Alejo's Tenuki

A year has gone by since I got my Android phone. Now, it’s time to get a new one. Taking into account that we are on Christmas, I assumed there would be a lot of wonderful mobile phones on the market.

Poor me. For some unknown reason, noone has thought of making a single “complete” mobile phone.

-Samsung galaxy S: the strenght of, currently, the best processor (Hummingbird at 1Ghz + PowerVR SGX540 GPU) together with the best screen quality (super AMOLED at 800×480) and the longest-living battery make it look like a complete mobile. Unfortunatelly, it will only last till it slips through your hands and crashes into the floor. It’s plastic case and the screen fragility won’t make it last any longer. Altogether with the lack of LED flash place it far away from perfection.

-HTC Desire HD: while the processor is also working at 1 Ghz, it’s not focused on multimedia and gaming, so its performance when it comes to watching high-definition videos or playing games is just disappointing. On the other hand, it’s got a 8 Mpx camera with double LED flash. Moreover, if we check the device’s weight (about 45 gr. more than its competitors), this phone could also be used as an improvised weapon. An expensive one, indeed.

-Nexus S: though it was just released in the USA and I wouldn’t be able to get it for Christmas, this phone was produced by Samsung with exactly the same mistakes from their Galaxy S. Differences between this two are focused on connectivity (bluetooth, NFC…) and the camera. Having Samsung learnt from Galaxy S, they decided to place an even worse camera. Moreover, they’ve removed the microSD support. Congratulations.

-Sony Ericson Xperia 10: certainly a good choice. Though its processor is slighty behind HTC Desire HD and, obviously, way below Samsung’s cell, it’s one of the best balanced cell phones around. Same screen quality as the DHD. 8 Mpx camera with LED flash with 16 zooming capability. Weight remains inbetween while battery expectancy is that of Samsung’s. Were the design and the interface similar to HTC’s, I’d go for this one.

There are just two options left:

-Wait till other terminals come out. Dual-core mobile phones and Nvidia Tegra 2 will land onto the market during the first half of 2011.

-Give up and hold on to the “take-as-it-is” iphone.

A group of game developers have released a pack of 5 games, called Hummble Indie Bundle 2, for the reasonable  price of “whatever you want”. Though I’m still downloading them, a couple of friends have already told me about them. Though they may not be the best games ever published, they grant you a nice amount of fun on your spare time.

Collected money will be divided up into the rates you want among: developers, Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Child’s Play Charity. You can also give a tip to the Humble Bundle to support this kind of project.

The games are multiplatform and released as open-souce whenever they reach the million dollars (they’ve collected around 940.000$ by now). Here you can see their numbers by now:
Number of purchases:124,824
Average purchase: $7.56
Average Windows: $6.37 (about 55% of users)
Average Mac: $8.49 (23% aprox)
Average Linux: $13.69 (23% aprox)

Funnily enough, Linux users pay twice than Windows’

The last time I took part into a project like this was “World of Goo”: an extremely good game which I bought for me, my wife and my parents. Taking into account the amount of hours and fun I had, it was well worth the money.

Edit: I’ve already tested “Revenge of the Titans” and “Osmos” and they are worth a few dollars each. In fact, Osmos is both a greath game and screensaver!

For some reason, games played during the last months have proved me right: my fuseki is awful. The worst I’m at fuseki, the more I have to fight during middle game. The last 20 games have been all-in tsumegos, with the result of the game as a price. Though I’m able to remember the basic theory from “In the beginning” and another fuseki book, it’s looks like if I wasn’t able to apply this knowledge to the actual game.

The result of the game depends on our life-and-death reading ability, nothing else. While I seem to consistently beat 7k, I suffer from mind-blowing defeats against 5k players… my fighting skills may be around 6k KGS.

Here you have a couple of samples of my games:

While yose moves are usually small and mainly consist on winning a few points while keeping sente, sometimes we happen to find big moves during the latest phase of the game. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s because of a shortenning of liberties or due to the presence of some aji-loaded stones.

In this case we’ll discuss the importance of big yose moves such as the one played a couple of weeks ago on KGS, between joehung (7dan, playing as white) and Mr12345678 (6dan, black).

At first glance, we can see there are several yose moves to be played on boths sides in sente. But there is a gote move for white which, as painful as it seems, is the unique path to avoid a 20 point loss. Try and make your guess before continuing to the next paragraph.

Though white chances of playing the big point vanished when he played around the upper-right corner and I’m unable to find a path to defend this formation in sente, black’s next move is so harmful it just shouldn’t be allowed in yose. Moreover, this 20 points loss in yose are extremely -if not impossible- hard to recover.

