Freebie anyway

First off, a big thanks for nothing for the utter lack of response to my previous entry. Either you don't care or you don't read. Neither is all that encouraging, but it does take the pressure off to know that there's really no standard to which I need to aspire, public or private. I guess it's a bit like being on a software project that you know is going to fail (of which I've been on a couple). You suddenly realize that you're working too hard at what you do, so you just let the arrival of your paychecks be the standard to which you aspire.

Yeah, it's a mite depressing, but I get enough feedback at my little browser-games to let me know that I'm going in the right direction in that sphere. Everyone's feedback-driven to one extent or another, and I get enough feedback there (positive and negative) to make up for it elsewhere.



On an unrelated note, good freebie today from Giveaway Of The Day. It's a little screen-recorder and playback gizmo. It allows you to define an area of the screen, records that area for as long as you want, then lets you save out that area in an animated format (Flash or AVI). Very handy if you wanna make an animated tutorial for something.

Reviewing the reviews

Just noticed that four of seven of the featured articles on the front page of gamedev are mine. Mind you, a couple of 'em are pretty minor, specifically a review of a book aimed at kids and a review of some kewl gamer-oriented bits. Still, I do a fair amount of semi-professional writing.

And apart from my official proofreader (Shelly), I get precious little feedback. As TANSTAAFL will attest, I'm a reviewer because I care about nobody's opinions but my own on. . .anything (and he was saying it as a compliment), but that only goes so far. Feedback can be a useful thing if it gives one room to improve.

So that being said, whattya think? Do I write too much? Too little? Is my tone too breezy? Not breezy enough? Do I use a form of subject-verb agreement that just rubs you the wrong way? Is my fanatical avoidance of ending sentences with prepositions something up with which you will not put?

If you got a minute, drop me a comment and lemme know what you think.

Razer Reviews

I'm trying something a little different here.

You see, I get lots of products to review. And I'm loath to turn anything down, and that's for two reasons:

1. I actually rather like writing reviews. It keeps me from living under a bridge, and it keeps my writing skills sharp.

2. I like stuff.

Problem is, I really only have one outlet for reviews, and that is gamedev.net. And once in a while I get stuff that's not really all that related to game development but is still review-worthy. Also, Drew and I have recently made an effort to purge the gamedev article database of obsolete articles and dead links and stuff that probably shouldn't have been included in the first place. And that means that old reviews are good purge candidates, especially if they're of products that no longer exist or are way out of date or are only tangentially related to game development in the first place.

So I decided to put reviews in the Bargain Basement Blog once in a while. That way I can still talk about the product in my official capacity as gamedev reviewer, and also I don't have to worry about reviews from happy sponsors being purged from gamedev sometime in the future. As long as gamedev and blogspot (which I must add is owned by Google) stay around, the reviews will live. Which means that the reviews will live forever.

That being said, here's the first in what will be an occasional series of gadget reviews.

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The Razer Piranha Gaming Communicator and the Razer Destructor Professional Gaming Mat

Quite some time ago, I (along with Terri Carey) reviewed pro|tone m100 and m250 Earphones and the Pro|Solutions pro|pad. I actually quite liked the products. In fact, I grabbed another set of m250's when woot.com put 'em on sale. And I still use the pro|pad. I liked the product quite a lot back when I reviewed it, and I recommended it to anyone who could live with the thought of owning a mousepad that costs more than an average mouse.

So I was enthused when a new box arrived from Razer, presumably packed with pretentiously named and packaged products. And I wasn't disappointed. Any company that has the hubris to call a mouse pad a "Razer Destructor Professional Gaming Mat" deserves at least a little attention.

For the record, the official page for the Destructor is here. And it's worth a look just for the adjectives they like to heap on their gamer products. It actually rather reminds me of an introduction to an old Monty Python record I had as a kid, which described the fine quality of the plastic and how the hole in the center of the record had drilled to fit my personal record player with all the precision of finest Swiss craftsmanship.

But, in Razer's defense, they don't take themselves and their image completely seriously. Along with the Destructor pad and the headphones were some cards welcoming me to the "Cult of Razer". And it is actually a very nice mouse pad. In fact, it's the nicest I've used. The surface, like with the pro|pad, is slightly abrasive and works perfectly with my optical mouse. The surface is also, despite being plastic, very hard and seems pretty scratch resistant. This, IMHO, puts it ahead of stuff like those 3M precision mousing surfaces which also work well but seem to scratch rather easily. I've had the Destructor on my desk for a couple of months and it looks as good as the day it arrived.

