Barriers are meant to be overcome.

Now, some of my readers might be severely disappointed that my beloved Steam platform is only accessible to the PC crowd. Now, as a staunch PC supporter, I’d like to start by saying to all you Mac users, “Na na na boo boo!” Now that we got that out of the way, let’s talk unity!

Steam has been hinting for a while through some no-so-subtle images, show below, based on their most popular games, Half-life (The ones with a crowbar), Team Fortress 2 (The one with the turret and the one with the fat man eating a sandwich), Portal (the sleeker, sexier turret), and Left 4 Dead (the one with Francis hating things), that they’ll be bringing Steam to the Mac. Well, now it’s official. Steam has announced that not only will Steam be on the Mac, it will be the same as if it were on a PC. There will literally be no difference, to the point where people playing on a Mac can play in the same game, on the same servers, as someone with a PC and you’ll never even know. Sneaky. They’ve even added a new feature called Steam Play which allows people who bought the game on one system to download it for free on the other. No buying the same game twice and we’re not talking some cheap port. The game’s being made as a native version, meaning the code will be custom-built to work. No wonky errors making the game better on one system. With this and Steam Cloud saving all your presets between computers, there will be almost no hassle transferring from one system to the next. The first game to be duel-released on both systems at the same time will be Portal 2, the highly anticipated sequel to what may be my favorite game of all time.

Valve knows how to form and unite a community, and what better way to band together than with games about killing each other?

Gordan Freeman from Half-Life 2, Mac-ified

TF2 turret vs. Portal turret

TF2 Heavy eating his Sandvich.

L4D’s Francis says “I hate different.”

Steam on Ye Olde Macintosh.

HL2’s Alyx Vance immitating the 1984 Apple commercial.

Gamestop’s probably pretty steamed.

Remember when people used to buy their music on disks? Haha, man that’s so 1990’s. Nowadays, we just download our jams off of iTunes, right? Well why not do the same with games?

This is what Valve, everyone’s favorite gaming company, was thinking when they came up with their Steam platform in 2003. Steam is a unique content delivery system that can be downloaded for free and allows you to buy, download, and play games at your leisure. While I’ve already posted about things like Steam Cloud, it’s often overlooked exactly how revolutionary the Steam platform itself is. It’s changed the face of computer gaming. It starts with a large community focus, allowing you to create an account and get the platform for free, create a personalized home page with your own profile picture and nickname, and a friending feature which allows you to add people as friends, chat with other users, or even create unique groups for people to join. With over 25 million users and 21 available languages, it’s attracted some big-time names in gaming, like Activision (Call of Duty, Tony hawk, Guitar Hero), EA (The Sims, Rock Band, every sports game ever), and LucasArts (Star Wars games and, uh, more Star Wars games).

The store itself is quite attractive as well. It’s incredibly organized and expertly laid out, allowing you to sort by genre, price, or just search for titles, which is a good thing considering how big it’s become. Steam boasts a library of over 1,000 games available ranging from big-name titles like Bioshock and Modern Warfare 2 to unknowns like Time Gentlemen, Please! And no, I have absolutely no idea what that last game is, but I’m totally playing it now.

Steam is more convenient, less hassle, and has no extra cost, so why hasn’t it been done until now? Well, probably because before 2003, it couldn’t have been done. Downloading a game off the internet takes a lot of processing power which computers didn’t have, not to mention that the majority of a game is usually saved on the disk, which is why you need the disk to play even after you’ve installed something. Steam has to put the entire game on your hard drive. This takes enormous amounts of space which wasn’t readily available until fairly recently. It still takes much longer than normal. I recently bought Mass Effect 2 and it estimated it would take 6-7 hours to download it when it probably would have been ready in maybe 2 if I bought a physical copy.

These problems are becoming more and more minor, however. While Steam started as just a platform for Valve games like Half-life and Counter-Strike, it has since become a viable option for all kinds of games due to improving hardware. Cable and DSL internet connections are lightning fast and my hard-drive has just under 600 gigabytes. I have around 40 games installed through Steam and that only fills maybe a quarter of the space. As Steam becomes more and more popular, people are starting to choose computer games over the console counterparts. PC’s finally catching back up to the consoles with downloading games as the main weapon, and I’ll be leading the charge.

If birds aren’t enough, now your dog can tweet too!

I’ve never been that curious as to what my dog’s really saying. I’m pretty sure Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon figured it out. However, I guess most people don’t think like I do. Or at least enough people to be profitable. Mattel has a new invention expected to hit stores in Fall that allows your dog to tweet on his very own Twitter page. Puppy Tweets is a small plastic device you can attach to your pet’s collar that syncs to a USB device you attach to your computer. Then you just create a Twitter page for your dog and voilà! Your dog will now update you to his activities. If he’s running in circles, it might have a tweet saying “I finally caught that tail I’ve been chasing and…OOUUUCHH!”

