From: [REDACTED]
Subject: Website
Body: One of the links on our homepage is broken. Could you please fix it.

From: [REDACTED]
Subject: VAT
Body: The request we previously submitted regarding our PDF invoices [which has already been actioned] does not appear to have been actioned. Please can you complete it?

The above request was completed precisely in-line with the original two-sentence email received as a spec. Ever get those days where you feel like you’re taking crazy pills, Mugatu?

Finally bought an SD card reader for my 3DS. Basically for this single purpose, as I’ll never be using it to take photos. Even 3D ones, because the camera is atrocious. Still, my Mii is a good likeness of me, and you should all be able to enjoy that if you want to. Scan and drink in that amazing bit of Nintendo.

I’m tired of things that annoy me ruining my enjoyment of social networks, so I reserve the right to unfollow people with a clear conscience and no fear of repercussions/hurt feelings.

right, apropos of nothing I was looking up mr t wigs and I found the following which get progressively more atrocious:

first up is the Mr Hammer wig. I like how they’ve avoided any potential copyright issues by calling it Mr Hammer. The mismatched skin tone isn’t so bad in this one.

next up is the Mr T wig with apparently Persian beard combo. It looks like what would happen if Mr T had been in 300. The suave look of the white mannequin contrasts sharply with Mr T’s abrupt character. Poetic.

This one’s listed as a deluxe Mr T wig set and is priced at $30. I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t pay 15-20 quid for this piece of shit. I like this one more than the previous because of a) it’s obviously inferior build quality and b) the clueless expression on the mannequin’s face, and the fact that they seem to have made an attempt to black it up.

AND FINALLY my ultimate favourite. There are so many things right with this one, the fact that they’ve bothered to black up is superb, and even better is the fact that they’ve NOT BLACKED UP HIS ARM, and that the beard is obviously painted on the sides of his face. His expression and dedication to the character make this man an instant legend.

I’m not normally one to share stuff like this, but it made me laugh so much that I couldn’t not. The last guy looks like some crazed Zoolander/Mr T mashup.

I consider myself to be a true video game fan. I love all video games. I love consoles, I love PCs, I love handhelds, I love mobile phone games and I love those crappy little Game and Watch things and all their clones. I don’t play PC games because it feels like you have to buy new hardware every time new software is released but, given the chance, I play when I can. I try not to let past experiences negatively colour my opinion of new things – it’d be a hell of a shame if a crappy implementation caused me to miss something in future. Makes no sense.

I’m a reader. I’ve spent the last 3 months reading about the 3DS every day. I joined the internet in feeling anxious about the weak lineup, disappointed with the crappy battery life and concerned about 3D-induced headaches.

Thursday night came, and I could barely contain my excitement. I was still reading reviews at 7pm, three-and-a-half hours before I was going to leave for the midnight launch, and I was still very excited. Whilst waiting in the queue (second place!), I got a chance to play Pilotwings, which made a very good impression so I walked away with that and Super Street Fighter 4. I have since picked up Ridge Racer on a friend’s recommendation, too.

Now I’ve had the chance to give all three games, as well as the built-in and AR software a go so I thought I’d add my opinions to the pile.

The Good

That screen. It’s damn impressive. I mean really impressive. I play everything with the 3D ramped up as far as it’ll go and I’ve not once experienced the motion sickness or headaches that you might be concerned about. Once you get used to looking at the screen, the sweet spot seems to grow and keeping focussed on the 3D becomes a much more relaxed affair. It adds a depth to Pilotwings that makes the experience a lot more accessible. It makes the car pop out of the track in Ridge Racer (not essential, but a delightful effect). It makes the characters in Street Fighter look like the little plastic wrestling figures I used to smash into each other and contort into shapes when I was little.

With the 3D turned down, the graphics are still great and the framerate increases (battery, too, apparently). It’s not essential to have 3D on at all – the improvements to the system make the graphics better anyway, so don’t feel like you might lose out if you don’t like 3D.

Built-in software. The OS is much more responsive than the DS, the Mii creator is great fun (and actually made a pretty good job of my face), AR games are hopefully a strong indicator of what’s to come – the yellow question mark one is the only real game, though.

The cradle. As you will have read, this cradle is going to become your 3DS’ best friend. The battery does run down pretty quickly, which doesn’t really affect me as I mostly game at home, but it will be a problem for some people. I find it quite comfortable playing whilst the 3DS is mounted in the dock, which is good because I will probably pick up a battery expansion when Ars Technica tells me which one to get.

Sound. The built-in speakers make a great sound. If you’ve got a good pair of headphones, it’s obviously better, but the speakers are more than sufficient. None of that tinny sound you had to get used to in the DS.

Street Pass. I haven’t walked past anyone with this enabled yet, but I love the idea and I’m hoping that the implementation is as good as it could be.

