Posted via email from Richii

Posted via email from Richii

I’d just like to say a quick “thank you” to everyone who has sent birthday wishes today (wish I was in the same state as my family, but alas, not to be.

As a follow up I also want to remind everyone of the appeal to raise funds for clean water projects. You can donate at http://mycharitywater.org/richii2012 – every dollar helps!

Posted via email from Richii

We recently picked up an Xbox Kinect bundle so Brenda and Campbell could play Dance Central without having to deal with the dodgy full body motion tracking on the Wii. Great for them, but as I prefer my games with a little more blood I borrowed a copy of “Rise of Nightmares” from a friend.

RoM is a mystery/horror/zombie slasher type of game. The story seems okay: your girlfriend has been abducted from a train in fairly horrific circumstances, the train crashes, you have to survive and find her. As the game progresses you run across all sorts of reanimated and surgically enhanced corpses.

The big problem is the control mechanism. The developers decided to jump onto the Kinect bandwagon, but it feels very poorly implemented. To turn, you turn your shoulders. To walk forward, put your leg forward. To run, put your leg further forward. To interact with something, hold your hand over it. Simple, right?

The problem is it’s actually very clumsy to actually play like this. Turning and moving would be much sinker with a controller. Having to wait with my hand out over a doorknob, waiting for an action icon, and then swiping to open the door is painful. All the gesture based controls do is pull me out of the game.

I think the best demonstration of how clumsy it feels to use is that the developers added an “auto move” function. Hold your hand up and you walk through to where you need to be. Simple, but it turns a free environment into an on-rails experience.

In conclusion, while the story appears to show some promise, I just can’t get into it or recommend it. If you want to take out some zombies (and who doesn’t?) hunt down “Dead Space” instead.

 

Posted via email from Richii

A few weeks back I stumbled over a link to a charity that builds out clean water projects all over the world, especially in developing nations. They had an interesting idea: donate your next birthday to raise funds.

My birthday is coming up. I’ve pretty much got everything I want. I don’t need (or expect!) any gifts. But for anyone that was thinking about it, pop on over to http://mycharitywater.org/richii2012 and throw a few dollars into the clean-water well instead. They need water more than I need more stuff.

Posted via email from Richii

Posted via email from Richii

Posted via email from Richii

I’ve been using Posterous for quite some time now, and it’s no great secret that I think the service is awesome – the ability to simply send an email, and have content seamlessly posted to a multitude of sites is amazing. I’ve convinced a bunch of other people that it’s a good thing (including my mother, who now posts photos from all over the place via a 3G iPad!)

I read the announcement that they are “joining the team at Twitter” with more than a little trepidation.

It’s not simply that Twitter has a terrible track record when it comes to acquiring another company, although that certainly comes into it. Rather, it’s that Posterous has always been destination agnostic: For example, while Posterous will host my photos in their own nice little gallery, they will also upload them to my Flickr, Picasa and Facebook accounts in the background, and then announce the new albums on Twitter and Facebook. Will we really see this level of interoperability continue? It’s hardly in Twitter’s best interest to promote other social networks.

Don’t get me wrong, I wish all at Team Posterous every success. I’m sure I would done the same thing in their position. It’s just that, as a user of the service, I’m a little concerned that things are going to change, and not for the better. I would rather pay for a premium service from Posterous and have it remain independent.

Posted via email from Richii

Posted via email from Richii