#oneaday Day 860: Kairobot

Have you played any of the games by Kairosoft on iOS and Android devices? If not, you really should. They’re quite remarkable little experiences, all the more noteworthy for fitting surprisingly deep gameplay into less than 10MB in most cases. This is a big benefit for those of you who habitually fill your phone and/or tablet device with all manner of crap games that you never play.

Kairosoft’s games are business sims/strategy games at heart. All of them feature adorable pixel art and dreadful MIDI music. Most of them involve attempting to make as much money as possible over the course of a fixed period of time which varies depending on the title. Some are almost identical to one another, others take slightly different approaches.

All are utterly bewildering the first time you play them.

Most players’ first experience with this little Japanese software company’s work tends to be with their breakout hit Game Dev Story which, as the title suggests, sees the player running a fledgling game development company over the course of twenty in-game years. As the game progresses, players develop their staff, produce new games, try to woo the public and even have the opportunity to develop their own game console. Throughout, knowing tips of the hat are given to the games industry with pun-based names and not-quite-real game systems coming on to the market and acting much like their real-life counterparts. Develop for the Game Boy equivalent, for example, and you’ll be on to a winner. Decide to support the Virtual Boy equivalent and you may find that your sales aren’t quite what you expect.

Basic gameplay in Game Dev Story is pretty straightforward. Through a series of simple menus, you tell your minions what to do and keep a careful eye on your finances. What’s interesting about it (and all Kairosoft’s other titles, for that matter) is how much is going on beneath the surface. Markets are being simulated; seasonal growth and decline is taken into account; real-world trends form a key part of the game. On your first run-through, you may not discover everything the game has to offer. On each subsequent runthrough, you find out more until you’re making ridiculous amounts of money with each one of your blockbusters.

The most recent Kairosoft title I’ve tried is an Android title known as Cafeteria Nipponica. This, as the name suggests, is a restaurant management game where it’s up to the player to take between one and three restaurants to the very top of their game. This is achieved by hiring staff, levelling them up, researching new dishes and, occasionally, sending staff members out into the fields to look for ingredients and “treasure”. I haven’t got my head around everything the game is doing at the moment, but if nothing else, seeing little pixel people running around making a restaurant work is most entertaining. Like most of the company’s other titles, a lot of concepts are treated in a rather “abstract” manner, and so long as you don’t go in expecting a literal simulation of how a restaurant actually works, you’ll have a blast.

If you’ve read my previous post How to Play Pocket Academy, you’ll know that success in these games is sometimes quite hard to come by, and it’s quite easy to mess things up beyond all recognition. That’s okay, though, because the game remains so unerringly polite about the whole thing throughout that you can’t feel too bad even as your money spirals into the red more and more with each passing month.

In short, then, if you’re looking for something to occupy your time on the toilet/bus that isn’t Angry Birds, then almost anything by our Japanese friends here is certainly worth a look. While they may not be the cheapest mobile games out there, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. They’ll provide you with a ton of entertainment for about the price of a single Starbucks coffee. And you can’t complain at that, really. That’s just good business.

#oneaday Day 822: Xoom, Xoom, Xoom, Xoom, I Want You In My Room

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time with my shiny (well, rather fingerprinty now) new Motorola Xoom since it arrived the other day, and I have to say I’m a big fan. While Android seems to be a little more clunky than iOS, particularly prone to slowing down for no apparent reason on occasion, I’m appreciating the things it does do. Having a fully-customisable homescreen is very pleasant, certainly, and the cool quasi-3D effect it does with the wallpaper is pretty neat.

What’s becoming abundantly clear to me as I continue to use it, however, is that using it simply feels very different to the iPad. It might be the fact it’s designed to be used in landscape as opposed to the iPad’s default portrait orientation; it might be the unique array of apps on offer on both devices; it might be a combination of interface elements. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I can say that both devices certainly have a place in my life at this moment for different reasons — and also that getting the Xoom has caused my desire for a 3rd-gen iPad to drop to zero.

