Beyond articles, well we’ll see. I’m not going to go making promises I can’t keep. Although I have a couple of ideas to keep us and our fans (which has probably dwindled from a couple hundred to 2, and their names are Josh and Jeff) interested and entertained.

So look for article 1 “Why Steve Jobs Hates Creativity” in the next day or so. I think I can piss a number of people off with this one. Article 2 “The Silicon Age Begins” wills how up later in the week.

I want to make it clear that this isn’t blind belief, I know I won’t agree with everything he does. I know he’s not flawless or perfect. I know he’s got much to do to prove himself. I also know Barrack Obama believes in our country and its people. He believes all of them, regardless of their religion, politics or color.  He believes that this truly is a great country and that we can come together. I believe Obama is a man who can help bring us together. l believe that Obama brings hope.

Hope is where this all started for me. A year ago I was not excited about the future of our government. I had no idea who Obama was and I figured the democratic nominee would be Hilary. I didn’t believe in Hilary or her beliefs. I believed the country was in a downwards spiral and I had little to no hope that we would pull out of it. Then I heard Obama speak and for the first time I knew what hope really was. In the end that’s what Obama brings, belief and hope.

There’s a long road ahead and I’m still not sure our economy can be fixed. I do believe that Obama will do everything he can for this country. I believe Obama has hope for this country and that his hope can and will inspire others. For the first time I can see our country heading in a positive direction. For the first time I have hope in our future and for my childrens future.

The concept of Live Mesh is pretty simple and not really new. Basically it’s a way to store your documents online. The real difference in Mesh is not just about online storage, it’s about syncing files. When you create a Live Mesh folder on the Live Mesh Desktop you can access it from anywhere. By that I mean any web browser, or any Windows, OSX or Windows Mobile device with the software installed. When you’re using the actual application it seamlessly keeps your local version of that folder in sync with the online version. Sounds simple and really it is.

The thing is this goes beyond just having your word documents anywhere you want. If you use your windows mobile phone as your camera you can simply designate the photo folder on your phone as a Live Mesh folder and now all your photos are instantly on any computers you have set up. I take a picture on my phone and as soon as Mesh syncs I’ve got it on my netbook and my laptop. For the first time my data really does follow me everywhere. Once Office Live releases I’ll actually be able to sit down at any computer and write and with apps like Photoshop online I can edit my photos too. But wait, there’s more.

Live Mesh also gives you collaboration tools. You give other users permission to access your documents and even see a history of who’s changed files. With a few more features this could become an important project management tool. We’re already starting to use it at work to keep Marketing files up to date when people are on the road or at home. Basically Live Mesh truly puts your data in the cloud. What’s next?

We’re seeing phones with very capable digital cameras and capable digital video cameras aren’t far behind (even an 8 megapixel camera doesn’t make for very good video, it’s just not designed for moving pictures). So now my home movies are anywhere I am. Now imagine a Live Mesh app on XBox 360 and other media extenders. This is one step away from streaming home videos. Who needs a DVD with their movie burned to it. Heck, it’s possible there could be a TiVO app to extend this too. Now we’re talking a few years down the road but this sort of tech is enabling a truly digital age. In fact I think we have to call the coming age something different, maybe the cloud age. That’s where everything is heading and Microsoft has finally seen the light.

We’re finally getting real competition in the cloud app arena, Google may not be the top dog much longer, especially if Office Live delivers the ambitious set of features we expect to see. Web based apps are becoming more and more powerful everyday, they’re a bit behind the curve when compared to desktop apps but they are starting to close that gap. When you can go to a webpage, log in and have access to your own desktop, complete with webapps and documents nothing is left to tie you down (except for games, but with bandwidth increasing the future holds live streaming game content that’s another article though). On average web apps require fewer system resources that installed apps. What this means is as more apps migrate to the web and as technology progresses, computers capable or running these apps will decrease in size. A future of wearable computers is in sight, netbooks are just the first step.

