As you might know there is only one real game for me: Risk.

And since the online era playing Risk online is pretty cool. It is where the Risk community meets.

Around 1998/1999 I played Risk on MS Zone. Great experience, great community and the online gameplay was cool and advanced (until it closed down). For some time I then played ATTACK on Facebook (from Zynga) which was not all as advanced as the Ms Zone experience but since there was a large community and a good system where players who left could be replaced by people joining this was again a very good experience. Especially the brainless "click to play" was addictive.

Unfortunately Hasbro is hunting online Risk place on the Internet, for years they are shutting down online Risk games "to protect the brand". So they did this also with Attack. I think Hasbro has no clue how they disappoint the core Risk fans on the planet time and time again by taking away places where this community can play and meet. I think most Risk players hate Hasbro by now… a lot (just think of all the time invested in an online version).

So… after they shut down Attack they brought out "Risk Factions" which I immediately bought for my X-Box. Playing the game in single player mode is nice. There are five short games which form a sort of story and they introduced some mods where you can e.g. conquer a temple to gain control of one other territory and some new maps. Which is nice in itself. Also nice are that the colors in the game are represented by robots (red), zombies (black), etc… I liked that idea.

But… of course playing by yourself is not what we buy these games for since 2000. Risk Factions allows you to play online in ranked and unranked games. So actually I was excited. But…. the online gaming experience is so enormously bad that I can not even believe that someone actually programmed this. Did they never play Risk online?

- When you invest time to play a game and you have actually a chance of winning whenever the player on the side thinks he better switches off … you get "lost connection with host" WHAT THE F***. Did we ever see this on other multiplayer risk version? No of course not because any simple soul understands that you do not want to play for 2 hours and NEVER ever win a game because other people just drop out of the game. All other online version took care of this as a basic requirement for their game with different solutions.

- In other many many instances you simply get a freeze and I mean a real freeze, the game just doesn’t show any progress anymore (also probably because someone dropped out) and if you manage to get to the menu you have to "concede" (especially bad since in Ranked games… you have another lost game).

- When someone leaves and the game is not frozen their armies are like "stupid bots", which I think is the most simplistic solution I have seen for the past 15 years on playing Risk online.

So I, not really a Risk n00b, declare this to be the worst Risk ever. I will also close my X-Box Live account since there is no use for it, I only had it for this game. I think Microsoft should ban this game from X-Box Live for the worst gaming experience ever.

And Hasbro … if you are not able to give the community a decent online Risk version because you lack the skills then do not shut down community places where there are people who really like the game itself and where people do produce at least playable versions which you are obviously are not able to.

And now I’m going to comment on all places where this game is reviewed.

Via the Facebook group of DC Universe I read that its coming in November.

So the question is …. shall I buy a new PC or shall I buy a PS3?

Maybe its time to start socializing already on http://www.dcuosource.com/

E3 VIdeo Channel on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/E3

Hey… some extremely nice stuff on E3:

… X Box 360 : Natal is going to called “kinect” and all call of duty items will be exclusive FIRST on XBox360.

… watching metal gear solid from Konami on E3 wow!

… watching Gears of War 4 DEMO … wow!

… watching unbelievable Guitar Hero demo demonstration (Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock)

… watching another demo of the kinect sensor, looks pretty cool I’m glad that I have an Xbox 360 sitting here. Zune…. yeah… but I live in Europe …. But the control with Voice and Gestures is way cool. This is like “Star Trek” : “X-Box stop” and the thing stops. “Xbox play music” and the thing begins playing.  Pretty slick and pretty simple.

… watching video kinect , also pretty cool, you can video call someone with just gestures, watch movies together and the thing followes you around the room so you no longer have to walk though a webcam and change the direction. This look SO simple that this would pretty cool. I can imagine watching my wife calling me by just saying “xbox call edward” and she sees me on the tv.

… ESPN has made an exclusive deal with XBOX 360: 3500 live events available (WK?)

… Natal /Kinect is probably the big message… hmm… I want video lessons Kung Fu by Bruce Lee… Kinectimals demo … looks great for my son. Looks really cool. So … I need to buy Kinectimals first.

… Kinect Sports also look amazing… bye bye Wii. Kinect Racing also look cool enough to buy, a fun race game which is hopefully easier. Kinect Adventures look really funny: Wii alike dudging and jumping

… HAWX 2 from ubisoft look nice, did not know that game actually, Long ago I played some air fight games that I really liked. Awesome details on the ground, you see ships sinking, detailed cities on the ground ,etc…

… Dance Central for Kinect. ……………. ok ….. this is now my #1 game that I’m going to buy. This will big fun in our household. Guitar Hero was big fun but dancing really takes away any border.

… lots of more reviews to read here: http://populair.eu/games/

… hey…. a NEW Xbox 360 with a new 250 GB disk + wifi. and…. it is shipping… today … so I can pick it up .and the complete audience  gets one FREE …. must be fun to make such an announcement

… demo of new Fallout Las Vegas…  I did not even finish the current one… must first finish that one before I can start this one … funny, the guards in a casino tool all weapons. Actually… fallout is one of the reasons I want to buy a new tv…\

… a demo for the new Legend of Zelda was bit difficult with some interference , well I dont have a wii and I never played Zelda, but I saw quite some movies of it.

… and a demo of DC Universe… well… I cant wait for that one.