If anything, the Xoom seems particularly suited for more “serious” tasks (and by “serious” I mean “not games”) — I’m particularly fond of using it for Twitter, chat, email and that sort of thing. Google Currents has become my go-to app for reading the daily news. The built-in “share” functionality, which allows you to easily send stuff from one app to another easily, is pretty neat. The keyboard I have installed, which lets you type by drawing wiggly lines rather than tapping keys, makes me feel like a wizard, particularly with the sparkly particle pattern that comes from aforementioned wiggly pattern. And the inclusion of a USB port (albeit a micro-USB one that requires an adapter for pretty much every peripheral ever, making one wonder exactly why they didn’t just put a regular USB port on it) means that it’s possible to do things like hook up a keyboard and practically use the damn thing as a sort of laptop.

A big draw for me was the thriving emulation scene on Android, however. Within a few short moments of getting the device up and running I had downloaded NES, SNES, Mega Drive and arcade machine emulators and a few minutes later had successfully transferred my collection of ROM files of dubious origin. What I have now is a portable gaming device that plays pretty much any NES, SNES or Mega Drive game, and a whole heap of arcade games.

This… is awesome. I hadn’t anticipated quite how awesome this was going to be, but the ability to play Final Fantasy VI while on an exercise bike at the gym, or Elevator Action while on the toilet, or Golden Axe while waiting for the kettle to boil… well… yes. It’s awesome. The fact you can hook up a USB controller (or, for that matter, Wii Remote with Classic Controller via Bluetooth) and play these games as they were meant to be played — with actual buttons rather than floaty, crappy touchscreen controls — is a happy bonus. The fact you can use floaty, crappy touchscreen controls at times when having a controller is not convenient or socially acceptable is also most welcome.

I’m certainly not going to become one of those gits who bangs on about how much better Android is than iOS because there are things that both do far, far better than the other. But I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by my first experience with an Android device, and the fact it’s turned out to be a portable retro-gaming powerhouse is just a happy bonus, really. Now I can finally get around to beating all the Final Fantasy games that are still on my “to-do” list. (V and VI, as it happens. Also Chrono Trigger, which may as well be a Final Fantasy game.) And, as previously mentioned, playing Elevator Action on the toilet.

Now, if you’ll excuse me…

#oneaday Day 819: I’m a PC, and I’m a Mac…

…and I’m also a PS3, a Wii, a 360, an iOS and an Android. I’m pretty frickin’ multicultural when it comes to operating systems and platforms, in short. Always have been.

The whole “platform wars” thing always bothers me. It’s usually started by the media and then perpetuated by fanboys who get angrier and angrier and spew more and more meaningless vitriol at one another until everyone leaves feeling rather embarrassed about the whole thing.

This isn’t a phenomenon limited to children and teenagers, either. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen grown men and women posting ridiculous comments about how much they “hate” Apple/Microsoft/Google/Sony/Nintendo/that guy Barry from the chip shop (to be fair, he is a bit of a wanker) and getting increasingly riled up when people try to talk sense into them. Or when people deliberately bait them. Or when people take their comments a little too personally and start yelling back. Or… you get the idea.

It’s been going on as long as there have been rival, roughly equivalent platforms doing similar things. We see it with every generation of computers, consoles, handhelds, smartphones, tablets, operating systems… it goes on and on. And, as I say, it’s usually started by the media, though in most cases it’s a bit of a “light the fuse and watch” sort of scenario, whereby they’ll sow the seeds of conflict and then just let consumers batter each other into submission with increasingly-dumb arguments.

I’ve never subscribed to this particular attitude. I don’t see the point. Every platform has its pros and cons. Some are likely to be more successful than others. Some will flop, hard. But they all have their place, and if you enjoy using them or find them useful, then that’s a win. If you have no use for them or don’t find them interesting, cool or exciting, then that’s no loss to you. There’s certainly no reason to judge people who do like them, though.

Let’s take the Android/iOS distinction. These two groups are regularly at each others’ throats, with Android users often hijacking iOS app Facebook pages with comments that just say “Android.” repeatedly under the mistaken assumption that this will make the developer of said app want to support them, and iOS users honking on about incompatibility, how much better their devices are and how cool they look. The vocal proportion of both groups are insufferable arseholes, and I really wish they would shut up.