Google didn’t really get the ball rolling but the certainly brought public attention to the ball. Now Microsoft is refining the ball and reinventing themselves in the process. The future of Microsoft isn’t Windows and they’ve seen that. The world of computers is changing in such a way that my generation could get quickly left behind if we don’t keep up with changing software technology. I know plenty of people from my fathers generation stuck in a pre-GUI world and the cloud is changing everything again.

We don’t have many details at this point, in fact the details are so few I almost didn’t post this. However there are a couple of things I wanted to talk about which are promising. First of all it sounds like this is going to be a role playing game first. There’s talk about an emphasis on the personal story, in fact it sounds like it will have a strong solo aspect, since they talked about companion characters which are customizable. It sounds to me like this may be a very non-traditional MMO. Other than that all we really know is the only in game footage they showed was a pre-alpha build. That means we’re probably looking at a couple of years before release.

I’m worried that letting this cat out of the bag so long before release could be a problem. A long wait like that often sets players up for disappointment. Also any details they do release are subject to change and over reaching is common in MMOs. Still it’s too early to worry about any of that really. Hopefully we’ll see some screenshots soon, it sounds like the game will have a striking visual style, concept art come to life was one of the terms used.

Anyway, I followed Star Wars Galaxies for 3 years, I’ll definitely be keeping up with SW:TOR.

“Google may discover a product that violates the developer distribution agreement … in such an instance, Google retains the right to remotely remove those applications from your device at its sole discretion”

Wow, that sounds a lot more ominous. I mean this doesn’t sound like it’s about viruses. Frankly I don’t trust Googles agreements. Google is a big fan of quietly slipping in things that are consumer unfriendly in those agreements and while I haven’t read the agreement (not for lack of trying, all I could find was the SDK license agreement) it worries me. I’m sorry but the software I want to run on my device is my damn choice. This is one thing Microsoft gets right, they don’t forceably remove software, you don’t have to run the malicious software tool. I mean this is an open source OS, isn’t the point to be able to run whatever we want. I can understand Apple, but Google?

I should mention that Google has promised to attempt to recover your original purchase price from the developer. Actually that part worries me more than anything. I paid for software and they want to remove it?  None of their damn business. If they want to check for viruses and social engineering scams great, give me the option to opt out of their interference. Frankly I don’t need their help and I don’t want it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Google has abandoned their original mission statement, do no evil. Now their goal seems to be to do no evil as long as it’s convenient and doesn’t limit our control over everything. Google is rapidly becoming the new evil empire. While Microsoft is trying (although not always very successfully) to correct their past mistakes, Google has embraced their power we all know power corrupts.

Age of Conan really pulled you in with the first 20 levels. it had everything a licensed game should have. Good gameplay, an interesting and involving story line, boobs (seriously it’s rated Mature for a very good reason and it was different. Combat felt different from most MMO’s, I felt more involved in the combat and the story. The story even made you feel like you had choices, none of them were very real but it at least made you able to role play your characters attitude. For 20 levels I thought this could be my PVP (Player Vs. Player) MMO. For the first time in a very long time I was enjoying fighting other human beings. I was slaughtering those biatches. I was the anti-griefer, writing wrongs throughout the realms of Hyboria. Life was good. Then I hit level 20 and ventured out of the newbie experience and into the “real game”. Suddenly it all changed.

Gone were the immersive story and cohesive landscape. Replaced by a ragtag collection of quests which might maybe form into an over all story arc. However that story arc was a pale imitation of the opening story. I never felt like I was in control of it. It didn’t help that everthing was instanced and the world felt small, cramped and confusing. I didn’t feel comfortable in the new world I’d found myself in. The PvP combat was still fun but the nature of the new areas and the higher level characters made it more dangerous and it was definitely not the same. I lost interest in the game.

Age of Conan pulled a lot of players from WoW, the thing is half of those players went back after a month. The problem with Age of Conan isn’t the initial execution, it’s the lack of follow through. In the begining it gives Lord of the Rings Online a run for it’s money in story telling, then it just drops out.

Warhammer: Age of Reckoning

Warhammer is a based on a roleplaying system. A roleplaying and miniature game system that’s been around for quite some time. There are actually two time periods that Warhammer the pen and paper game takes place in, the swords and sorcery time period and the far future time period (known as Warhammer 40k). This game is swords and sorcery. Warhammer takes a lot of the complexity out of the game. Unlike Dungeons and Dragons online there are no stats to worry about. You simply choose your class and hit the ground running.

