How I Got My Western Digital TV Live to Work with Mac OS X Lion
I recently purchased a WD TV Live so that I could watch .MP4 and .MKV files on my HD TV. Before, I was using my Xbox360 and using Connect360 to stream videos to my TV from my Apple MacBook Pro and while this worked most of the time, it didn’t work all of the time and I was unable to play HD files like .MP4 or .MKV.
When I finally got tired of watching low quality videos on my big screen TV, I did some research. I found the WD TV Live which would allow me to play HD files and watch Netflix on my TV. I found it on Amazon for about $80 and bought it.
I was excited to use it when it first arrived at my doorstep, but the excitement didn’t last long. I set it all up, but had no luck when it came to finding videos (or talking to my MacBook Pro at all). After a few Google searches, I found out that the WD TV Live has problems with Macs that are running OS X Lion (currently the latest version of the Mac operating system).
I tried cursing at my screen, but that didn’t help. I kept looking for a solution and realized that I could use my Mac as a media server using a program named MediaLink (made by Nullriver Software, the same folks that make Connect360).
Here’s how to get setup:
- - Download MediaLink from Nullriver’s website. It’s $20, but there’s a trial available.
- - Once it’s installed, select the folders you wish to share with your Mac
- - Click the Start button if MediaLink is not already running
- - Now on your TV, start your WD TV Live and click on the videos tab
- - Select the Media Servers source
- - Select your Mac
- - Done! You should be up and running with your WD TV Live
My WD TV Live has been working perfectly since I did this. I wouldn’t hold my breath for Apple or Western Digital to solve this issue, MediaLink was well worth the $20.
Voxatron – A Humble Beta Good Time
Voxatron is a voxel-based arcade style shooter feature a lot of voxel personality and a pretty hefty challenge. Now, voxel technology is nothing new, but it’s not something I see used to often. In Voxatron, they go the max and use it for absolutely everything. But this is what really gives Voxatron its personality so I’m quite ok with that.
If you don’t know, Voxels are essentially the pixels of 3D. They are individual cubes that can make up some object. In Voxatron, everything is made out of voxels! On top of that, everything in every environment can also be destroyed and you can see the developers have really taken advantage of this. You’ll find yourself destroying trees when you walk buy just to watch the voxels fall but also using this in battle to knock things onto enemies or cause enemies to knock things down to clear a path.
Voxaltron plays like a twin-stick shooter, though much more “old school” arcadey feeling than say Geometry Wars or Everyday Shooter. The game is comprised of room to room style gameplay in which you must get to the exit by surviving waves of enemies and often grabbing a key. This is easier said than done. Voxatron will pile on the enemies and not let up on the waves; which is where the challenge of Voxatron lies.
There’s nothing particularly difficult about Voxatron, but the game will not let up on you. Just when you think you’re surviving the final wave, yet another will appear with a handful of even more powerful enemies. And no room gets easier than the one before, in fact, each one gets progressively harder including several boss fights spread throughout.
Probably the coolest thing about this game though is the voxels themselves. It gives everything that cool, blocky, retro look and when things get destroyed or bombs go off there are voxels flying everywhere. Since the environments are also destructible their constantly getting dings taken out of them from your gun or enemies and changing around too. It gives the simple mechanics the extra eye candy they need to feel rewarding.
Voxatron provides a good balance though. While it’s tough, it’s definitely passible with some diligence and practice. And when you get done with the adventure mode, there is an arcade mode that just challenges you with endless waves and a section to view user created levels (and of course a level builder of it’s own). So even though this game isn’t complete, there’s no shortage of things to do while we wait for more developer made content to be added.
I’m looking forward to seeing what comes in Voxatron’s future developments. I’d like to see more adventure mode, some different arcade challenges, further fine-tuned controls and of course some achievements! Bottom line, if your’e into arcade style shooters, Voxatron will be a fine addition to your collection.
If you hurry, you can get Voxatron as part of the Humble Voxatron Debut!
“American Gods” Becomes a Mortal Reality
Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods, is intended to hit the screens by 2013. Tom Hanks’ production company, Playtones Production, is tentatively scheduled to produce six seasons, to be aired on HBO. It has been rumored that there will be a $40 million budget per season, with ten to twelve episodes covering each season.
The accounts of American Gods function in the construct of the real world, while introducing elements of fantasy and exploration. The main character, Shadow, travels through the North American mid-west while coming to grips with trickery, exploitation and treachery from gods of old and gods of new. A strong base of Norse mythology is referenced throughout the telling of the tale, but Gaiman also inducts contemporary concepts into forming his own god-like characters. Gaiman thoughtfully toys with human/god interaction, and its consequences, throughout the text.
