So you know how there are a ton of apps out there that allow you to mix music and make beats in the iTunes store? Yeah, they’re loads of fun but you know what would be a great idea? If someone came out with an app that instead of producing, allowed you to start your own music label! Wouldn’t that be hot? You could sign your own artists, and hire producers, and even watch your artist’s tracks move up the charts. If your like me, your slapping yourself for not thinking of this idea sooner.
Apparently great minds think alike and Hungry Eyes Film and Television Inc. along with XMG Studio Inc. have developed this very same idea as a mobile app. You get to roll like P Diddy, or Russell Simmons. You manage your artists and build their fan bases by going on tour and selling records. You can even mix your own tracks with music from real producers including Ryan Hemsworth, Jake One, BADBADNOTGOOD, Frank Dukes, Marco Polo and others.
This app sounds legit so I can’t wait to try it out when it drops in the iTunes store on the 12th. Does this sound like something worth coping to you?
Check out the video Below, which I must say myself is pretty dang good with the rhyming explanation!
Yeah, yeah, this review is kind of late – however, can you blame me? I was too busy trying to get VC points! They are so hard to come by until I got a few tips from some friends. At any rate, take a look at my Likes and Dislikes for the new installment of NBA2K13 and see whether they take the franchise to the next level, or if it falls flat on it’s face.
Likes:
Different Modes
There are many different modes that you can play with this game. So much so that you will really be playing this for a while trying to master each one. Right now I’m developing my player who got drafted to the Grizzlies. You can have conversations with the GM, boost your twitter following, have post game conferences and negotiate contracts. It’s really cool to kind of play the game from that perspective. NBA2K13 is by no means the first game to employ the ability to build your character from scratch, but I really like the way it was executed here. It really brings the game to what we see happening in the NBA today.
If developing your own player is not your thing, you can develop your team just the way you want to in the “My Team” mode. Execute trades, and build a powerhouse of a team. Not your thing – you can play games with up-to-date teams at your leisure. You can also play online with your friends in still more modes like “Quick Match Team Up” and “Tournaments”.
Shoes
The Shoes man! If you are a sneaker fiend you can really spend a lot of time in this area. You can pick from hundreds of pairs of shoes, and you can even modify the colors down to the rubber souls! You can choose from different brands as well including 2K Generic brand, Spalding, Under Armor, Reebok, Converse, Nike, Jordans, and more. After you finish editing your shoe you can even name them.
Moves
There are tons of moves to choose from to leave your opponent in the dust. from crazy dunks, alley-oops, hook shots, crossovers, fade-aways. Even hesitations, and slight post-up moves. the lean-back that Kobe always does, the shimmey, they are all there and some. Not only that, but there are even moves that are particular to star players so Dirk’s crazy unstoppable awkward fade-away is present, as Derrick Roses ball-handling. I really don’t mind just watching a game play out because it really is entertaining to watch. I end up rooting for a team even though I know it isn’t real.
Music
The music is Boss. Period. Produced by Jay-Z as you no doubt have heard repeatedly, but it goes a long way. I think the era of generic video game beat is now fading as more deals are made with video game companies and famous musicians. You can of course edit the track listing and even add your own library in the editor but the titles are quite good including Nas, Daft Punk, U2 and of course Jay-Z among the line-up. Full Track listing can be found here.
Dislikes:
Graphics
There were times when I was really wondering about the graphic quality of the game over all. For instance – the screen with the starter line-up just before the game starts looks last gen. Seriously. There are other screens like this scattered throughout which really has me scratching my head as most of the game’s graphic quality is top-notch. Also, if your on PS3 make sure “PS – Smoothing” is turned on so the in-game graphics looks as good as it is meant to be. I also found the background screens with all the colors and moving parts to be really quite distracting. The interface could really be cleaned up, but that really is aesthetic preference. However, the game designers could really do something about it.
Too Many Moves
Yeah, I had moves in the section of Likes, but dang there are a lot of them to master. I end up trying to perform all of them and end up getting the ball stripped. Take it from me, just master a few of them – the ones that work for you and stick with those.
VC Points
I’m questionable with these. It definitely drives the game forward, but does everything have to cost these VC Points – even skills? Also, why do the cost so blasted much!? I can understand shoes, and unique articles of clothing. I can even understand training camps etc. but I would much rather my skills being upped based on my style of play and exploits on the court. It gives me more of a sense of accomplishment rather then me putting the game on coach mode to get easy points and just buying a decent jump shot.
Product Placements
the are everywhere this time around. Sprint, Nike, Jordan, Gatorade. You can spot them a mile away. Though they do add some credibility to the game and make it close to what goes on in reality, it does seem to be a little distracting at times. What if I don’t like Gatorade? Or I prefer a different brand? I think they may be alienating a few folks with this move, but that’s just my two cents. It really didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for playing the game so take that with a grain of salt.