Unlike the pro|pad, though, it doesn't have the nice metal backing and the double-sided surface. It's a plastic surface backed by a neoprene rubber table-gripper.

The size and shape is very nice. It's only very slightly larger than the pro|pad, but the actual mousing surface is quite a bit larger because the surface covers the entire pad and doesn't stop shy of the edge like the pro|pad. So this does turn out to be a really large mousepad. It requires more desk real-estate than the aforementioned 3M pads, but unlike the 3M pads, you'll never find yourself driving the mouse off the edge.

Oh, and it includes a case. Yes, a case. For a mousepad. I suppose this is handy if you're using it for a laptop or you're taking your machine to a gaming LAN-party, but I really haven't put the case to much use. In the case's defense, it's quite nice. It's thick and padded and has a Razer logo on the front. My only worry is that if it got mushed or folded, the pad might get creased even in the case.

And the price is pretty high. The Amazon price is $37, which is almost ten bucks more than the pro|pad. While I do like the surface and size a bit better than the pro|pad, the pro|pad does have the advantage of being double-sided (in case you accidentally mess up one side) and is practically indestructible.

Honestly, if I had a lot of money to spend on a mouse pad, I'd stick with the pro|pad. Even though the website proclaims that the Destructor is superior for gaming, I think the pro|pad's lower price and other advantages make it a better choice unless you absolutely have to follow an all-black color scheme.

Next we have the Razer Piranha gaming Communicator, which was immediately co-opted by my wife upon opening the box. Despite appearing to be something that must be married to a particular game console, the Piranha has standard microphone and headphone jacks and hooked up to the PC just fine. It also has a USB connection that I don't quite understand. Best I can tell, the USB is used to power the blue LED lights on the side of the headphones as well as on the little volume dongle. The actual cable is very nicely coated in braided nylon and looks very tough. In fact, if Lassie ever barks at me because Timmy fell down a well, I'm gonna grab these headphone cables to pull him out.

Actually, I probably wouldn't. While the nylon covers the cable itself, it stops about two inches from the jacks at the end. I'm not quite sure if this is a good idea or a bad one. If your headphone cable is gonna fail, it's likely going to happen at the plugs, so having nylon webbing stop before the plugs doesn't help as much as it should. On the other hand, if somebody manages to pull on my headphone cable hard enough to break something, I'd rather break off the headphone plug than the headphone socket that's attached to the motherboard.

In the couple-months use of the Piranha, Shelly's had a couple of complaints. One is with the obligatory volume dongle in the middle of the headphone cable. The little volume wheel is pretty loose and changes with the lightest touch. I don't know if it's intended to be this loose for fleet-fingered gamers who need the most precise and quick control of gaming volume during crucial moments of the story (hey look, I'm a Razer marketer), but she does occasionally find the headphones adjusting the volume on their own just by rubbing against her pants while she sits at her desk. And it's a problem that's going to likely solve itself soon with a piece of scotch tape.

The other complaint is with the shape of the headphones themselves. Here's the publicity photo of the headphones.

As you can see, they're not very round. They're a bit angular. And if you push the earphones apart so they fit your head, the shape is a bit squarish. So rather than cradling your head or not contacting your head at all, the top of the Piranha touches the top of your head. And it's not noticeable at first, but it's a mite annoying after prolonged wearing.

So my conclusions for these two products:

Destructor Professional Gaming Mat - Very nice and big and tough, but expensive. The Razer pro|pad is probably a better choice.

Piranha Gaming Communicator - Very nice cables, but easily maladjusted volume dongle and a mite uncomfortable to wear for a long time.

I gots invitations!

Dunno if any of you have been following the RIA (Rich Internet Applications) space, but that's getting to be a big thing. Basically it's people putting replacements for apps that you'd normally install on your hard drive up on the web. It's currently taking baby steps right now, but there is a critical mass of sorts of web-based applications out there.

And I'll be the first to say that RIA apps aren't yet the equivalent of their standalone counterparts. Much like that "Gimp is even better than Photoshop" crowd, anyone who tells you that Google Spreadsheet is as good as MS Excel simply hasn't used Excel very much.

