Here are a few sites that are protesting SOPA and PIPA today:

Fark.com
Reddit.com
Imgur.com
Wikipedia.com
WordPress.com
Google

Leave a comment if you know of any other sites that are joining the protest today.

After a month and a half and about 55 hours sunk into the game, I finished Skyward Sword on the Wii tonight.

Early on in the game, I had the impression that it stood a fair chance at being the best Zelda game ever made. That didn’t quite pan out, but that’s not to say the game wasn’t excellent.

In fact, aside from a few nagging parts along the way, seemingly there for no reason other than to rack up more game time, the game was nearly flawless.

Things I loved:

• The orchestrated music was wonderfully composed. I even found myself stopping outside the temple at Lake Floria just to listen for a while.
• The ability to upgrade items and potions was great.
• The adventure pouch system provided for a small amount of character customization, which is worlds beyond what we’ve had in previous Zelda games.
• Link is so mobile in this game.. finally no more rolling and rolling and rolling. Not even climbing ever felt like a chore.
• Loved seeing the origins of the entire Zelda timeline.
• Level design is as good as ever, probably better. The play mechanics in the final temple were outstanding. I could write pages on how good the level design in Zelda titles is.. I can’t stress this enough.
• The art design. This is right up there with Okami as one of the best looking and most stylistic games I’ve played.
• Fast travel and being able to start where you saved. These are modern gaming concepts that took way too long to make it to Zelda.

Not so much:

• I dreaded the Spirit Realm portions of the game. I’m not sure what they could have been replaced with, but they broke the pacing of the game and were really just more aggravating and stressful than they were fun.
• The treasure and bug reminders pull you out of the game far too often. This could/should have been optional.
• The Demise events felt repetitive by the end. This is another thing that felt like time padding.

Overall, the game was spectacular but still doesn’t top A Link To The Past, in my opinion.

Sorry Rick, the Constitution protects the American people from the theocracy you guys want so badly (try reading it sometime). If you want to be governed by religion, try living in Iran for a while.. let us know how that works out for you.

Lately, they’ve had a new weapon in their one-sided war, Facebook friends. Here’s the post spreading around that you’ve probably seen by now:

Just so everyone knows, I will have a CHRISTMAS TREE in my living room (not a holiday tree), my child is getting CHRISTMAS PRESENTS (not holiday gifts) and we will eat CHRISTMAS DINNER (not a holiday meal), and I will attend a CHRISTMAS PARTY (not a holiday party). I will also very cheerfully wish you a MERRY CHRISTMAS! (not… happy holidays). By the way, if you want to have a Happy Hanukah , by all means do, I respect that. If you want to have a Blessed Kwanzaa, I also respect that. I want to have a Merry Christmas, so I ask YOU to respect that! Repost if you agree!!

Can we stop this nonsense? You say that you respect that not everyone celebrates Christmas, and in the same breathe you exclaim that you will only wish them greetings for something (that you know) they don’t celebrate. Even if you *don’t* know what holiday someone celebrates, it’s incredibly rude to just assume it’s Christmas.

If someone wishes you “Happy Holidays”, they aren’t doing it to insult you or “take the Christ out of Christmas”. They’re being considerate because THEY DON’T KNOW what holiday you celebrate.

This Facebook post is the reason I’m so sad about what this country has become. When did so many of us adopt ignorance as something to be proud of?

When you post or “like” stuff like that on Facebook, it only makes intelligent people think less of you. The only people you’re going to impress are those who are equally as ignorant,.. but I guess that’s the point.

p.s. why don’t we stop spamming our friends with chain letters on Facebook altogether?

