Do you still remember godswar online on Facebook? I blogged about it a couple of months back because it’s known to be an MMO running on your Desktop which was ported to Facebook. Now, it’s Maple Story who’s been doing the same thing just like godswar and it’s rebranded with an expansion – “MapleStory Adventures”.

I’ve tried playing the game and it appears that it’s not running officially yet. It’s on Open Beta phase right now and you can only select two classes, Warrior and Magician. So far graphics is a bit jittery compared to the desktop version but I’m not too sure if it’s because of the game or my internet connection just sucks. But still, the game is totally playable with similar appeal to the desktop one.

I’ll be spending a couple of hours on Maplestory adventures this weekend and try to give a detailed review about it. First impressions about the game is that it will work! At the time of this writing it has a 91K likes but that’s too shallow to judge if it will end up successfully. If they fixed those lags then provide timely updates to fix some issues then MapleStory adventures will surely be a hit!. But then again, I would mostly play in my Desktop because you have a much better control and it’s speedy for me.

In my opinion, it’s a good move by nexon to introduce the game. Marketing wise it will be helpful but in the long run it will go in a steady decline. Things might change a bit because of the improvement of technology but it’s way too long to judge it. So far good move for Nexon on trying this out.

We know how good ASUS laptops are, in fact they’re one of the hot brands and is renowned for long lasting notebooks. ASUS K43U was almost around for 2 months but I didn’t noticed it till now (I should go out more often). What’s surprising with this one is that it’s one of the bang of the buck choices if you’re short with money.

It’s not that powerful to play resource hungry games but I think it’s more than capable to perform those  office work. Anyway here’s the brief specs of ASUS K43U if you’re interested in buying one. I’d say better get this while supplies last.

Asus K43U Specs

AMD Fusion APU E-350 (Dual Core)
2GB DDR3 1333 MHz SDRAM,2 x SO-DIMM socket for expansion up to 8 G SDRAM
2.5″ SATA, 500GB 5400rpm
AMD Radeon 6310 Graphics
Integrated802.11 b/g/n
Built-in Bluetooth™ V2.1+EDR (Optional)
10/100/1000 Base T
14.0″ 16:9 HD (1366×768) LED backlit
2.44 kg (with 6 cell battery)

Angry Birds Web App

It’s good to know that such web application exists, an Angry Birds game that can be played on your favorite browser – no downloads, no installations, just pure waiting time.  Anyway here’s the link of the Angry Birds which you can play on your browser and it’s weird that it’s sponsored (not sure) by chrome. There might be a connection to this one to it’s recently announced Google Chromebooks but whatever Google is thinking is a good sign for gaming goodness.

It plays smoothly for me and no discovered bugs on my case. It’s in Beta version so there might be some glitches when you play it. Anyway, I wonder what could be the effect of this  when the Facebook version will be released? Hope they add a few improvements of gameplay like cooperative mode or something so there’s more interaction with your friends.

Update 05/13/2011: You can now play Angry birds on any browser instead of wasting angry birds download you’ll find on the net.

It’s going to be Angry Birds meets Angry Nerds. The bird-slinging popular game of Rovio is crowned to be the most popular game this 2010 because of it’s simplicity. And it’s not surprising to see a cloned game and get instant popularity because of it’s funny name. Haven’t downloaded this one so I can’t judge how the gameplay fairs compared to Angrybirds. Perhaps will be seeing more clones when this one propelled with revenues that matched the original game.

Anyway this is not an April Fools Joke so if you want to download this game then you can proceed here if you own an iPhone or Android device. Atlassian’s specialty comes from developing enterprise software products so the concept of Angry Nerds has a geeky mindset (squishing bugs). If this game proves to be more entertaining than Angry Birds then Rovio should start developing a counter agent to maintain it’s top spot, again hands down to Atlassian for such a wacky idea.

There are just some details that the game needs to be polished in order for it to be a successful game similar to pokemon. Here are some detailed points which I think Influence the most in the long run.

1. Game doesn’t have the explorative nature which pokemon have. You are just stuck with all the battles in a static place. What happens is that it doesn’t categorize itself as an rpg.
2. The skill improvement is good but the waiting time for it to be used  is kinda crappy. This would bore a lot of players and it will give them great disadvantage in battles. They should have place the skill waiting time if their monsters are on high levels.
3. The Game needs a website and it needs a repository of all the monsters that you can collect. The excitement of a Pokemon game is that you are geared in looking for what your monster will look like and what monsters are yet to be captured.
4. Although the graphics is kinda good it’s not yet of best quality. It’s in the average though and it’s not gonna last especially that there are some games out there that uses smooth streaming. Godswar Online is an example to this.
5. They have to put an all original feature in the game. Something that distinguishes it different from Pokemon. In case the game gets popular then there’s the chance of Nintendo filing a lawsuit against them.

Mino Monsters has so much potential but they need to get things done quickly as competition is really tough. Facebook now is more than just a social networking site and is considered a platform. If Mino Monsters gets ahead of this game then it’s going to be a million dollar game in the future.

