David Fisher : What is Noise Blog

Another book that O’Reilly Media was kind enough to send me was Fashioning Technology: A DIY Intro to Smart Crafting. I like making stuff, and I’m confident enough in my manhood to admit to the internet that I learned to sew, crochet, and knit a bit as a kid even if I only remember a bit of it now. I can thread a needle and I know where a bobbin on a sewing machine is.  So I figured this book would be pretty fun and useful. I love Make Magazine and Craft Magazine. This book is a pretty direct summary of techniques and projects from Craft that can get you started.

This review is going to be a bit short. This book has a lot of strong aspects. It covers techniques and materials well. I didn’t even know some of this stuff existed, and just reading about the materials and techniques alone really got me going and inspired to start making. Everything is very clearly written, and makes the entire process very non-daunting even if you’re pretty new to the DIY world. Even the explaintations of electronics were really practical and friendly. That’s hard to do. The printing is great, on high quality paper and the entire book conveys a feeling of ‘fun’ really well.

Normally a part of Make and Craft magazines that I like the most are the detailed tutorials stepping you through how to do various things in great detail. For example there’s a killer article on soldering SMT components and projects in the newest Make Magazine that’s worth buying this issue solely for that project alone. Yet, for some reason in this book the projects totally lose me. Page 76 onwards until the references in the back of the book just don’t do it for me. The technology primer section at the beginning was so dead on, and so great, but then this section fell a bit flat for me. It’s not that the projects are bad… so much as useless or at least to me. To be frank, this book is targetted at women, which I am not one of, so maybe that’s why I don’t get the projects. Reading the primer sections I was imagining all sorts of neat things to make and build from the things I was learning and then I just didn’t find them in the later sections of the book.

The LED braclet is pretty cool, and could be modified to something useful. The Rock Star Headphones are pretty well useless. The Space Invader Tote has a few neat things, but I can’t imagine any girl I know using it. The Birdie Brooch completely loses me (and this is coming from someone that wants a wearable computer like we all imagined in the 90’s so badly!) although it does step someone through etching a circuit board and using ICs a bit, which is a nice thing to show. The Photochromic Blinds are one of the best things in the book, and give a nice intro to screenprinting. The Cardboard table is neat, but not great. Then things just go down from there for me as it moves into the interactive toy section. I could see someone really enjoying them if they have kids, but not many other people… then again maybe that’s the target- a making mom!

Overall this is a good book, and well worth getting… if just for the technology primer section, and the screenprinting and PCB etching tutorials- then get a subscription to Craft Magazine and go from there. I don’t think they expected many people to actually go through and make all of this stuff, but rather take it as inspriration and/or modify it to suit their own needs. That’s great, but the projects themselves just left me feeling a bit lukewarm. My only other request is that they start releasing these books with a spine that you can easily open up and lay down (maybe spiral bound?) I find that when working on a project its hard to keep these books open. The retail price is $30, but it seems that Amazon has it for $20, or used copies for even less so its not a bad deal at all.

Tags: book, craft, diy, fashion, magazine, make, o'reilly, projects, review, technology

Tonight around 11:30PM (likely, it looks to be happening soon), the three millionth Wordpress 2.6 download was made since it’s release on July 15, 2008.

With that in mind, I thought to upgrade to Wordpress 2.7beta off the SVN trunk release. So far I like it. Let me know if anything is broken or if you have any problems.

Tags: 2.6, 2.7, wordpress

I almost never purchase games the day they come out, and for good reason! The hype machine around most of these games is so big now that it’s hard to tell the crap from the gold. I personally don’t like throwing $60 out the window and for whatever reason I just don’t rent games much anymore. But regardless of this, I went out and purchased Fable 2 for the Xbox 360 the day it was released. Yet, once again the hype engine overpromised and underdelivered.

I didn’t play Fable 1, so I wasn’t fully sure what to expect. Fable 2 is a cool game. It’s an Action/RPG game much in the style of the Zelda series. The main difference with Fable however is that it takes the Zelda ideas and throws the ability to do bad things into the mix and kicks everything up to a much more adult level. Oh and you have a dog that helps you dig holes in the ground and occasionally finishes off an enemy.