But that's not to say that Google Spreadsheet isn't a player. Its price (free) coupled with its web-based collaboration/sharing tools and its ability to edit spreadsheets from anywhere you can find a web browser is a compelling set of features that Excel just isn't gonna match. And in a lot of cases, the advantages of an online spreadsheet are gonna override the rich user experience that you get from real Excel installed on your computer.

And there are a couple of local apps that I've discarded entirely for web-based equivalents. While I still prefer Word and Excel to any web-based replacements, I have uninstalled Outlook in favor of Google Calendar and Yahoo's Deluxe Email.


And all that foreshadowing brings me to a.viary.com, which is a pretty big suite of fully online Flash-based image, vector, and 3D tools, all running in your browser. They're all written in Flex, and they're pretty good. Thus-far, the only two they've released to a closed beta community are "Phoenix", which is a baby-Photoshop image editing tool, and "Peacock", which is a very cool algorithmic pattern making tool.

It'll be interesting to see where this suite goes. For example, could it collaborate with a service like Flickr so I could upload my photos there and then edit and rotate 'em online? Thus-far, a.viary.com has its own picture cloud for image storage, but it'll be interesting to see where it goes.

Also it'll be interesting to see if they go with something like Adobe AIR in case you do want to edit pictures locally or if you're on a laptop that might or might not have a handy internet connection. I'm currently using Twhirl, which is an AIR-based application, and I'm pretty impressed with how smoothly it works despite it actually being a Flash application that's just pretending to be a standalone EXE.

Anyways, I have five beta invites if you'd like to try the system out and its current crop of two available applications. And they're yours if you want one.

But because I am a greedy person, I will state that I'm gonna give priority to those who have signed themselves up to Money Exchange and gotten their free $25 (and the free referral-bucks for me).

Note that I don't actually have the ID's of the folks who have signed up to Money Exchange, so it'll have to be done by the honor system. I can, however, confirm that it does work. I transferred the Money Exchange cash out to my account a couple of days ago, and it's now available for me to spend on loose living.

Full Moons!

This comic gave me a laugh because it reminded me of a "full moon fever" event in my own life.

About 6.5 years ago, Shelly and I were doing the "getting ready to make a baby" shtick, and we toured the babymaking ward of our local hospital to see all the rooms and the check-in procedure and all the important stuff that you'll forget the minute your wife goes into labor.

While checking out the ward, the nurse remarked that things that day were pretty quiet, and that was because the moon wasn't full. Once there was a full moon, you could guarantee that the place would be hopping and that doctors and nurses and relatives would be all over the place. Shelly and I just gave each other the eye-rolling look and went on with the tour.

After getting home, I happened by the wall-calendar in the kitchen. It's one of those calendars with little moon-phases printed in the corner of the days.

And guess what was happening that very day.

Yep, full moon. Couldn't have been more ironic if we'd planned it in advance.


And I'm sure those nurses are working just like the cops in the comic strip. If they have a busy day with lots of babies and running around, then it must be a full moon. Never mind that it's a pretty trivial process to check for a full moon, even if you're working indoors. They just keep the meme alive out of sheer intellectual inertia.


And it's just one of those things that makes no damn sense on its face, like "don't buy a red car because they get in more accidents". The fact that insurance companies charge more money for the model of the car but not the color debunks that rumor more effectively than anything. Ditto for crime and babies. If crime and births increase during full moons, then why don't police departments and hospitals staff up on those days?

It's because it doesn't. Werewolves aren't real. Live with it.

Big News - Duck Tiles is now free!

Well, mostly free. After looking over my existing games, I decided that Duck Tiles could better serve the community (and make more money) if it was ad-supported. Therefore I have re-tooled the game a bit and I'm releasing it 100% free.

As it stands, not all 216 levels are currently available. Like Bulldozer, I decided to re-deploy the game as a three-parter, and each part will be free. Currently I have a 77-level version that's available for free here. In the coming months, I will be releasing Duck Tiles 2 and Duck Tiles 3, also with 77 levels each.

I'm currently still selling the full 216-level version if you just can't wait for the sequels to arrive. This version will remain available on the site until Duck Tiles 2 and 3 arrive. At that time, I'm going to phase out the commercial version of Duck Tiles, and it'll be completely ad-supported.

