1. Small World

(iPad only)

A graphically stunning and highly addictive 2-player only and slightly smaller version of the full board game, recently updated to enable 1-player games with an AI opponent.

The concept of Small World is a fantasy land where you take control of various races of sentient beings, each with their own special ability which is combined each game with a random power, as they prosper and waver into decline through 10 turns of game play. You gain points for the land you conquer, as well as bonuses from special powers. Each game offers a new set of race and power combinations, and you’ll quickly learn which combos are the strongest, or the best defense against another combo, or the best choice in such and such a situation ….

The most difficult part of Small World is understanding the idea of sending your race into decline. If you feel your race is no longer serving you as best as it was (usually after 2-3 turns), you can choose to send it into decline, essentially getting rid of their bonuses and losing control of them, but also letting them live on as spirits in the land they conquered (until someone else conquers it of course). You then choose a new race and begin a new civilization from scratch. You can only have one active race and one race in decline at any time (except for certain bonus powers which allow more). It sounds hard but the tutorial mode is excellent and you’ll have the basics down in no time.

The game just lends itself so perfectly to the iPad format – conquering land is a satisfy swoosh of your finger dragging your pieces to the area. They could have made it so that you simply click on the land you want, but it feels so much more physical, as well as giving you a visual clue as to how many pieces you need to play to conquer the land.

The developers have also put serious consideration into the boardgame conversion aspect by allowing players to place the iPad in between them as you would a real boardgame, flat on the table (and autodetecting it, to boot) instead of forcing a round-robin pass-the-iPad style of gaming. It works wonderfully. The game is fairly quick, around 30 minutes with two human players, even faster with one AI player. There is no option to play over the internet or with with two iPads, though, if that is your thing.

My only gripe is that having never played the physical version of the boardgame I had no idea that it took one more race card to attack a mountainous area, and having scoured the tutorial and quick rule set I see no mention of it at all. Still, if that is the only bad thing I can say about it, then I’d say we’re on to a winner here! The game is so good, it convinced me to buy the real boardgame the next day from Amazon, along with 3 expansion sets to add even MORE variety in races and powers. Hopefully the developers will add some of the expansion sets in the iPad version too in the future.

2. Blokus HD

(iPad only)

Blokus is an incredibly simple board game that’s easy to pick up by both children and adults alike, as well as those new to designer board games such as Small World and Carcassonne. You start with a set of Tetris-like blocks (I guarantee every new player will be compelled to say “oooh, it’s like Tetris isn’t it!?” when you sit down to play), the goal being to place as many on the board as you can. The only rule is that your pieces must and indeed can only touch at the corners (see the screenshot). After a few rounds, space becomes a little more premium and you’ll start blocking each other off, trying to find weak spots where you can creep through he opponents’ carefully laid walls of defense. A full game should take no more than 30 minutes.

The iPad implementation of this classic boardgame is just as fun, though the interface feels a little gimmicky. It takes a while to get used to the on-screen control for orienting and flipping your pieces over – something that we do intuitively in real life but needs a lot of thought to implement properly on a touchscreen device. It’s easy once you get used to it, but turn off the time limit if you have players who’ve never played it on the iPad before, or with children. Playtesting with my wife, she got frustrated a few times as she tried to flick and twist the piece how she wanted, only for the countdown to end and the computer places a random piece somewhere for her instead! It’s a minor gripe and a quick learning curve, though.

There are of course local and wifi multiplayer options, though the local multiplayer isnt quite as sophisticated as Small World, and the only way to play is to hand over the iPad to the next player or spin it around for them. There is an internet play option too, but when I tried to join a game it said none available.

The addition of various challenges through a tournament mode play and achievements are a nice touch, but somewhat irrelevant.

3. Carcassonne

(iPhone, compatible with iPad and free HD update available later this year)

Though not officially an iPad optimized app, I’m including it in this list because Carcassonne still looks great when run at 2x magnification, and an iPad HD update is promised later this year along with a price increase (unless you buy now, in which case it is free).