Reoccurring characters is a theme that Gaiman utilizes throughout his work, so it will be interesting to see a live interpretation of the personalities that fans have come to know so well.
Gaimans’s concepts, and execution of thought, are of fantastical proportions. His descriptions are unbelievably vivid and phenomenal, so it is likely that the filmic adaptation will hold a reliance on CGI. It is expected that Gaimain’s brilliance will influence the production of the show, which will allow fans to rest easily during the course of its production. Though it has been rumored that Gaiman anticipates for the TV Series to differ from the original novel, high hopes are held for the fantasy series.
As devout fans will tell you: anything Neil Gaiman touches turns to gold.
HBO has already impressed viewers with the most recent series adaptation to George R.R. Martin’s novel, A Game of Thrones. Not to mention, with the momentous popularity of the supernatural series, True Blood, the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre is growing quickly. It is likely that this will be the trend of the future.
Dead and Divine: Continually Definining Divinity
Dead and Divine’s junior album, Antimacy, is yet another indicator of their irrefutable talent. As their third full length release, Antimacy, proves that the Canadian Metal-Rock band can continue to work within their genre. The band does not reinvent their image from album to album, rather, they tastefully mature the aggressiveness and catchiness of their sound. On this release, it is vocalist, Matt Tobin, who steals the show. Lyrically speaking, Antimacy is dark, but extremely contemplative and well written. The screams are mean and consistent, but the vocal patterns found within the choruses are spot on. Steady, strong and unexpected describe the development of the clean vocal tracks.
Additionally, fellow musician and vocalist of the band, Letlive, Jason Aalon Butler, is featured on the album. It feels as if Letlive’s presence on the scene has influenced the production of Antimacy, and fans of the genre will tell you: this is absolutely a positive thing.
The guitar tracks have a progressive outlook as they utilize more effects. This differs slightly from what was traditionally seen on the previous releases from Dead and Divine. Though the least memorable pieces, the drums and bass are consistent, and continually accentuate the other driving forces of the band. Unfortunately, Dead and Divine have a small following; nevertheless, they continue to produce, and to produce well.
Throughout the process of promoting the release of Antimacy, Dead and Divine creatively utilized the communicative power of social networking to deliver intimate gifts and favors to their fans. Support is a difficult trust to gain in today’s world, and they truly put forth the necessary effort to gain it.
It is tough to find a metal album that holds anomalistic musical structure, as well as lyrical merit. Dead and Divine’s, Antimacy, conquers this difficulty.
Buy this album.
Who’s That Flying?! A Comical and Accessible Bullet Hell Shooter
Who’s That Flying?! or for short – WTF, is a bullet hell style game about the protector of earth being on trial with the rest of the protectors of planets for various disasters that plagued earth. As the game plays out he is telling about the various evils that he has saved the world from which play out as the games levels. WTF delivers some wonderful comic style graphics, a whole lot of content and bullet hell gameplay that is accessible to those of us who aren’t so good at the genre, but with enough depth that the hardcore will find a good challenge.
I am not the best bullet hell gamer out there, but I do love the genre. The chaos and patterned gameplay is something I love and WTF delivers on all of that. The stages of the game are broken up into three levels each which each get harder than the previous. They start you with just the most basic enemy, then introduce a more complex enemy, then introduce a bigger version of that more complex enemy before leading up to an epic boss battle.
OK, that was a little generic, but let me go into the gameplay a little bit more before I come back to that. Unlike many bullet hells, you don’t even directly have health in this game. Often times these games are one hit kills for the player and the challenge is dodging everything on screen while still focusing on defeating your foes. In WTF you are protecting various cities on the earth so you lose if they get destroyed.
The enemy you’ll see the most will simply come out in patterns (as enemies often do in bullet hell games) and can be destroyed with one hit. They cannot hurt you directly, but if you let them past you off the screen then they subtract from the health of the city you are trying to protect. If you let 50 past in any level, that city will be destroyed and you’ll have to try again. On the flip side, you get bonus points for the amount of health a city has at the end of the level and the only way to get a gold medal is to not let any enemies hurt the city.
Your basic weapon is a single shot firing gun. As you rack up kills and combos you’ll build up a meter that will give you temporary powerups. These go from a faster shooting weapon to a hyper laser that will annihilate everything. One of my favorite twists this game has though is that if you run into any of these basic enemies, you will grab and destroy them which will destroy everything in a very small vicinity to that enemy. This is critical to become efficient at if you want to move up the leaderboards, but definitely not easy to master.