Summary:
Over all this is my favorite NBA2K game so far in the franchise. They seem to keep the stuff that works and continue improving on everything else. Seeing the Dream Team, and all the other old school players is just fantastic and they all look so good graphically. I love the level of control of my own player, or team as well as over the shoes my character wears. It really makes me feel like I’m apart of the action which I suppose is the point. Good move 2K, good move. I’m sure in the coming years, they’ll tighten up on the background graphic elements and when that day comes, I will definitely be rejoicing. But until then, this game is still a winner.
Windows Phone 8 was officially unveiled today. Many people, myself included, are really looking forward to see what Microsoft has up it’s sleeve in this battle for the best mobile UI. Does Windows Phone 8 have enough to gain momentum against the entrenched Android and iOS platforms? This is by no means an exhaustive review, but just preliminary highlights.
I saw the entire keynote and a few things jumped out at me”
Data Sense
Though a little late to the party, this is a welcome addition to the mobile UI. It does exactly what you might think it does. It keeps track of your data usage for you so you know whether or not you can afford to give that thumbs up or no. However, it goes a step further by intelligently compressing websites, as well as autmatically flagging and using existing wifi data connections. This is estimated to save about 45% of the data that could have been used according to Joe Belfiore.
Kids Corner
This allows the Windows Phone 8 owner to compartmentalize his or her phone so that only the apps they choose are accessible to the kids. They brought Jessica Alba out to demonstrate the usefulness. That said, I thought Dieter Bohn and Chris Ziegler made a good point over at The Verge when they said this might still be useful for people who don’t necessarily have kids when lending the phone to a friend. Rooms
This is really the natural next step of the people hub on Windows Phone. Rooms is basically a more private group where you can share location, calendar events, etc… with your closest buddies. What I found interesting was that you can include people who are not necessarily Windows Phone users in this group and they can still receive updates. I’m not clear on what features won’t work across android or iOS devices though.
Skydrive
Skydrive was really interesting to watch in action because of two main points. First, they give you 7 Gigs to play with which is about 2 Gigs more than normal with these cloud services now-a-days. Second, it works in a similar fashion to when playing a game on a windows device. If on Xbox, you can pick up on your windows phone and vice-versa. The same with your work documents. You can continue working on presentations, and Word documents across the Windows Phone, PC, or Microsoft Tablet.
Wallet
This app allows you to pay via NFC, and store your credit information. It also spots local deals which can really come in handy for someone like me who is always on the go and can’t necessarily plan around a good deal on groupon. I really can’t wait to try this out for an extended period of time.
I had the chance to spend time with Chief Extraction Architect Steve Chao about the new technology that Detron is developing. He’s working on high-level encryption for the masses. This stuff is not connect the dots to open a file. We’re talking serious encryption that apparently is extremely difficult to break. It’s called QDK or Quantum Direct Key. It’s so secure that the claim is it hasn’t been broken yet…AT ALL. If you’d like to give it a try you can find the Code Challenge here.
I loved speaking with Steve, and what I got was that he is extremely passionate about the technology and extremely confident in it to boot. He explained that the encryption works with two keys. One public and one private. The private key is generated by some machine (Key Management Center) that is in some deserted place Mars somewhere in the boonies, and is never online. No one knows where it is while the other key is generated by the phone itself. Mr. Chao divulged in the interview below that a random number is used as a key and is generated by “thermal noise on the chip“which is then used to open up an encrypted file. However, that number was encrypted as well so you would need to decrypt one key to decrypt the real key to decrypt the file! This sounds pretty tough to get around to me and should stop lower skilled baddies from even trying.
This technology will be fitted to the Defense phone that Detron is developing. It has a 4.3″ Sharp qHD screen, an aluminum frame, and a dual-core ARMv7 Cortex A9 1GHz CPU with 1Ghz of RAM. There will be a 16G and 32G option. With that said, I want one, and I want one NOW! The possibilities for secure transactions of all sorts via the cell phone or whatever medium file transfers exist is seemingly endless. I would definitely feel more secure using this technology while making online purchases, or reviewing sensitive documents online. This has huge implications for in-app purchases or apps like Square which allow credit card transactions via the cell phone or tablet. Once we get more time to review the phone we’ll have that up for you. In the mean-time check out the interview with Steve Chao below:
The NY Games Conference held by Digital Media Wire took place earlier in September, and I had a chance to chat with a few folks and look at emerging technologies at the conference.
Three items really stood out to me and I’ll talk about them briefly here. I’ve also included some video of my conversations with them.