The biggest complaint I have about WAR is that the story is a little light. It doesn’t really suck you in and it’s not very well connected. WAR does do a couple of things to make up for this. Probably the biggest of those things are the public quests. Public quests are triggered by area and every player in that area is part of the quest. They usually start with kill X number of bad guys in the area, then destroy some stuff then kill the big bad guy. There’s an XP reward and a chest that drops. Loot in the chest is rolled on and you get a bonus to your roll based on your contribution to the battle. It turns out these are a lot of fun and helped pull me into the game.

WAR is a different approach to a licensed game. Instead of trying to place you solidly in the story they simply give you feel of the world from the game. The classes are different and again reflect the game it’s based on. The real meat of the game is the RvR or Realm vs. Realm.

The company behind WAR is Mythic Entertainment (bought by EA during the development of Warhammer). Mythic was one of the first companies to really challenge EverQuest in the MMO arena. When Mythic released they’re first MMO Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) they put a focus on battles over frontier keeps. Unlike previous PvP experiences this was meant to be large scale massive battles. Capturing keeps, using siege weapons, the whole ten yards. In the early days DAoC was excellent RvR and at best mediocre PvE (Player vs. Environment). Still that was the first game I reached level cap in and I loved it, right up until the dreaded Atlantis expansion, but I digress.

Mythic has returned to RvR in WAR and it’s going to be what keeps a lot of people in the game. There are keeps to siege and bad guys to kill. The causes of order and destruction clash on the battle field and it’s often tough not to get caught up in the action.

So Mythic got things right by keeping the feel of the pen and paper game but adding their own twist. More companies need to look to this model. Some games aren’t fit to be story driven like LotRO and this approach could do a lot to improve them.

The Wrap Up

Basically we’ve got one game that did it right and one game that made people think they’d done it right.  Hopefully WAR can steal some of WoW’s thunder and prove to the media that other games can make an impact. There are plenty of successful MMO’s out there, just none that have caught nearly the attention WoW has. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Next up (I won’t promise when because it took me over a week to get this part up) I’ll talk about Star Gate Worlds and Star Trek Online.

Well I think the changes are enough for those people in the general populous who weren’t buying the game, but it won’t be enough for the geeks who are already taking a stand against the game. They’re not going to change their minds for anything short of dropping the DRM. The thing is, it may already be too late to fix the good will they lost.

EA has caused some serious damage to the reputation of Spore. As I said earlier this fix is probably enough for the average user. The problem is they probably won’t know it’s happening. The people that this likely to make buy the game will probably never hear about it. Sure the game has already sold well and it will sale well on consoles too. But sales numbers isn’t the only thing that matters.

There are people out there who already aren’t fans of EA (myself included). Many people think EA is heavy handed in what they do to win a market. The best example being the NFL license. They couldn’t be the 2K games so they bought exclusive rights to the NFL. Of course EA is crying all the way to the bank.  Still the don’t need any more bad publicity like this.

Does this rumor even make any sense? I mean what could Google want with a game company? Especially a 3D first person shooter (FPS) game company. Googles traditional roles in the industry have been about information and advertising. This would be the first time they got into a strictly for profit software venture. I mean advertising is for profit, but that’s not what I mean. This would be the first time Google would straight up charge for their product. Unless of course they go free, which with a license like Half Life, sorry, it just isn’t happening. I mean I can see a 2D webbased game company being bought by Google to release totally free ad supported games. But with an FPS game, there’s too much overhead for that. So why?

The answer is simple, advertising. The next big thing in gaming is advertising. IN game ads are already popping up all over the place, sports games, racing games (Burnout Paradise City has CompUSA ads, which I find hilarious). With Googles focus on advertising as income I can see them wanting to get into that space. So we could see ads for real products in the next Half Life game. But it goes deeper than that.

I said earlier that Google won’t be giving Half Life away, there’s really just no way, but I can see them having other advertising supported games. Smaller 3D games, even 2D games. There is a lot of potential here. I’m guessing Google has some other ideas I haven’t thought up.