As I mentioned before, there are other enemies in the game that have some sort of attack to throw you off track. Sometimes it’s an electric shock, other times it’s a goo that leaves you temporarily immobile. These enemies also take more hits to defeat so balancing attacks on them and stopping the other guys is what this game is all about.
I really enjoyed playing this game. Like I said before, I’m not the best at bullet hell games, but this game is accessible enough that you’ll be able to beat most levels first or second time through, but going back for the gold medals will take a lot of practice. On top of the story mode you’ll unlock various challenge stages and infinite runs through the cities. There is a lot of content here and it’s well worth the low price of entry if you’re at all a fan of bullet hell games.
AaAaAA A Reckless Disregard for Gravity Review – Free Falling With a Parachute
AaAaAA!! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity is probably the closest most of us will ever get to extreme free falling and as far as I’m concerned, my life is better off that way. ARDFG gives you one parachute and a whole bunch of crazy areas to fall around. Each level starts you at a very high up point and just let’s you fall to the bottom, trying to get as close as you can to, without touching, various floating platforms for which you will be rewarded points. Then, if you deploy your parachute in enough time to land safely, you will earn some teeth and you can choose another level to do it again!
This game is actually pretty awesome. It has a ton of personality and whacky style throughout it. For example, there is a powerup that let’s you slow things down temporarily to get around tricky situations that is called the “Triple Espresso” in which you consume a triple espresso and it soars through your veins you have heightened senses. Also, you can give “obscene” or “kind” gestures to bystanders that are sometimes in levels to earn extra points. Not to mention some of the weird commentary you just have to hear for yourself.
Moving on though, gameplay is simple, but takes some getting used to. You are free falling so no movement is quick and precise, you have to predict and constantly judge your surroundings to figure out how abruptly you want to make your movements. You will usually being going through some pretty tight corridors and if you run into a wall you get bounced off it in a way that I usually found unrecoverable or I got bounced outside of the tunnel I was in and lost all chances at a good score. It takes practice though, give it time and the practice really does pay off.
This is definitely one of those games that you have to find the path intended for a high score run; I hardly ever got over three stars my first time through a level because the answer is just not that obvious. Though the game doesn’t stop you if you don’t get good scores, you are required to unlock every level by spending teeth which are earned from good runs.
My least favorite thing about this game is easily the music. Each level has some sort of background track and whenever I had to redo levels due to deaths I felt like that music was just grating on me until I completely turned it off. Honestly, it’s not a deal breaker, but I felt justified in bringing it up since it got to the point that I just turned it off.
This game is really something unique, which means that you’ll probably either love it or hate it. I know, that’s a mediocre way to try to wrap up a review, but honestly I think it’s best to grab the trial and try it out for yourself. If you like what you see, then you’re definitely going to like the whole package. I’m personally having a blast with the game and plan to continue playing it for some time to come.
Crayon Physics – A Sampled Review
Crayon Physics has been out for awhile now, but I just dabbled in it for the fist time ever today. At one point in time, creating a physics sandbox was nowhere near easy and was well worth showing off; now days though, I’ve played quite the handful of them, but never mind checking them out. Crayon Physics delivers yet another physics sandbox full of ‘get the ball to the star’ based puzzles, but allow you to draw whatever shapes you want and watch them “come to life”.
Of course, everything in Crayon Physics looks like it was drawn by a three year old kid with a crayon, which can be neat at times, but ultimately leaves the game looking mediocre. It never allows for really polished looking graphics, since everything needs to have that little kid effect on it. I don’t want to knock it for this because I understand that it’s this way intentionally, but when bumped up to a 1080p resolution, it doesn’t hold up quite as well as I imagine it would on say, an iPhone.
What’s most important about Crayon Physics though is that the physics work and it seems that all of that is in place just as it should be. I didn’t really play that much of the game, but it adds new features and new depth fast. The first few levels just require you to build platforms, but you quickly find that there is a lot more involved. Before long you’re building hinges and catapults to launch the ball around.
There are also secondary goals in each level to solve them in a “creative” way or the most “awesomest” (the games wordage) way. I didn’t really explore what these meant, but it’s nice to see the game encouraging you to re-play levels and find different solutions. I always appreciate a game that accepts multiple solutions because it is not an easy thing to design.
Honestly, I don’t feel that I need to go into that much detail because games like this have been done before and you’re probably familiar with one or two. Crayon Physics is a competent physics sandbox and looks to have a whole slew of built in levels along with user generated levels to keep you entertained for a long time. I’m not a big fan of having to draw shapes with a mouse, so I’d say it’s probably a much better choice to grab a touch screen based version.
Bottom line though, if you like physics based puzzles and you need a new fix, Crayon Physics will fit right in to that void!
