Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you’re enjoying the holidays as much as I am! Soon I’ll be back to posting regularly! For now, here’s a little holiday song!

The Twelve Days Of Warcraft

On the twelfth day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me…

Twelve angry murlocs,
Eleven nagas swimming,
Ten priests renewing,
Nine ‘locks-a-sharding,
Eight moonkin dancing,
Seven rogues-a-gankin’,
Six night elves naked,
Five lazy peons…
Four calling nerfs,
Three ranging hunters,
Two exploding sheep,
and a pally in the retribution tree!

-Matt Graham

Caught a quick post over at familyroommedia.com – beyond church walls, it was good and really summed up my past couple of weeks:

Of course that’s a good thing! The problem arises when there’s an area in our lives where we haven’t yet learned to trust Father completely. That’s when I’ve resorted to weighing pros and cons, considering “what ifs?” and letting the opinions of others sway me. In the end I suffer the consequences of my mistakes, submit that area to Father, rejoice that there’s no guilt to deal with and walk on in his love and forgiveness.

I tend to be more bull in a china shop that trusting.  It comes hard for me.  Sometimes it takes a bit of relaxing before the calm can set in.  I hope you all have a calm Christmas!

Section: Gaming News, Handhelds, iPhone & iPod Touch, Genres, 2D, Action, Strategy, Updates, Apple App Store

Square Enix’s long-awaited debut to the Apple “gaming” platform has finally arrived. Crystal Defenders is up on the App Store right now for $7.99 as well as a free “lite” version of the game if you want to give it a test run.

Crystal Defenders is a strategy/defense game similar to tower defense games, except instead of towers players use units based on various Final Fantasy-related jobs (Black Mage, Archer, etc.). The goal is to protect your party’s crystals from the waves of enemies.

Based on the iTunes profile for the game, the full version will offer “over 300 stages of action in one of three different game versions.“

• In W1, players can learn game basics.
• In W2, the introduction of Power Crystals opens up new doors, allowing for deeper, more detailed strategies.
• Finally, the complex maps in W3 will challenge even the most seasoned players

.

Meanwhile, the lite version of the game offers up “20 waves” of enemies on W1 only.

Players can opt to use the virtual control pad or simply tap an area to place units. Selecting options is as easy as tapping the center button of the control pad.

I’ve been checking out the lite version and it’s a really good game so far. I’ll reserve a final judgment after I download the full game and play through it but, if you own an iPod Touch or iPhone, you owe it to yourself to at least download the lite version.

Photo Gallery [Gamertell]

Full Story » | Written by Kris Rosado for Gamertell. | Comment on this Article »

So I’m driving to work last Thursday and it comes to be.  Wordpress, Drupal and Django relate to the three OS’s we all come to know and love.

Wordpress = Apple
Think about it.  It is the prettiest of all the platforms.  It makes the hard thing a bit of a no brainer – plugins have become a simple act with. WP2.7.  Anyone can use it, there is very little training needed and as the man says “Code is Poetry”

Drupal = Microsoft
This gorilla is a solid product.  It’s not as shiny as Wordpress, but not matter what – it will work for you.   Don’t worry about the new module you wrote 3 years ago, its still supported and it always will.  This is a popular product and it gives you 40 ways to do the same thing.

Django = Unix
This is solid and requires some serious console time to get things done.  Django screams masicist and taped up glasses.  Now – this baby will give you some serious street cred, but you have to REALLY know the jung-fu to get around.

OK – that was the drive, it’s a bit off the wall; but it makes sense, at least to me.

Section: Gaming News, Features, Rumors, Consoles, Xbox-360, Genres, 3D, Action, Adventure

When Crackdown made its debut on the Xbox 360, reviewers both praised and criticized its interpretation of the open-world formula made popular through the successful releases of the Grand Theft Auto series.

However, regardless of any disparagements that were heaped on the game, it sold well enough commercially to raise demand for a sequel. To many gamers, the prospect of having a super-powered being leap over tall buildings in the name of justice would be the perfect means to begin their new year.

Interestingly, while the prospect of a Crackdown sequel has been shot down in the past, the likelihood of it coming to fruition has increased, thanks to a 1UP report that Microsoft is funding a start-up studio titled Ruffian Games, with the singular of working on Crackdown 2.

However, the decision to take this action did not necessarily please Real Time Worlds studio developer Colin Macdonald who remarked that he was doubtful that Microsoft would hand over the reins of one of their highly-regarded franchises to a lesser-known development company.

Macdonald also made it clear that he would be “gutted” if he was not involved in the Crackdown 2 project but emphasized his wish that the game be done justice with an established development team. This statement, when taken on its own, does not heap a great deal of praise on the developmental talents of Ruffian Games, even though its team does comprise some former Real Time Worlds staff members.

All in all, I hope that Crackdown 2 sees release sometime in the future. It remains the only game that truly encapsulated the “open-world” method of execution.

Read [1UP] Via [Videogaming247]

Full Story » | Written by Jason Townsend-Rogers for Gamertell. | Comment on this Article »

OK – so about a month ago I posted a concept about how to use Wordpress as a DAM (Digital Asset Management system).  I felt pretty good about things – but have been thinking about it more and more lately.

I think some of the magic missing was the extra contetual and semantic stuff.  Here is a revised plan which may help with that.

Free DAM

The concept leverages a WordPress plugin which will go out and “harvest” content called WP-O-Matic.  It can be used for the dark side, but we’re using it from the white hat side – only for good.  It allows you to setup campaigns which can go out and get summaries. We will need to modify the plugin to grab complete articles, again – this is only valid for content we own the rights to…stealing content is bad.

After the content grab, we need to get some more context – this is where we leverage the open calais project.  (I still cannot pronounce that!)  They have a web service which can take a feed and add come back with extra goodness.

The OpenCalais Web service analyzes text and provides semantic data such as:

• Names of persons mentioned in the text
• Names of companies mentioned in the text
• Events described in the text such as bankruptcies and mergers

The results of the analysis can later be used to evaluate the text, by humans or machines. For example, a person interested in news stories relating to a specific merger, might find the Open Calais semantic analysis useful in determining the relevance of a specific article.

Then we move to open project #2 – one of my all time favs, Zemanta.  (I’m been a fan of these guys for awhile – Andreaz and the crew have got a great thing going and I applaud them when ever I can.)  So we run the new feed through Zemanta’s API and we get the tags and cats.

Then you add it to the WordPress DAM and bada-boom, we’re storing content.  The next steps will come later – when we add a plugin for users on Wordpress, Drupal and others for easy insertion into their new creations.

OK – let me know, are we moving forward, sideways or off base all together?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Semantic publishing tool Zemanta adds features, moving toward professional use
• Footnotes plugin for WordPress
• OpenCalais will link to Linked Open Data identifiers
• Rich blog content at the click of a button – Zemanta has gone live!

Section: Gaming News, Game-Companies, Developers, Publishers, Web-Sites

Free Radical, the studio behind the recent flop Haze and the beloved TimeSplitters series, has closed it’s doors this week, according to a report by Kotaku. Unfortunately it looks like the closing is for good. The most painful part (for fans of awesome, not-so-serious FPS games, anyway) – the post states that the studio was working on a new TimeSplitters game.

Boo on the economy. Seriously. Best of luck to all the employees who are now jobless.

Read [Kotaku]

Full Story » | Written by Danielle Riendeau for Gamertell. | Comment on this Article »