Krister Axel

I finally got an iPhone. I wouldn’t dream of developing a Rails app on anything but a Mac, and I had an iPhone 3G a while back, but for the last 2 years I had a Droid phone that synced pretty well with my google account and only froze up the tiniest little bit every now and then. Now that I am actively drawing down my gmail account and moving back to a personal (aka private) email account, it made sense to move back to the iPhone and try out the awesome new camera. It is slightly annoying that you can’t use the photo stream on your Mac until you upgrade to Lion (note to anyone like me that was excited for iCloud and the photo stream) and there is literally no way out of the box to get pictures off of your phone without it except by emailing them to yourself, one by one. But the good news is that there are a couple of apps that you can buy that will do that for you.

I am using PhotoSync to push pictures to my desktop, PhotoLoader to push pictures to Facebook, and Move2Plus to copy the facebook folders over to google plus. Good times.

Here is a short list of the few game titles I am enjoying:

• Scrabble

This is a classic. I wish the music wasn’t so horrible but so far it seems to be a pretty solid app. The UI is pretty slick and functional and it’s easy to turn down the horrible music. There is also a stats section which is a nice touch and is something I wish Civ Rev had.

• Civ Rev

This is easily my favorite title for PS3 (as Civilization Revolutions) so I was pretty happy to see it offered for iOS. A Halloween special at 99 cents, how do you say no to that? It is almost the exact same game, down to the technology tree and all of the different Wonders. The one issue I have in terms of gameplay is with the screen real estate, I wish it were easier to scroll around the map without inadvertently moving your soldiers around. It would be great if you could lock a solder to the city and not have to worry about it. I lost a city that way because I moved my army out by mistake and Napoleon just marched his ass right in there. I took it back the next round but not before he stole literacy from me. That was a dark day. I’ll bet this title is great on an iPad because you would have so much room. The one thing that is missing that I loved from the PS3 version is keeping track of all your victories. I enjoyed systematically getting every victory under Warlord before moving on to Prince, for example, and you can’t easily track that for iOS.

• Carcassone

This is a weird one, but it gets under your skin. It takes a while to figure out what a good strategy is, but it is also sort of intuitive and once you get a taste of victory it is easy to become obsessed. It is a lot like chess in the sense that you need to think about all sorts of eventualities. If Scrabble is unappealing to the barely literate then Carcassone will be unpopular among those who do not premeditate or who think systems philosophy is boring.

In the end, I do not do a lot of gaming on my phone but if I did these titles would keep me busy for a little while. Feel free to post any personal favorites in the comment section.

It ain’t easy being a Mac person.

First you have to find a good game, and then you have to figure out how to play it on your Mac. For example, I sort of got DDO to play on my Mac via Crossover, but it was buggy enough to be annoying and functional enough to be somewhat compelling which was not a good place to be. The short of it was that I could never really group up because there was a decent chance that my client would crash at any given moment. As anyone who has played DDO will tell you, you eventually need to group with people because of the strong requirements for specific classes – certain instances need a really good thief, for example – coupled with the really annoying need for other live players to coordinate opening certain doors together. An example:

You stand here, I’ll go into the other room, hit the switch that both closes the door that I just went through and then enables a switch for YOU to hit that will reopen the door for me!

It’s either an ingenious way to encourage grouping, or an insidious way to render your ‘hirelings’ more or less useless just when you need them. It depends who you ask. If you ask me, it’s an annoying way of grinding your solo play to halt where you have to leave because you are SOL and are doomed to take a penalty whenever you come back. Sweet!

Still one of favorite sandbox titles to date is a little-appreciated gem from Steam called Tycoon City: New York. I really loved playing that game but it too was pretty buggy. You would have to save incessantly just on the off chance that the game would crash, and even then occasionally the save file itself would corrupt and you would be lucky if you could restart without having to do a poor man’s reboot by yanking the plug out of the wall.

I have also been revisiting the Tropico series, lately release number 4. I’m still not sure if I liked 3 better because although they made some things better they took away some of the detail-oriented browsing of individual citizens. I feel like you used to ‘know’ your citizens better and were more encouraged to select them and follow them around in 3. Now, the AI is noticeably better – people actually find things that they are looking for, but it feels less personal. I like more detail, not less, and I think in some ways they caved to the ‘derr, this is complicated‘ crowd and dumbed the title down in some ways to make it more palatable. Good luck with that one, Kalypso.

All I want is a crafting community with a player-centric economy, decent solo play, player-built housing and good customization options for your avatar. I don’t think that is too much to ask. So far, Origins of Malu seems to be putting something along those lines together. I will be following along closely.

It started out bad, I should say that from the start. Maybe those are the relationships that seem the most rewarding at first – like maybe if you try hard enough, you can fix it, and then you will have created your own happiness. For me, I bought a PS3 slim model when it came out, not because there was anything I wanted to play but because I was getting ready for The Agency to come out.

Note to people that do things in anticipation of other things: bad idea. That does not always work out – they kept on pushing back the release date and then they pulled the plug. My hopes were dashed. Dragon Age got boring really fast, and Borderlands did too. My dream of playing a worthy MMO on PS3 was turning to dust.

And then I discovered Hulu. They had a client for PS3. That is great, I said to myself. I can watch my favorite shows on the big screen instead of my laptop. Maybe this PS3 will be useful after all. Now of course we are talking about software, and I can’t reasonably hold PS3 accountable for the performance of someone else’s app. It turns out that the Hulu app for PS3 is really buggy and laggy and just makes you feel dirty for using it. Also, most of the shows on Hulu are not licensed for ‘television’, whatever that means. Don’t we all just have monitors now? I’m disappointed, but that’s not the fault of Sony, right?

Well, technically that’s true, but as a company like Apple will tell you, it doesn’t matter if it’s not your fault. That’s a big plus for a closed system because you get to actually control for quality. Who else is big on a closed system? Sony. You see where I’m going with this? Besides, there may very well have been some platform issues that contributed to the Hulu app fail for PS3. At this point we may never know – but I’m starting not to like Sony. The only thing that was definitely NOT their fault was the licensing issue – and I could have lived with that. Or even if they just had a decent browser that actually parses modern javascript, things would have been fine.

And THEN, there was the mother of all PR losses – Sonygate, you could call it. I had a few accounts hijacked, nothing major happened to me – but it could have been really ugly. More than 70 million people were affected by this, and that is their number. The real number is probably higher. What bothered me the most was how long it took Sony to respond. I had no idea what was going on for close to a week (if I remember correctly), and that was time that my data could have used against me had I been unlucky. The story finally broke, and I ordered a new credit card like millions of others but sitting on their hands while figuring out how to spin the story did not endear Sony to me.

For now, there is a glorified dvd player with its HDMI cable already pilfered from it living in my house, disconnected, dusty and presumably bored.

Maybe a game will come along some day with the power to bring it back to life.