Crayon Physics is available on Steam for $19.99 and for your various apple platforms via iTunes for $4.99
Capsized Review – A Lost and Confused Spaceman Adventure
Capsized is a gorgeous looking game about a Spacemen and his attempt at escaping after his ship crashes. I know, a pretty generic story, but this game isn’t really about the story. Capsized is more Metroid-esque than anything else, but on a much smaller scale. It’s got a lot of personality, a lot of firepower, and well, a few troubles if I must be honest.
I bought Capsized because it looks downright gorgeous. It’s also built on XNA, which really doesn’t make a difference as far as players should be concerned, but I’m quite fond of XNA myself and love to see games get released that are built on it. The fact that Capsized is gorgeous and quite robust makes it even better!
Gameplay in Capsized involves a lot of up and down movement as well as left to right. You’ll also encounter a ton of enemies to unleash your robust arsenal on. The downside to the guns is that you have to re-find them every level. So, every gun is not available in every level and if you don’t explore you’ll be stuck with your most basic rifle; but at least it never runs out of ammo.
Most of the weapons are sci-fi like, but fairly similar. They all fire some sort of blue-glowy bullets, but in different patterns. I found myself most often using the basic gun, the “machine gun” and the “grenade launcher” (I quote these because I didn’t write down their in-game names, but these are what I would most closely relate them to from other games). There are a few interesting weapons, but without being able to carry them over between levels I found myself not getting attached to any of them specifically since I never knew what I could rely on.
The way the spaceman controls always felt kind of off to me, I always felt like I was fighting him with the controls and hoping that he would end up where I intended. The biggest flaw I saw was that movement in the “up” direction and the “jump” command are both mapped to the same control and you cannot change this. Let me go on and then come back to this control issue.
The spaceman also has a lasso of sorts that he can latch on to things and pull them towards him or pull himself to things (if you were to latch it onto the ground, or a wall as opposed to a rock). One of the other odd things was that you can essentially climb up a wall by just jumping into it and then holding ‘up’ and he will just keep climbing up it. These two things are both fine on their own, but all put together it creates some really confusing movements.
So once you latch onto something holding ‘up’ will help move you towards what you’re latched on to, but if you run into a vertical wall you’ll stick to it and movement up it will take control, but you’ll then be jumping up it with ‘up’ and need to unlatch yourself before that pulls you back to it’s origin. These very different movements are all controlled with ‘up’ and take precedence over each other in different situations, plus pressing shift while scaling a wall to detach your latch seemed to always throw me for a loop. Especially when I was surrounded by enemies.
Of all things, changing weapons was never easy for me either. As you collect weapons they stack on top of each other which you can then cycle through or use the number keys to change between. However, since weapons are never constant, the number keys select different weapons based on what you’ve found and for some reason the scroll wheel cycling goes backwards from how I always expected it to go. This made every firefight a scramble for me.
Level’s come in a few different varieties. Some of them require you to find other spacemen or ship parts and carry them back to the beginning of the level, most of the others require you to destroy X more-powerful-than-normal enemies or X of these funny alien statues. The statue levels were my least favorite because they were always surrounded by powerful enemies and you had to use items like rocks (or these glowing glass orbs) to destroy them because they would reflect bullets, however, if you were to say drop these items you had to figure out how to get them back to that area to be able to destroy the statue.
Honestly, there is a great game hidden in this mess. The graphics are incredible, the weapons are solid, the sound is good, the levels are big, the enemies have a decent amount of variety, but when it all comes together it just doesn’t work. I played for a good 5 hours and my fingers always felt like I was trying to make a cats cradle while platforming and I couldn’t get comfortable with weapon switching or the grapple. I wanted to love this game, but honestly, and that makes me disappointed to say.
Super Stickman Golf – The So-So Kind of Super
Super Stickman Golf is a stylish 2D golf game for the iPhone. This game caught my eye because of the vector graphics and simple golf appeal; I like golf, but I really like simple golf! In many ways this game succeeds at providing a ton of courses, some fun powerups, simple, but appealing graphics and most importantly, an on the go golf experience. However, as I spent more time with the game and got into the more complex courses, what were small blemishes became annoying flaws.
Controls in Super Stickman Golf are very straightforward. For each shot you pick the trajectory of the ball and then the power of your swing and that’s it. As you complete courses you will unlock “power ups” that you can use. These start with the mulligan (arguably not even a powerup) and then move on to a sticky ball that sticks where it lands, to an ice ball that will convert water to ice when it lands and keep going from there. Of course these are all incredibly useful in various situations, but you can only take a maximum of seven into a course; which hardly feels like enough with how difficult the courses get.
