A place for things and stuff
Today the last episode of season three airs, and it has been a good season with a lot of twists and turns, and if they could cut down on some of their questionable content, it would be possibly the best show on TV. I have reviewed Game of Thrones before, and all of what I said still sands, and it will be agonizing waiting until next year for the show to start up again, so try not to cry and be happy because Summer is Coming.
I recently was upgraded to a new Lumia 928 on Verizon. It runs Windows Phone 8 versus my previous phone that I hacked to run Windows Phone 7.8, and several Nokia specific apps. Does it live up to my high expectations? Yes it does.
The first thing you notice about the phone is it is pretty heavy compared to the new iPhones and Android devices, but not so heavy that you are going to drop it all the time. The front screen is curved to raise the screen up from the phone, but still make it smooth on the edges. It is subtle difference, but it does feel good. On the back of the phone is a large speaker the camera and xenon flash.
Windows Phone 8 is a pretty major step forward. The multitasking works better, you can add notifications to the lock screen, and download custom camera mods. They got rid of any Zune references, and now everything is Xbox related: Xbox Music, Xbox Video, and Xbox Games. They have also done a lot of work tweaking the software. Everything just feels faster.
Nokia has been hard at work making custom apps for the Windows Phone 8 platform. There is City Lens that lets you scan a city with the camera and it will tell you about any shops or restaurants that you may like. Nokia Music which is Nokia’s version of Pandora, but there are no listening limits. Nokia Maps/Nokia Drive+ is probably the most important because it gives you free turn by turn navigation, but it also lets you download the maps, so you can still use them even if you loose cell coverage.
Like with most high end Nokia devices this phone is all about the camera. It has a modest 8.7 mega pixels, but the kicker is it has hardware based image stabilization so you can take better low light pictures, and not have them turn out all blurry. The xenon flash helps you with action shots, but since it is so bright it can give people a weird look if they are close up, so it is best to leave it off. It also has a front facing camera for Skype and self portraits, and it does an OK job, but the rear camera should do all the heavy lifting.
As far as the phone goes there is nothing to complain about. The sound quality is good, and I haven’t heard any complaints from the people I have talked to.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I love this phone. It looks great and works well. It may not be as powerful as the latest Android devices, but I don’t play a lot of games on my phone so I wouldn’t notice anyway. If you are looking for something different than an Android or an iPhone, this makes an excellent choice.
Thanks to a Comcast promotion I now have access to HBO, but even better I have access to HBO Go. It allows me to stream pretty much all of HBOs content on my Xbox in Hi-Def. Which means I get to watch Game of Thrones Season 3, and I couldn’t be happier.
The one thing I wish now that I have it, is that you didn’t need cable TV to get it because I would probably pay just to have HBO Go, and not have cable TV, and I think this is costing them a ton of subscribers, so if you are out there HBO, you need to allow everyone to sign up for this service and you could be rolling in piles of money! What Netflix has shown is that people want this sort of thing more than they want cable. The time for live scripted TV is drawing to a close, and would rather be at the forefront of change instead of missing it and trying to catch up.
State of Decay came out on Xbox 360 yesterday, and it is developed by Undead Labs and published by Microsoft Studios. Since the game just came out, this is more of an initial impressions instead of a review, but the impressions are great!
For those of you that don’t know State of Decay is a zombie survival game. You have to find food, water, medicine, and other supplies, and rescue people with the skills you need to say fix cars, cook food, or provided medical services. You take houses and fortify them so you can survive the zombies at your door.
The game is completely open world, and you save who you want, and you may not want to save them all because some people have draw backs like bad attitudes that ruin moral, or diseases that will eat up your medicine, but if they have a skill you want it may be worth it, but when people die they die for good, including your character.
This game is a ton of fun. Doing quests and looking for more resources keeps you engaged, I started playing this game and quickly lost a couple hours, and it has that ‘I just need to do this one last thing’ addictiveness that is wonderful in a game like this.
There are some drawbacks. The graphics are not the greatest, and the combat is a little wooden, and I think they made the draw distances just a little to far out, so the game can lag a little when you are driving in places with a lot houses and stuff going on, but the game is so addictive those are just minor things.
This game feels like you are playing The Walking Dead, and the stakes are just as high, so if that sounds like fun to you, and it is, then this game is for you. Though I know some of you may want to wait for the PC version with the mod kit, but who wants to wait when you can play it now.
In 2011 Andy, Ryan Fadden, and I were at PAX Prime in Seattle, because where else would we be, and we decided to get in the The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim line, but we quickly got out of due to the fact it was three hours long, but as fate would have it that put us front of the Prey 2 booth. A game none of us had any interest in, but that would change as soon as the guy started the demo. We were floored, and it was my game of show for PAX that year. Two years have past and it looks like the game is in trouble.
The first Prey was about a Native American named Tony that is captured by aliens, and then tries to save his girlfriend, and along the way he has to use his Native American super powers to help him survive. The game was a straight up shooter that was only notable for its questionable architecture, and use of portals, yes like from the game Portal, but before Portal came out. You shouldn’t play it. It is not good. This is why we didn’t care about the sequel, but they changed everything for the sequel. It was about U.S. Marshal Killian Samuels and he was also captured by the same aliens, but he escapes and becomes a bounty hunter on an alien planet in a cool Blade Runner like city. It had free running and an open multi-tiered level design. It was really sweet looking.
Last year the publisher Bethesda announced that Prey 2 would not come out that year because it was not ready yet. That is not too strange it happens all the time, but then this year they announced the game was pretty much just a demo and that they were taking the game away from its developer Human Head studios.
This was a shock to me because they had a demo in 2011, and I saw it. It was great, so to have nothing a year and a half later sounded questionable, and developers from Human Head are saying that Bethesda is lying, and they had a near complete game. Bethesda is just mad because they offered to buy out Human Head but they refused so Bethesda pulled their funding, and then finally gave the game to their studio Arkane, and gave the game a new release date of 2016.
I find this story hard to believe as well because that would mean Bethesda is willing to throw away tens of millions of dollars to spite an independent developer, and most companies don’t like to waste that kind of money based on spite. Especially ones in the tumultuous video game industry.
I think the truth is between those two stories. I think Human Head was behind in development, so Bethesda got antsy and asked to buy them so they wouldn’t loose the talent working on the game, but they could bring the quality control in house, and when Human Head refused then Bethesda pulled the plug and moved the game to a new studio, and one that was in house so they could monitor the quality personally.
I am sure there is even more to it then that, and it would great to get truthful account of what is going on, but doubt that will happen. I hope in 2016 the game is as cool as it was promised to be in 2011.