Freyburg

Update: Rogers is shockingly offering the $30 for 6gig deal again, along with a $20 offer to share that data with your iPad. So I guess I was wrong. BUt enjoy the invective below regardless. Plus they could have told us this a few weeks ago.

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The iPhone 4 is set to drop in Canada tomorrow, and we still don’t know how much the plans will cost, what data plans will be included or if the Big Four wireless vendors have any other tricks up their sleeve. Don’t count on being pleasantly surprised.

?After all, these are the same companies that blithely announced ridiculous data plans a month before the Canadian iPhone 3G introduction, and then were soundly spanked by the blogerati and Twitter folk. They won’t repeat that PR disaster; instead they’ll wait until the last minute and then drop a crappy plan on early adopters who won’t be able to resist the phone’s siren call.

And if you’re looking to save money on a discount service, forget it. Wind doesn’t work with the iPhone 4, so even if you buy the phone unlocked you won’t be able to dictate terms. And if you think Rogers will give you a reasonable deal, think again. This is a company that responded to Netflix coming to Canada by cutting their download caps, rather than attempting to compete.

Here’s some helpful info on the iPhone 4 courtesy of iphoneincanada.ca. I won’t be buying the iPhone 4 tomorrow, as I’m waiting until we move to Tokyo next month and then picking up a unit via Softbank. But I look forward to hearing what everyone thinks of their new toy.

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Update: Rogers is shockingly offering the $30 for 6gig deal again, along with a $20 offer to share that data with your iPad. So I guess I was wrong. BUt enjoy the invective below regardless. Plus they could have told us this a few weeks ago.

——-

The iPhone 4 is set to drop in Canada tomorrow, and we still don’t know how much the plans will cost, what data plans will be included or if the Big Four wireless vendors have any other tricks up their sleeve. Don’t count on being pleasantly surprised.

After all, these are the same companies that blithely announced ridiculous data plans a month before the Canadian iPhone 3G introduction, and then were soundly spanked by the blogerati and Twitter folk. They won’t repeat that PR disaster; instead they’ll wait until the last minute and then drop a crappy plan on early adopters who won’t be able to resist the phone’s siren call.

And if you’re looking to save money on a discount service, forget it. Wind doesn’t work with the iPhone 4, so even if you buy the phone unlocked you won’t be able to dictate terms. And if you think Rogers will give you a reasonable deal, think again. This is a company that responded to Netflix coming to Canada by cutting their download caps, rather than attempting to compete.

Here’s some helpful info on the iPhone 4 courtesy of iphoneincanada.ca. I won’t be buying the iPhone 4 tomorrow, as I’m waiting until we move to Tokyo next month and then picking up a unit via Softbank. But I look forward to hearing what everyone thinks of their new toy.

Been busy this week, mostly with boring but necessary paperwork and moving concerns, but I’m still trying to hammer out exactly what I should do for online video regarding Freyburg.com. If I can come up with a way to do something quick, dirty, and simple, I will, and I suppose it should involve me blathering at the camera. But for some reason talking to the camera fills me with dread, unlike my Gen Y counterparts who seem to revel in the attention a webcam brings them.

So I’m asking you, dear readers…what do YOU want to see in a weekly or daily show centred around this site?

In this episode, Warren and Todd discuss GameCenter, the law, Tron Legacy, old schol games like Ecco the Dolphin and Cinemaware classics, and the late, lamented Amiga. Plus we pimp Robert Ashley and explore the madness that is Tass Times in Tonetown for the Apple IIgs. Enjoy!

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In this episode, Warren and Todd discuss So Long Oregon, Archetype and the state of iPhone shooters, Steam, Netflix coming to Canada and Microsoft’s continued tumble into the abyss. Enjoy!

In this episode, Warren and Todd discuss So Long Oregon, Archetype and the state of iPhone shooters, Steam, Netflix coming to Canada and Microsoft’s continued tumble into the abyss. Enjoy!

