Freyburg

Mel gets her “eeeeeeeekkk” on as we head to the airport.

These bellies speak truth. 

Pretty much describes why I’m looking forward to moving to Japan. 

Stay tuned for much Japan loveliness. 

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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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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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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Fruitygamer at E3 2010 with an interview with Joe Bentley of Onlive about their streaming video game service. Onlive brings many premium titles to the Mac that have up until now been out of reach for Mac gamers.?

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iOS4 hit the iTunes Store this week, and with it came several updates designed to enhance the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad gaming experience. Here’s a list of the new and improved features that will affect your gaming:

Gamecenter: Companies like ngMoco and others have up until now created adhoc social networks to connect up players for games as diverse as We Rule and Words with Friends. Apple has in one fell swoop replaced their patchwork efforts with Gamecenter, a social networking hub for iGamers to connect, compare scores and compete.

Unfortunately, Gameceenter isn’t out yet, with only vague promises of “this summer” to tide us over. Until then you’ll have to use Feint or one of the other competing services, or actually (ugh) talk to your friends and set something up.

The other big addition for gamers is the gyroscope, though unfortunately it’s restricted solely to iPhone 4 owners. Like the compass and the accelerometer, the gyroscope will literally bring a new dimension into gameplay. Steve Jobs impromptu display of his Jenga skills at the WWDC keynote notwithstanding, it’ll be very exciting to see what amazing gameplay iPhone developers come up with to take advantage of the gyro.

Not quite related to gaming, but thrilling to the anal-retentive amongst us is Folders, which lets you organize up to twelve apps in a folder that opens up when you tap it. I’m sure all of us have tons of games scattered far and wide across many pages of our iPhones, and the folder app lets you gather all of them up onto one page, and even sub categorize them into different genres.

Last but not least is the Retina Display. With a 960 by 640 display, the new iPhone screen has eye-popping clarity. While many are touting the screen’s suitability for surfing the web or reading e-books (all of which are valid points), think back to the leaps in gameplay that occurred int he glory days of the Graphics Card Wars. Entirely new game genres like first person shooters and RTSes became possible on the PC, and now that same revolution will happen on the iPhone. FPS still presents a challenge due to the iPhone’s touch screen controls, but RTSes and other tactical games could get a real boost from the increased screen real estate and sharpness. And dare we dream of World of Warcraft on the iPhone? Yes we dare indeed.

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It’s like the coolest camping trip ever.