The Bad

Friend codes. What the fuck is the point in these things? They’re so irritating. The social element of the 3DS is brilliant, and this seems to be such a weak link. I kinda understand the increased privacy of an obfuscated identifier, but decent privacy controls could achieve this, too. No. I hope Nintendo drops this.

Stylus. They’ve moved it. It’s now next to the cartridge slot. Fine, y’say? Not when the 3DS is in its cradle – you just can’t get to it. There’s a fold-down flap, but unless you’ve got tiny, tiny fingers, you aren’t getting the stylus out at all. Annoying.

Hinge. After less than a day, my hinge started to exhibit a bit of “give”. It’s a tiny bit flappy, which doesn’t fill me with confidence about its long-term durability. If it stays how it is; great, but I’m not confident about its lifespan.

Camera. The camera is shocking. I’m not talking about megapixels or anything like that. The quality is abysmal. Noisy-as-hell images, which are almost incomprehensible make this feature basically useless. The AR and Mii Creator are the only uses for the camera. Don’t even bother taking pictures. Nintendo; please don’t work on a video camera – spend the resources getting rid of friend codes.

Battery. The battery doesn’t last long. This is easily fixable with a decent peripheral. Unless it’s like the Game Gear battery monstrosity.

The Games

Street Fighter. I have the equivalent on PS3 and this is a great port. It’s basically impossible to hit L+M+H combinations properly due to the separation of the shoulder buttons from the rest, but you can set the bottom screen to have a shortcut for L+M+H P or K, which eradicates this. The thumb-stick is my input device of choice – once you get used to it, it’s accurate and much more reliable than the d-pad.

Pilotwings. The best demonstration of the 3D, and the best usage of it. Adds depth perception, which helps with landing. Great learning curve, some of the later challenges are quite frustrating to 3-star – involving a lot of concentration and coordination. There may only be 3 types of vehicle (there’s a couple of different types of plane and a weird bike/hang-glider), but there’s plenty of variety to keep you quiet and more than enough enjoyment to keep you coming back, even when the main missions are done.

Ridge Racer. Arcade racing at its finest. The main game is 3 Grand Prix, each with around 20 challenges, each with 4 races. I’ve got 5 hours play-time with around 30% complete. Couple that with the sheer fun of the game and local multiplayer (no online, unfortunately – maybe in an update?), make this a definite keeper.

Conclusion

It seems a popular verdict that the 3DS isn’t without its faults. I wanted to love every bit of it and totally disagree with all the little negative points. I don’t. It’s true that there are faults, but this is very-first revision hardware. The only thing I think is required is a bigger/better battery, re-positioned stylus and an improved hinge. Other than that, it’s an excellent piece of kit that has the potential to perpetuate Nintendo’s trend of wiping the floor with other handhelds (there’s a broom pun I can’t be bothered to make there – fill your boots).

Once Mario Kart, Super Mario (Galaxy, Paper or 2/2.5D), Dead or Alive, Starfox, Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil, F-Zero and Street Fighter x Tekken come out (the latter two are a rumour, but it needs to happen please), I think you could basically sell all the other consoles. It’s really that fun.

Recently, I ordered a shirt from buyolympia (The Incident, coincidentally (yeah, you heard) is a brilliant splice of 8-bit graphics and chiptune that you owe yourself and your iOS device). It was delivered promptly, which was surprising as the delivery was cheap and the company is US-based. Excited like a child, I tore open the packaging, only to discover that I had received a women’s large shirt, instead of men’s.

I contacted Neven Mrgan on twitter with details of my order and received an email from buyolympia offering to send another shirt if I post mine back and giving me the option of choosing another shirt from their range as compensation. This was the first great response. I have no interest in getting more than I paid for from anyone and, seeing as this was clearly an honest mistake, I was happy to let it go with having just informed them of the mistake. I have a wife who likes wearing baggy clothes (and American Apparel shirts come up small anyway), so it’s not what you’d call a loss. I’d just donate the shirt to her (grudgingly – it’s a cool shirt!).

A week or so passes and Sudo rips a package through the letter-box. Surprisingly, it’s from buyolympia. I felt kinda guilty, or maybe like they didn’t receive my response or something, but upon opening said package, a new shirt and the following message fell out.

This made my day. There was absolutely no need for them to do this – Neven’s shirt was my first purchase through buyolympia and they have no obligation to me, but the note and gesture has put them near the top of my “Oooh-I-want-to-buy-a-shirt” URL list, so they’re bound to see some more of my money.

Kudos to them. Hopefully my good experience will get some of my friends on their site as well!

How do you go from being some guy in his (or her, whatever) room, to some guy in a small office, to 400 guys in a crazy loft in San Francisco smashing their heads against the wall trying to figure out the least offensive way to make money from this brilliant thing they’ve created.