If this really happens (and I’d say there’s a 50/50 chance this is true) then it means we’ll be seeing a new Half Life game, probably developed by the very same people who have been doing it all along. We’ll also see Valve ramp up design and focus towards new markets. This could mean some very interesting Half Life spin offs. Puzzle games, games which tie into the larger game. Mini games available both on in the game and out of the game. This could also put Google in a whole new venue, gaming consoles. I can see a lot going on there too.

I’m split on whether we’ll actually see this thing go through. I think it could be very interesting though.

DRM

Jeff is writing an article about the DRM. Jeff and agree for the most part, the DRM is crappy. We don’t agree on what should have been done and while it’s a deal breaker for Jeff it’s not for me. However, to be fair, I should say that I wasn’t fully aware of the DRM limitations when I bought the game. I would have made the same decision either way. Anyway, I disagree with Jeff on what they should have done with Spore. I think the creature creator is all the demo they need and they just need to drop some of the more draconian issues in the DRM. The one benefit of the DRM is no disk required to play. You could actually play on up to 3 systems. But many people would rather play from the DVD than be limited on number of installs and have the game check in every time an update comes out. In the end it’s not much of a benefit, especially since beyond the 3 you have to call EA to install, that includes reinstalls. That particular piece of the DRM definitely needs to go. Despite all the outrage Spore is selling like mad. So let’s get to a proper review of the gameplay shall we?

Creature Creator

This is by far the best feature of any game on the market. You have a ton of flexibility and can do some really fun things. The creature creator is actually a stand alone game, you can play with a few of the pieces available for free or spend $10 and get a full version with all the features of the in game creature creator. I can’t stress enough how much freedom you have in creating your creature, no two will look the same. There’s even a group of people creating X rated creatures. When you have the full version of the game you can actually chose to share you creations and have creations shared with you. When you do this you’ll run into other peoples creatures on your planet. Now with X rated creatures out there this may be a concern, don’t worry, there’s an option to block offensive creatures from the game. There is also a vehichle and building creator in the full version of the game which are both based on the creature creator.

This is by far the best feature of the game. Even if you’re not a fan of the Sim games you should check out the creature creator as a stand alone.

Survival of the Fittest: Doing it Solo

This is what Spore is really all about. Surviving. For the first two stages you’re surviving on your own. You start out as an a single celled organism. You choose whether you’re an herbivore or a carnivore (you can purchase upgrades later on that either change what you eat or make you an omnivore). This is actually an important decision because it determines what you can eat and in the early game eating is the way you level up. You don’t start the game with all the pieces unlocked, as you move through the game you unlock new body parts. At first by discovering them in the bodies of opponents or in pieces of the meteor which brought you to the planet (did I forget to mention the opening cinematic is a meteor crashing into the ocean and you spilling out?). As you move through the game you are always collecting something, in the first two stages it’s body parts. In stage two you find the body parts by searching skeletons spread across the landscape.

As you move from the cell stage you grow legs and move onto land. At any time as you evolve you can completely change your look. You purchase new features with DNA points gained in various ways. These DNA points also drive your evolution. How you gain DNA effects your evolution. As you move from the cell stage you gain the ability to make friends with creatures instead of killing them or avoiding them. Gaining allies gives you DNA points just like killing does. If you are aggressive you’ll get skills suited to combat, if you’re passive you’ll get skills useful for making friends. As you evolve you move onto the tribal stage, now you’re controlling multiple creatures.

Survival of the Fittest: Doing it With Others, is it More Fun?

Up until now you’ve been controlling only one creature, now that you’re a tribe you control them all, this is where things begin to look like a familiar RTS game. Now you’re competing against other tribes in an attempt to become the dominant species on the planet. As you begin this phase you make the last genetic changes to your creature. This stage has no creators to use. You no longer gain DNA points, now you gather food. You fight other tribes (or make them allies) and you hunt creatures. That’s pretty much it. This is where the game starts to feel very familiar and actually loses a bit of its charm.