Another classic, Carcassonne has remained one of gamers’ favorites for years now. With up to 5 local or AI players, you take it in turns to randomly draw terrain tiles, place them on the board and claim different features of the landscape for points. Each tile must match other tiles on the sides, and you cannot claim something which has already been claimed. If you connect to a road for example, which no one has claimed yet, you can place one of your “meeples” (little game pieces representing your people) and when the road is finally finished you’ll get 1 point per road tile. A castle gets you 2 per tile, or half points at the end of the game if you couldn’t finish it; a church gives you 9 points once all the surrounding tiles have been placed; a meeple placed on farmland will get 3 points per completed castle within connected land when the game ends. Again, it sounds difficult in words, but you’ll understand after a few turns and the in-game tutorial isn’t bad either.

One especially strong point of Carcasonne is the internet play option, which “just works”, without any registering with websites or further steps on your part. It also gives you an estimated time until you find an opponent, which I assume depends on the average wait time. The latest update adds support for multiple internet games and push notifications, so you can play in a number of games or do other tasks while you wait for your opponent.

Honorable Mentions:

Zooloretto:

(non-iOS4 iPhone, iPad compatible)
A relatively unknown contender in the euro-boardgame space, Zooloretto is a game about making a nice Zoo with paddocks full of animals. I won’t go into the game play details, but suffice to say it isn’t just a game for kids so don’t be fooled by the graphical style. Sadly, the sprites and icons look quite horrible when magnified on the iPad, and the game crashes on iOS4, so that’s why it didn’t make it to the top 3. My wife doesn’t seem to mind the pixelation though, and she’s been playing every night before bed for the last week or so.

Catan:

(iPhone only)

Yes, Catan is on the iPhone too. Sadly, the graphics look bad enough on the iPhone, magnified on the iPad just made me wince in pain. The game mechanics are basically all there, but I just found the interface (especially for trading cards) to be leave a lot desired. Frankly the Nintendo DS version was far better, and included the SeaFarers expansion, which the iPhone version doesn’t.

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Want to me to consider your game for inclusion in this list or any future ones? Send me a download voucher and I’ll be glad to give an honest review!

Note: Antcor also produce an identical router with model number AW54-SC, available cheaper than the WifiRobin brand model from dropshipping sites such as DHGate.com, so this review can be considered accurate for that model too. The only difference I can find is that Antcor already have a firmware update out that presumably fixes some of the problems mentioned in this review. As of writing there are no updates for the WifiRobin branded device.

1 paragraph conclusion:

In my tests, the device was only able to perform attacks on WEP-secured networks when there were also clients present and data being transmitted. Clientless attacks are not built-in, though they may be added in a future firmware update. Though the device claims to be able to attack WPA-secured networks too, it refused to hack my own home network saying “No clients” despite the fact that I had a few computers connected to it and transmitting data. I also found it incredibly difficult to set up and understand the router interface – I spent 3 hours fiddling with settings before I had a useable network hacked and retransmitted for my own use. But for that one use case – hacking a WEP network with some clients already connected, then retransmitting that network for your own use – it does actually work, and that in itself is quite an amazing accomplishment. I can only imagine it wil get better via future updates.

Interface issues:

I guess regular routers are hard enough to set up – one such as the WifiRobin that acts both as a regular wifi/3G (supposedly) router and an embedded wifi-hacking system just complicate things a million times over. It doesnt help that the online manual in incredibly basic and clearly written by a non-native speaker. I’ll write a better tutorial soon for anyone having trouble.

First off, you need to plug the thing in via USB and ethernet physical network cable to actually turn the device on and access the interface. You also have to configure your wired ethernet connection to a certain IP address manually, there is no DHCP plug-and-play in this thing. The online interface can then be used to set up most of the functionality, though the manual only describes a tiny subsection of it (for instance, I can’t for the life of me figure out what the claimed 3G network function is supposed to do). Curiously though, you can’t actually hack a network via the online config – you have to perform the actual hacking functions (such as scanning for networks and choosing your target) from the tiny LCD screen on the device itself. Once the device has been able to hack a network, it seems to say it to a shared memory area, and when you choose that as the network you wish to use in the online interface, it grabs the networks password from the shared memory and fills it in automagically.

