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Ooh Ouya! Testing MMOs on a $99 console
My big birthday present this year was an Ouya -- the $99 Android console that was funded by Kickstarter, powered by dreams, and promoted as a "revolution" by its makers. I've not been big on either consoles or Android platforms as of late, mostly due to being preoccupied elsewhere. But something about Ouya's roguish underdog status and the combination of being a fully functional console and a development kit in one attracted me to it. Plus, it's so dang tiny! You can only fit one-half of a magical elf inside it, and even that took some intense pushing. Obviously this is not a bleeding-edge console that's going to pump out realistic graphics at 100 fps, but that's not Ouya's thing anyway. So you might be forgiven in thinking that MMO studios might stay far away from it, what with its limited storage space and processing power, but that's actually not the case. Two MMOs that I know of have been released on the Ouya, Vendetta Online and Order and Chaos Online, and to me that signals the possibility that there might be more in the future. So I downloaded both of them fairly quickly and settled onto my couch to check out MMO gaming with a controller on a TV powered by a console smaller than a Coke can. What kind of MMO experience was I going to get with a $99 machine?
Google doodle marks birthday of the pea meister, Gregor Mendel
Once in a while we see a Google doodle we just have to cover. This one marks the 189th birthday of Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, whose vital discoveries about inheritance patterns in pea plants weren't fully acknowledged until after his death in 1884. Feeling overlooked in his final years, he famously promised himself that meine Zeit wird schon kommen ("my time will yet come"). And today, Gregor, it has.
