Sendspace.com a useful site to share big and small files

Sendspace is a site I use to share large files with anybody. I owe it to my friend and DJ D'JAMENCY for letting me know about this site. The good reasons to use Sendspace are numerous:

• It's free.
• It's not required to even register.
• It allows you to share files up to 500MB (up from 300MB previously).

Using Sendspace is pretty straight-forward:
Click the "Browse" button, choose a file on your hard-drive, then add the recipient's email, click "Upload", and you're done.
You can also add your own email to receive a copy with the link to download your file.
After your file is actually uploaded, an email is sent to the set recipient, who can then download the file.

Additionally, you can create a free account, so that you can access your uploaded files anytime.
As long as the files are downloaded regularly, they remain on the server.
After 30 days of inactivity, the files are deleted from the Sendspace servers.
Subscribing to the service enables you to keep those files for as long as you remain subscribed, upload as many files as you want, download faster... and max size for each shared file is upgraded to 10GB.
You can check the various available plans there.

That's it. As you can see it's simple and can be very useful.

Personally I use it often to send large zip archives of my party shootings to venue owners or party planners, after converting the original JPEG files via Xnview, another very useful freeware that I might talk about some day later.

If you know of any similar service that you like, feel free to let me know in the comments.

--KRWonders

Ryan Mitchell's Mission Europa on iOS

There's a guy I would like to introduce here because I find that his passion for game development is amazing. This guy is Ryan Mitchell, the designer-artist-developer behind one-man outfit Banshee Soft.

Ryan Mitchell is special because he's an iOS developer making never-seen-before games that I wanted to play the first moment I heard from them.

Ryan Mitchell's latest game on the AppStore is Mission Europa. It's a FPS-RPG. With a lot of loot. It's huge!
Just to give you an idea of how big it is, it has 5 episodes featuring 170 missions, randomized levels, hundreds of items, crafting, spells (including invocations)...

The graphic don't look best of the best but I like them because they are unique, and you might be happy to learn that it runs on most iOS devices.

What is truly amazing is when you learn that Ryan Mitchell made the game 99% by himself, during his free time, over the period of 1.5 year.

Mission Europa is really special because it feels basically like a PC game on the iPhone.
You can customize most of the UI, drag and drop skills in slots, open, drag and close windows. It can feel a bit cluttered at time, but overall, if you are a gamer, it's actually refreshing. It feels like there's none of the usual limitations of usual games that are made to please a very large audience.
Here, you will probably die quite a few time during boss encounters, and you'll have to think a lot by yourself about what is the best strategy to take down enemies. There are melee weapons, ranged weapons, spells, invocations. Equipment schematics can be found so that you can craft pieces of armor (for legs, feet, arms, head, body, etc.)

The minimum gameplay time announced is 50 hours, and I guess there is enough for much more actually, and this is without mentioning the multiplayer arena mode.

You feel hardcore? Then go for it!

Game's official site:
http://www.missioneuropagame.com/

iTunes link:
Collector version
Free version
(if you like the Free version, go for the Collector version. The Standard version is not really worth it in comparison).

A good video review (actually it was a preview) of the game by AppSpy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc_BH-pXIZY

Image source: Mission Europa official website.

How to make me enjoy freemium social games

I currently don't find any social game appealing enough to capture the free time (and money) I spend on console games. It doesn't mean that I am fundamentally against social network freemium games, but simply that none has been appealing enough to me as a gamer.
I am totally conscious that social games can be profitable from a business standpoint, but I fail to find them appealing as a user because they seem designed to go viral and rip me off rather than entertain me. Furthermore, I do believe that there are quite a few people who share my point of view on this and just don't play social games, feeling that it's not for them.
It means there might be some untapped opportunity for developers to appeal to people who like packaged games and basically dislike the freemium model.

Save the premium model!

I feel so out of touch these days, since I just can't stand most free games as a user because they either break the immersion with stupid "sharing" popups (Facebook games) or discriminate users based on their spending (most free-to-play (F2P) and Facebook games). Nowadays with downloadable game demos available for most titles, it's pretty easy to avoid mistakenly purchasing the wrong game, at least on current consoles such as the Xbox360. Am I the only person here who'd rather spend 50 bucks upfront with the guaranty of a good experience?