The hacking:

As I said, I couldnt get it to work with my own WPA network, but it handled most of the WEP networks around me just fine. It doesnt inject packets though, so you’ll have to wait for it to collect enough crackable packets from the existing traffic (about half an hour).

Hardware:

It’s cute but plasticky, and while powering itself via USB might seem nice initially, the whole point of a router is to be put in the corner of the room and run by itself without the need of a physical machine. I’m thinking I’ll use the regular electrical socket to USB plug that came with my iPhone to power the thing more permanently. The Antcor model comes with a real power adapter, though it probably isn’t correct for your country unless you live in China, so thats just as useless.

Should you buy?

If you live somewhere with a *lot* of Wifi, then go ahead, it is bound to be able to hack one of them. If you have one particular network you wish to access, or you’re thinking it would be useful when you’re on the go, I’d give it a miss. I’d also say wait for my tutorial unless you’re really tech-capable, as the interface is hard to figure out at first, even for a geek like me. For the price of 2-3 months net access though, you can potentially get free wifi for life.

NVidia 3DVision:

COST: $200-$600
REQUIREMENTS: NVidia GFX card 8000 series or better, 120Hz LCD monitor or CRT monitor
BUY: @Amazon US
, @Amazon Japan

MORE INFO: NVidia Website

3DVision from NVidia has actually been around a long time – I have fond memories of playing Unreal Tournament on an old version of these LCD-shutter based glasses about 7 years ago. Back then, the glasses had to be plugged in for power and to get a signal, but the newest model is completely wireless and rechargeable for about 40 hours of 3D gaming goodness. The basic package of just a pair of 3DVision glasses and USB signal box costs about $200, but they probably aren’t compatible your current flatscreen monitor (for reasons I outlined last week). You’ll need to either get your hands on a big old CRT monitor – which you can probably pick up for free if you hang around dumpsters enough – or spend another $300-400 on a new 120Hz capable flatscreen LCD monitor. You’re also going to need a fairly powerful NVidia GFX card in your gaming rig, but you probably already do. Bear in mind that playing your games in 3D is going to take twice as much effort for your machine, so you’re going to get about half the framerate. This is unavoidable no matter what solution you choose. I personally chose the 3DVision route as I’m a cheap bastard and people are forever trashing huge CRTs at work, so if you can get your hands on one then $200 is really the cheapest option out there.

If you prefer really big screen gaming, you can also use the 3DVision glasses with a good number of DLP projectors, or with newer 3D capable projectors.

The downside to shutter glasses is that they do flicker, especially if you’re using a CRT. If you’re prone to headaches, or your eyes really hurt after watching Avatar 3D, you should probabaly look at getting a passive polarized solution like…

Zalman Passive Polarized Monitor and Glasses Set:

COST: $400
REQUIREMENTS: NVidia GFX card or proprietary drivers like TRIDEF for ATI cards
BUY: @Amazon Japan
MORE INFO: Zalman Website

Zalman offers a complete set of 22″ flatscreen monitor and 2 pairs of polarized glasses for a reasonable $400. Before actually using one of these, I thought that polarized glasses might result in a lower quality 3D image with a lot of ghosting, but I have to say I’m pretty pleased with the Zalman set, and they certainly have no more ghosting than the average 3DVision setup. Because the glasses are polarized, they don’t flicker either. The set comes with drivers for 3D gaming if your using NVidia, otherwise you’re going to need to purchase a special set of drivers from IZ3D or Tridef.

I’d recommend the Zalman set for anyone who really has issues with headaches, or if you can’t get hold of a free CRT monitor to use NVidia’s 3DVision, or if you really must have flatscreen 3D on a budget.

DIY: Two projector / Silver Screen / Polarizing Filter setup:

COST: $150+
REQUIREMENTS: 2 projectors, same kind is best.

If you happen to have 2 projectors lying around, or think you could source some on Ebay for cheap, this is probably the best way to go for big screen gaming and movies on the cheap. I’ll detail the build process next week, but basically you’re going to need:

• A big flat surface, like a cheap plastic sheet
• Some silver coloured spray paint to cover that surface
• 2 projectors, preferably the same type; and some way of mounting them on top of each other
• Some polarizing filters (25cm sheet cost me about $10
• 45 degree polarized glasses

If you already have some crappy old projectors, you could put it all together for under $150. Unfortunately, you’re not going to get anywhere near the quality of viewing on a LCD monitor or with with shutter glasses, but you’re trading the quality for sheer size.