After you’ve dominated the other tribes you become the dominant species and move onto the civilization stage. In this stage you’re competing against other cities of your race. The civilization stage is full on RTS mode. You have Spice as a resource you mine. You have different types of buildings and you have to keep your people happy (hey look, an element from the Sim games). Again you can make war or you can make friends. How you’ve progressed up to this point has a fairly big impact on what abilities you have and your abilities make it easier to proceed as you have up to this point. as an aggressive race you get things like missile strikes. I tried to make peace with a couple of the other cities I’m not sure if it was my war like nature or what, but after I had them listed as an ally they attacked me while I wasn’t looking. So I nuked the crap out of them.

There is a return at this stage of the creator system and it’s back with a vengeance. You get to design buildings and vehicles. One land vehicle one sea and one air. You have population limits based on number of houses per city and an over all population limit. Combat gets pretty intense but again the game had become very familiar and lost a little more of its charm. All in all, doing it with others isn’t really more fun (insert lewd comment here). Once you’ve conquered the world you move onto a new stage.

Survival of the Fittest: The Return of Solo

After two familiar stages we get to something a little different, you are the captain of a spaceship. You start out by building your spaceship. Then you get a bit of a lesson from mission control in how to pilot the ship and use your ships abilities. The highlight for me was the ability to abduct creatures and experiment on them to learn more about them. There is actually a lot to do in this stage from a control stand point. You can acquire new tech and abilities from other races by, you guessed it, either destroying them or making friends with them. There is definitely a feeling of exploring a very large galaxy. You can go from planet level to solar system level to galactic level. There’s even a bit of a story to start you out and teach you about exploration. This is really the pay off. The good news is, once you’ve reached a certain stage on one planet you can jump straight to that stage on any other planet.

Controls

All in all the controls are pretty simple, they’re pretty usable and definitely designed to make the game easy to port to consoles. It is interesting to see how the controls evolve with the stages of the game. In beginning you’re really navigating a fully 2D world. As you move out of the water you get a taste of 3D with the ability to glide. Once you hit the space stage you’re in full on 3D navigation mode. Each stage takes a little getting used to (well not the civilization stage it’s very similar to the tribal stage). Controls were one of my biggest concerns but they seem to have really nailed them.

Conclusion

Spore is a good game, it had a few disappointments. For one it feels too short to evolve through the stages. Once you get to the space stage it’s very open ended but they force you to end the other stages because you stop getting many of the benefits once you’re ready to advance (no more DNA points once you’re done with the land stage for instance). When I saw that you could start at any stage once you unlocked it I had hopes of stages being more complex and taking more time. I’m sure it’s harder on the highest difficulty (I went with normal for my first game). The different play styles make things interesting but the tribal and civilization stages don’t feel all that unique or interesting. If the DRM doesn’t scare you off it’s definitely a game worth checking out, but the game play is not going to change the face of gaming as we know it. The coolest stuff is really under the hood, it’s the dynamic animation and creature creation. In the cut scenes it’s actually your creature doing those scripted animations and they’re pretty flawless.

I have IE 8, Flock (a derivative of Firefox) and Chrome installed on my computer. I’ve been running head to head comparisons of the 3 since I downloaded Chrome yesterday and for a week before that I was comparing IE 8 and Flock trying to decide which would be my primary browser. It’s no secret that I’ve not been a Firefox fan, other than a brief flirtation when Firefox 2 came out, I’ve been an IE 7 guy. There are several features I like and Firefox 3 has had a recurring memory leak problem which pops up every couple of updates. So, it’s going to take quite a browser to convince me to change my ways. First let me start with the competition.

