hard to grasp. As I'm sure most other people are, I would have thought of technology as a rather linear progression. But in all honesty, if I look back at the state of computers when I was in elementary school to how they are now, I guess that an exponential curve makes perfect sense. The computers I used in grade school are thousands, if not millions of times less powerful that the one that I am typing on now. It is extraordinary to then think of what will come next given this exponential growth.

Kurzweil talks about is predictions for technology, and some of the things he says are quite remarkable. The development of electronic blood cells and their advancements is unbelievable to think about, like something that you would think about in a science fiction novel. And for him to say that these things are actually predictable is amazing.

Truthfully, I can't imagine how this technology will change our lives. It's hard to fathom what the future will be, even if we can predict the technology that it will bring. It's like if you had asked me about it even seven years ago, I wouldn't have been able to grasp what computers would be today. But what a can say, as a nerd, I am genuinely excited for the technology that the future brings and I hope that what Kurzweil is saying is reality, because let's face it, that would just be awesome.