Which to choose?

Just so you know, as of writing, Tridef drivers under Windows 7 aren’t working with a lot of games because the drivers still don’t support DirectX 10. This is promised for future updates, but for now I’d stay clear of the Tridef or IZ3D drivers if you’re using Windows 7 for modern gaming. Under XP, or just playing old games, you should be fine though. So which to choose?

If you’re looking to play modern games in Windows 7: Choose 3DVision with a monitor for best quality at $600, or a Zalman set on a budget $400.
If you get headaches while viewing 3D, or have an ATI graphics card: Choose a passive solution, like the Zalman monitor set. And next time you upgrade your GFX card, get an NVidia one instead.
If you’re using XP, don’t mind playing old games only, on a really tight budget, or absolutely must play really big screen: then put together your own DIY 3D projection rig for $150 and up, assuming you can source some cheap projectors.

Subscribe to the feed for details on how to build your own 3D projection rig next week sometime.

Feel free to ask any question you have about 3D gaming in the comments, I’ll try to reply soon. Also, I’d really appreciate a digg! Thanks!

Torrent sites:

Most torrents aren’t legal, but they’re still the best way to get Japanese movies and TV, often with subtitles! If you follow my previous guide on securing your connection for Windows or OsX, you needn’t be worried about being caught. If you’re not familiar with torrents, go read up on the whole concept first; then register on these sites for all your Japanese movie, anime, and j-drama needs:

Tokyo Toshokan is free and requires no registration. It mostly focusses on anime and music, but the archive is so huge it’s difficult to find random new content. This is the best site to go if you have a specific anime or album in mind, and the anime releases often have a number of different quality and fansub versions, including a lot of HD/Blu-ray content. No login required.

Asian Torrents is the best asian movie site out there, I think. A ton of movies are uploaded every day, but the blog does an excellent job of highlighting notable movies and always including a synopsis, cover art and trailer – so it’s a great way to discover new movies. The site requires free registration and you must login to download.

Akiba Online (NSFW) is down right now due to server issues, but the forums have a small Japanese media related torrent section, though it’s not regularly updated. The site has a decidely otaku feel to it and there’s a large amount of Japanese idol, porn, and hentai content in there too so be careful where you click.

SELECTION: 3/5 - Tons of movies and anime, though TV broadcasts are generally limited to the most popular
EASE OF USE: 4/5 - Once you get the whole torrent thing down, it’s as easy as browsing a website!
QUALITY: 5/5 – much better than streaming, and TV shows are usually recorded in HD too where available!
SUBTITLES: 4/5 – Most Japanese torrents will come with subtitles written by fans or taken from the DVD
TOTAL: 16/20

PPStream:

I wrote an English guide to the Chinese-only software PPStream last week. For me, it’s the best way to get TV and movies on demand semi-legally (you can feign ignorance because it’s all in Chinese!), but it’s far from perfect and even less so for Japanese content. You can read all about it and try it for yourself with my previous guide, but here’s a summary review.

SELECTION: 4/5 - All the latest and popular dramas
EASE OF USE: 2/5 – you’ll need to know the Chinese title of movies
QUALITY: 3/5 – varies, generally tv quality or DVD for movies
SUBTITLES: 1/5 – Well, they are subtitles, just in Chinese!
TOTAL: 10/20

KeyHoleTV:

KeyholeTV is only legal way to get Japanese TV, as it’s an experiement in p2p sponsored by the Japanese government. As such, it pretty much sucks – but what do you really expect from the Japanese government? You’re also going to need a TV guide. There’s a good guide at xorsyst.com to getting the app running and configuring it. It streams live, so you going to have start adjusting your schedule to watch what you want, and there’s no way to record anything or access content archives. In additional, warn you now that 99% of Japanese TV really, really sucks; every show can categorised as the following:
1. Food
2. Onsen
3. “Talent” (or lack of) discussion panels
4. All of the above.