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THe following is an editorial by Chip of Two Minute Time Lord fame. He’s also a Apple fan and Mac gamer, and he’s got a few things to say about the current state of gaming on Apple platforms.

Even though Steam had come to the Mac, bringing with it some of my favorite games, I hesitated for a moment before pushing the magic button that would wipe out my MacBook Pro’s Boot Camp partition.

Of course, dual booting is a pain in the neck. So I’m now setting enemy players on fire in Team Fortress 2 within OS X. At a slower framerate.

Um, yay?

Don’t get me wrong. Valve’s migration to the Mac is unambiguously good. While there have always been good games on the Mac platform, it has perpetually lagged behind DOS and Windows for 26 years. Steam’s presence on the Mac offers a new pipeline for big-ticket and indie games alike — a new legitimacy that helps the Mac finally approach parity with the PC.

But it’s not all fun and games for Mac gamers. OS X isn’t yet tuned for gaming. TF2 is entirely playable in Snow Leopard, but runs better on the same hardware in Windows 7. Many PC games are ported to the Mac using Transgaming’s Cider Portability Engine, essentially translating Windows code to OS X on the fly at a performance and system integration cost.

Mac gamers still haven’t realized those heady expectations we had back when John Carmack rolled out a Quake 3 test for the Mac in 1999. In fact, one of the _reasons_ we’re approaching parity with the PC is because that’s a stagnating platform as well. For several years, the best answer to “What kind of Mac should I buy if I like to game?” was “Buy an economical Mac and a gaming console.” These days, that’s the best advice on both sides of the aisle. The MMORPG genre aside, gaming is now a console and handheld phenomenon.

Mac gaming can still be a profitable and enjoyable niche, though. Gaming on the desktop and laptop make sense for gamers both hardcore (MMOs, tweak-friendly FPSes) and more casual: the people who want to frag their colleagues during a break and then turn back to work on their Final Cut projects. Current Macs can run most ported games well with some system adjustments. Cider and Steam have lowered the cost of not only developing games for the Mac but also distributing them to customers, bypassing the increasingly antiquated shelves full of data discs.

In short, the state of Mac gaming is “good enough.” While there’s faster money to be made in developing games for Apple’s iOS devices, there’s still a healthy market on the Mac side that will continue to attract ports and indie creations. On the consumer side, gamers who consider switching to a Mac will find that gaming is much less of a trade-off than before.

Hop onto a Team Fortress 2 server, and it won’t be long before you see a player’s character decked out with iPod headphones. And you’ll realize that “good enough” actually _is_.

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Check out the inaugural episode of the Fruitygamer Podcast over at fruitygamer.com. I’ve ben working for a while on the Fruitygamer website, and I think it’ll likely be a showcase for weekly audio podcasts, along with less frequent but higher-end video segments.

In the inaugural episode of the Fruitygamer Podcast, Warren and Todd discuss new games on the iPad and iPhone, Spore, Hayao Miyazaki’s rather blasphemous views regarding the Jesus Pad, and the latent homophobia in Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony. All this and more in the very first episode of the Fruitygamer Podcast!

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I’ve been working through various ways to create compelling internet content, and I’ve explored various options including scripted material and making elements for FInal Cut Pro so I can film, drag and drop. All off this comes from the idea of minimizing the inputs while maximizing outputs…but it would still involve a lot of work. Putting together the two Fruitygamer pilot episodes required about half a day of work for each segment, in addition to being down at E3 in the first place and filming the interviews.

That’s all well and good, and there’s no reason I can’t use that same methodology for special episodes. But if I want to create a lot of content quickly the way to do it is live and streamed. So I looked at BoinxTV as a viable option. I got Boinx when I bought one of the MacHeist offers for $40 a while back, and as the program is normally $299 I got a pretty decent bargain. But since I had no use for it at the time, Boinx sat on my computer unused, until now.

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