Maybe it’s just my dog Minnie, but this device seems phenomenally useless. Random tweets are boring enough when written by people, but do you really want to know the exact minute your dog pooped in your azaleas? If I’m ever excessively curious about what Minnie is doing, I sit down and reconsider my life because something is clearly wrong to make me less interesting than a dog. Though I suppose those “gangstas” can finally keep up on where the bitches at.

5 awesomely useless gizmos

The year is 2010. Only five more years until we get to laugh at Back to the Future II. I’m still waiting for my flying car and self-drying jacket, but at least we can rest easy knowing our scientists are hard at work making some crazy stuff to distract us. Thanks to www.gizmag.com, I was able to search their 2010 posts and find some pretty silly stuff. So in no specific order, here are 5 bits o’ tech that serve almost no function.

5. The $160,000 diamond-encrusted cell phone.
Really? Do we need to pimp everything we own? I mean it was bad enough when people started wearing gold braces, but this is a bit excessive. According to Gizmag, “The sparkling unit is encrusted with 12.5 carats of pink diamonds, resulting in approximately 1225 individually set gems arranged around a whopping 3-carat navigational button centerpiece. As if that weren’t enough credentials to enter the Blinged Out Phone Hall of Fame, the Nokia Supreme also packs solid platinum veneers and screws, amounting in a total of 83g of platinum. The phone has been crafted in a limited edition run of only three, and of course sells with the obligatory granite clad case with leather interior.” As much as I hate to admit it, I’d get it if I had 160k to blow. As useless as it is, it’s pretty awesome.

4. The Xrocker Vibe platform.
Do you like playing Guitar Hero or Rock band? I sure do. Ever wanted to play it in an earthquake? Well now you can! The Xrocker Vibe platform is akin to playing while standing on a subwoofer. It supposedly tries to emulate a real stage experience by playing the bass through your feet to simulate the stage vibrating to your rock. This is all pretty swell, until you miss a note and hear an obnoxious plunk and notice your score multiplier drop. I’m sorry, no matter how hard you try, you’re holding a plastic toy with a virtual crowd. For the “real rock experience,” learn guitar. That said, I’d totally use this all the time. How else could I truly rock out to “Livin’ on a Prayer”?

3. The pocket knife/garage door opener.
You ever get so tired of having to get out of your car and lift up your heavy garage door? No? Oh yeah, that’s because everyone on earth has a garage door opener clipped to those little sun-blind thingies right next to that C.D. rack. Well now you can inconveniently store that device in your pocket so you can fish around trying to reach between your cell phone and iPod to get it out. Hey, but it can also turn on that outdoor light you set up so that it turns on automatically when someone drives up. While I’m all for cramming things in other things, this just seems a bit more useless than awesome. Though if they tacked on a cell phone, mp3 player, camera, and microwave I bet Verizon would pick it up.

2. Custom laser-etched tires.
Two things still disappoint me about lasers. They aren’t in gun form yet and they aren’t spelled with a “z”, as spell-check often reminds me. Despite these vital flaws, however, we’ve found some pretty cool uses ranging from pointing at things to carving the bad out of your eyes. However, we didn’t have enough car pimping lasers yet. Until now. Now people can custom-make their tire treads, supposedly so you can better experiment with traction, but mostly so I can drive with flaming skulls on my wheels. You can even illuminate it with that awesome neon glow you’ve got going on there. Spinners eat your heart out, I want to carve “awesome4life” 100 times on my treads.

1. The iSwing app.
Ok, I suck at golf. I’ve gotten the two best hits possible and now I never need to play again. One hit a branch and landed back on the tee, and the other went backwards. But now apparently my cell phone can help me out. The iSwing allows you to record your swing, then play it back and you can even draw lines to show where you need improvement. The main flaw I see is you need to be able to recognize where you need improvement. Now call me crazy, but I have this little feeling that just watching your own swing won’t exactly get you on the PGA. However, it’s apparently pretty popular in Japan and Korea, and it might just let me see how I managed to hit a ball the wrong way. Whoever you are though, you’re not gonna be the next Tiger. You need the iSwinger app for that.

Avatawesome

Wow. I mean, really wow. This movie is beautiful. Rather, this experience is beautiful because it’s more that than it is just a movie. If you see this movie, you must see it in 3D. Preferably 3D Imax, though I just saw it in a normal 3D screening. The environments are absolutely fantastic and gorgeously rendered to the point where you can feel the humidity in the forest and feel the wind from the helicopters flying by. With by far the best CGI I’ve ever seen, this movie would be worth seeing even if it were an instructional video.

That said, this movie did have some issues. The dialog was a bit better than I expected and the characters felt very real, but the whole story might as well have been written by early Native Americans. Humans, with the exception of five good guys, are all evil, greedy, murdering warmongers who want nothing but to kill everyone in their way. It’s very reminiscent to Disney’s Pocahontas. A soldier is sent to communicate to the natives and get them to move. He meets up with this native woman who teaches him how pretty flowers are. They fall in love, yadda yadda, the entire plot basically seems to boil down to nature is pretty and the bad humans hate flowers. Though it may seem like I didn’t enjoy the story much, I thought it did work well and was entertaining as long as you didn’t get too caught up on the hippie message.

There were also a few “oh come on” moments. Like when someone shot a bow and arrow through re-enforced future bulletproof glass. Really? Arrows can pierce futuristic space ships? I have a bit of trouble accepting that. They’re also a bit inconsistent as to how long people can breathe in the alien atmosphere. Sometimes they seem to be able to walk outside for a minute with no trouble at all, and others it seems to incapacitate people much faster than they supposedly should.

Ultimately though these are minor gripes with a overall awesome film. An Interesting story, a fantastic world, stunningly beautiful effects, and really a truly unique experience make this move a must-see in 3D. Go watch it.

Guess what I forgot?

I forgot that my laptop has a broken wireless card and can’t access the internet! I couldn’t blog for the extent of my Christmas vacation! So, sorry about that. On the plus side, I did see Avatar and I will have a post up about that tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Not The Last Airbender one.

When I first saw the movie “The Last Airbender” which is the live-action version of the award-winning Nickelodeon animated series, I was wondering why they didn’t call it Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is the proper title. I quickly learned that this was because they already had an Avatar movie. At first, I was a bit peeved that some elf-like things that look like the Zora from Zelda had forced a movie I was looking forward to (hey, Nick’s Avatar is awesome even if it is a kids show) to alter it’s name. However, after watching a few trailers, I noticed that this new Avatar looked pretty awesome too. Some sort of fusion between sci-fi and fantasy. Needless to say I’m pretty psyched to see it, so watch for my review which will be coming out whenever I’m able to get to a theater. Hopefully it’ll be up in a few days.

Steam Cloud makes gaming a bit clearer.

It’s always a pain playing a game on a friend’s computer. There’s always the one guy who has inverted controls so up is down, or a PC gamer who set “c” as crouch instead of shift. You can either struggle to get used to your friends play style, or switch back the the default controls you spent so long editing the buttons to avoid. Fortunately, Valve has found a way to fix this dilemma.

In comes Steam Cloud, Valve’s newest little trick on their Steam gaming platform. As long as your friend has Steam installed on their computer, you can simply log into your account and Steam Cloud saves all your key bindings, controls, and other preferences along with the rest of your account information. Any change in the game options will be transferred between computers. Valve’s tradition of innovation and customer convenience lives on.

Sagan Sings…sort of.

Anyone who likes rap, knows someone who likes rap, or has heard that “I’m on a boat” song probably knows about T-Pain. He’s become popular because of his unique use of pitch correction, a digital process which allows singers to use programs like Auto-Tune to correct any mistakes they may have made by changing the note of a sound. This can be used to create flawless vocals on an album, add a unique sound to your voice like T-Pain, or to make a song from basically anything.

My favorite use of this technology so far is the Symphony of Science. This music project describes itself as “a musical project by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form.” Boswell takes clips from scientific movies, such as Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” or speeches given by Richard Dawkins (even Bill Nye the Science Guy makes an appearance) and uses pitch correction to make awesome songs and music videos. Check it out, download the songs, put them on your iPod, whatever. Definitely my cup of boiled Camellia sinensis.

Bordering between genres

I’m generally not a big RPG guy. I’m more of a shooter fan with games like Call of Duty or Team Fortress 2 in my repertoire. Like most other twitchy, head-shot junkies (NSFW: Naughty words), I lack the patience to spend a weekend killing spiders in World of Warcraft in order to level up. This is why I was excited about the new game by Gearbox Software that came out October 20th (October 23rd for PC players) called Borderlands. It combines the real-time shooting of an FPS with the level-ups and progressive improvement of an RPG. As the trailer says, “The RPG and FPS made a baby.”

This idea of combining two genres is really starting to pick up in gaming. While plenty of games had elements of a different genre, like Tomb Raider combining platforming with shooting elements, they usually could be classified in a single area. However, a true hybrid like Borderlands is rather rare.

Still, the self-titled “Role Playing Shooter” is awfully reminiscent of Fallout 3 (a bit graphic), the 2008 game developed by Bethesda Game Studios. Both had a level-up system to improve your skills, quests given by Non-Player Characters (NPCs), random drops of money, weapons, and armor, they even both took place in a barren wasteland populated by random bandits and monsters. The main difference between the two is the tone. While Borderlands has a light tone with silly little robots, screaming midget psychos and cartoony graphics, Fallout 3, while still having it’s silly moments, goes a more serious route, taking place in a post-nuclear apocalypse Washington D.C. called the Capital Wastes.

Ultimately which game style you prefer depends on personal taste. Fallout 3 looks a lot better and feels more like a shooter. It’s also a lot more realistic. Borderlands feels more like an RPG with numbers popping up when you shoot something and different guns having elemental damage types. It’s much lighter with it’s crazy characters and it’s 87 bazillion guns. Borderlands also supports 4-player co-op so you can play with your friends if you like, just like WoW! Perhaps games like these might make us shooter fans branch out a bit and explore new genres. For now though, I need to go play some more Modern Warfare before my adrenaline rush goes away.