IE 8

I’m not all that impressed with IE 8 as a new version of IE, it really feels more like IE 7.5. I’ve heard rumors that it’s different under the hood and handles things better. IE 8 is definitely faster, it certainly gives Firefox 3 a run for it’s money. IE 8 still has the thumbnail view of all opened tab, which both Flock and Chrome are missing (I’m running all these browsers stock, no extra plug-ins, plug-ins tend to really increase the memory usage of Firefox). IE 8 also has compatibility mode, a good choice by Microsoft, except it shouldn’t be needed. The biggest complaint about IE 7 has always been standards compliance, one thing that made me start to consider a switch from IE was a problem with WordPress 6.1 which makes it impossible to write a post from IE. Now blame has to be laid at the feet of both WordPress and IE 7, the latest update to 6.2 didn’t fix the IE 7 problem, which is actually a PHP problem, something that should have been easily fixable. Still IE 8 has new compatibility problems thanks to the changes under the hood. With compatibility mode it’s not a deal breaker, but it certainly doesn’t help IE 8′s case. One of the niftiest new features of IE 8 is it color codes tabs so you can see which tabs were opened from other tabs. Makes it easier to organize the millions of tabs I often have opened.

Flock (based on Firefox 3)

Flock is a social web browser. It’s got some interface improvements over Firefox and it’s got a side pane for keeping track of your favorite social networking sites (Twitter and Facebook are the ones I use, MySpace is coming sometime this year but isn’t supported at all yet). It’s every bit as fast as Firefox. The main thing this has going for it is the social networking stuff. Firefox 3 in general while slightly faster than IE 7 isn’t fast enough to negate what I feel is better tab management in IE 7 and when compared to IE 8 Firefox doesn’t even have the speed edge. For other people there are things to like, plug-ins being the main thing really. Plug-ins aren’t for me. The other advantage is built in spell check, which I like, but isn’t a deal breaker. The social networking tools and spell checking in Flock just aren’t enough for me to ditch my thumbnail view and the tab management I prefer in IE 8.

Chrome

Google has got some things right with Chrome. It’s interface is at least as good as IE 8 and Firefox. It’s missing the thumbnail view I like and it doesn’t show you child tabs by color. Those can be forgiven if Chrome gets enough other things right. Chrome has the built in spell checking and matches IE 8 and Firefox 3 in speed tests on my big notebook. Chrome is actually faster on my HP 2133. Tab management in general in Chrome is as good or better than in IE 8, if it just indicated child tabs and had thumbnails. Chrome does a few unconventional things as well, it drops the home button and combines the search box and address bar. Ditching the home key is strange to me, combining search and address bars is completely natural however. Another thing Chrome does is put the tabs at the top of the window. This is nice when working full screen but fairly in different when working windowed, at 1680 x 1050 full screen is a waste of screen real estate.

There has been a lot of talk about the application shortcuts in Chrome. Frankly that’s not all that big of a deal to me. All they are is website shortcuts that open into a tabless and address barless Chrome window. I prefer to keep as few windows opened as possible. The other feature Chrome offers is a set of thumbnails of your most frequently visited websites every time you open a new tab. It’s not bad but it’s not a huge feature by any means. Still with as much time as I spend online a little time saving never hurts.

I talked about compatibility issues in IE 8 (the biggest being google reader, although those are all fixed with compatibility mode). Chrome has it’s own compatibility issues but no mode to fix them. The most noticeable downside is I can’t play my Facebook games, that damn Heroes game is addictive and I don’t even watch the show anymore. The other thing is the WYSIWYG preview in WordPress doesn’t work. What is it about the WordPress write post page that causes problems in browsers? These compatibility issues should be fixed as Chrome moves forward, at least I hope they will be.

Conclusion

One thing I haven’t addressed is security. How secure a browser is is always changing. New exploits are found everyday in both Firefox and IE, I’m sure the same will be true of Chrome. The real question is how quickly will Google respond to these new threats. I’m not sure if there is a streamlined update process for Chrome, we can only hope they don’t expect us to download a new client every time they plug a security hole or add a new feature.

On my HP 2133 Chrome is a no brainer, it runs faster than Firefox or IE 8 on that machine. On a system with more resources the speed difference is negligible but on a slow netbook Chrome is much faster. On my primary machine though I’m still trying to decide. I’ll probably be running Chrome along side either IE 8 or Flock.

Chrome has all the makings of both a Firefox and IE killer and it’s got the Google brand behind it. I think its real strength will be on netbooks and other low end PC’s. In the end though which browser you use is a personal preference just like which OS you use. All I can say is give Chrome a try and see if it’s your cup of tea.