Tiny Pirate

The Second Life games wiki I host is currently down. I’m going to have to repair it some how and I’m not sure how long that will take. I’ll try and get it back up soon. Meanwhile, does Linden Labs want to take it over? Wikis suit Second Life perfectly, and slotting in the games one shouldn’t be too hard and all sorts of clever mapping to launch people straight into Second Life. Hmm, good ideas huh?

Update: The wiki remains down, despite my efforts to update it. I’ll give it another go, but I don’t think I have much chance. If you are good at these sorts of things, please let me know and I’ll give you a shot at fixing it! The records are still there, just the config and setup side of things is broke. If I can’t get it fixed it will simply have to stay down.

Not sure I have many active readers since I no longer post much about Second Life, but regardless, as you will see, I’ve updated hte blog somewhat and reinstated comments (with new spam-protection features!). Enjoy, I should be posting more often now.

Here in New Zealand we like to think of ourselves as a small, nimble, technical country, however, when it comes to eCommerce we’re rubbish! Take a look at this newspaper comment about Air New Zealand simply refusing to support Mac users who want to book online. You heard me, if you use a Macintosh you can not do online bookings with Air New Zealand. This is supposedly an internationally recognised top-quality airline who are pretty much giving the finger to some of their customer base. What makes it worse is if you book over the phone with them you are charged an extra unwaivable $15!

Further examples abound in the terrible website design that supposedly modern companies employ. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been putting a bit of time into PoxNora, a fun collectible, turn-based, tactical fantasy game for the PC. Right now it’s in open beta (go sign up and play!) and the small team behind it have done a fantastic job.

The core idea behind it is the player buys booster packs of ‘runes’ (like cards in Magic: The Gathering) and then by selecting twenty of these builds a deck to play against other people with. The game is played out on a small battlefield where your creature runes are moved around and spell runes are cast, effecting play.

‘Nora’, the power to cast your runes, is gathered at the start of each turn from your home ‘shrine’ and also from wild ‘nora fonts’ the players can capture. The battles usually last around 30 minutes and end up a lot of fun. Once the battle is over (won by destroying the enemy’s shrine), your creature runes get experience points to spend to upgrade stats and abilities.

While the game is in beta you can sign up and play with the basic free deck as well as spend $50 worth of credit on game boosters. From my play it would seem that you would need to spend around $40 to $50 when the game goes live (August) in order to have a competitive deck. That being said, the game will also allow you to trade runes, so you could spend less and trade to the sort of deck you want.

I encourage everyone to go have a look. It’s web and Java-based and very straight forward. Have a look at their Getting Started information and take it from there. Lets support independent developers working on neat games.

It’s about time I blog some more. And update my flickr pictures too for that matter. Anyway, I think I’ll keep this baby updated a bit more, however I won’t be covering Second Life much. There’s one reason why, and that is that I just don’t play much any more! I find I tend to be a bit obsessive with SL, and that obsession manifests as a desire to be a fantastic coder, artist and builder in game, something I can’t hope to achieve. The result is my crappy builds and art tend to annoy me more than excite, especially when I know there are other fantastic. I end up hounding other people to do ‘my’ work and that is no good for anyone!

I plan on dropping in regularly, but for the good of everyone, I should keep my fingers out of that particular pie. So what will I blog about now? Mostly games I’m playing now, tech ideas and other bits and pieces I feel like discussing. Lets hope it’s interesting.