I am not against the idea of F2P and I know there are a few good examples like League of Legends, where payments add convenience without over-empowering heavy spenders and giving a lot of importance to pure skill, but when you look at most Facebook games, it's just money=power, with almost no importance given to skill.
Besides, these games usually misuse Facebook to spam unwilling users with game-related notifications.
I used to play some Zynga games for the sake of "gaming culture", but now every time I pick one of these, even their latest attempts at non-farming titles (namely Adventure World) I have some sort of allergic reaction and can't play them for more than 5 minutes. There's not always a necessity to spend cash to have things done, but if you want to have things done for free, you have to "ask you friends". Sorry but I have 300 or so people in my "friends" list, and you want me to scroll through that list and pick 10 people who might help me by sending me some required material so that I can finally build a hospital in a freaking social sim.
I am 27 and I feel like a grandpa already, ranting about changes and cherishing the good ol' days. But let me tell you something, Freemium developers: I bought the first xbox because of Halo. I went on to buy Halo2, 3, ODST, Reach + a few DLC map packs. I bought Forza 2, 3 and now enjoying Forza 4. Same for the Gears series. On the other hand, I played Farmville (past level 10 maybe), CityVille (past level 25), a handful other social network games, and I am level 62 at Zuma Blitz (the only FB game I play regularly, because it is actually a game and it plays well in a browser).
I bought all the console games brand new, and didn't spend a cent on the social games. Why? because I don't feel they are worth it. I am sorry, I know there are brilliant and great people behind many of these games, but every time I play one of those, I pause and think of how my time on this Earth is limited (thanks Steve Jobs for this one :) and how I should spend it on meaningful games rather than soulless time (and money) sinks.
I have never been so happy to spend hard-earned cash on premium titles as I am these days. Save the premium games! :)

First Skyrim hands-on gameplay reports

As seen on Bethesda's Blog, reviewers from most prominent gaming sites have played the game for a 3-hour session each, and it's like they're competing for the best praise. I feel more and more sorry for the developers who will release titles within the two or three months following Skyrim's release, because it looks like it will take a lot of effort from any Elder Scrolls fan to divert their attention from the game. --KRWonders

Rage by id on Xbox360

I bought Rage the day it was released in Korea. Finally I played it yesterday. And tomorrow I am selling it back to get a discount on Forza 4.

Pulse News

Pulse news is the best app (for all I know) to view news feeds on my iPhone. They also have an iPad and Android version.

They have a selection of sites, listed by category (tech, food, gaming, etc.) that you can select as sources for the feeds.

Then once these are selected, the app will show the feeds with an image (if any in the original article). 

The strength of Pulse is in its presentation. It's a pleasure to use because it has a very slick design, with every feeds presented as a tile, so all feeds are very easy to visualize and browse through.

There is also possibility to star stories and save them to Instapaper and the Pulse account at the same time (which you will have to register to after 50 "starred" articles). You can login using your Facebook account.

You can also share stories to Facebook and Twitter in one click. You can even access your Google Reader feeds.

All starred (saved) stories can be consulted in the Pulse menu of the app or online on the Pulse site:

However, I find it a pity that it's not possible to browse through my feeds online like I do on the apps.

--KRWonders

Image sources: Pulse website, iTunes.

Unter Null, the diva of Aggrotech

Unter Null (below zero in German) is a project by Erica Dunham. It's hard to define clearly her music since she produced a variety of different songs of various styles. However, terms generally associated to her music are power noise, aggrotech, and even metal. I must reckon this kind of jargon does not speak to me much so I call it dark electro because it conveys a dark/sad atmosphere and it sounds overall very electronic. This is my term for calling stuff that many people would consider as "gothic", which in my opinion is not a totally wrong conception but I think "gothic" is usually referred to by the general audience as music-performed-by-satanists-in-churches-on-full-moon-nights. Which I obviously consider as a biased conception, to say the least, but this is not the topic of the day, so I will just say to me gothic is a state of mind rather than an appearance. Being gothic for me translates into "To be happily surprised, expect the worst!".
As for Unter Null, she says she was smarter than the average joe when she was in high school, which means she was always bullied as we can expect, and her dressing in black probably didn't help socializing either. The good thing is that being the "black sheep" as she calls herself probably helped forge her character and adds to the emotional dimension of her compositions. And talking about emotion, when listening to most of Unter Null's tracks, what strikes me most is how deep her music goes into my soul. I often shiver, just listening to her voice, even without getting the meaning of all the lyrics :D If you believe the saddest songs are also the most beautiful, then Unter Null surely deserves a place of choice in your music library. You can check out her official site here. And below a video of one of my favourite titles from Unter Null:

 

Links:
Unter Null playlist on YouTube
http://www.myspace.com/unternull
http://unter-null.net/