The game has a fun graphical style, but it doesn’t feel all that “next generation” to me as Metal Gear Solid 4 did. There are plenty of glitches graphically. Leaving the menu system normally reveals this, as the screen looks as if its at some 8-bit console resolution for a few seconds.

The music is forgetable. I literally can’t recall a single song in my head. Yet I can almost transcribe music from many of the Final Fantasy and Zelda games from memory. It’s not bad, just nothing memorable.

The play control is pretty damn good. I was wary of the simplified combat, but then I remember that is exactly what Zelda had and it worked perfectly. Jumping, as in Zelda is generally only when you’re at an edge/trigger point.

So with those things being good about the game what is weak? LOTS! I don’t think any major gaming publication has covered this well. I guess they were paid off. Big shock there.

Flaws:

1. Bugs, bugs bugs. I feel very honestly that this game was pushed out before it was done. Another 3 months and it could have rocked. There are parts that simply aren’t play tested, aren’t smoothed out and stick out horridly. In any other game these could be acceptable, but this was supposed to be one of the biggest games ever. Hype machine wins.
2. Co-Op play is a hack: I don’t know what they were thinking. Co-Op play is stupid, useless and broken. You find your friends and join in as a henchman. You can see their character but they can’t see yours. You run around and kill stuff even faster than before. Oh, and the camera goes fixed-angle. If the entire game was like this it would be an outright bad game.
3. It is too easy! : First, there is zero consequence to dying. There are no ‘lives’, no ‘continue’ button you have to hit, and no resetting to the beginning of a section. When you die, you fall over for a second… lose a bit of experience (5% of unused experience?)  and then come back with full life and keep hacking away. I think you a chance of having a ’scar’ too, but who cares?

   On top of that, there is zero challenge. No enemies except trolls (only 3 or so of in the game) have difficult timing. None of them have special attacks that matter, and the AI might have been better on a NES system. This is 2008, the enemies need to work together, react, have tactics, use the environment and generally make you hate them. I’d say that this was one of the easiest games I’ve ever played

4. The dog was useless: I felt a bigger connection with my horse in SotC, or with my Blob in “A Boy and His Blob” from 20 years ago. The dog did nothing for me. There were no quests related to him. He couldn’t die, so you never cared to defend him. He just found random treasure. He was useless in battle. Getting him to do tricks wasn’t fun. I had more fun with a tamagotchi or neopet.
5. The economy got broke really quick: Once you found out how to make a bit of money chopping wood, and you bought a few places you were set.
6. They introduced MMO style grinding: The endgame stuff was all MMO style grinding. Who cared about getting 1,000,000 gold to buy the castle. Nothing happened when you did. You didn’t have to defend it or anything. Even with a broken economy 1,000,000 gold was a lot to get and very pointless. Negative points to any single player game that does this.
7. The plot sucked: The guys at work told me that I shouldn’t have expected a great plot from this. Zelda’s plot was simple so maybe I should cut it some slack, but as soon as I heard “choice” in a game I thought of the choices having as much bearing on the game as they did in Chronotrigger. Yet, no. The “end game” choice that you make is silly and there’s only one sane choice of the three. While I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, the plot is EXACTLY what they lady at the beginning tells you. Go find three ‘heros’, and beat the bad guy. That’s it.
8. Love is stupid: Even though as far as I remember Zelda and Link never got their groove on, I always felt a strong draw towards finding the princess. Yet in this game, getting married to a random villager takes all of 5 minutes, and has little bearing on the game. Yea, they give you stuff. Whatever. I felt nothing in the relationship. Zero depth.
9. You can’t sacrifice children: At one point in the game you can sacrifice people to an evil temple. Yet you can’t take the children there. Blah. If I am able to play evil in the game I want to be able to be SUPER evil.
10. No Blood: I’m not expecting a gory game, but its just cool to see a bit of splatter here and there, even if just to illustrate the type of weapon I use.
11. Magic was boring: I found the entire magic system to bore me. I used “Fire” for the entire game, and it was generally wear compared to my sword, slow, and a liability. I tried some of the other abilities but there was nothing inventive there.
12. The inventory menus sucked: Nuff said. Taking potions took forever. The ‘clothing’ system was a joke. Play tested? I think not.
13. Zero consequence: No matter how many villagers I slaughtered, or what I did… the world kept going. The people of Albion must breed like rabbits, because there were always more to kill. They never amassed against me to draw and quarter me. They actually were just a bit resentful or a bit scared. It didn’t feel like the lord of death had entered the room and was about to end them if they stopped facing perfectly North, or if I forgot which was North was. In Grand Theft Auto the police WILL end you if you act up too much. That’s part of the fun.
14. Too short: I can’t remember the last game I beat this fast. Seriously.

