I grabbed my version within minutes of Rovio tweeting its official release, and before the release website got hit by the masses and ground to a halt.

Angry Birds is currently free and is supported by ads, however, the version I got from getjar.com, which had a 24hour release exclusive, doesn’t have any ads! Interesting is that the market doesn’t recognise the app as being installed, so potentially the getjar version is a little different and doesn’t have ads.

And Rovio is promising Angry Bird plushies (with potentially ~20 models) out before Christmas! Who wants to do a mass order with me to save on shipping? Sounds like a great xmas present!

See you guys in a few worlds time!

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What I do want is an easy way to manage and buy my music across several devices. My desktop and mobile at a minimum. It doesn’t sound so hard. Valve has done exactly that for games. A non-platform specific way to manage your games from any computer in the world.

But where is the music equivalent? And more specifically, where is it for Australia?

Music companies, much like movie and tv, are still tied down with antiquated country and region-specific licensing restrictions.  That’s why when Microsoft recently announced its updated Zune line, Australia missed out on being able to purchase music on Zune. Why? Probably a licensing restriction from the record companies.

So my options to buy music is to manually purchase and organise it from somewhere like Amazon. How non-Web2.0, and how non-cloud based. Bring on cloud computing! I’ll buy a song, and can download it when and where I want, without restrictions like how many times I can download it, or I can only play it on 2 devices or something silly. And I’ll never again run into the problem of: “I want to listen to that song, but the CD is in a different city…” or “I’ve formatted my computer 5 times (I format my computer regularly, makes it run faster) so can’t download that song again”

But I don’t follow the Amazon road at the moment, as I perceive it as messy and troublesome. It’s a little bit better than buying CDs, but still a far cry from my ideal online solution.

I’ll stick to watching and listening to the music I want to, on Youtube. If the record companies want my money, they’ll have to get their act together and get their licensing web2.0-fied.

How do you organise your music collection?

Posted from my HD2 using WordPress for Android

Less than 50 downloads in the market so far. Downloading now!

Let’s hope it works properly!!! Will do a proper review later =)

< Portal: Prelude Official Trailer from NykO18 on Vimeo. >

Its story revolves around the pre-GlaDOS epoch, even before she was plugged in. At this time, test subjects were monitored by real Aperture Science employees, whose work was tedious, lengthy and repetitive. This is why they decided to build a great artificial intelligence that could both replace them in these difficult tasks, and also take responsibility for many other tasks within the complex and compete with Black Mesa’s superiority. All employees of the Aperture Science complex are now eagerly awaiting GlaDOS. Maybe even a little too eagerly…

This game is totally free and set to be released somewhere around the end of september 2008. It offers a bit more gameplay hours than the original Portal, with 8 chapters, 48 challenges, 6 advanced maps, a brand new storyline and more than 400 lines of speech with english and french subtitles.
-http://www.portalprelude.com/

Portal. And the lack of cake.

If you haven’t heard of Portal, I seriously feel for you. You have led a seriously deprived life. It is a fun, interactive game that makes you think to solve puzzles, while led along by GlaDOS.

Upon hearing of this prequel, my excitement knew no bounds! More fun, more games, and more hours spent in Aperture Science Labs. The game is set to be released soon-ish, and it is a complete game, not just a map-pack, so I have high hopes for it. I would actually even pay money for such a game (if it’s as good as it sounds). Stay tuned for a review once it comes out!

I bet the developer gets hired by Valve.

The games are simply awesome. The games aren’t that long, but they definitely are a LOT of fun. I’ve already finished Portal and Episode 2, which are both single player games. Team Fortress 2 is multiplayer, and unfortunately my connection is just too poor for me to be able to play the game properly. It’ll have to wait till I get back to Aussieland.

I’ll do a more indepth review of the games later. For now, pop over to my new forum which I’ve been putting a lot of effort into: The Baka-Forums. It’s still a work in progress, but I’m aiming to make it even better =)

Enjoy~

If you want to pre-order the box, do it now, as you’ll be able to play the TF2 beta when it comes out. Visit www.steampowered.com and sign it up to your steam account.

What is even better, is that because I already have the original HL2 and Ep 1, I can give these games away once the box is released. I’m thinking some sort of competition is in order, or some sort of giveaway. Regardless, this is some of the best news.

What are you waiting for? Go out and pre-order it!!!

But I had some free time, so i thought, I might as well give the demo a whirl. Best. Decision. Ever. All those reviews? They were right. The game is simply SO much fun. The graphics are great, the game play is fun, controls are easy to use once you get used to it. We have a winner here.

What is even better is that the game is provided over steam. Now, I love steam. I think having a central control system for the games is the best idea ever. I hate logging into BF2 only to find there was a patch released. Then having to download the 500Mb patch. With steam, it’s always running, so will automatically update the game. So when I want to play, the latest patches have already been applied.

Which isn’t to say that the game/steam is perfect. If you want to play the game, you need to update your graphics drivers to a special release by ATi/nVidia. Then there is the fact that it needs administrator privileges to play on Vista. Once you get past all the itty, bitty annoyances, the game is simply just fun to play.

I seriously recommend this game if you love FPS. And even if you don’t.

I leave you now to go play BF2 on my shiny rig. Did I mention it had 4Gb of DDR2-667 and a 8800GTX? keke