I entered the Android brigade today with the arrival of my new Motorola Xoom tablet. I got it for several reasons — work, curiosity and the emulation scene. What I found was that I gained an immediate appreciation of what Android did, but did not suddenly find myself hating iOS, Apple and everything they stood for. Instead, from a rational, relatively neutral (well, I have been exclusively iOS for mobile for a number of years now!) point of view, I could see that both of these operating systems had distinctive purposes, and could appreciate both of them.

iOS is simple, easy, consistent and clear. You know what you’re getting with an iOS device. When you run an iOS app (games aside) you generally know what the interface is going to look like, and you can usually figure out how it’s going to work. This is true to such a degree that when apps make minor changes to what is seen as the “standard” way that things work, it’s very uncomfortable. A good example is the Spotify iPhone app, which has the “go back” and “now playing” buttons the opposite way around to how the iPhone’s native music player has — it’s a little confusing and irritating. Not enough to warrant INTERNET RAGE, obviously, but it highlights the fact that most iOS apps are a little more consistent with their interface design.

The “walled garden” aspect of iOS has its place, too. For those who are new to smartphones, tablets and technology in general, the fact that everything scary is walled off means that people can experiment and gain confidence with the device without breaking anything. Apple as a company has been increasingly moving towards the more “casual”, “consumer” market over the last few years — various changes to OSX indicate this, too — and the easier and more consistent things are for users, the better so far as they’re concerned. All this has the side-effect of irritating self-confessed “power users”, however.

But then there’s Android, which would be ideal for said “power users” if they weren’t so stubborn. Annoyed at lack of customisation? You can do that on Android. Wish you could transfer files to the device simply by connecting it to a USB port, not by farting around with app-specific transfer programs? Sure, go ahead. Want to use non Apple-branded accessories, including USB gizmos? Knock yourself out!

The side-effect of all this, of course, is that it provides more things to go wrong. It’s still pretty difficult to break an Android device from what I can tell — at least if you haven’t “rooted” it, a process which I still don’t really understand — but there are more variables in play. You can install apps from places other than one single “official” App Store. There’s a greater risk of malware — something which is practically nonexistent for non-jailbroken iOS devices. The interface(s) for Android apps is (are) maddeningly inconsistent at times. And although the iOS App Store carries a lot of absolute garbage, there’s even more on Android.

Both have their place, in short, and both have their own flaws — just as Windows and OSX have their place; PS3, 360 and Wii have their place; and if you really want to keep on using that Palm Tungsten you’ve had kicking around for years now, be my guest.

In short — and I’m aware I’ve said this before to little effect on the Internet at large, but it’s nice to at least try — people should pretty much just shut the fuck up and enjoy what they’ve got while ignoring what they haven’t got. We’d have a much nicer world without all this envy and jealousy floating around — since, after all, that’s pretty much what most fanboy arguments tend to boil down to — so why do we still do it?

I guess it’s fun to be contrary. Well, you can count me out. So far as tech goes, I’m multicultural and proud.

#oneaday Day 699: Apples to Apples

Inspired by my good buddy AJ’s recent post on this very subject, I thought I, too, would share why I’m so loyal to my Apple devices, particularly in the smartphone sphere.

In simple terms, it comes down to “it got to me first, so I’ve stuck with it.” It’s as straightforward as that. The first bona fide “smartphone” I ever had was my original iPhone, and since acquiring that I’ve been through a 3G, a 4 and now a 4S. I have no desire whatsoever to switch to Android because my iOS devices have done everything I needed them to. And it’s not as if I’m a “casual” user — I know my stuff about tech, and my iPhone is in almost constant use nearly every day. And yet in all that time, I have never once banged my head against the supposed restrictiveness of the platform which supporters of Android do so love to point out.

Now, this isn’t an anti-Android rant. I’m very aware that Android works as a platform for those who have chosen to be loyal to it. But I have never used an Android phone. Perhaps I’d like it if I did. Perhaps I’d change my opinion on iOS if I did. But the thing is, I don’t feel like I need to. Because to me, personally, Android sounds like a giant pain in the arse. Homescreen widgets? Battery life management? Flashing ROMs? Rooting? No thanks. For me, all I need is a phone which neatly displays my apps on my homescreen, allows me to access my personal data, email, the Web, Twitter, Facebook, G+, WordPress and all that gubbins, and occasionally play games. I’m not sure what benefit I’d get from the openness that Android offers. Customisability? Perhaps — but again, not something I feel is necessary for the way I use the phone. A fancy homescreen is all very well, but the neat and ordered rows that iOS’ Springboard offers mean that I can always quickly find what I’m looking for. My time isn’t so precious that I need to see the weather at all times on the home screen — I’m quite happy to open up the Weather app.