Image Metrics (3D Technology Company):
I spoke with Robert Gehorsam who is the CEO of the company. They have a few products, some of which they couldn’t show us yet, because they were unreleased, that were really fascinating. I was extremely impressed with the performance of the technology that he showed me and you can take a look at the video below. In a nutshell, what sets the company apart is the fact that they can drive 3D renders of either avatars, or a 3D version of yourself extremely acurately, with almost any camera, on a mobile device.They’ve done work on such films as the Wolfman and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Spartacus Game:
I also caught up with David Katz, VP of Starz Digital Media as he talks about the gaming initiatives the company has undertaken surrounding their popular shows. Of course Starz has some compelling content, and to keep customers engaged, they’ve turned to some interesting sources such as gaming. Check out the conversation below.
How to Speak Jamaican:
I just had to talk with Gary Carr, the creator of “I Know Jamaican”. You can check out my thoughts here.
It’s exactly what it says – no more, no less. You can have common phrases translated into the Jamaican dialect called patois. Really cool!
If your into mixing music and videos, here’s a nice little app that you might be interested in. It’s called VJay – which is appropriate, but still sounds funny. It’s set up in pretty much the exact same way two turntables would be set up in a DJ App, except there are two videos instead. The makers, algoriddim, know what their doing as they’ve been around the bend a time or two. They created the DJay app for iPhone, and iPad and their up to their usual schennanegans with this latest app.
I got the chance to play with it for a little while and there is quite a bit you can do with this puppy. Apparently it’s the first of it’s kind giving its users the ability to mix music videos rather than just .mp3s. A few of the cool things you can do are of course fading the music as well as the images together as you move from one video to the other. There are different graphic options for fading from one video to the other like “Cube”, “Swap”, “Grid”, and few more. Changing those options determine how the fade will work. Block for example transitions like a turning cube.
Not only can you que up videos, you can also que up different songs as well. So that’s four separate things going on at the same time potentially. Two different tracks with two different videos, unless of course the videos have their own audio. You can loop a portion of the audio at 2 or 4 beats and you can also choose different cool effects that effect the video in real-time. Some of those effects are “strobe”, “twirl”, “crush” and “fisheye”. Strobe causes the video to pulsate with light instantly giving you migraine. Twirl is a mini tornado in the middle of the video. Crush pixelates the video so that you look like you are playing a video game straight from the 80s and fisheye is a bouncing ball under the video.
You can record your best moments for playback at a later date, and the video toggles to full screen when you want it to. It’s quite a bit of functionality and if you want it, it’ll cost you $10 bucks. You can create really cool music videos if you put in the time and energy, however, I instantly thought of one really cool use case scenario. I saw this cool band call “Kung Fu Masters” and they play jazz while kung fu movie clips and anime play in the background. You can check them here, but I think this app would totally be cool for you creative types out there who think up cool stuff like that. If your looking for a great tool, I recommend it. You can download the VJay app right here.
Now this is interesting – If you can’t wait for the Basketball season to start, and you are looking for some exciting NBA action, then check the NBA 2K13 live stream of a Full NBA Game being played out in the NBA 2K13 Game. Also, the match-up is the Miami Heat vs. OKC! The quarters are 5 minutes worth of game-play. The game will happen today at 5:00pm EST, or 2PM PST. This is not a replay. It will be played live by two 2K Sports community managers “Ronnie2K” and “LD2K”. Not clear on who will be controlling which team. Now to the important stuff – You can watch the live stream here: http://twitch.tv/2K.
Ran into Gary Carr at the NY Games Conference last week. He is the creator of the “I Know Jamaican” iPad app. Now before you say its fake, check it out for yourself. Gary tells me he took pains to make sure the lingo was as authentic as possible. The way it works is by tapping on canned common phrases which you can then translate to “Jamaican.” Jamaican in this sense actually being “Patois” which is the dialect of Jamaicans. There is actually no such thing as speaking Jamaican. I give it my seal of approval having heard it myself. Goan Rude Boi!
You can get the full app here. There is also a dumbed-down free app as well in case you want to try it out. You can see the video below:
Looks like 2K is outdoing themselves with the music for this game. They’re pulling out all the stops with this one. Check out the trailer below featuring the cut by Momentous which is based off of the song “Victory” by Puff Daddy and the Family. Biggie Smalls is rapping over the beat while the featured NBA Ballers are breaking ankles. Arguably one of the best trailers yet for NBA 2K13 don’t you think?
This Wednesday will be the start of the annual NY Games Conference. There will be tons of speakers sharing their intimate knowledge of the gaming industry and their insights as to where the gaming industry is going. Make no mistake, this is definitely a gamer’s paradise where the likes of Dan Porter – GM for Zynga, Anders Lindeberg, Head of Investor Relations for Rovio – creators of Angry Birds and others will discuss the future of gaming as we know it. There will be lots of panels and the full agenda can be found here. We’ll be following all the action so stick around for updates!
