Over the past few years, there has been a whole lot of hype about a game created by Will Wright, the maker of The Sims. This game was Spore. It allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. Well that’s what Wikipedia says, and yes, it is about that. As well as the big PC title, there was also a mini version, Spore Origins for mobile devices. This concentrates on just the first stage of the main game as a unicellular organism.

To start off, I played Spore Origins on the iPhone. The controls on this are very basic, using the accelerometer to control your little organism through the level on its objective to eat enough guppy creature things to collect enough DNA to move on. Most of the levels are this, except they start including unique creatures for you to attack or defend against. There are also special levels where you have to traverse a maze-like setting and your goal here is to get to the end without being killed by other creatures. This goes on for most of the 30 levels in the game, except for the 2 boss levels where you have to attack and kill huge creatures. This game is small, a little challenging at times but is worth checking out.

After getting to the end of that, I evolved onto the full PC title, Spore. At the start, it is much like the Spore Origins game, where you eat meat to grow and evolve. There is a fair bit more depth to the unicellular organism stage of Spore compared to its Origins counterpart. From here, you get to the stage where you grow legs and go onto land and either become friendly with another species or kill them. For me, this part of the game was the most interesting. It’s also where you get to customise your creature the most and turn it into your own unique creation.

Unfortunately for me, this is where the game all goes downhill for me. Then comes the Tribal stage where you either form friend a tribe, or again destroy them. Although the difference this time is that it is done in a RTS kinda way. The problem is it is not quite an RTS and is a bit weak. After this is the Civilisation stage. This is where it get completely ridiculous! It’s still the RTS type game but here you create the buildings yourself. that may be fun for some people, but I can’t be bothered with this. I couldn’t find any auto or random button so the game throws some random parts together to whip something up quickly in 5 seconds so I can get back to the actual game. Maybe I am missing something, but it’s still pretty annoying and ridiculous. I endured anyway and through the taking over of cities and silliness of creating building and vechiles.

From here, the game started getting better again, although not as good as the second stage of the game, in my opinion. Here you traverse through space, encountering other civilized planets. There are missions you have to do here to get through the game, and there are even missions to be done so you can form a good relationship with a civilization so you can form an alliance with them. Or you can annoy them and go to war with them, your choice. What you do through this stage, you collect badges for various objectives and such. This is by far the longest part of the game, and the rest of the game has literally been building up to this point.

To get a good feel of the game, you’d have to play it yourself, either by purchasing the game, or acquiring it by other methods. I did enjoy the game, but there was a lot I didn’t like about it. The game felt like a whole bunch of little mediocre games all thrown in a blender and released as some sort of huge game. For example, for anyone who has played a real RTS before, the RTS stages of this game will feel horrible to play and fairly weak. Although they definitely aren’t going for a full experience like you would from an actual game from that genre. This game is probably not going to give much to gamers, but for non-gamers or casual gamers, they might enjoy this a whole lot more because it offers a wide range of different things to do. This game was definitely not for me, but hey, it might just be the game for you.

Over the past month, I have been using a Twitter like services called Plurk. The major difference between this and Twitter is the way they display the messages, or as they call them, Plurks. Where Twitter shows Tweets in a list form, Plurks are shown in a timeline format. At first, I found the site to be a little slow and not as good, but as soon as more of my friends jumped on the bandwagon, the ball started rolling.

One of the things that makes Plurk different from Twitter is the conversations. Replies are threaded with a Plurk, as shown by clicking on the Plurk to drop down the replies people have said. This is better than the way Twitter does it because it don’t show it as a new message, which is a little annoying at times seeing replies to other people in your tweet stream. It just doesn’t make sense.I really like the replies because it makes the site seem a lot more active and fast paced, more like IM or IRC.

Plurk is very smooth, all thanks to AJAX. There is no refreshing of pages, which is a godsend, especially when there is a new Plurk or reply every second. You would be refreshing all the time otherwise. It is also good about notifying you when there are new messages and replies, and marking them as read. I like being able to know what I have and have not read. It makes it so much easier to catch up when I have been away sleeping or at school or away from keyboard.

One of the perks with Plurk is a Karma system. This gives users a way to how they compare with other users on the site. This is much better than judging by who has the most friends or followers, as sometimes its impossible to beat web celebs with that. The karma system is more fair and is based more on messages that friends, although it still is a factor. Although having a ratings system as such does have its downsides, such as people overplurking, aka spamming. This isn’t a huge issue but it could be in the future. I hope they have ways to manage this when it does happen.