Right off the bat, here are a few I noticed tonight:

• No health penalty for falling into a pit. The Link of Skyward Sword is the most athletic we’ve seen, and along with that comes a fair amount of climbing, swinging, and jumping. No longer will you suffer damage if you fall into a pit.. your only punishment is to go back to the last solid ground you stood on. While some may write this off as simply making the game easier, it is so much more than that. Platforming in Zelda is a puzzle element, and the game is all the better for reserving health punishments for combat situations.
• No more starting in reserved spots when loading a saved game. This one is great – if you save inside a dungeon, your game will load up in that room when you restart. No longer will you have to trek back through the dungeon from the front entrance and eliminate all the enemies you dispatched on your first run through.
• Less dependence on menus. I believe Nintendo picked this up from their remake of Ocarina of Time 3d when they provided the player with quick access to a few commonly used items on the second screen. Skyward Sword follows the trend by letting you select tools and items by holding the button that activates them and then quickly selecting from a radial popup. This is so much faster than diving in and out of menus and really helps to keep the game flowing.

I’ll probably come back and post a full review once I finish the game, but I just couldn’t wait to mention these “little” tweaks. They really improve the game in a way you wouldn’t imagine. Even better, the game itself is gorgeous and (so far) more compelling than the last few Zelda games that have been released.

But is it the game’s fault? I’m not sure. Playing a 6 year old game is like watching a 50 year old film.. things were just done differently back then.

Your sole reason for slaughtering 16 giant creatures that you know nothing about.

First and foremost, it’s obvious why this game was considered so amazing on the PS2, technically speaking. The colossi are, for the most part, enormous. The engine also features impressive cloth and hair/fur physics.. something that’s taken for granted these days but a real feat back then. The graphics are well done but the land feels barren – grassy areas appear painted on, not alive and varied like a field should be. This is a problem that wasn’t one back in 2005, and it’s a common theme as I think about my problems with the title.

Don’t get me wrong – there is a lot of good in the game.  Many of the colossi fights are tense and satisfying when you tip the scales in your favor. The sound design is brilliant. Most of the time you’ll find yourself exploring the land with your horse, Agro, with nothing but the sounds of a wasteland to accompany you. A bird here and there, the scratching of a lizard climbing a rock. It isn’t until you’re locked into battle with a colossus that you get to hear the epic and very appropriate orchestrated score. Each track feels similar yet unique.. much like the enemies themselves.

But beyond those colossi battles, there isn’t a whole lot to the game. There is next to no story, and what’s there is mostly revealed after burying your sword into a colossus for the last time. There is no character progression beyond collecting fruit and lizard tails.. a tedious and unsatisfying method of growth. It feels like an idea that somebody came up with in the early stages of design and never got around to fleshing out.

Much of the gameplay is centered on climbing, and for a lot of the game it works well. But when it doesn’t, boy is it annoying. The camera is generally terrible throughout, especially when trying to position it in a colossi fight. This adds to the frustration of climbing difficult areas and making precise leaps. Riding Agro could have been a beautiful and smooth experience, except approaching an unseen cliff or sometimes even just a tiny ridge in the ground bluntly disrupts your ride and make it difficult to get him moving again. This happens enough to make getting to each colossus a painful chore.

My final, and perhaps, most important let down, is that the game just isn’t consistent. From the onset, it plays like a puzzle game. Leave the temple, find a colossus, figure out how to kill it, and repeat. But at some point in the game the colossi get more agressive and avoiding energy blasts becomes part of the game. This is only an issue because Wander takes an excruciatingly long time to get up after being hit.. and many of the enemies can chain their attacks making it nearly impossible to escape after being hit for the first time. It’s frustrating that we’ve been taught for 2 decades that if your character takes a long time to get up, jam on the buttons to speed up the process, and that has no effect here. In addition to this, the game also defies it’s own mechanics in order to make later colossi more difficult. Sometimes the method of killing a colossi is so bizarre, that I can’t imagine anyone would figure it out without consulting a guide(or spending hours experimenting and discovering the method by accident). Back in 2005 I was completely opposed to guides and this would have been one of those games I just never finished.

Overall, I stuck with it, so the game wasn’t terrible. But being accustomed to 2011 gaming mechanics like decent checkpoints, consistent strategies, and having stuff to do made Shadow of the Colossus an overwhelmingly disappointing experience for me, and makes me regret not playing it immediately when I received that copy for the PS2 a few years back.

Good: Apps run very smoothly, and operate just as you’d expect them to on Android. You have full control over screen orientation, a soft menu button, full keyboard support, and multitasking ability.

