Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Beta June 25
I’ve followed this followed this game from the start. I was a hardcore Street Fighter fan back in the days when there were lines-ups around the Street Fighter II arcade machines, and I have owned various version of this game on earlier consoles like the Super Nintendo. Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (Wow that’s a mouthful) will be released in beta if you buy Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3 on Xbox Live arcade for the 360. I have tried Commando 3 and it’s really not my kind of game, but I think I may have to bite the bullet and buy it just so I can play the Beta of Street Fighter, I’m that much of a Street Fighter geek.
Every single frame of animation has been redone in this game, and it aims to tweak game play and add a few new moves while still staying true to the original. The game will even run in wide screen. Capcom has also mentioned the possibility of expansions in the future. The original Xbox live file size restrictions have also been overcome.
Now for the bad news, the controllers. For some horribly bizarre and sadistic reason you cannot use a high end controller on the 360. If you have a 500 dollar DDR mat or a 200 dollar arcade joystick, it’s pretty much useless on the 360 unless you want to do some serious modding that will require an extra 360 pad. This really sucks, and it’s always been a huge beef of players on the 360, why do they even use a USB plug? Last time I checked the U stood for Universal.
Anyway, enough of my rant, I will still give in and buy this game because I can taste it. Check our the screenshots on IGN and there are a few game play videos on Gametrailers.
Check out my last article on Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix
Rogers iPhone data plan
There’s a lot of buzz in the blog sphere today about a leaked Rogers iPhone data plan. Prices are rumoured to be about 30 dollars a month for the data plan which will average 90 dollars once you add a voice plan. Top that with a 3 year lock in. Just think, the iPhone 5 will probably be out by the time your Rogers contract is up.
I don’t think I’ll be picking one up, but who knows, it might be hard to resist. I know Android phones are just around the corner, but they probably won’t have a much better data plan either if you live in Canada. A sweet spot for me would be around 60 dollars for voice and unlimited data, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. The only time I would use the data plan is during travel to and from work, so it’s hard to justify a lot of money on it, especially considering that in downtown Toronto their are lots of free wireless hubs.
WirelessNorth has more details, and has calculated that if these data rates are true it will cost around $3440 over the life of the contract.
Firefox Launch Party photos
Here are some photos of last nights Toronto Firefox Launch Party, thanks to Lee for bringing a camera, the rest of us forgot to bring one!
Toronto Firefox Launch Party
I just got back from the Mozilla Firefox launch party in Toronto and I must say it was way cooler than I thought it would be. Geeks descended from all over Toronto. We got free beer, free tshirts, free food, free desserts and all kinds of free FireFox items. The whole night was really fun and I met a lot of really cool people.
Myself and two of my co-workers showed up a little after 6pm and spent the night hanging out with fellow geeks. I got to ask lots of questions about Mozilla and Firefox. I didn’t even know they had an office in Toronto before tonight. They expected 40 people to show up to the party and got over 120. The computers and large LCD screen had real time stats of the downloads happening in several countries. At one point it was over 5000 firefox downloads per minute. At the time of this writing Asia had still not woken up for Firefox download day and I’m sure it’s well over 3 million downloads at the time of this post. The Mozilla IRC channel was very active too, and I think their were web cams covering the event, because the chat seemed to be talking about us.
I also couldn’t help but think of how great a marketing strategy this and other parties are. You get 140 uber geeks together, give them some food and drinks and then have them all go home and talk about Firefox on their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. This is viral marketing at its best.
I hope to have some pictures of the party up soon, but I didn’t have a camera on me. Luckily, a friend of mine did! So I should have some soon. Oh, and if you haven’t downloaded Firefox 3 yet, what are you waiting for?
A great new toy – The Blade CX helicopter!
This weekend I bought myself a new toy with the help of some early birthday money from family, an RC helicopter. Although I had done a lot of research into helicopters over the past year, the only one I had ever flown was a cheap 20 dollar Walmart heli which I talked about last year.
Firefox Download day is June 17th, mark your calendar
Download Day 2008 is a really cool viral marketing campaign on the Spread Firefox website. You can see the current stats on the Download Day 2008 website. Total pledges at the time of this posting were 1,243,370. You can also see how many pledges each country has on the world map. The official download day for Firefox 3 is Tuesday June 17th.
The goal is to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in 24 hours. So pledge now and download it on Monday and “Enjoy a Better Web”. Oh, and if you really want to geek out, don’t forget about the Firefox parties all over the world, you can find one on mozillaparty.com.
Apple iPhone, more news than actual interest?
Update June 18th: It looks like the iPhone search volume has completely spiked, surpassing original spikes, but I still think there’s a lot of saturation in the blog sphere. I will do a follow up after the phone is released.
Today I have been playing around with Google Trends and the BlogPulse tools. While trending some of the newest smartphones out there I noticed something odd with the iPhone data. It seems that last week when the new iPhone was announced there was actually a far larger spike in iPhone news than actual interest.
Firefox – some website images do not load
I’ve had this strange Firefox bug happen on only a few occasions. I’ll be surfing the web when out of the blue some sites will not load images. Restarting the browser doesn’t seem to correct the problem either.
A quick fix for this this is to go to:
Tools / Options
Select the Advanced tab, then below that select the Network tab.
Under Cache click Clear Now.
This seems to fix the issue.
Geeks In Training officially launched
A friend of mine has launched his long anticipated Geeks In Training website. It is intended to fill a niche in computer training for, as he says “the not-too-puzzled”. It strives to bring context to many of today’s technology challenges, the when and why you should be using a technology. It is not intended to be a bleeding edge site, nor is it for total beginners, it’s something in between for the every day geek, and a real geek is always in training. It will also help people who have started their training, but wish to take that final plunge into full Geekdom.
Eventually there will be more writers, and I hope to contribute in the near future. With so many technologies merging together we are being bombarded at every level. You may be an expert in one area, but you may need to bridge the gap to another that you are less familiar with, this is where Geeks In Training comes in. I really look forward to watching this site grow as it is still in the early stages of what will soon be something much bigger. I recommend reading the Welcome to Geeks In Training article for a more indepth overview of what the site is all about.
SEO tips for Google image searching
I have been trying to find ways of increasing traffic to my site lately and part of that includes SEO. Ever since I changed my domain name, traffic has dropped off the map and Google’s crawl rate is abysmal. I wrote about this in Where did all my Google traffic go?. That said, one article keeps pulling in traffic and at first I didn’t know why. At the time of this writing my most popular post is my Eternal Sonta Review. Every now and then I give a mini review to games I really like, but it’s a small part of my blog, and rarely generates much traffic, so the Eternal Sonata review really shouldn’t account for so much traffic, so why does it?