They however did a few really cool things right:

1. The world around you: You could hear the world around you. Not as in creatures and stuff, but you can turn it on so that you hear every other person playing the game nearby you over XBL! It made a single player game into a cool multiplayer situation, like you were sitting in a room with 100 friends all playing the same sections. Very cool. Very fun.
2. Debauchery and wrongness: I wasn’t a “good” guy in the game. I cheated on my wife. I had two wifes. I had threesomes with hookers, no condoms. I think one was a man. I got STDs (I wish there was some consequence from this asides from just the number. Shouldn’t i go blind or at least spread them back to my wife?). I dugg up a lady’s body parts from graves for her sick lover. He raised her from the dead and she fell in love with me. I married her, had sex, had a child, and then since she was a bitch I sacrificed her to the Temple of Shadows. Fun stuff. And then I came back to my normal family and acted like nothing was wrong. Oh, and I killed a few hundred villagers because there didn’t jump when I walked by. And the guards too. In fact, why did I “save the world” asides from to save my own ass. If I was really evil I’d have simply taken over and pulled the switch myself.
3. Just Fun: Despite being a broken game on many levels, it was pretty fun and I did play all the way through.

Overall, it wasn’t the 10/10 A++ game that many places had billed it was. It was a 7.5/10. This isn’t the new Zelda. This isn’t the new Chronotrigger. My number 1 place to kill hookers is still Liberty City. And if i want good roleplaying storyline there is still always Baldur’s Gate. Well worth playing, but nothing like they said it would be.

Tags: 7/10, blah, boring, dave fisher, David Fisher, fable 2, fable II, hype, meh, overhyped, review, tibbon

At gamerDNA we were working with BlueLithium as one of our ad networks for our alliance network. BlueLithium was acquired by Yahoo! last September for $300M USD. They had only taken 11M in VC to start up, so it was a cash in for the major shareholders.

I noticed shortly after beginning to work with gamerDNA that something was a bit funny at BlueLithium. They were not excessively responsive and one day I had some problems with their phone systems, getting messages that the number was out of service. I wasn’t getting emails back from our account representative quickly, so I thought to simply try to call the numbers on their website.

Time after time the numbers listed on their contact page were all invalid. I called their PR line that was listed, which ended up being Blast! Public Relations in North Carolina. They informed me that they were no longer working with BlueLithium after the acquisition. I finally got in touch with someone at one of their “offices”, which is really just one guy working in NYC as their salesperson. He told me that he (and just about the entire sales team) had quit working with BlueLithium after the purchase. He was able to give me a contact at the company directly, so that I could find out why I couldn’t reach my account manager. Something smelled funny to me still. Somewhere in all of this I tried to call a Yahoo! business line for customer service (I think it was the phone root of my account manager’s line) but was politely told that they couldn’t help me reach anyone at BlueLithium and that there was no org chart at Yahoo! to be able to find who was the manager of my account manager.

Weird. I couldn’t figure out how they were running a company if neither publishers nor advertisers could reach them for new business. Couldn’t they have changed and updated the contact information on the website for the $300M investment at least? All they were able to put was “bought by Yahoo!” basically in a few places. In trying to Google for BlueLithium I was also shocked at the results. Almost every search result only came up with things about the Yahoo purchase. Nothing was from happy/upset customers. Nothing about about the quality of their service or their technology. I found a few things about their founder and his track record but unlike searching for something like Tribal Fusion or AdSense I got almost nothing except the very loud statement that Yahoo! had bought them and that all of Wall Street thought that it was a genius purchase.

I finally did get in touch with my account manager. She said that they had a temporary phone system problem and she was sorry to not have emailed to notify me. I was a bit uneasy and asked if everything was ok there. She said that things were fine.