Not So Good: ..it would probably be more accurate to call this “Things I’d like to see changed”. None of these are a HUGE issue, but small tweaks could make this software absolutely killer.

• Make the Windows Gadget optional/customizable. I don’t mind having a picture of Andy sitting on the edge of my screen, but if I only had one monitor, I might. It would be nice to just have a traditional Windows application to use as a launcher, or at least the ability to turn the gadget into a smaller icon.
• Apps can only run full screen. This is a bummer. The apps I tested generally looked fine running on my 22″ 1680×1050 monitor, but these are simple programs with very specific functions.. I probably don’t need them to take up my whole screen most of the time. Just adding a Windowed mode would be great, and even better if it was resizable to your choice of resolution. Android scales properly no matter what, as long as the software is written right, so that shouldn’t pose compatibility issues with many apps.
• There’s no way to delete or reorder preinstalled apps. This might be more of an OCD thing but having the 10 preinstalled apps perpetually stuck on the grid is kind of annoying. I’m guessing that since this is a very early release they either just didn’t include deletion functionality, or they’re trying to monetize like the carriers do.. by including a bunch of apps prepackaged that you can’t get rid of.
• Closing the screen suspends all apps. I was hoping that closing the displayed screen would be more akin to turning off the screen of your phone – apps like music players should continue to play their music. But they don’t. This would be less annoying if I could have these apps open in a window instead of taking up my whole monitor.
• Apps only run on your primary monitor. For folks like me running two or more displays, we might like to run these apps on a secondary one. This is another issue that wouldn’t be if they could be in windows.. we’d be able to drag them to any display we wanted.
• The ability to link our Google market account would be extremely helpful. I understand that this software will probably never have access to the actual Android Market, but without having our account registered on the “device”, we won’t be able to use many of our purchased applications, even though they can be installed to Bluestacks from their excellent Cloud Connect app running on our phones. One sad example of this was “Game Dev Story”, which just pops up a licensing error.

Image via Wikipedia

So lately I’ve been browsing Reddit a lot, and since I tend to gravitate to the image posts, I wrote a little script that remixes their RSS feeds to include only those(it also puts the image directly into the feed).. specifically it looks for those hosted on imgur, which seems to be (by far) Reddit’s hosting service of choice.

If you tend to fly through looking at pictures and not commenting a whole lot, you might find the feeds useful, so feel free to give it a shot..

The url is:

http://www.brabbler.com/redditcustom/rss.asp?r=[subreddit]

example..

http://www.brabbler.com/redditcustom/rss.asp?r=comics

Enjoy, and please leave a comment if you try it out!

I just deleted my Facebook account. Will I stay off there? I have a good amount of friends and family that I only get to stay caught up with through status updates and occasional messages. But for now I will be roughing it. Maybe this will force me back to the pre-AIM, pre-social network days. Maybe I’ll have to start chiseling out time to sit and call ten or fifteen people every week to feel connected. Maybe I just won’t care to. I don’t know.

Or maybe G+ will bring me back to life.

The gist of the game is that a tribe is on a quest to relearn the memories of their ancestors, and in order to do that they need to travel across various islands and restore their villages. Aside from giving the Men their final destination, you have no control over them..they just try to find the best path which you create for them by picking up and moving earth, creating land out of lava, and redirecting rivers. Of course, all of these elements work against each other in some way, and there are more advanced concepts such as powers that the villagers use to ward off fire and floods and powers that you can use to evaporate water, put out fires, etc. You’ll also be working against natural disasters such as shifting earth, erupting volcanoes, mass fires, and tsunamis.

What really hooked me about this game is that even though it’s so simple on it’s surface, digging in reveals that this is , at it’s core, a brilliant puzzle game. Further beyond that, it’s something we’ve never seen on a home console before at all.. a terraforming simulator with accurate water flow and land erosion. It can be a blast to just sit and shape the maps to your whim, and the final level essentially opens this up to you completely – allowing you to create the entire map including volcanoes and disasters.. with no game imposed time limit.

Overall, my only real gripe is that the camera is a little finicky, only providing 2 levels of zoom. A small problem in an otherwise great game and an excellent value for 15 bucks.