If it’s not already obvious, this is loosely based on Twitter. Twitter always seems to have struggled with making money. Sure, you can sell search data to Google and Microsoft, but that money isn’t going to cover everything. You could even get some investors to give you a boatload of money, but they’re eventually going to want to see some sort of return.

Once you’ve exhausted those avenues, it’s unfortunate but, you’re going to have to turn to your users. This presents a problem. Users hate it when you make money from them. Even if it doesn’t cost them anything at all. Show some adverts (some people – yes you, Gawker – take this way too far) and people moan that you’ve sold out. Start charging and you might as well have broken into someone’s house and just started taking their stuff.

It must be incredibly frustrating when a bunch of people are selling an app to use your service and making decent money from it when you can’t make income no matter what you try.

If it were me, I’d do what Facebook is trying to do. Get a load of businesses on board and promise them good advertising. When I say “good”, I mean advertising that might actually work. When I use Facebook, I see ads for stuff that relates to what I talk about and what’s in my profile. I probably see ads my close friends would see, too. That’s the only way I can explain some of them! Facebook ads don’t annoy me – I trust them. It’s all based on things I willingly tell them, so why wouldn’t I trust them? I’m a pretty reliable source when it comes to the things I like.

This seems to be what Twitter is doing. I don’t know how much real value there is in trending topics. I think they’re pretty useless, personally. As soon as something gets popular, it gets spammed and becomes pointless. Spam notwithstanding, there could be real value in selling trending topics. In order to do this, Twitter needs to put them in your face. They need them to be in pride of place on their website, on any native clients, anywhere. But doesn’t it make people moan?! God, take away people’s faces and their predisposition to whining about inconsequential shit goes through the roof, doesn’t it? The entitled rage at the #dickbar in Twitter for iPhone is just mind-bottling. Seriously; 1. Who is really that angry about the #dickbar? 2. Is Twitter as a service not worth it? I mean, they’ve got to try and make some money, haven’t they? If you’re not going to visit any of that stuff, just don’t. At least let them try to make money because, if they can’t, the service will disappear. Sure, you’ll move on, but Twitter is a job to some people and, as such, they rely on it to live.

Personally, I’m a fan of Freemium. Show ads, offer subscription. Remove ads if people subscribe. Replace one revenue stream with another. I happily subscribe to Instapaper (I would pay more for this) and Flickr (though I sense Yahoo! isn’t long for this world, so we’ll see what happens there) and I would pay for Twitter and Facebook, too. It wouldn’t need to be a lot, either. Marco Arment charges $1 a month. With Facebook’s 500,000,000 users or whatever it is, even if 25% of those people paid a dollar a month, that’s a decent guaranteed income for just being yourself.

I realise that willingness to pay for a service puts me in the minority. You only have to look at App Store reviews to see that. Before I bought Tilt to Live for iOS, I was reading the reviews (of this 59p, 99¢ game that is fucking awesome, by the way. Seriously, you’ll get your 59p’s worth in the first hour of play) and people were outraged by the fact that One Man Left added a game mode and were charging the same again for the new mode. 59p that you don’t even have to pay, and would-be 5-star reviews became 3, 2 and 1-star. Unbelievable.

I suppose what I’m getting at here is that people don’t spend enough time looking at something’s worth. If it’s always been free or cheap, it should always be free or cheap. Nothing should ever change, even though your users don’t pay, they’re damn sure going to throw their toys out of the pram if you change anything and demand that you put it right-the-fuck back.

I say fuck that. The people who created this awesome thing that you love are probably only going to try to change it for the better. Even when they’ve got to start doing something a bit lame to make some money, they’re going to do it in the best way they can. This isn’t only so that they don’t piss off their users, but so that they don’t ruin the thing they created. Chances are, if you love it, the people who made it and spend their lives improving it love it way, way more and don’t want to be the cause of it properly sucking. Stop fucking moaning about free things – this is the world; we’ve all got to make some money at some point.

Bitching online is stupid. With that in mind, every time Seth MacFarlane says something in public it makes me wish I didn’t love American Dad and Family Guy. They’re both hilarious. He’s really not.

In his own, immortal words as Roger; what a douche.

Apple; you make amazing computers. Your hardware is sturdy and reliable, and when it’s not reliable you have great customer services to back it up. Your operating system is Unix-compliant, attractive, relatively stable and easy to use. Your phones are well-made and have a pretty decent OS, which is improving at an acceptable rate. You as an entity are the only weak link in the chain. You are the overbearing mother of the technology world; you refuse to ever let your products truly go to their new owners.

