The best part is the ‘P-p-p-p-p-p product placement’ line. The telephone video has some of the most blatant and jarring product placement since I, Robot, where the action would simply grind to a halt every once in a while so that people could compliment Will Smith’s ‘vintage’ sneakers. Telephone is less of a music video and more of a 10 minute infomercial for Virgin Mobile.
Petville is another facebook game by Zynga, who are also the makers of the previously-reviewed Cafe World and Farmville. In Petville, you create a humanoid furry creature and control them as they live their life, in a vaguely Sim-like way. The graphics are actually pretty impressive in this game. The number of appearance options you have when making your pet is pretty massive, and the resulting pets are generally really cute. I’ve played some other pet-type games on Facebook, and none of them come anywhere near Petville’s level of detail. As an added bonus, the (Flash-based) game runs at a respectable speed as well, just about the only Zynga-made game that does (though it frequently suffers from slow loading in the evening.)
By far the funnest part of Petville is the decorating options. You can decorate your house from a nearly overwhelming number of items that are available to purchase. There’s dozens of carpeting options, dozens more paint/wallpaper options, a huge variety of windows, furniture and electronics, kitchen appliances and even cars. Clothing options are similarly massive with just an overwhelming number of shirt, pant, dress and shoe options. There’s even a lot of costumes available, so you can dress your pet up as anything from an astronaut to Santa Claus.
He invented a new kind of fuel cell, which is like a very skinny battery that always runs. Sridhar feeds oxygen to it on one side, and fuel on the other. The two combine within the cell to create a chemical reaction that produces electricity. There’s no need for burning or combustion, and no need for power lines from an outside source.
combustion, burning (a process in which a substance reacts with oxygen to give heat and light)
Clearly, what’s going on in the Bloom Box, in which fuel and oxygen react to produce energy, is TOTALLY different from combustion, which is where fuel and oxygen react to produce energy. Completely different. Not even remotely similar. Nope, no combustion going on here. And that’s not even getting into the later part of the article where they mention that the Bloom boxes could also run on solar power. How would that even work? I mean, I guess you could use them to prop up solar panels… A giant cardboard box would work just as well, though, so that’s not much of a selling point.
Farmville is a game that’s gotten some attention lately, though, not really the positive kind. Apparently even Dr. Phil had an episode about it, dealing with people ‘addicted’ to Farmville (I know about that only from what I’ve heard. Trust me, I don’t watch Dr. Phil.) Apparently there’s 60 times more people playing Farmville than there are actual farmers in the US. So its a pretty popular game.
Without a doubt, its a pretty casual game. You plant some crops, come back later and harvest them. That’s about 90% of the game there. Like the best of casual games, ‘playing’ it doesn’t require much time investment, which is why it often winds up eating up so much time. When you play a game like World of Warcraft, you always have to ‘plan’ your playtime – you know that if you’ve anything else that needs to be done in the next hour or so, its really not worth starting the game up at all. There’s always a fairly hefty minimum time investment to get anything done. Read the rest of this entry »
Lately I’ve been playing a lot of games over on Facebook. There’s an amazing amount of games available over there. Some of them are pretty good. Some of them are amazingly bad. I’ll start by reviewing one of the first games that I started playing on Facebook, Cafe World.
I’m a big fan of cooking shows. I’ve been watching FoodTV for years, and am a fan of Top Chef Read the rest of this entry »
I finally found some of the new Mountain Dew Game Fuel the other day, at Walmart. As it combines my 2 greatest loves in life, Mountain Dew and World of Warcraft, I obviously needed it. It comes in 2 flavors, one for each side, Horde Red and Alliance Blue.
I’ll start with Alliance Blue: Alliance Blue is, not too surprisingly, blue. Its official description is “Mountain Dew with a Punch of Wild Fruit Flavor”. Basically, its a slightly citrusy fruit punch. Its not bad, but its not that great, either. I thought it tasted a lot like one of the blue flavors from last summer’s Dewmocracy promotion. I’m sure its not quite the same flavor, but similar.
Horde Red is misnamed, IMO, as its really more of an orangish color. It really should be redder to match the color of the Horde insignia. Its flavor description is “Dew with a Blast of Citrus Cherry Flavor”. I though it was pretty good, better than Alliance Blue. Not good enough to be a permanent Mountain Dew flavor by any means, though. It kind of needed a bit more of a citrus kick to be really good, I think.
You know, this blog has turned into a bit more of a soda review site than I intended. I’ll have to start posting about, you know, other things…
I wrote previously about Mountain Dew Thowback. Since then I’ve been able to try Pepsi Throwback as well. My review of it: eh. I really just didn’t see a noticable taste difference between it and normal Pepsi. The sweetness was a bit ‘crisper’ perhaps, but other than that… I readily admit that I’m not that much of a Pepsi drinker, though, so perhaps someone who’s more of a Pepsi ‘expert’ would be able to see a bigger difference. I definitely don’t think its the massive difference that exist with the Mountain Dew product, though.
I’ve been using the Swagbucks search engine for a while now, and I’m pretty happy with it. Its not actually that great of a search engine – even through it pulls most of its results from Google, I really wouldn’t recommend using it for a complicated search for something obscure.
So why would I recommend it? Because you earn Swagbucks for searching with it, which you can then redeem for prizes and gift certificates. I’ve been using it for around 6 weeks now, and so far I’ve gotten 2 $5 gift cards for Amazon.com, for doing nothing more than doing web searches that I was doing anyway. Definitely not a bad deal.
If you want to sign up, please use my link – this one here – so that it’ll use me as a referrer and I’ll get some bonus Swagbucks for it. Hey, its my blog, and I’ll spam if I want to.
Has anyone else tried the ‘new’ Mountain Dew Throwback? Its Mountain Dew, except that its made with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS.) Its REALLY good. It comes in retro-looking cans, and definitely has a flavor that I remember, different from modern Mountain Dew. It has a lot more of a burst of sweetness than regular Mountain Dew, and overall a stronger flavor.
Its a temporary promotional item, and will only be available for 8 weeks. I’m not too happy about that, because it is, without a doubt, a far better product. There’s also Pepsi Throwback (again made with sugar instead of HFCS), but I haven’t tried that yet.
I haven’t bought many games for my Wii yet – aside from a few WiiWare downloads, all I have are Guitar Hero: World Tour, Samba de Amigo and, of course, Wii Sports.
I really haven’t had the opportunity to play any Guitar Heroes up until this point, so I’m starting fairly inexperienced. Nevertheless, the game is, in my opinion, extremely fun. Most of the songs are pretty fun to play. There is, though, one complain that I have about the game, one that I think is an issue of poor game design:
