In the early 2000s, Flash was supposed to revolutionize online advertising. Its animation and drawing capabilities, combined with the scripting and interactivity of ActionScript, were the future. Advertisements that users could play around with, in ways more complex than punching a monkey, were seen as a compelling alternative to the passive ads of tv, print, and flashing animated gif ads of the past. The word bandied around this type of advertising was “sticky.”
None of it stuck. While there has been a lot of good and interesting work over the years, the majority of those types of ads have been forgettable, obnoxious, and irritating. The majority of everything is horrible and Flash ads aren’t any different, but the stigma stuck. Users became increasingly aggravated and then came two final nails in the coffin.
As browsers opened up and became extensible, ad and Flash blocking add-ons grew increasingly popular. Then Google entered the fray, offering really simple text based ads that had the distinction, thanks to Google’s massive databases, of being super contextual to where they were placed. Flash experiental ads, while still around, no longer have that optimism anymore.
So with that it was interesting to see Apple focus so much on their new advertising platform, iAds, at last week’s WWDC. They demoed interactive rich media, some would say “flashy”, advertisements that were targeted at mobile devices. Words like “engaging” were used. The future was likely mentioned. And I feel like I’ve heard it all before. And I as a user, and as someone that made those same obnoxious Flash ads, don’t share that optimism and I hope that history repeats.
Apple, of course, doesn’t want that. It denied Adobe’s Flash in its iOS. If you want to make these flashy ads on its platforms, you have to do it their way. It, effectively, banned Google from advertising on its device. It has strict control of what is and isn’t allowed in the AppStore, so you’ll never get an ad blocker (even if they push one out in their own browser on the desktop.) It’s doing everything in its power to control and minimize the things that led to those very same ads becoming the ignored whipping boy of the web.
There’s just one problem with that strategy and why things are a little different than they were when the wild web was embracing rich ads: there is only one web, but there are other mobile platforms. It’ll be interesting to see how iAds are handled and how consumers react.
I realize that such a comparison between the Apple iPad and the Sony PSP is inherently fallacious. Comparing the sales performance of the iPad to the PSP is like comparing the performance of a boat to a plane; they’re completely different. For one, the low end iPad costs almost twice as much as the PSP at launch. On the other hand, the iPad has far greater utility and a lot more software and media available at launch. The iPad also has a browser and mp3 player that isn’t painful to use. So in some ways it evens out.
The one thing that distinguishes both launches is the amount of hype. While the PSP had a bit, most of it was contained within the already excitable gamer demographic. The mainstream press, while making mention of it, casually passed it by. There certainly were no marquee features in the likes of Time magazine, written by Stephen Fry, or anything of the sort. There was no hyperbole about the PSP saving media/journalism/print/whatever. It was just another game device.
Today it was revealed that the iPad sold 300,000 units on launch. People are claiming it’s a success. It sold more than the iPhone originally did, and look how that turned out! Big numbers!
You wouldn’t know it if you went by the buzz alone, but when the PSP launched in North America it sold, in two days[1], 500,000 units. It was considered a flop.
It’s pretty safe to say that the PSP under-performed over its lifetime and didn’t make the in-roads that Sony hoped it would, but it’s also pretty far from a failure despite public perception. There are over 50 million of them. I don’t care what you’re selling, if you sell 50 million of it that’s pretty damned good. You wouldn’t know it by the hype, and this is where that media perception comes in, but that means there are 20 million more PSPs sold than iPhones and iPod Touchs combined.OK, yeah, that’s an old number. There are more of those than PSPss now. But still fewer than DSs. See comments
I find this interesting from a media perspective. When I see the actual numbers being so disproportionate from the actual buzz around the devices, I come to two conclusions: 1) Apple’s marketing is that much better than Sony’s; 2) Videogames, despite their obvious ubiquity, still get no respect in the media and the PSP, being a games-first machine, was duly dismissed. Let’s not even mention that the Nintendo DS is approaching 150 million sold.
The revolution with simple, accessible computing in magical devices happened long ago. They’re already all around us.
I realize I’m comparing one day sales to two day sales, but with launches like this the vast majority of sales are on day one. There’s no way that the iPad sold more on day two than day one, so I believe the PSP still has the edge.
I’ve never been much of a gadget person. My current phone, for one extreme example, is five and a half years old. I’ve been on top of trends and I know what’s going on in the hardware space, but my primary interest is in software. More specifically speaking, media players and entertainment software. Games. 95% of my gadget purchases are pretty much dictated by this, which is why I have every game console released in North America since about 1997. This is the point of view I take to the recent iPad hubbub.
The only reason that I have an iPod Touch is because it came with the MacBook when I bought it, but I’m glad I do since it turned out to be a decent game device with some, amidst the sea of junk, quality games. The lack of any tactile input does hurt it when it comes to the kind of games I know and love, but for more casual fare the machine performs admirably. The developers that need more precise input have managed with virtual joystick and button setups, some better implemented than others. These generally work because the iPhone’s form factor is not all that different from the kind of ergonomics we’ve had since Nintendo released its controller in 1985. It works because it’s stable. The machine rests between two hands, supported by back fingers, while the thumbs are free, in their natural position, to press things. This is also the form you use when typing with the soft keyboard (or, even, your Blackberry.) It works.
It’s great that the iPad is backwards compatible with all the Apps that are out there and all those games that you’ve bought, but I look at its size and weight and wonder how that form factor will affect all those many games. Can you imagine playing a game on your Playstation with a controller that’s seven and a half inches wide and weighs 1.6 pounds (about 3 times wider and 5 times heavier than the iPhone)? I can’t, and I’ve used one of those massive original XBox controllers. This, as a gamer, is the most glaring problem with the iPad.
All told, though, I do hope that this change in ergonomics, making the virtual d-pad awkward, forces developers to really think about the interface, slow down their game designs, and make something nice for this specific platform. Too many rely on old conventions dating back to 1985. When someone does, that’s when I’ll consider the device worth my investment. Maybe a nice, original strategy game. One that can also work on the iPod Touch too. I’d buy it. That gadget works well enough already.
I bought CodeWeaver’s Crossover yesterday in an impulsive moment of “I miss some of my PC games” boredom. Based on open source project WINE, Crossover theoretically lets you play numerous PC games on your Mac without having to boot into a separate Windows installation and all the crap and space that entails (including the requirement for a Windows license, which I have but still.)
First impressions, before I could even get the software, were not positive. The checkout process on the web store required that I create an account (annoying) and kept failing when I would try to create one. I figured it was something NoScript related, even though I was allowing scripting for the site (maybe some cross-domain stuff is going on?) I switched to Safari and it was fine. Bought it, downloaded it.
My first impression of the actual software also wasn’t positive. It looks like this:
Dear Codeweavers, hire a designer.
But I clicked on the “Game Software Installer”, clicked Steam, chose my “bottle” (hire a copy writer too) and it instantly began downloading and installing the necessary components (fonts, flash, directx, the client itself). After a few minutes Steam was running on my Mac. It was surprisingly smooth. There are a few minor quirks with the in-client browser (Steam, for whatever dumb reason, always used Internet Explorer) but it was working well enough to allow me to login to my account and start a download of Left 4 Dead.
No more than thirty minutes later, thank you French broadband, I was up and playing. And playing at a much higher resolution and with more fidelity than on my PC desktop back home. Apart from issues getting the Steam Community functionality working in-game, it worked flawlessly. I managed to get through, and survive, the new “Crash Course” campaign and, last night, get through two whole Versus matches. It’s an enjoyable addition, the perfect length for quick play without the time commitment that the original campaigns require. Why something of this scale wasn’t included from the start, I don’t know., but I’d like to think that Valve has taken user feedback into account for Left 4 Dead 2 and that it will have more of this kind of variety.
Now that I’m out of the console and PC-less gaming ghetto, to a minor degree, I now have one major holiday season release to look forward to: Left 4 Dead 2. It might not be guaranteed to work with Crossover, but considering it’s using the same Source engine I can’t imagine compatibility to break. I’m finally excited about an upcoming game release.
Then I noticed that the Steam Store was detecting my now France-based IP, despite my Canadian credit card, and it was offering me the idiotic European pricing for Left 4 Dead 2. 50% more expensive because my IP happens to be French? My enthusiasm has tapered.
Right from the start, Reiner Kniza’s “Knights of Charlemagne” is in my good graces. It does something that all apps in the App Store should do: it doesn’t mute my music on start. I have an iPod Touch and an iPod is primarily, above all else, a music player. If it’s on, chances are it’s playing music. Any app that mutes it without my consent makes too many suppositions about its place and role on the device it’s on. “Knights of Charlemagne” isn’t so presumptuous.
Much like “Poison,” the game is mechanically simple. There are ten estates, 5 uncoloured ones numbered 1 to 5 and five unnumbered representing five colours, in the middle of the playing field that two players vie for. Each player is dealt eight knight tokens, each one representing a colour and a number. Every turn, the active player has to place one of his knight tokens on a matching estate (either colour or number.) A new knight is then drawn and the game continues until the last one has been placed.
At the end, players score one point for every estate in which they have a presence, no matter how many the opponent has there too. The real scoring benefits come from every estate in which you have more knights than your opponent. Each coloured estate is worth five points and each numbered estate is worth its value. Additionally, the first player to control two estates, counting up, gets a crown worth five points. It’s an important game balancer that makes ignoring the least valuable estates a perilous choice.
It’s always dangerous because the AI is competent enough to punish you. The easiest difficulty, squire, which acts as a tutorial, is a pushover, but the other two, knight and king, locked until you beat the preceding level, provide a heady challenge. It’s not much, but the limited progression towards beating the king level adds to the replayability of Knights of Charlemagne. Although equally portable, in the best of ways, as Poison, Knights feels more rewarding because of this design. When you don’t have human opponents to play against, or even physical cards, these little additions are essential to keep a game engaging.
Best of all, the level of strategic thought and planning that Knights of Charlemagne requires is engrossing enough to be fun but simple enough to never be frustrating during brain addled morning commutes on the train. For $2, it’s a great little strategy game to have in your pocket.
There’s a pair of Rainer Knizia games currently available in the App Store. Both are based on already existing physical games, neither of which I’ve ever played, but seeing Knizia’s name attached to anything is enough to pique my interest. Add to that instant availability, portability, a low price, and remove the need for another physical human opponent and the purchase becomes a no-brainer. I bought both games, Poison (iTunes link) and Knights of Charlemagne (iTunes link), and have been playing them over the course of the last week. Some impressions follow.
Poison was made by Griptonite Games and at $2.99 is the more expensive of the two (as opposed to $1.99) if you consider three dollars “expensive.” It’s also the more polished overall since it’s produced by a full-on game studio (Griptonite is a part of Foundation 9, which also has the fantastic Backbone Entertainment) and not by one guy.
Poison’s premise is simple. Four to six players are dealt specially designed cards spanning three colours and covering the values 1,2,3,5,7. There’s also a green “wild” card that is valued at 4, but I’ll get to that later. During each turn you are required to play a card into one of the matching coloured cauldrons. If, after placement, the total value of the cards in that cauldron is greater than 13 that player claims all cards from it save for the one they just played. These cards are removed from play and counted, each is worth one point. The goal is to have the lowest score at game’s end, after the last card has been played.
Having the lowest score does not, however, mean having the fewest cards. There are two special conditions: first, the player with the most cards of a specific colour negates that score. In other words, if you have 8 blue cards and everyone else has 2 or 3, you score 0 while everyone else scores 2 and 3, respectively; secondly, each green “poison” card, which can be played into any coloured cauldron, counts as two points. You definitely do not want to be stuck with these.
That’s where the give and take of the game happens. Depending on your hand, you can either try to take nothing or try to take the most of one colour (maybe two if you’re ambitious, but this too is harder) since neither of these scores you points. But if you try to focus on one colour, and if anyone else was eyeing it, chances are the other players are going to poison that cauldron. Each turn you have to decide what high or low card to play and which to hold on to (you don’t want to get stuck in a situation where you have to take something you don’t want; always try to keep safe outs), and manage the risk and reward of the poison cards. It’s a fairly simple game but a very well balanced one and one that has a decent amount of strategic thought. In some ways, it’s reminiscent to Hearts.
The iPod version does a good job with the actual card playing, and the drag card to a cauldron interface feels fine, but it offers very little on top of that. The only available options are a mute button and the choice of how many computer controlled opponents to play against. That’s it. The AI is competent and puts up a good fight, but with only one difficulty level it does start to feel a bit same-y after a few games. The absence of any multiplayer, local or otherwise, further adds to the repetitious nature of Poison. I believe that games like this would benefit greatly from even a basic goal, aka. achievement, structure. The added incentives those provide might be minor but they do encourage a little more play variety.
Poison feels very temporary. It doesn’t keep a record of past games, or any play history, so it feels a great deal like a quick distraction. At $3 that’s not a problem, but you can’t help but wish that there was more to it.
Knights of Charlemagne pseudo-review to come, but it’s worth saying, slight spoiler, that it is the game that I return to more often.
The latest game worth checking out in the iTunes App store is Nonverbal’s “Monospace.” (iTunes link.) It’s a fairly simple puzzle game to understand, packed with 64 challenges, but one that can get devilishly annoying on the higher difficulties. There’s no music[1], no fancy effects, nothing but a good sized set of logic puzzles that can be solved at your own pace; there are no time limits. Add the intuitive controls and the $1.99 price tag and you have yourself a nice, little diversion that’s hard to resist. It sure beats hitting the daily’s Sudoku.
The “official” video demonstrates the mechanics of the game quite well:
What’s interesting about this is that it has the same kind of “project 3D items onto 2D space” mechanic that’s been used in a number of games recently: Nintendo’s Super Paper Mario, Kuju/Zoe Mode’s awesome (but mind-busting) Crush (play the Crush demake Squish), Sony’s Escher-inspired Echochrome, and the upcoming indie game Fez. Polytron’s Fez (trailer) is easily, indie or otherwise, one of my most anticipated games of this year.
It’s not enough to call it a trend — more of a synchronicity — but it’s something. These mechanics exist as if, after a decade and a half of 3D games, developers have just now started to realize that they’re still being displayed on 2D screens. Why not make use of that?
Though for some idiotic reason it still disables your music when you start the game. Thankfully, a double tap of the home button will resolve that but it’s still annoying.
I bought the chess app Deep Green for the iPod last week. It’s a very good, well designed chess application but I’m having a hard time saying anything beyond that: I’m not very good at chess.
As a child, I never played much of it. Sure, we had a chessboard but by the time I was old enough to grasp the intricacies of chess and graduate from “checkers”, I was already enraptured by Mario’s adventures in the Mushroom Kingdom. In my mind, chess was an archaic distraction from the days before the invention of TV games. The closest that I came to a chessboard, in those years, was Archon.
In my preteens I received one of those birthday videogames from someone that didn’t know better (we’ve all had those) that had me smiling in appreciation while, under my breath, I muttered “this isn’t Axelay, damnit”: The Chessmaster. I played it a handful of times, mostly lost, learned about castling, and never touched the cartridge again. The Super Nintendo controller wasn’t the ideal interface for chess. It was clunky and slow, though back then few people minded.
On the iPod, Deep Green’s input is perfect. You can either drag a piece, with a highlight showing where you are about to place it and if you can place it there, or press it to select it and then press on a tile to move it there. Any errors, quite possible on such a small screen, can be instantly fixed by hitting the ever present undo button. It mitigates the fat finger factor. The only problem that I’ve ran into is with the pieces on the far right of the board which sometimes don’t register my annoyed taps on the screen, but I don’t know if this is a problem with the app or my iPod.
My chess life, after The Chessmaster, consisted of pirated copies of Battle Chess, and its variants, and the built-in Chess.app in OSX many, many years later (last year, actually.) I think Battle Chess was the one game everyone with a floppy drive had and nobody played it for the actual chess. I remember being enthralled by the animations in that game and the chess was nothing more than a means to get those animations. The novelty wore thing since battle sequences that take longer than the actual decision making of chess are about as much fun as waiting for a bus in the winter. Once I managed to see all of them, including having the king take the queen, I was done with it.
Deep Green has none of that. It’s bare bones except where it counts: stability, usability, speed, and a good computer opponent. The stability is particularly welcome. My evenings at home in London over the summer, alone and internetless, were often accompanied by Chess.app. Unfortunately, when it wasn’t kicking my ass, it had a tendency to brainfreeze during the computer’s turn. The first time it happened I thought: “damn, my last move was so smart it completely blew the computer’s fucking mind;” the second time, I was a little less self-congratulatory: “damn, my last move must have been so stupid that it completely dumbfounded the computer;” by the third time it happened, I had given up.
With Deep Green, it’s nice to play a game of chess that doesn’t crash, has an intuitive interface, is speedy, and is portable. This makes it the best chess game I’ve ever had.
The only thing that I can’t comment on is the most important part of any chess software: the AI. I’m not qualified to judge it. I might know some chess tactics, but I don’t have any strategy to what I do. It shows: Deep Green beats me consistently on all but the very easiest of difficulties. How can I possibly comment on how well it plays when I’m so poor? (SEE: Edge Online: The Implications of the Skill Gap.)
I’m not very good at chess but it’s a very good chess app.
Without hesitation, I have to say that Mobigames’ “Edge” (iTunes link) is my favourite iPod/iPhone game yet. It: looks great, with a very minimalist aesthetic; sounds terrific[1]; has lots of original music; has good controls; is altogether well designed; has a novel mechanic and is perfectly suited to the device it’s on.
When I first heard of the game I thought it was one of those spatial puzzles, like new PSN game Cuboid, that’s been done many times over since the 80s. Turns out that, though it has some of those spatial elements, it’s really more of an isometric platformer like Snake Rattle ‘n Roll or, more obviously, Marble Madness, but without any of the imposed challenge that enemies (haven’t encountered any so far) or time-limits add.
It’s a forgiving game, with many (invisible) checkpoints and without any limited attempts. This is perfect for a mobile game on a platform with a still unfamiliar interface and it makes it instantly accessible. That’s not to say that there isn’t any challenge at all, parts of it can get tricky, but a lot of it is left as an optional aside for the user: collecting all the little cubes in a level, getting record speed runs, not falling off, and maximizing your rating. So while casually flipping through a level might be fun and (mostly) stress-free, trying to do so in the fastest time possible without error will frustrate you. But, like I said, that’s only there if you want it to be. Clearly, judging by the few things visible in my prototype yesterday, this is a design decision that hits all the right nerves with me.
There’s also a tricky balancing act that can be done with the cube when it’s precariously dangling from an edge. The longer it’s maintained — and it is skillful because it requires precise input — the more time bonuses are netted. Again, it’s an optional (as far as I’ve seen so far) aside but it adds a great deal to the game’s overall depth. Now that I’ve played it more I can see that it becomes a necessary mechanic in the second half of the game. It doesn’t change anything I’ve said since it can be used, optionally, in other places to access shortcuts and improve your time. It just means the game is a bit trickier than first impressions led to believe. Especially that one fucking part in level 20.
The music in Edge is surprisingly good too, but unlike some other games (SimCity) it doesn’t force it on you. “Edge” never forgets that the device it’s on was a music player before it became a game player: right after the initial boot, you are given the option of in-game sound or whatever tune you’re listening to at the moment. It’s a little thing, but it shows consideration for the user and the platform. I wish some of the “bigger” games (SimCity) treated it as fairly.
Every time Apple makes any announcement about the iPhone, whether it’s new functionality or sales numbers, the internet goes abuzz. Rumour mongers, Apple blogs and tech sites make a lot of noise. The mainstream press follows suit and everyone everywhere hears how great the iPhone is and how successful it is and how sexy it is. Apple does a good job of marketing itself in this regard.
Now, I’m not about to rag on the iPhone — I like it but I don’t own one, though I do have a an iPod Touch and I make use of the App Store — but I do see all these numbers and press releases from a slightly different perspective. It’s not from the point of view of a PC user, I made the switch and bought a MacBook last spring, but through my hardcore in-the-trenches gamer goggles. This perspective doesn’t in any way diminish what Apple has accomplished, but it does put Nintendo’s successes in a new light altogether.
The recent news is that Apple sold almost 7 million iPhones in the quarter, outselling the Blackberry, which puts them close to the ten million sold number for the year. There’s a lot of “told you so” coming from the Apple camp — Apple fanatics are adorably annoying when they get any shred of success — and it reminds me of the Nintendo DS (Nintendo fans are equally cute.) Obviously, the products are very different, focusing on entirely different demographics and users, but they are both portable consumer electronics so certain comparisons are apt.
While a quick perusal of mainstream news and business sites will reveal a number of stories about the success of the iPhone, the same search will show little about the Nintendo DS. Maybe Apple is the more mainstream story with broader consumer appeal. Maybe the fact fact that Nintendo is a Japanese company factors in a little bit. Maybe the iPhone is just plain sexier and the DS has that whole “gamer” stigma attached to it. Maybe it’s seen as a child’s toy and not an adult product. Whatever the case, unless you are a NeoGAF member or a seriously invested follower of the gaming industry, it’s hard to know what is going on with the DS. The mainstream news doesn’t notice that little Nintendo device. It should.
The iPhone has sold around 9 million units this year. In the same time, the DS has sold around 18 million and it still has the massive holiday season ahead of it as well as a new SKU in Japan (the DSi). It has quietly (relative to the buzz around the iPhone) sold nearly 90 million units in total. Is there any doubt left about the mainstream appeal of videogames?
It’s also worth mentioning that the PSP, (wrongly) considered a “failure”, has sold on par with the iPhone: around 9 million on the year.
if you are a Mac user, as I am now, looking at the TIGSource Demakes competition will probably bring one thought to your head: “wow, look at all those seemingly awesome games that I totally can’t play.” Most indie games are built on PCs for PCs. That’s where the majority of the market and the majority of the dev tools and majority of operating systems are. As a new Mac user, I miss the vast wilderness of low-key and big budget games that exists on Windows machines.
Soundless mountain screenshot
Eager to play something, I went through the competition and compiled a list of games playable on OS X. I likely missed a few, but I did go through the top 10 and most of the higher rates ones (10 votes or more.) Here’s the list. Maybe it’ll be useful to somebody.
Soundless Mountain
The winner of the competition, a NES-style “Silent Hill” demake, is OSX friendly (though it does trap keys in an annoying way.)
House Globe A 2D pixely “Homeworld” remake. With multiplayer. Awesome. I definitely need to play this more to get a better sense for it.
There are two browser-based games that are playable too: Rocket Belt Rawr (a “Jetback Brontosaurus” demake) and Thieving Raccoon (a game and watch version of “Sly Cooper.”) Additionally, a few games are playable with some dependencies: Offslaught ‘81 is Python based so it should be platform independent (but it’s not the most user friendly way to distribute a game) and Super 3D Portals 6 is playable in an Atari emulator (which is impressive in its own right.) A few other games have source code so you can try your hand at porting them, but that’s contrary to the whole “download and play” instant-action philosophy.
And that’s it. A pretty short list considering there were 69 rated entries in total. As a Mac gamer, you take what you can get.
On Thursday it was cold and rainy in London so, for the first time since my arrival, I took a day “off”. I was not wandering the streets nor riding the underground nor hitting a gallery nor adding to the blisters on my left foot. Instead, I stayed indoors reading, listening to British radio–it’s very British–and manually added the artworks to all the albums in my iTunes library. This is a tedious process. I’m up to artists starting with the letters “Bu”.
The reason for such busywork was, more or less, to beautify my iPod Touch. I’ve been using it extensively, on the Underground, in sunlit squares and in bed, and I was growing tired of the grey music note on white graphic that accompanies any and every song without album art assigned to it. It seemed like such a waste of prime screen real estate.
Never did I think that I would devote such labour to this tiny device. I never intended to own it, I was perfectly content with my tiny iPod Shuffle, but jumped on the chance to get one when I discovered that it came “free” with the MacBook Pro. Like any offer too good to be true there was a catch. I still paid for it but could redeem the price with a mail-in rebate. This was acceptable, I thought. Unfortunately, in the move before the bigger move to the UK, I misplaced the iPod box and its required UPC so I could not claim it. The Touch was no longer free.
When word that the firmware update to 2.0, to coincide with the release of the new iPhone, would cost $10 I scoffed. Can you imagine if Microsoft charged $10 for their updates to the XBox 360 dashboard? There’d be riots. Yet here was Apple charging for this most basic of features. It was charging for the privilege to be able to buy from the new App Store. The nerve.
But I’m considering it. I have grown to appreciate this device a great deal over the last week and a half. It goes with me everywhere. Apart from the music that it contains, which is good, all the other features have proven useful. I take notes. I have used the address book to make a phone call. I check my email and post to Twitter, whenever I can find open wifi in London (not so easy), and use Google Maps to find my way through some of the labyrinths in this city. It’s not like Toronto, a city strictly laid out in a grid like manner, where it’s impossible to get lost. Roads go off in all directions here and in my wanderings, on one day, by dumb luck I crossed through the same intersection three times (it was a SEVEN WAY intersection). I didn’t need the Maps then because I was just aimlessly wandering, but they have proven useful in other situations.
Knowing what’s in the App Store I think $10 is a small price to pay for the extra convenience therein. Besides, the app store has one more category of applications useful for the boring minutes spent on the Underground: games. That is the most compelling because, no matter how many thousands of kilometers away from home I find myself, I can’t escape my nerdy passions for digital interactive entertainment. It’s a passion that I was going to work on during this trip, trying to build an idea I’ve had for a while, but so far it’s all been for nought. I’ve been too busy being a flaneur on the streets of London.
About
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