I have not had any issues with Plurk and I think it is a great service, better than Twitter in my books. Although this wouldn’t be the case if it wasn’t for my friends and the internet people that friend me and make the Plurking experience more enjoyable and real. If you don’t already have a Plurk account, make one by using my link here. By doing so will note me for your referral and we will automatically be added on each others friends lists. Plurk on my friends!

The new version of Opera came out a couple of days ago. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try and alternative browser that wasn’t Internet Explorer or Firefox. When I saw the news on the Digg front page, one feature really stood out. This was Opera Link. I wanted to see how well it performs and if it, along with other features was enough for me to take Opera as seriously as I do Firefox. Could this play around make me a switcher?

There were a few surprising things I loved about Opera right off the bat. The first one being a feature called Speed Dial. This is a page displayed when you open a new tab, and it gives you access to your 9 favourite websites. You can choose what websites you put there and it had a thumbnail of the site along with the title underneath for quick access to the sites you access the most.

Another great feature of Opera is the tab preview. When you hover your mouse over a tab on the tab bar for a few seconds, a little thumbnail will display of the current page, and when you scroll your cursor over the other tabs, the thumbnail will change to the website tab hovered. This may sound a little useless but when you have quite a few tabs open, its a great way to find the webpage you are looking for in your tab bar.

On the topic of tabs, I also love the way Opera handles the Ctrl+Tab keyboard shortcut for switching tabs. Unlike in other browsers where it would switch you over to the next tab, Opera shows a little menu with all you current tabs and you can keep tabbing through them till you get to the one desired and that page will come up. It is much cleaner than having to focus half a dozen tabs to get to the one you desire. Also if you go into the options, you can incorporate tab thumbnails, so along with the titles in the menu, you also get a visual aide.

The final feature that really appealed to me was Opera Links. This is a service provided by Opera that synchronizes your browser bookmarks, speed dial and the personal bar (known as the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox.) All the information goes to the cloud and can be synchronized across browsers. And as an added bonus, you can also access your bookmarks and speed dial right from the Opera Links website. This is useful if you are using an alternative browser or a mobile browser and allows you to view all your bookmarked sites right from in the browser.

Now, my Opera experience did come with a few annoyances. One thing I did find odd is the search on the speed dial. I don’t think it is necessary to have that there due to there being a Google search tool on the address bar. I believe that it would be much more useful as a bookmarks and history search, instead of another web search. And while we are on Bookmarks, I didn’t find the bookmarks manager anywhere near as powerful as Firefox’s Places. I am so use to having my Bookmarks Toolbar, Bookmark Menu and General Bookmarks all separate, but still together in a unified place. With Opera, the Personal Bar was completely separate from the other general bookmarks, which is the same as the bookmarks menu. This is not Opera’s fault this annoyed me, I’m just so use to the new way Firefox manages bookmarks that I find the old way frustrating.

The default Opera UI is a bit of a mess compared to other browsers. I don’t understand why everyone wants to change things! Internet Explorer removed/hid the File menu, and Opera thinks that they would prefer to have the Address bar and Tab bar switched around. This is a little annoyance and should not be a problem one you get use to and familiar with it.

Being so use to the Firefox way of browsing, the pop-up password notification box is here, and annoying! Its not too bad because the website still logs on in the background and you can wait for it to successfully log in before saving your password, but I would still prefer it out of the way completely. And while we are at password saving, the Wand password manager is a little different from others. When you go to a site with a saved password, other browsers would auto-complete the username and password fields. Opera on the other hand highlights the edges. I have no idea what this means and ended up typing my username and password again. It wasn’t till a few sites later I noticed a wand icon in the address bar and clicked it and the fields filled in with my login details. It would have been nice to have a notification bubble telling me how to use it the first time this happens just so a new user like myself is aware.

My last minor gripe with Opera is Google. Yes, Google. I use a lot of Google’s services and it was a little annoying to not have them work as well as they do in Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Gmail was stripped down and didn’t have a lot of the cool display that it does in Firefox. It seemed a little stripped down. Also I couldn’t be invisible on GTalk inside Gmail and I couldn’t use any of the Gmail Lab features. I also got an error message on Google Notepad. I could still use it perfectly fine and it looks normal to me, but there was an error message there for some reason. That was just odd. My iGoogle page has quite a few gadgets and one of the gadgets didn’t like Opera, so it caused it to keep refreshing the page. This made iGoogle unusable. I am also disappointed that there is no Google Gears for Opera either. I understand that this is not really Opera’s fault, it’s Google’s, but nevertheless, I still found it to be worthwhile to mention.