… disney epic mickey is another game that would be great for my kids, its exclusive for wii, so maybe i should just go out and buy a wii , then again most anyone has one so… they can play at … e.g. their grandparents

… Sony brings Killzone 3 in the year that 3D is coming to each household. nice.

Courier: First Details of Microsoft’s Secret Tablet – Microsoft courier tablet – Gizmodo
WOW this courier is cool. It look so stunning that i cant believe it will work like this. If it does it goes to top of my wishlist. ok i have thought about this, where can I order one so I it on day one?

I bought a new laptop (and dockingstation and 19 inch monitor for dragging windows onto from the laptop’s screen)(printscreen actually makes a screenshot of both of them at the same time, whatever) and therefore I had to install some of my favorite proggies on it again, luckily by now I have made a nice list of the top 40 essential programs I keep installing

One of them is Windows Live Writer which I gave Id #40.

Installation is simple enough, just go to the Writer Zone, download and doubleclick.

However, after defining one of my blogs on it I wanted to add the plugins I usually use with it and so I clicked

“een plugin toevoegen” which leads to here:

 http://gallery.live.com/results.aspx?bt=9&pl=8&ds=1&la=nl&tier=0&st=3&p=1&c=0

*nothing*. So where is there the button “add plugin” in my application when it leads to a pretty empty page? The other categories also lead to nothing. Hmmm… well… via the http://dev.live.com/writer/ I find that they actually do exist on the live gallery but somehow none of them will be shown in whatever category:

e.g. : http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=6a125986-6550-4ce9-9c71-9a0fbbc3443f (polaroid plugin) or http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=6c4619fa-6865-4632-9b48-0f4390a512b8 (insert file plugin).

Ok… so maybe it’s just me but how in the heck can I view all Windows Live Writer plugins?

update: ah…. “all languages”… and then they all appear solved.

Hotmail now offers POP Access for Hotmail Plus users – Windows Live
As of NOW it works for ALL hotmail users, I just tried it with my outlook and WAMMO 493 unread e-mails in my inbox

I went to the MSN group of Windows Live Writer, Microsofts Blogging Tool and read that all groups are preferred to move to Multiply.

I totally missed this. So I did a Google

You may have heard rumors that MSN Groups will in closing, I’d like to respond to those here so that our most active users have the information you need to manage your groups effectively. It is true that we are planning to close the MSN Groups service on February 21, 2009 and will offer you the opportunity to move your group to our new partner service, Multiply. We understand the importance of keeping your group together, so we partnered with Multiply to create a migration process that moves your group to their service to preserve your online community and its history.

The migration method that Multiply has built for you is still in the beta stage, we plan to open it next week. Once the service is ready we’ll be sending all of our users an email and will post notices within the MSN Groups site with more information, including instructions for beginning the migration process. In the meantime I encourage you to visit http://Multiply.com to get to know the service and see some of the thousands of groups they host already.

The natural question to ask in this situation is why we are closing MSN Groups. It is our goal to provide our customers with the most current and user friendly technology available today. We made the difficult decision to close the MSN Groups service as part of an overall investment in updating and re-aligning our online services with Windows Live. In the long term we believe that closing the service is the best way to continue to offer innovative, best of breed services that help you stay in touch with the people you care about. It’s very important to us that you keep the data you created using MSN Groups and that is why we have partnered with Multiply, so you can keep your group going into the future despite the closure of MSN Groups.

Between today and February 21, 2009 the MSN Groups service will remain the same as it is now. We will remove the option to add more storage to your group but other features will remain until the service is shut down and you can use it the same way you do today until the date of closure. Watch the site and your email inbox over the next week as we will post updated information there, including a more detailed outline of your options and next steps.

Regards,
Charlotte Jones, Group Product Manager, Microsoft

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_taps_multiplycom_as.php
http://msngroups.multiply.com/
http://www.techwatch.co.uk/2008/10/24/msn-groups-to-multiply/
http://msngroups.multiply.com/

Basically I think this is good news. Personally I think Multiply is the best social network currently out there. In fact, it was the beginning of my social network experience before I joined a gazillion other networks and got a trillian different profiles.

I hope all other social networks will migrate to Multiply too, that’s of course another way of creating “open social”: just create 1 social network

Good news!

Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats
"I cant read docx" well… with this you can

Lookit! The new Windows Live Writer supports a lot of new goodies that will make Bloggers all over the planet very happy.

We now have goodies like rounded corners, reflections and more to give images a little bit more touch.

Furthermore photographs are now tiltable as can be seen on the left, with an extremely dummy proof slider control (as can be seen on the right)

The inline cropping is extremly handy. Especially when you make screenshots and only want to include a little part in your blogposting. Normally I do a printscreen, copy it in Irfanview, do the crop, and then copy it in the WLW. Now I can skip the complete Irfanview tool though I will have to break out of that automatic habit. The inline cropping works WYSIWYG with you blogposting, so that you immediately have a feeling what the best crop should be.

The new addition to also center images is nice to have in the gui box, normally I had to enter the html code and hack that in myself.

It now also makes links e.g. http://www.google.com automatically a link, nice to have.

The Word count is pretty useful, when I was in the paid blogpostings phase of my life   I had to write a minimal set of words per blog posting and the only way to check that was to either manually count them or copy and paste the text in a text editor.

May 3, 2008

Mr. Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089

Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

•

First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.

•

Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.

•

In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.

•

This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

•

It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

via liveside.net