Quake Live

I almost really enjoyed Fallen Empire Legions, but not quite enough to play it for a length of time. It was a good Tribes knockoff, and it was fun enough, but it lacked whatever Tribes had back in the day. So, I’ve given the concept of browser-based “instant” games a pass. Honestly none of them are that terribly “instant”, you always have to wait forever for the game to download before you can play, that’s just the nature of the technology. But at least it makes the developers pay attention to file size and limit what the game contains so that it gets to the user in a reasonable download time. (I’ve been waiting about 30 minutes so far.) 

I am definitely behind the idea of quick games that don’t cost $60. That’s why Quake Live is exciting.

OK, just played for about a half hour. It’s exactly like Quake. Exactly. It’s Quake. Quake was fun. I guess it still is fun. I’ll probably play a little more.

Recommended: Alert Thingy

Just found Alert Thingy today. It’s surprisingly good. It shows status updates from twitter and facebook, and a few other common social apps. It also lets you post status updates to these services. It runs on Adobe AIR, so it is definitely a memory black hole just like every other app built in AIR. But it feels responsive and well put together in a way that almost all other AIR apps are not. It looks a lot like a native OSX app, which is really nice. One complaint is that it comes with the opacity turned down to 80% for some reason. I thought this effect was cool a few years ago, but now I have no need for apps to be anything less than fully opaque.

Bauhaus chess set

I love this chess set. The pieces are indicative of the moves you can do with them. Though they are highly simplified, they are still recognizable as chess pieces. Looks like it was designed by Josef Hartwig http://www.fawnandforest.com/products/317-naef-bauhaus-chess-set