Update 03/15/2011: It’s confirmed, Fujitsu is releasing Lifebook in the Philippines as models have been featured on their product introduction. will be posting more on this.

Lots of things happened in  short amount of time this week of March and Apple’s race to present their core products (iPad 2 and New Macbook Pro) was nevertheless very successful. That’s what to expect to apple as they made another striking improvement for their iPads and with New Macbook Pros released then there’s much to expect for what will be their sales report this year. Anyway, I know that Nokia Microsoft Partnership has been closed leaving their future platform, Meego, behind. But it seems that there’s a few left which do have faith in releasing products that are Meego powered. Take a look at Fujitsu for example with it’s blazing red Lifebook being the very first meego powered netbook in the company.

It’s not safe to say if this is the very first device released officially that runs with Meego but I’m confident enough that this is not a beta or alpha prototype as it’s been released in Japan a few months back. It’s availability in the Philippines is still in question but this would appear in Asia for sure. Specs are pretty standard in which it’s powered with a 1.66ghz N450 atom processor, a 1gb of RAM and 250gb storage available for $400 (17,200 Php).

I don’t know how Fujitsu get that pricing but in my opinion it’s pricey for a platform with less support for applications. The thing is, Meego has been designed for Netbooks and Tablets to compensate and enhance battery life for portable devices. Sadly, It’s been abandoned by Nokia in favor of WP7 but the way I see it there’s a lot of potential for the platform. There are lots of opensource developers out there that supports meego but it’s not enough, the only thing that Meego needs is a strong company/corporation that would fund the platform.

Anyway here’s a video of the pre-alpha release which runs on a tablet. It’s still not mature on that point so expect it that it runs differently on Fujitsu Lifebook. Who knows? Meego is just sleeping and all it needs is decent funding for it’s comeback.

Update 07/11/2011: I made a list of currently available blackberry phones in the local market so if you’re looking for one then you can head on the link I provided.

If you own a blackberry here in the Philippines, chances are you’ve been using it mainly to connect to your social networking accounts. Blackberries are really good in terms of messaging and posting updates to social networking profiles cause not only were they cheap (globe promos) but they have one of the coolest keypads which are addicting to type with. But there’s one thing that keeps bothering me when I use my blackberry 9300 curve, and that is when I unable to connect to my Twitter account for two straight weeks which bugs me a lot as I’ve been concentrating my effort to enrich my twitter profile.

All I can think of why I’ve been experiencing connection problems to my twitter account in my blackberry is that RIM has been doing some upgrades for it’s blackberry application. Other than upgrades for the app then there must be something wrong with the connection layer between blackberry and globe.

I haven’t found any solution on how to fix these or maybe it just happens to my handset. But most of the people I know who owns a blackberry, be it online and I know personally have been experiencing similar problems as well when connecting to their twitter account. I haven’t tried a normal connection without using globe’s blackberry social but it seems that the results would be the same.

If you happen to experience this blackberry twitter connection problem and discovered a workaround or tweak of some sort to connect to twitter application then you can just hit in the comments section and share it with us if it’s ok. Other Social networking profiles such as facebook and Instant messengers have no problem connecting online. Le’ts just hope that my first hunch of RIM doing some upgrade on their twitter app is the main cause of this.

Anyway, if it affects your social experience you can still use the old Facebook photo viewer easily. All you have to do is to click the picture you want to view and when it’s loaded with the black screen on the background just press F5 to refresh the page and it would redirect you easily to the old photo viewer. Anyway in my opinion, the new Facebook photo viewer is really cool as it makes up with faster loading time and wouldn’t redirect you to your friend’s page when you click a photo in your social wall. I think Facebook just need to redesign the black background running as it’s conceived more like an eye-sore than an enhancement for better social experience.

So what’s really special about this game? Actually there’s nothing special about it but what’s special is on the platform on which it is running. First it runs natively on your pc but now you can choose to play it on using your facebook account. Yes guys… It’s running on facebook platform. The difference is that is not powered by flash compared to other facebook games. And it runs pretty well with the graphics similar when it’s launched first on PC. I don’t know how they did it but it seems that Godswar online can hook and use system level resources since it can only play on windows OS only (not sure with this). Flash games like cityville are limited to Flash API but Godswar performed better in terms of flexibility since it’s using system resources. Anyway you can check out the game here if you want to try it out.

Angry Birds the most downloaded and most popular game on the smartphone is now available on your PC. If you have windows or MAC then you can easily enjoy the game by downloading this app for just $5. It sucks though cause you can download Angry Birds for free on Android and just a dollar on iOS. In my opinion I think it’s much better if you’ll just buy a smartphone and download it there instead of getting it on your PC for a $5 value. Anyway here’s the link of Angry Birds on PC if you’re planning to get it. And if you know a legit site which offers the game for free then just post it up in the comments section so everyone will benefit from it. Just make sure that it’s a legitimate one or it will just end up in my Post Bin. I’ll be having a post about this game since it’s so much hype, might as well pour my thoughts about it plus a couple of review with Aspire One 522 and LG Optimus One in the weekend.