The beginning courses of SSG are really easy. In most games, the beginning is easy to allow you to familiarize yourself with the controls and the feel of the game, but there’s not really enough in SSG to require the level of simplicity they give. As the courses got harder, I never felt at one with Mr. Stickman and this ultimately became very frustrating.
Certain levels are set up so that you can get a hole-in-one if you know just where and how to shoot the ball, but others seem like it’s hardly possible to score under the 10+ par. The biggest thing that I think is missing from SSG is an accurate trajectory indicator. I don’t play many golf games, so I’m going to now reference Mario Golf. Mario Golf provides you with an arrow from the ball in the direction you’re aiming and an approximate landing zone if you were to hit a perfect full-swing shot. This allows you to accurately judge how hard to swing and how to factor in wind and whatnot (which SSG doesn’t have anyways).
Super Stickman Golf provides you with a small arrow to indicate trajectory, however, this arrow is so short that it doesn’t show any curve and you really don’t get a feeling of how hard to hit the ball ever. I found a bunch of drives that I thought would go way to far end up falling short and more than enough chip shots go soaring past the green unexpectedly. Because the courses are so whacky and unrealistic it’s nearly impossible to get a good feel of scale from hole to hole let alone between courses. This issue caused me to always feel like I was guessing and hoping.
Of course, guessing led to a lot of missed shots and frustration. Especially frustrating was using a power up that didn’t end up where I wanted it too and losing it. With a limit of seven per course, losing one of the two ice balls I brought it is killer.
I would love to see this game get some more helpful updates because most of the courses I played were really cool and I want to enjoy more of them. I get far too frustrated though at things like a series of floating platforms that cause me to start back at the beginning after missing the top one that could be fixed with a better trajectory indicator.
To be fair, I got SSG when it was free so I can’t say I didn’t get my moneys worth. I like the concept and the style of the game, it’s just nowhere near perfect. I look forward to seeing future updates to the game and hopefully the developers will introduce some of these gameplay tweaks instead of just loads of new courses and power ups like I’ve seen so far.
Army of Darkness Defense – Boomstick in your Hand
When I saw Army of Darkness Defense on the app store I knew that I had no choice but to purchase this game. It’s only $0.99 and it’s Army of Darkness! I honestly didn’t have any expectations going into this, but was looking forward to kicking some serious deadite ass with my boomstick and hopefully even more fun weapons. What did I get? Well, pretty much exactly that.
If you’re any sort of fan of tower defense style gaming and Army of Darkness (but who isn’t?) then you can just stop reading right now and go purchase this game. It’s not perfect, but it’s more than worth your $0.99, even with it’s few flaws.
Army of Darkness Defense plays like all other side scroller tower defense game. You have full control of Ash and are able to move left and right. As enemies get close, Ash will automatically fire his boomstick and when enemies get at melee range (after purchasing the upgrades) Ash will attach with a gauntlet and later with the infamous chainsaw. You also have some secondary magic attacks that you can bring into combat with you. You have two equipped and these range from flaming arrows falling out of the sky to a “Deathcoaster” that comes barreling across the screen destroying everything in it’s path.
On top of Ash, you have a whole slew of troops to bring into battle. It wouldn’t be tower defense without it! Troops pretty much fit the basic formula for TD games. The weak, cheap peasant; attack heavy soldier; defense heavy knight; fast moving guy on horse; healer, etc. I’m not going to go into them all. You will always have a blacksmith who mines ore for you which you spend to spawn troops and can level up to mine faster.
Army of Darkness Defense is based on various waves getting more and more difficult. You must protect the Necronomicon from being destroyed by the deadites by fending them off yourself and spawning a massive army to help. You’ll be able to collect money from fallen enemies and use it in between levels to level up Ash, his powers and your troops. How you level is very important, unfortunately, the game doesn’t give you any aid or indication on how you should level and it can end up haulting your progress.
The game ramps up difficulty at a fairly slow place until you hit the dreaded wave 45. This wave seems to be nearly impossible without some magic combination of correctly leveled troops. Personally I found leveling Ash and his powers the most useful thing and when it came to troops I kept most all of them moderately leveled with some exceptions. I can’t even seem to do damage to wave 45 though, which is disappointing since there is no way to replay levels without completely erasing all of the games data.
Honestly though, Army of Darkness Defense is a really fun game. This crazy difficulty wall and the inability to replay levels is really disappointing because if these were fixed it would be one of my favorite tower defense games of all time. I couldn’t stop playing it whenever I had downtime for several days in a row and I recommend it to all of you tower defense and Army of Darkness fans out there.
Linnnk is a Zero & Ones product
