Archives for the 'Reviews' CategoryDo You miss Sprite-Based Games?Though I might be a little unique, I am sure that someone out there has run into the same problem as I have. As computer technology grows we often find ourselves immersed around better 3d games with the newest technology of adaptive AI technology or directx; often times, due to this, I reminisce about the times of old. I wont deny it, I am proud of it. I grew up during the times of SNES and Sega, where the first RPG games became quite popular and its pretty much all we talked about at school. With their pixelated graphics and16 channel midi songs, we were satisfied. At least, I was Even though technology has improved and games have gotten much better, I still miss playing those old games with 8 or 16 bit graphics. Consider me a true geek at heart, even at my age. Is there a Cure?! I don’t think so, at least I hope not. I’d much rather enjoy myself in an old game from time to time while taking a break from a MMORPG. Not that I play much of anything anymore, but it is a very true statement, nonetheless. Do YOU miss sprite games? If you miss sprite-based games, then I might have a solution. I used to be part of a community that built sprite-based games from a hybrid coding/programming engine known as Byond. What is Byond? It is a community of sprite-based games, pretty much. (or at least that is the most dominant theme). The user-base is over 3,000 and steadily growing by the day as the engine becomes more powerful and versatile. The best part about it is that these games are multiplayer, so imagine playing a fan-based game of Final Fantasy 2 or an anime-based sprite game with 20 other people playing, it can be a fun experience if the game is coded well enough. What’s the Catch? Due to byond connecting a network of online games through their own extensions and ‘player-hosted’ servers (their PC’s), Byond has to act as a connecting point which means that there must be software installed on your PC. The file itself is not big at all, perhaps about 3mb in total size. (it is a rather lightweight program). To connect to the program, you have to register a free account (which does not get spammed by e-mails, by the way), and then use that free account to login. (The link for this is located at the bottom if you are interested, it is in the form of an image). What is Included? The installer includes 3 major programs which come compiled in the installation file. Each of these files play a unique role to the average byond user or developer.
For Conversational Purposes, lets just say that the main program you will need is a shortcut which is placed on your desktop, which is just called “Byond.exe”. In all essense, it is the same as Dream Seeker, but rather so just placed on the desktop for you while the others are located in your Program Files folder. Any Bad Points? Recently, it seems that the majority of games started seem to be anime-oriented (primarily around things like DragonballZ, Naruto, Bleach, etc). Though, if you are an anime lover than this will be perfect for you
Linux is a Powerful “Skinny” Operating SystemOk.. so, by the looks of it I am back up and running, and boy have I had a long weekend. I did, however, have a chance to try out a few different operating systems I have been interested in trying. One that stuck out was, of course, Linux (who saw that coming?). To be more specific, I tried out Mandriva 2007 and I was pretty impressed. It seems like a pretty powerful Operating System. The only down-side to Mandriva is you need to know a bit of programming, or at least you have to prepare yourself for a steep learning curve. I am, however, back on Windows XP. I tried out Windows XP Home, Windows XP Pro, Windows Vista Home Premium, and Mandriva 2007. Each had their own pro’s and cons to the mix. The most lightweight of them all (yet still powerful) would be Mandriva 2007. (I am currently downloading Mandriva 2008). I need to read a bit more into it before I switch, because it looks like my wireless internet driver is not supported (there are ways around that, though it takes a bit of programming, which is what is currently stopping me). Windows XP Home/Pro: This is probably the most common of the operating systems that still view this blog. It encompasses a large portion of the visitors as it remains to be the most popular Operating System. The Bootup Time for XP can be tweaked and performance can be vastly improved with a few small edits here or there, and overall is pretty stable once you get all the security fixes updated. The operating system, as you probably know it, is filled with rather useless programs which are never touched yet somewhat ingrained into the operating system itself. It is bulked up with other miscellaneous programs which are not needed by your average windows user. Upon reformatting, it took about an hour and a bit of semi-managed supervision. I did not have any problems, other than the clock reseting to 3 hours prior to what I set it to. (even though I put the right time zone). There were a few drivers that were not detected, so that was fun trying to connect to the internet or have sound. Windows Vista: This is a rather interesting operating system. I never knew how stylish the ‘real thing’ could be. But perhaps that is its main function, to serve as a bit of “Eye Candy”? With Service Pack 1 approaching, this could be my next operating system of choice, depending on how well Service Pack 1 fixes all the errors and driver/program incompatibilities. Though it is a very powerful operating system, it is also rather bulky. Minimum Specs are much more than with XP, but I think it is worth it if you have a pretty decent system. Reformatting and Booting took about an hour and a bit (felt less than with XP, to be honest), and it was easier than the XP install process (and much less annoying). I was not asked random questions throughout the hour, it was all pretty well organized. Linux: Mandriva 2007 Distribution: I was rather surprised. I managed to download this a while ago but never really tried it out until today. I must say, I was impressed. Though the operating system looks a little different than the Windows XP/Vista styled themes, it is very powerful and can be modified to your whim pretty much with a bit of coding knowledge, or even just being able to install the modules needed. Best part about it, it is free. You have to know how to compile programs using the terminal for most programs, I noticed. That was the case with my wireless driver, anyway. I had to “make” and compile it, though I have not dealt much with that as of yet so I decided to leave that for another time. (I have another computer which I intend to try it out on shortly). The Reformat/Bootup was surprisingly shorter than expected. It only lasted about 40 minutes (probably less). The reformat was especially short, which surprised me as I