I hope you enjoy playing the new Duck Tiles, and please tell your friends about it. If you want to embed Duck Tiles (or any one of my other games) in your blog or web page, check out my play-n-share page here.

Happy playing!

Friday Freebie Fest

It's recession-time, folks. And that means that you need to take advantage of the freebies as you can get 'em. Here are the freebies for today. . .

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First up is free science fiction books! Well, not really books per-se, but Tor, the science fiction division of McMillan publishers, is giving away free legal e-books for signing up to their mailing list. It's pretty-much a no-brainer. You fill out your info in the form, and every friday they send you an email with links to a new e-book from their catalog. And they're not in any weird DRM-locked formats either. You get links to PDF, HTML, and Mobi format books. This week's book is Four and Twenty Blackbirds, which I recently got on paperbackswap for Shelly.

It'd probably be worth it to head over to ebay and buy an old model PDA or PalmPilot or PocketPC to use as an e-reader. Ebay routinely sells those little Palm Zire organizers for under $50, and those would work fine, although you might wanna spring for a PocketPC just for the higher resolution screen.

Or if you got the big bucks, get one of those Amazon readers. They just came back into stock. Although it's gonna take a lot of reading to cost-justify a $400 gizmo.


2
And speaking of free books, my next freebie is old and obvious. The public library. For the low price of free, your local public library has enough books and videos to keep you reading for the rest of your life and then some. I currently frequent the Southlake library (because I'm a resident and it's free) and the Grapevine library ($25 a year but much bigger than Southlake). The Southlake library features free inter-library loan, which means that if I can find a book at damn near any library in the country (searchable at worldcat.org), they can get it for me.

And don't be bashful about requesting that they buy a new book. Shelly often does that with the Southlake library and they're pretty good about buying 'em. Libraries generally work off a common list of books-that-they-should-buy, which consists of current bestsellers, classics, references, and requests from locals. And local requests tend to be at the top of the list because they know they'll be checked out.

Also check out your library's online presence. Both of our libraries have an RSS feed of new books so you don't even need to go to the library to see what's new.

Apart from comics and kids' books, I haven't bought a book in quite a while. There's just no point.

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The third freebie is the best. Free money!

Yep, again it's one of those well-funded startups that is trying to bootstrap itself by handing out free money to everyone who signs up. This one is MoneyExchange, and it's a paypal knockoff. And you know the drill. You sign up, $25 appears in your account, and once your account is verified you can then transfer the cash out or use to purchase things from anyone who accepts MoneyExchange currency.

Which is. . .umm. . .well nobody.

So just transfer the $25 out and keep it.

And it's legit. It's backed by a couple of large banks. Not sure what those large banks were thinking when they decided they could unseat Paypal, but hey. If they wanna give me $25 for the effort, it's fine with me.

Here's the link below. I get a couple of extra bucks for referring you, so use that button to sign up, get $25 free, and spend it on loose living.








Finally, Shelly's computer is now officially built. Apart from the 32-in-one card reader thingy that had a hundred wires coming from it and was just a mite too difficult to figure out all the connections, it went pretty smoothly. I'm now the proud owner of a four-processor 8-gig 64-bit monstrosity with 8 USB ports.

Biggest problem I see now regards running our ancient (at least according to HP) inkjet plotter. According to them, the Designjet 450c is just too goldurned old, and there will not be any 64-bit drivers made for it. I did find a Spanish company that makes a universal plotter driver that they claim will drive it from any OS, 32 or 64-bit. If I can't find a better solution, I'll likely be opening up my wallet and getting that.

Other problem came in with the case. After the PR-guy offered me the case, I didn't hear from him again. Having been in the review business for a while, I knew the drill. Happens all the time. People promise you something, and you never actually see it. After a couple of weeks, I assumed that the case wouldn't be forthcoming, so I went down to Fry's and bought a rather tasteful boring rectangular Antec case with power supply.

Murphy's law taking hold, the big monstrosity multi-fan case arrived the next day. And since I am not really into the idea of re-wrestling the motherboard into another case, I'll need to find a new project for it. Don't worry, though. The case will get itself reviewed, even if I gotta build a four-processor beast for myself :)