Things still didn’t seem to line up. No one at BlueLithium seemed to give a rat’s ass about their jobs, what they were doing, performance, customer service, etc. There was another misunderstanding and I tried to get in touch with a manager there to mention a problem and I couldn’t reach anyone. None of them got back in touch with me. That’s odd when a concerned customer calls and tries to climb up the poll and no one bothers to call back at all, or even send an email. Something was up.

Then more recently I called my account manager to ask her about some demographic targeting features, which she oddly didn’t know much about (seeing that supposibly BlueLithium’s whole thing is data/analytics i was shocked), but she said that we’d actually need to switch to another network the RightMedia Exchange another Yahoo! property. I said that all things considered I was pretty happy with BlueLithium and that I’d like to stay with them. She said that they were migrating all customers to RightMedia or the Yahoo Publisher Network. I was told that it was 100% self service and that I’d have no direct account manager. Needless to say I wasn’t too happy.

Basically, Yahoo! bought Blue Lithium and then… well I don’t know what they’ve done. The customer base couldn’t have been worth that much and surely they lost many of them in dumping the customers over to another dissimilar and lower performing service. The technology couldn’t have been worth that much as I never saw anything too special in the ads served or in BlueLithium’s capability for targetting. I’m frankly confused as to what Yahoo! did asides from maybe take some competition out the of the market.

Pure speculation: Yahoo! made some business mistake. They had some plan to buy up a ton of ad networks to take on Google and others. They bought some companies for way too much, and realized that it wasn’t that easy. The employees at BlueLithium who were there in 2007 (and originally had options) took the money and ran (which is why every single one of the salespeople weren’t there) and what was left was a broken organization with little expertise, weak management, and massive gaps in it their internal knowledge. Yahoo! thought instead to then simply make the mistake go away and simply slide the customers (advertisers and publishers) over to other services and take what bits of the technology and management that were valuable and move on. This coupled with Yahoo!’s other business blunders over the past year and the mass exodus of anyone that knew what they were doing there makes me really wonder about the fate of the company. Microsoft made them a damn good offer a while ago, and I’m guessing whoever ends up getting them will have a bargan in comparison in the future.

Tags: bluelithium, close, exit, fade, fire, lay off, shut down, yahoo

I have just recently purchased an Xbox 360. I had owned Grand Theft Auto IV from when it came out and I bought it for betahouse, so I didn’t have many games. After seeing it showed off at GamerDNA a bit, I wanted to buy Braid.

Braid is a platform-like puzzle game, but to call it a platformer is like calling Myst an FPS. It does have side-scrolling action, and many of the creatures in the game take a serious nod to Mario Bros, and it works the phrase, “I’m sorry but the princess is in another castle” into the storyline quite well.

Braid is a time-manipulation puzzle game. Every map has a unique challenge, and an excessively unique solution. In some levels you can simply rewind time to correct your mistakes, in other levels some items react to you rewinding time but others do not, in other levels a shadow version of yourself completes actions that you had done prior to rewinding time. Overall it is simple, elegent, and mindblowing.

Braid is currently exclusively for Xbox360, although I see no reason that asides from licensing that it couldn’t hit the Wii, PS3 or PC in time. It isn’t excessively graphically demanding, although it is beautiful. The musical score is great, and the music plays off of your time manipulation. In one level there is the sound of a music box playing. As you walk left and right the music box goes forward and backwards.

Braid is only $15 on the xbox DLC. Some have complained of its high price compared to other DLC offerings. All I can say is that its well worth it. Braid and Geometry Wars 2 are the winners right now on the DLC and well worth their combined $35.

So this leaves us that Braid is likly the best puzzle game of the past 15 years. Myst was the one before that which totally blew my mind with its complexity, graphics and puzzle skills. Much of the puzzle genre is represented by casual games that don’t have any depth or brain power involved.

What is interesting, is that this game isn’t based on high powered hardware. Honestly, this is the game that Super Mario Bros, (or at least Super Mario World) could have been. We could have had this 20 years ago. Its like the Wikipedia in a way, in that it wasn’t the technology holding us back from having the product but simply the fact that it hadn’t been done yet.

Here is a video review that I found of the game and highlights aspects of its gameplay rather well:

Tags: 360, best, braid, dlc, game, myst, xbox