compared it to the times I had to reformat from XP boot and Vista boot CD’s. It is very lightweight and compared to XP or Vista, I had no lag what so ever switching from applications. There were no freeze ups. There was no delays in opening up 10 different programs. The best part is, I was able to have 4 desktops running at once with no problems what so ever. Surprisingly, Linux detected and installed most of my drivers that I needed. The only ones that didn’t work was sound (built-in sound worked, but not my creative labs one), and my wireless internet, but thats because I had to compile/make “madwifi” to enable it. Most of the programs are provided free which offer the equivalent of its windows-based programs. ie) OpenOffice is a program which resembles Microsoft Office. Conclusion: If you know a bit about coding/compiling, and you have a weekend to spare on some fun, you should try out the Mandriva 2008 version. The filesize is pretty decent, the original 2008 version is about 700mb, while the Beta 2008.1 is over a whopping 3.8gb. (I believe it has a lot more modules pre-installed into the installation). Anyway, this was my experience over the weekend, reformatting and installing random operating systems. Stumbleupon Traffic Intake: Quality TrafficI am sure the majority of you have heard of Stumbleupon before, if not, its a rather nifty thing to have. It’s often underestimated and bloggers or web masters think that the traffic is particularly of low quality (as stumblers often stumble to the next page). What Sets Stumbleupon Apart: See, with other social bookmarking sites, you only end up seeing decent traffic increases after your post or article has become popular, and often to do that you need to have some form of a strategy before hand as there are hundreds of articles submitted every minute. What Stumbleupon lets you do, is pretty much channel surf through various websites that are tagged with the interests you like and the pages you have submitted previously. Visitors often switch through websites and make the decision whether or not to go to the next one, rate the current one, or stay and look around The Quality of Traffic: The type of quality you get from Stumbleupon would really depend on your type of site or blog. If you have ads plastered everywhere with a bad layout and no sense of design, chances are the channel-surfing visitor will just change the channel and see what else is new and exciting. With my own experiment in the past, stumbleupon has proven to be a useful tool which can help bring quality traffic (and returning traffic) to a website. Landing Page: The page you bring stumblers to has to be creative, eye-catching, and just something they would be interested in coming back to. If you stumble a page which is filled with advertisements and a ‘hopes and dreams’ product to make $1000 a day, “available to you for only a low payment of $39.95″ then chances are, that is not the type of page stumblers will want to see. Content Content Content! You have heard me preach it before, but it is true. If you have quality content that is visible to the reader or stumbler right away, they can get drawn in. Not that hard of a concept, eh? Though it can be difficult to judge the totality of a blog or website in just a few seconds, it is often a much more pleasant experience if you plan out your website and have a decent header or decent content placement. Fact of the matter is, Stumbleupon can be a reliable way to increase traffic to your website on a daily basis if you are smart about it. You cannot just sign up for it and expect to get 100 visitors a day for stumbling 1 site. You have to gain friends, gain ‘minions’, stumble other sites and leave comments; you have to increase your overall visibility and find a way to get more readers to your stumbleupon page, which in a way itself, acts as a blog. It is pretty simple once you get down past the nitty-gritty work, so try it out for yourself, you might be surprised. Izearanks is becoming more PopularBackstory: For those who have not heard of IzeaRanks, this is probably a good chance for you to start. If you have a blog, and have always wondered where you stand in the midst of other bloggers, this is a good tool for you to have. In their previous versions, it has been unreliable due to the amount of innaccuracies between the tool and other analytic tools such as google (this one was understandable), awstats, or sitemeter. The Tool: What it does is that it puts a script at the <head> of your website, a very small script which now loads up pretty quickly. It tracks the visitors to your blog and through their website, you can compare yourself to other bloggers in your niche or competition (who have put this tool on their blog, as well. Its nothing fancy, it does not lag up your blog; it lets you have an idea of how everyone else is doing and how you are doing, so I think this is a great tool which is gaining momentum. The Change: In their recent change which took place on February 5th, 2008 (which I did not feel until about a day ago), they have changed their tool so it is about 25% quicker and compressed it up to about 85% more than the older version. Ontop of this, the plugin does not wait for everything on the page to load before it sends data back to Izearanks which was a great addition on their part. The Next Hurdle: In their attempts to fix this code, they stumbled upon a problem in internet explorer which was rather severe. (Go Internet Explorer for messing up yet another awesome tool). They are fixing the problem currently, however they had to roll back to a version slightly previous to the one they worked on. This blog was still, however, fixed, though it just does not really count internet explorer users correctly. Currently, this problem still exists as I can see an error at the bottom corner of the loaded up page in Internet Explorer. However, within the next few days this should be fixed as they are currently working on the fix for this. So what does all this mean? Izearanks is a great tool for bloggers to compare your visitors to. You can set it so that bloggers do not know the exact number of your visitors which is a great bonus to all of those in direct competition with someone else that is on the site. Izearanks is back on this blog (I somewhat disowned it for a bit as they were having problems of only grabbing about 20% of my visitors), however they seem to be working pretty hard on fixing it and its getting much more stable than before. I never said I’d fluff Izearanks up, however its a good tool to use and have. I will often check back on Izearanks on a daily basis in the next future, just to see how other blogs did on a daily basis that could be in direct competition with myself, for example. Its a nice comparison tool which is becoming steadily more reliable. | |
The link is below to sign up and then download the program!