Black’s move was at A11. It doesn’t matter how you answer to this simple hane on the lowest line, white will lose about 20 points. Just in case you want to try it, I’ve provided a few variations on the tsumego below. Please, comment on it if you find any mistake.

Below this line you’ll see a comparison of white’s territory after 6 moves and the result by the end of the game. Huge, isn’t it?

Now, how big should the difference be in order to resign? If we take into account that big yose moves exist, resigning on the early stages of the game shouldn’t be considered. On the other hand, wishful thinking is regarded as a kyuish mistake…

The situation below is extracted from a game I had on KGS a couple of weeks ago, too. Mindless filling the gaps and liberty shortening might be very dangerous during the endgame. In this case we can see a corner group being severelly threatenned due to the lack of external liberties. And thus, ending up with just 1 point in territory. The final balance from this situation was black losing 7 points.

As you can see, we had already filled all the external liberties, which may be worth 1 point each. Playing a 7 points move in this phase of the game may mean the difference between defeat and victory if the game is very close, since all the other big and small points should have already been played.

Wii-berration: game adapted for Wii in a way that turns enjoyable classic games into a morally painful experience

Since Wii hype was derived from its motion-based controllers, some games have been modified in order to be able to use Wii’s main virtue. During the last months I’ve tried some Wii versions of classical videogames… with fustrating results, so Wii’s main virtue is actually stopping me from having fun with certain games. Actually, it’s very annoying to find some games so changed, their fun has totally vanished.

Pro Evolution Soccer (aka PES):  having enjoyed countless hours of this game on both Playstation and Playstation 2, I can’t say I have played it more than once on my Wii. Since this was not the first Wii-berration I found, I was worried about it even before loading it on my console. Poor me, I was only worried about the lack of buttons, but a wiimote has 7 buttons plus 2 more on the Nunchuck, while Playstation had 10 buttons. Unfortunately, you can’t use Wii’s 8 buttons with just 2 hands, so it’s reduced to 4-5 with 2 directional crosses. In the end, I thought that an acceptable adaptation was possible. However, if you use these buttons you wouldn’t be using Wii’s superb motion engine
Solution: you need to point at the screen where you want to pass. You can see a sample below… but don’t get it wrong, these controls are awful.
Conclusion: this game can’t be called PES any more. It doesn’t deserve it.

Virtua Tennis 2009: This is my second favourite Wii-berration. In this case, I’m using Virtua  Tennis just for its saga history and the playability it had (notice I said HAD) as an arcade simulator of tennis; but this explanation could be applied to any other racket sport in Wii, starting from the very beginning with Wii sports.
Just in case you’re not familiar with tennis video games on other consoles I’ll give you a few hints: you move your character with the directional pad, then press a button for striking and, while striking, direct your shoot with your directional pad. Easy as pie. On the Wii, you move your character with the directional pad, move your arm as if you were striking and, according to “when” you moved, the ball will go to one direction or the other. Though it’s intended to give users a enjoyable experience, traditional gamers will find this a paradigm of Wii-berration and tennis players will find it absurdly unrealistic. If we take Wii moves into reality, only parallel shots would actually cross the net.

Bust-a-move (aka puzzle bubble): Oh, my God!!! I could never imagine they could screw up this game too. If you don’t know Bust-a-move, it’s a game similar to tetris. You only need a directional pad and two buttons, nothing else. And yet, they screwed it up. They did actually broke this game so much they made me not want to play one of my top games from my late childhood.
Firstly, control is based on pointing the screen with the Wiimote rather than the directional pad. Just with this slight modification I’d say the game is broken, it doesn’t depend on your calculations or ability but on your speed on pointing. Second, but not least, the traditional mode has been turned into a single cooperative screen. Though my English is far from good, I assumed Versus as a synonim from “against”, but it doesn’t work like that in this case.

And now, a sample of the formula which granted bust-a-move a place among the big puzzle games from history… back from SNES time

A few days ago I came across this site while checking Lifein19x19. The purpose of this site is to help Go players to find each other on real life rather than on virtual servers.

Though registering only takes one minute, I’d say it’s usefulness relies on the amount of players on your area. In my case, since there isn’t any other player within 100km, it’s a bit useless. However, if I hadn’t registered and someone on my neighbourhood joined the site, he wouldn’t be aware of my presence.

The more users joining the site, the more useful it’ll become. There are about 1700 users from around the world, but you may be lucky if you live in certain cities… specially in cities with Go clubs

On the other hand, Go clubs may find in this site a nice management tool, but I still have to experience it.