For example, a group of talents travel to an onsen and eat something, as we are treated to them saying “kimochi” (that feels so nice!) and “oishii” (delicious) over and over again. This is the pinnacle of Japanese TV.

SELECTION: 1/5 – limited, live-streaming of crapy Japanese TV in Japan time, some password protected areas
EASE OF USE: 4/5 – doubleclick on a channel
QUALITY: 2/5 – streaming, live
SUBTITLES: 0/5 – none
TOTAL: 7/20

I’m guessing you’ve read a little about Windows 7′s amazing new features, but let me give you an honest round-up and show you the stuff I thought was cool. I’ll come out now and I say I like it overall – it even seems speedier than xp, but only time will tell. Bear in mind it’s a beta too, so I’m not going to be too harsh on it. I promise not to mention Vista, because that can only be described as a scourge on the face of computing. Any self-pronounced geek that tells me Vista isn’t actually that bad has obviously just upgraded from DOS v5, in which case they’re right – Vista is a mild improvement over DOS.

One feature getting a lot of hype is the new taskbar… but coming from OSx it’s very difficult to praise the new Windows 7 taskbar at all. If anything, it sucks even more than XP – now instead of getting the program title, you just get a large blurry icon – which combined with an entirely new icon set for the windows interface it’s hard to figure out what the damn button for My Computer is and you end up just clicking on them all or reverting to alt-tab. So that’s shockingly bad, then.

I don’t know if it’s been mentioned a lot elsewhere, but one cool feature about the new start menu is the addition of a recent documents interface to all apps – see the screenshot – so hovering over WordPad shows me the Network+ study tips I was writing myself. This is utterly awesome, and avoids the extra time required to launch the individual app and then go to open recent menu dialog.

One thing I find myself doing is juggling windows a lot, resizing them so I can see two browsers at once to write a review or such, so the new “snap to half the desktop” feature is much appreciated. You just drag a window to the side of the screen to have it automatically snap itself to that half of the desktop – then dragging it back again will revert it back to the size and shape you had it set before (accompanied by a satisfying animation of the window mutating back to it’s old size and position). This works for either side of the screen, and then the top of the screen snaps to the whole desktop. Nice.

This might be kinda geeky, but I really like the network mapping. I don’t know how this might scale to large networks and corporate firewalls, but for small-ish home networks it’s really rather cute. Apart from being eye-candy though, I don’t know if this has any real world use. It is however very nice eye candy that I wish they would implement in Snow Leopard, as the networking aspect of OsX is still really crap in my opinion. Apparently it also let’s you click on network devices to configure them, like intelligent routers etc. I don’t have any of them fancy-pants devices though, and my 5-port switch doesn’t need an awful lot of configuring, so I couldn’t tell you if all that works or not.

The install and setup is pretty painless too – mostly everything was working on a fresh install, except for the obvious problem components like the TV tuner (which frankly was a pain in the arse to get working on XP even with the correct drivers). Wireless was set up and ready to go, and that’s all handled so much better this time around. Apparently, there’s no suitable gfx driver for my system either so that rules out games – but to Windows 7′s credit I didn’t actually realise for a few weeks due to the high resolution and quality of the built-in standard VGA adapter. I’m not going to count lack of drivers against it, as the ones that are built in worked flawlessly without intervention for me, and the ones that it couldn’t find are due to the manufacturers not releasing any yet.

Even on my crappy old laptop it runs really snappy, so I would certainly recommend it for sorting out older machines that have started running sluggish. It’s a lot less hassle to set up than XP, and the out-of-box experience is just a lot smoother. Once the final release is done and driver support is sorted, this one will be an essential upgrade in my opinion. The complete opposite of Vista, in fact, for which I still recommend you downgrade right back to XP if you want to keep your sanity.

For now, I think I’ll play around for a few months with XP Media Center edition, as I’d really like to try out the DVR recording and be able to play it back on my Xbox. Other than that, I’m really looking forward to Snow Leopard, but I doubt it’ll be running on hackintoshes for a while due to massive underlying system changes that’ll need to be hacked.

Oh, you know what would be really cool? A Windows Home Server based on Windows 7….