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Gamespy's MMO column returns with a look at Battlefield Heroes
Gamespy's excellent ongoing MMO column OnLife has been regrettably on hiatus for some time, but it looks like it is back with a vengeance. Its first column back in the saddle is all about the online free-to-play FPS Battlefield Heroes. While not technically an MMO, author Miguel Lopez notes numerous similarities between Heroes and high-end PvP in MMOs. As he observes, the fact that he can even make these comparisons is bad news for the folks at DICE. The stated purpose of the stylized online shooter has been to offer a simple, fun, low-cost experience for FPS players. Instead, even in the game's extended Beta, the game is already beginning to resemble World of Warcraft's sometimes-arcane PvP build strategy game.Says Lopez, "I'll admit that much of what makes me want to play Heroes' is its promise of varied abilities, full of potential for synergy and experimentation. But I hope that its designers will tread thoughtfully when it comes to implementing them." Check out the article for his full assessment of the game, then click below the cut for a look at the hyper-cartoony graphics and strange sense of humor found in Battlefield Heroes.
Slife 1.0 Awareness Browser
Slife is a rather unusual piece of software. I tried it out in its previous incarnation (Onlife), but it has now been released under a new name and seems considerably more polished. Its developer calls Slife an "awareness browser" which "let's you visualize and organize your computer activities like never before." Basically, Slife "observes" your use of applications like Safari, Mail, iChat, iTunes, Word, NetNewsWire, etc., and records what you're doing with them (e.g. what web pages you looked at, the text of your emails, what songs you listened to, etc.). You can then visualize these interactions in a variety of different ways (e.g. one visualization is a kind of scatterplot over time) and go back and see what you were doing on your computer at any given time. In other words, it's sort of like a global history of your computer use, which instead of merely recording what pages you've looked at in your browser, records what you were doing at any given time in a bunch of different applications. You can also search through all of this mess, to find things you were doing, but perhaps lost track of or forgot where you looked at them. Finally, SlifeLabs offers a subscription service called Slifeshare where "you can share your Slife activities such as browsing the web and listening to music with your friends, family or anyone you care about" (I'm not entirely sure why you'd want to do that, but whatever). While something like this is definitely not going to appeal to everyone, Slife has a lot of potential to help you keep track of things you've lost and to understand better how you use your own computer. And since it's a free download, I think it's definitely worth a look.[Via MacMinute]