In conclusion, I feel that Opera is a great browser, and with a few tweaks and a bit of getting use to, Opera could be a perfect browser. Its memory and CPU usage was as good, if not better than Firefox 3 RC1’s, and it was very stable. Did playing around with Opera 9.5 make me want to switch. No, I’m still a Firefox user and will continue to do so for a while now. But in saying that, I am going to keep Opera around. It is an amazing alternative browser, second best, and I will use it when I need to use another browser for certain tasks.

When I heard the first rumors about the possibility of a God of War title coming to the PlayStation Portable, I was pretty excited and would love to see it come over to Sony’s little game machine. As well as being excited, I was a bit worried, thinking that a random company would either make a port or do a really bad job doing a prequel or something of it, spoiling the God of War franchise. When it was announced that Ready At Dawn was doing the game, all my worries were gone because I knew they would do another brilliant game, just like they did with Daxter.

There wasn’t a well defined storyline of the game, you help the Gods by going where the path leads. You start off doing one thing and then you go off on another arc that is unrelated from the first one and then there is another arc that is unrelated from the first and second arcs. The only similarities are you, the main character, and that each story has something to do with the Gods of Olympus. Basically, there is no main storyline.

As in the other games in the series, you are equipped with the blades. At the start, you are limited with what attacks you can do but as you level up the blades and acquire new weapons and skills, there is quite a bit you can do. The attacks do get quite repetitive but using different combination on different enemies, makes it a bit more enjoyable. You tend to use the strongest attacks most which makes them get old quite quickly. There is some magic but I only tended to use it when fighting a boss, when I really needed it.

There are a few unique enemies, all that look really good. They could have put a few more enemies in the game to give you more things to attack and new styles of killing your opponents.  There are also many unique environments that look amazing. They have really done a lot to make this game look stunning. The very few cut-scenes were very interesting to watch and gave you a sense of where the game is going. The mini-games which consist of pushing certain buttons at the right time give the game some unique killing sequences which turn away from the regular button bashing hack and slashing of enemies.

I do have to say, the end of the game was the best part. The last two bosses were so much fun to battle and did take time and strategy. I do have to say, the game difficulty does decrease towards the end as you get the Gauntlet of  Zeus which does a slower but more powerful move that can take out an enemy in a couple of attacks instead of the usual dozen or so with the blades. The end of the game is enough reason to play this game.

One problem I had is if I went into battle with low health, and got killed, I resume at the last checkpoint with the same low health. This made boss battles ten times harder because I would have to attack him but make sure I didn’t get attacked myself. One stage in particular is when you have to push a cart through fog and you get attacked by unreachable archers. It ws really hard to do without getting hit, unless you took ages to get past this part. Then after the archer have taken some of your health, you are put into a battle with a big difficult creature. Its very hard to do with little health and took many many attempts.

Another small problem with the game is the inconsistent save points. You might find 2 save point within 5 minutes of each other and at other times, they are miles apart. I never have liked it how many games only let you save at certain points in the game, generally before going out to battle or after a big boss or before going into new area. I like to be able to save the game so I can quit out of it. The problem is less of a problem because before going into battle with enemies, there was always a checkpoint so if you died you can easily return to just before the battle. Also with the PSP, you can power the system off in a sleep mode and return to where you were when you turn it back on. This is not really a big issue in the game but it could have been nice to ditch the save point and let us save anywhere. I can see they have done it to be consistent with the console games.

If you loved the other God of War titles, you are going to love this one too. It is considerably short, I was able to go through the game in about 6 hours on normal difficulty. In saying that, it does have a lot of replay value allowing you to go through the game again with a higher difficulty. As well as lacking in length, it also lacks in the amount of puzzles. If you enjoyed the puzzles in the console games, you might be a little disappointed that there aren’t many in this title.

Ready at Dawn did an amazing job at this game, just like they did with Daxter. This is definitely the PSP game of 2008, possibly of all time. This is a must have title for the PSP and I can easily see it becoming the best selling PSP title and possibly even surpassing the huge success of Daxter. If you have a PSP and want a great game for it, God of War will not let you down.