People spend more time using their smartphones for surfing the web, checking social networks or playing games than making phone calls, new research has found.
According to the Telegraph, the report has indicated that on average day, 25 mins is spent on Internet browsing, 20 minutes is spent on social media, whereas people will spend an average of 12 minutes on actual telephone calls.
Original article (Telegraph)
I’ve recently helped two clients create their own iPhone apps;
and
The third installment of the Saints Row game, “Saints Row The Third” sees you trying to take over the city of Steelport.
Whereas I did enjoy Saints Row 2 and found it a good throwback to what made GTA3, GTA Vice City and San Andreas fun; I found Saints Row 3 to be quite boring.
Despite all the positive reviews of Saints Row 3, I feel that this “GTA sandbox clone” is actually quite poor.
There is very, very little content. The mission/story mode of the game can easily be completed within a few hours, and the difficulty of the game is pretty easy — even on hard.
The story seems interesting, and the role-play element where you can choose your path seems an interesting path, but these are window dressing to the actual gameplay.
The upgrading system also makes a total mockery of the difficulty. Within a couple of hours you can upgrade your character to the point where he/she is impervious and have unlimited ammo.
The one thing that really annoyed me the most about Saints Row 3 is that it brings nothing new to the genre. GTA SA, a game that came out more than 5 years ago has more content than this game. Hell, even GTA:Vice City Stories had more interesting features than Saints Row 3.
There STILL is no working economy system, the assets/property system is extremely poor; especially as you cannot enter a vast majority of the buildings you purchase. Worse still, the rival gangs, that you are feuding with, do absolutely nothing — they never attack your compounds, buildings, or assets.
In short, I feel the game offers no re-playability, no difficulty and no long-term enjoyment.
I would rate Saints Row The Third as a rental only and give it 4/10
Everyone talks about Kickstarter, but did you know that its only open to US citizens? Fortuently there are other alternatives,
There are others out there too.
With fund locations like this, who needs Dragon’s Den?
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There’s no question that’s there’s a mobile movement going on. Smartphones are everywhere and their usage is on the up.
As reported in Techcrunch, Facebook have over 845 million users every month, and more than half use mobile (Read article).
But it’s not just Facebook, mobile is increasing in popularity amongst other businesses. Starbucks recently announced that it will allow its customers to pay for drinks via their mobile transaction app service.
Of course, it’s not strictly limited to “apps”, smartphone ready websites (or mobile-ready websites) are also on the move.
In Singapore, mobile app replaces loyalty cards via QR codes (article).
Of course, its not just business. Smartphone apps are being used in the medical industry, food industry; in short — mobile is not only here to stay, it will increase its foothold in our daily life.
At a recent event held by Google in New York on 10th February 2011, Google reported a 400% increase in the number of searches being carried out on mobile devices, compared to the same time last year. This means that 20%, or roughly 1 in 5 Google searches, is now being carried out on a mobile device or smart phone and, Gartner predicts that by 2014, more people will access the internet from their mobile devices than from their PC desktops.
For more mobile trends, read Top 10 Mobile Internet Trends (via Slideshare.net)
I’m producing my first iOS game using cocos2d. I’ll be showing screenshot previews of it at the upcoming Mobile Mingle event.
In addition, I’m producing an official silentflute iPhone app, and am producing several other smaller iOS apps too!
I’ll post regular updates when the app is ready for publishing.
I’ve just developed a HTML5 responsive design theme of my almost 5 year old design, it’s still in beta, however this signals the slightly cleaned up theme a new direction for both myself and this website.
Tony Jaa, who hit to fame in 2008’s ground-breaking, world-wide hit “Ong Bak” created a rejuvenation into action cinema and put the laser focus of the world’s attention on Thai action cinema.
Following Ong Bak Jaa came out with 2005’s “Warrior King“, incorrectly labelled as Ong Bak 2, this movie carried on the formula of strong-style martial arts combined with fast-paced frenetic action.
After 13 odd years being stuck in development hell, the final release of Duke Nukem Forever made me giddy with nostalgic memories of my early youth playing Duke Nukem 2 and Duke Nukem 3D and so bought this game wondering if it would live up to the hype, and also wondering how much of that 13-year development cycle would be put into the game.
After about 3-4 hours of playing Duke Nukem Forever I couldn’t believe just how bad it was. I was pretty flabbergasted and couldn’t understand what went wrong.
DNF by all accounts represents everything that is wrong with modern first person shooters. It forces you down one path, and only one path. There are lots of scripted events, there are contrived puzzles tacked on for no reason, and it seems to rely heavily on pop-culture references to the point where it literally screams at you to “look at this! aren’t we cool, hip and trendy!”
I must have counted at least half a dozen pop culture references, everything from Lost to Duke Nukem 3D’s sister project, Lo Wang. Even references to old Duke Nukem games are in there.
In the original DN3D you had to collect health, bonuses, power-ups, however in DNF you have an ego health system which regenerates after a few seconds if you get hit.
Another thing in the game I hated was the really long loading times. Even if you die, you have to wait anywhere between 30 seconds to a minute.
I spent a lot of time playing the single player game as I wanted to know how it compared to the old DN3D. Oh boy was I in for a surprise.
The first few missions has you being handheld, forced down a linear path. At first I thought it was designed to be like this so that it can tell a story and then I’m sure it’ll give me the actual game after this.
Except, it doesn’t. Instead you get one linear path/map after another. A majority of the levels make you go over a certain ledge or platform, after which you cannot go back. Its basically a lazy way for programmers to release memory and keep the footprint of the game small.
Eventually you’ll fight tougher aliens, bosses and drive different kinds of vehicles; one thing you will notice is that the guns are pretty much the same as in DN3D, which I would expect; but I would also expect some other weapons — I mean you did have 13 years to build this game!
Strangely I feel that the 13+ year old Duke Nukem 3D is actually more 3D than DNF, the reason: you could move in 3 dimensions, you had multiple paths, there was much more interesting levels.
I guess it all comes down to expectations. I was expecting DNF to be a throw back to DN3D, showing the Halos and Call of Duty games that you can create a fun game that employs all the mechanics which made the FPS genre famous in the first place.
I would avoid this game, or at least rent it before buying it.
Rockstar’s latest offering, “LA Noire” is an amazing visually appealing game set in 40s Los Angeles and no doubt you’re already aware of the amount of R&D they put into face mapping, rendering and graphics.
I’m not going to retread on the multiple superlatives that other reviews have given this game; they are all correct; yes its got great visual appeal, the face mechanics are truly amazing, the True/Doubt/Lie system coupled with a strong detective game proves that you can make a “smart” video game which requires you to think.
My only concern is the lack of actual content in the game. With no multiplayer (a cops and robbers multiplayer game would have been cool) and very few side quests (there are about 20, not including the number of hidden collectables such as film reels and cars).
A lot of the game mechanics/engine reminds me of Red Demp Redemption, however in that game you could go into shops, you could try and collect bounties, there were other things to do other than the main game; this is where LA Noire kinda falls down.
Another issue is the incredibly long time it takes to drive from one point to another; yes you can opt to skip these driving by electing your AI colleague to drive for you; but the problem with this is you may miss on a side quest.
The ending of the game also does not fit into the main narrative of the game; the vast majority of the game is you doing good old fashioned police work, and then suddenly it becomes a run-gun and cover fight.
The kicker is that most of the shoot-outs are incredibly easy and most of the enemies do not pose any major threat.
If LA Noire had more side quests, and more features I think I would have enjoyed the game a lot more.
Overall score: 7/10.