Without the indie software scene, OSX would be nothing. Sadly, some parts of the OS are so frustratingly closed that some things become almost prohibitive. The software you build and sell is fit for purpose (on-par with industry in some cases, below in most), but not nearly adequately varied to rival Windows or Linux.

When you released your phone, it was like the popular girl in school – looked so good in every way, but forced to spend more than 10 minutes with it and you wanted to smash it against a rock. Then came the App Store, and things were good for a while. You still, however, refused to let go control and some trivial things became impossible. This prompted an incredibly talented and generous group of people to start hacking the device so that people were free to use it as they wished. This was, after all, their right (regardless of terms and licensing – you part with outrageous amounts of cash, the right is yours!). You struggled for a while, but now you seem to have given up, which is nice. Thanks.

All of this meandering leads me to the crux of my point. You might be able to pull the wool over some people’s eyes regarding Flash on your devices, but you don’t fool me. I hope your hypocrisy left a horrible taste in your mouth when you wrote your letter to Adobe. If you think that any piece of Mac hardware or software is open, you must be kidding yourself as well as everyone else. How dare you preach openness whilst you supply us with phones and iPods that you can’t even change the fucking battery in?! How dare you preach openness when I have to run the risk of rendering my phone useless just so I can install software I want on it?! How fucking dare you preach openness when you actively and vocally restrict Flash from being installed in any capacity on a device that I own?!

And another thing; HTML5 may well be relatively open compared to Flash, but if I want to use HTML5 video, I guess I’ll be needing the H.264 codec (at time of writing). That famously open source codec. What’s that? It’s not open source? So Firefox (truly open) will never be able to support it? Sounds great.

Before you preach openness, maybe you should do some research into what that actually is! Give your devices to your customers and let them do what they wish. If I want to deplete my battery in 10 minutes using Flash and all my simultaneous processes, that’s my prerogative. If I want to consequently complain, you’ve got leverage to tell me where to get off! Honestly, sometimes your smug sense of superiority makes me hate you and everyone who makes excuses for you.

I hope I’ve made my point.

Onto you now, Adobe. This will be shorter.

Hey, Adobe. I see you’re getting all upset because Apple won’t let Flash run on their mobile devices. That’s pretty annoying for everyone involved. Whilst I disagree with their methods, I am totally with their justification. If you can’t even write a Flash plugin for a device with 2.66Ghz Dual Core processor, 4GB RAM and 512MB graphics memory without resorting to slowdown, memory hunger and frequent crashing, then you shouldn’t be writing plugins for devices with a fraction of that power. Seriously, Flash is the number one reason I scream at my laptop every day, and I’m almost certain that there’s plenty you can do about it. I wonder why you don’t.

I heard that Apple also now ban apps from being distributed using their nice, open App Store if they’ve been compiled using IDEs you wrote. Man, that sounds just like something they’d do, but have you ever actually used one of the apps compiled with your IDE? As a technical exercise to prove it’s possible, you’ve nailed it. Go you. But try using one. My God, it borders on harrowing it’s so terrible.

Your problem is really quite similar to Apple’s when you think about it. You give developers all of these great tools that can theoretically do amazing things, then you totally screw them by making a horrendous platform for their use. This subsequently screws their users, too, because people just don’t want to use apps that frustrate them. I’m now at the stage where I close any website that looks like it’s full-Flash. It’s that bad.

In case I haven’t made it apparent what might help you – make Flash better. Make it not crash browsers and eat memory and slow computers down all the time. I know it’s not as simple as that, but if anyone can do it it’s you. Seriously, no-one else could because, well, they’re not allowed!

And now, to my avid reader. There you have it; Apple and Adobe are just as bad as each other. So bad, in fact, that it’s created a convenient little blind-spot to badness that both of them can live in until the mighty Google comes along and sells the world to aliens after America accidentally signed it over to them without reading small print.

If you really care about open, buy an Android phone. Wait, that’s Google. Buy a Palm. Wait, that’d be a pointless waste of your time. Uhh. Sell all your stuff and go live in the woods with hippies and the squirrels so that none of this inane shit really even matters any more.

As a (relatively) normal person, I don’t see why games companies have these events. I mean sure, a great willy-wave is fitting every now and again (especially when you’re knocking out an awesome game soon) but you’re making it impossible for reviewers to effectively communicate to their audience. You’re subsequently breaking the review process and cheapening your release!

I, therefore, propose that if a company has a game to review they send a copy to the reviewer and have them review it in the way they would normally play a video game (if you’re from Hawaii, and you usually play on a beach with hula girls and piña coladas, lucky you! (nationalist stereotyping aside)). Using this method removes peer and corporate pressure, as well as the temptation to be greedy from the review process. If you’re a reviewer, either pay for your own ticket and disclose that even though this could’ve been a subsidised event, you’ve integrity. Your review will serve your audience much better!

Thanks.