You see, perhaps partly as a result of my upbringing, constantly surrounded by computers and technology, I’ve grown to take the attitude that as a user, I’m the one that can adapt to new platforms and new combinations of features. If something comes along and has a new feature, I learn how to use it. If something else comes along and has a different feature set, including some absences from the first device, I adapt, and find alternative ways to do things — or, in some cases, consider whether I really needed that functionality in the first place. For just one example: MIDI ringtones on old Nokias? Fun for a little while, until I realised that any time I was in public I would typically mute the phone anyway, making them largely redundant. I haven’t missed them since entering the iPhone age. Likewise, when the iPhone drew criticism for not offering copy and paste functionality, I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Past phones that I had used featured limited copy and paste capabilities, but I rarely, if ever, used it. As such, it was another feature I didn’t miss on the iPhone. Now it’s there, I do occasionally use it, but I could certainly live without it if necessary.

This isn’t making excuses for Apple — it’s explaining the way I think. For some people, features the iPhone doesn’t have are deal-breakers. And that’s fine — Android’s out there to give you what you’re looking for, as is BlackBerry and any number of feature phones. But for me? I’m comfortable with iOS, and happy to stay where I am. It does what I need, it adds new features at a regular enough rate to keep things interesting and exciting, and I’m never short of something new to experiment with thanks to the popularity of the App Store.

#oneaday, Day 64: Act Your Age, Fanboys

Why does the phenomenon of fanboyism still exist? And more to the point, why does it exist amongst men (and it pretty much is always men) who are old enough to know better?

The simple and easy answer is, of course, that it’s always been around. I remember growing up as an Atari-based family and all of the Atari magazines at the time belittling the competition with stupid names like Spectrash (Spectrum) and Crappydore (Commodore 64). Then came the schoolyard arguments – SEGA vs Nintendo. Sonic vs Mario. “We’ve got Street Fighter II! Hah! …Oh wait, now you have, too.” It got pretty silly.

Once the Dreamcast came out, it was hard to justify fanboyism because, certainly once SEGA’s wondermachine came out, it was so far ahead of its competition – the 64-bit Nintendo 64 and the 32-bit PlayStation – that half-hearted attempts to call it things like “Dreampants” always came across as more than a little desperate.

Things then kicked off again with Sony vs Microsoft, with Nintendo kind of relegated to “background observer” by this point. The PS2 and the original Xbox both had fiercely loyal supporters when, in fact, you’d have a far better experience if you bought both systems, played the relevant exclusives on their respective platforms and played multiplatform titles on the Xbox. That’s what I did, and I never felt the need to slag off any of the systems.

And it still goes on today, despite each of the consoles arguably offering a more distinct and unique experience from each other than ever before. The Xbox 360 offers its legendary ease of online play, the PS3 is home to a variety of unusual and interesting games (like Flower, flOw, Linger in Shadows, the Pixeljunk games) and the Wii is the family-friendly bundle of fun.

Still the hating goes on, though.

But nowhere is it more apparent than in the world of smartphones, particularly between the owners of iPhones, BlackBerries (let’s pluralise it properly, please) and Android-based phones. iPhone owners are either Apple fanboys who bang on about how great Apple is all the time or jailbreakers who bang on about which ludicrously-named hack they’re installing this week – and, of course, which apps they could get for free rather than paying for them on the App Store. BlackBerry owners seem to be updating their OS every night. And Android owners seem to be particularly sore about the iPhone for some inexplicable reason.

The question is: why? When it came to the early console wars, slagging off the systems your friends had was just schoolyard banter. You didn’t really think that the systems were inferior, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone around to their houses and played those games with them. The fact that this juvenile banter has grown up with people who have been using gaming and other consumer electronics for years is utterly baffling. Even people who started gaming at the same time as me – or before – are still bitching and moaning about how much better their handset is that [x]’s handset, and blahblahblah open source, blahblahblah build quality, blahblahblah BlackBerry Messenger, blahblahblah… You get the picture.

Am I alone in thinking that all of this stuff, without exception, is seven degrees of awesome and we should appreciate the brilliant things we have? Yes, some of them have more features. Yes, some of them are objectively “better” in terms of capabilities, power and technical specifications. But is that really any reason to act like 5-year olds telling each other that their respective Mums smell of wee?

No, it’s not. So why does it still go on?