Why the games of tomorrow suck, and why we should stick to the classics

Let’s face it – the future sucks. Being so obese that you can’t lift your fat ass off your seat will be so commonly accepted. Robots will be left to do the dirty work, and that isn’t cool because, unlike the sweatshop workers of today, they don’t look sad and you can’t laugh at them. Robots are programmed to be happy while they do menial tasks, which sucks.

The future of gaming is even more bleak. Ever since Nintendo attempted to touch the more unfortunate side of the gaming society (aka old people), with their devices of doom called the Nintendo Wii, everyone, even non-gaming companies, have tried to follow suit to make digital life better for people over 40. Apple, for instance, created the iPhone and the iPad because they knew old people would go all sorts of crazy with keypad buttons, and that they would love a device that resembles their fantasies of the future during the 60’s.

Sony and Microsoft have tried to appeal to the much older community too, because apparently Nintendo has made a lot of money selling gaming consoles with remotes that were accidentally thrown into flat screen TVs, smashing them in the process, because they thought you have to throw the controller forwards when you’re playing Wii Bowling. They wanted to produce the same effect of making you look stupid while you’re playing (which has been the standard for the whole gaming era), sans the weird looking controllers we have been with since the beginning.

Enter the Kinect and the Move. Created by Microsoft and Sony respectively, these accessories will be available shortly to the Xbox 360 and the PS3. Both have been featured in the recent E3 2010, where nerds and gaming enthusiasts have gathered to watch the impending horror of the death of the gaming industry before their very eyes, in a fancy and exciting convention.

Both of these motion controllers, which feature state of the art sensors (I won’t go into any details here, go Google for it yourself) that somehow intelligently perceives your motion in front of it. This allows games like dancing to be more “dance-like” without the use of a heavy metal pad with four direction buttons on it. Boxing and fighting games wouldn’t need a badly designed glove-like accessory or a platform with infrared sensors that does the contrary to feel realistic. Driving is probably the worse – instead of using an already awkward-to-use steering wheel and pedals, you now just have to raise your hands in the air, grip and imaginary steering wheel, and you’re good to go. It’s like reliving what you were doing in your childhood again.

There’s also new ways of manipulating this new technology, like using it for simulation games like having a pet tiger in a jungle. With these new toys you can actually own a virtual pet tiger that you can feed, pet, and punch in the face by just letting your hands do the action in front of the motion sensors. Of course, all this does is just doom children when they realize that tigers don’t like being fed, pet, or punched in the face when they grow up as adults.

If there’s such thing as too much technology, it’s very apparent for the coming years of the gaming industry. This makes me want to throw away all my new games away and just start playing games that were made prior to 2008. Those were all better than most, if not all the new games we have now.

Why I absolutely hate Yahoo (and why I am still using it)

WARNING: Rant inbound. If you don’t like listening to a person bitch about what he hates, flee. Flee now.

These days, Yahoo is known as the international version of AOL. It’s clunky, cheesy, and the only Americans who seem to be using it at the moment are those who believe chain spam mail about a creepy girl appearing at your closet tonight or Bill Gates eating your hard drive if you don’t send an email to everyone in your contact list within eight minutes.

I absolutely hate Yahoo. Really I do. The search engine is just another crappy competitor of Google, and has failed miserably doing so. Bing is ten times better than Yahoo search, and we all know Google is ten times better than Bing. Yahoo search is clunky, full of ads, too purple, too family oriented, and too…friendly. It does not appeal to power users like me.

What I hate most about Yahoo is their mail service. Yahoo mail is one of the most crappiest mail services I have ever seen. It is like the greatest shitty e-mail service of all that you’ll think God himself crapped out Yahoo mail to remind people of retarded people sending chain mail to each other. The interface is just plain awful – very, very little space for people like me who use 4:3 screens, and there’s too much things going on screen – worthless ads about some untalented old “singer” named Kelly Clarkson, deals on car air filters, and other flash ads that were actually made in 2003 but Yahoo was too busy annoying the shit out of its users so they left it there on purpose. The interface is also very, very slow. The massive orgy of Javascript and Flash in the interface slows down any computer with a browser to a crawl. That’s why I switched to Mail Classic, in order to not have my computer molested with unnecessary JS.

But yet I’m still using Yahoo despite my opinions of it being the shittiest thing on the Internet since Geocities (funny thing to know, they own Geocities too). Why? Because of the same reason why I’m still on Facebook despite me hating it also – everybody’s  on it.

My professors use Yahoo Groups to upload lecture notes, worksheets, etc., so not having a Yahoo account to access this groups would be a bad idea. And it appears 98.3% of the Philippine population uses Yahoo as their Instant Messaging client, so I still maintain a YM account, though I don’t use Yahoo’s crappy IM messaging client, I use a much more stable and lighter Miranda IM.

Yahoo is also where I got my first email address. That email address is what I still use today, as I have since 2004. I signed up for Hotmail shortly after that, but I realized Hotmail is somehow shittier than Yahoo during that time, so I quit and let it rot under a million spam mails every month.

Thinking of switching to Wordpress

When you ask a web designer, a professional blogger, or a tech geek about a good blogging platform, almost all the time, their answers would be Wordpress. And it’s true, most of it anyway. Wordpress allows great flexibility, its engine is open-source and can be loaded up into your server (some popular websites such as the Cheeseburger Network uses Wordpress technology), if you feel hosting on Wordpress.com is a little sleazy.

I’m thinking of making that switch. As a amateur graphic designer and tech enthusiast I would definitely enjoy the flexibility of Wordpress. However, there are some things in Blogger that I cannot live without, like integration into my Google account. I don’t use any of those “account and password” management softwares, for I don’t trust them at all with my data. So having multiple accounts for e-mail and blogging would be hard to manage. I wouldn’t want that.

Next, Blogger is easy to set up, and even though it does not allow you as much flexibility as Wordpress, you can still make your own Javascript widgets if you would prefer so. Also, Blogger still has a pretty good user database, despite Wordpress overshadowing it. It’s not like people don’t like Blogger; Blogger is in fact, one of the most preferred platform for people when it comes to personal blogs. It’s only when people plan to make professional blogs that they use Wordpress and/or the Wordpress engine.

There are also other blogging platforms available other than Wordpress and Blogger, like Tumblr and LiveJournal. However, I don’t prefer Tumblr and LiveJournal because I don’t want sad people posting unnecessary comments on my posts just because I expressed disgust for Twilight or a lesbian named Justin Bieber or something. I like to keep things civilized.

So there you go. Hopefully I won’t get an aneurysm trying to decide whether to import my blog to Wordpress or not. Google is doing a good job maintaining Blogger, and as long as they keep it up, I’m staying there.