Category: fun

Runtastic – a compelling smartphone alternative to fitness GPS

Do you have a smartphone, and are in the market for a fitness GPS for running, cycling or mountain biking? Consider the Runtastic line of apps instead. With support for several external heart monitors and other accessories, it is flush with features normally found only in more expensive equipment. Most of the apps run on both Android and iOS; Runtastic Pro also supports Windows Phone and Blackberry.

Even when I am on my best exercise habits, running is one of my weaknesses. Mountain Biking was not much better, and as I challenged myself to get into better shape and enjoy the countless miles of trails near my new home, I looked into a fitness GPS to help track my progress and map out some goals. My wife has a nice Garmin fitness GPS loaded with cool features she can use for both running and cycling, which was a basis for my comparison. When I stumbled upon a recommendation in a mountain biking forum to try Runtastic apps on my smartphone instead of buying a more expensive dedicated GPS, I had to give it a try. I was instantly impressed.

Runtastic apps are each built on a similar foundation, and each is themed on a common fitness activity such as running, cycling, etc. I love that they are simple to use and reliable. They are available both in free versions and paid pro versions. All integrate with a great web site where you can track all of your activities across multiple applications and support heart rate monitors. Runtastic sells their own heart rate monitors and other handy cycling monitors, which are competitively priced to other 3rd party chest strap monitors. The web site itself also offers both free, trial and paid membership options depending on your wants for fitness plans, advanced statistics and other premium features. At a glance, it seems similar and competitive to other full-featured fitness sites.

Even with the price of the heart monitor and the smart phone apps I cared to get, I still shelled out less than the Garmin could have cost, and get nearly all of the same features from something I already owned. Of course, a high end dedicated GPS will always come out on top specially when you are in zones of limited cell coverage, but Runtastic is still a lot of bang for your buck.

 

Deadspace 3: Awakened DLC – Don’t Blink

Dead-Space-3-Awakened-2

Don’t blink, or you might miss this fantastically scary, and short, encore. Visceral Games responds to complaints that Deadspace 3 wasn’t a “horror” title, giving us 3 additional missions that follow the end of the main story – each packed with pretty much everything that ever made a Deadspace title scary – condensed into espresso strength fright. They also manage to pack in some of the best dialog and one liners yet for Isaac and Carver. Top it off with a rousing boss sequence and it is well worth the spare change: 800 MSP or approx 10$. I do wish it had been a bit longer – It’s easily completed in a single sitting – but in this case having been left wanting more is hardly a complaint.

Report: PS4 can’t make toast.

20090904-burnttoast

Or, how consoles grew up and got day jobs.

Since the 1994 debut of the Playstation, Sony releases a new version of their flagship gaming platform roughly once every 6 years. The Playstation 2 was released in 2000, and the blu-ray powered PS3 was released in 2006. The recently unveiled PS4 is due holiday season 2013, about 7 years after the still-relevant PS3. Unlike their cartridge-powered competitors like Nintendo, The Sony Playstation and other disc-delivered home gaming consoles have always done a little bit more than just play games.

Although the original Sony Playstation had horrid in-game load times absent in the cartridge gaming world, it could do something the others could not: play music CDs. For a gaming console this was hardly worth the trade, but this is when gaming consoles first started to develop noteworthy differences in total home entertainment utility. Of course, in 1994 you probably knew more folks with musical doorbells than musical phones, and gaming consoles were still primarily just that: for games.

Leap forward a generation of consoles, and the Sony could also play DVD movies. Marginally useful when a lot of home videos were still VHS, it still showed a growing divide between their console and the competition, a division that was also increasingly evident in the types of game developers attracted to a specific gaming console, and the age of each console’s target audience. Sony commanded a larger portion of the mature gaming audience. Nintendo, for a long time the face of family-safe games and games designed for younger children, steered clear of games with mature content until an awkward, ineffective about-face in 2001 featuring an adult-rated game about a heavy drinking squirrel with strong suggestive content. Eyebrow-raising failures aside, Nintendo survives to maintain its core brand and lead its ahead-of-its-time gameboy innovation to command a lion’s share of the handheld gaming market today.

Around the same time, Microsoft decides to get a piece of the pie with the XBOX gaming console, going from zero to awesome in an instant with genre-defining titles like Halo. By 2006, Sony and Microsoft pull ahead of Nintendo with local hard drives and native High-Definition Video support, each betting on opposing players in the blu-ray vs HD DVD war. Both the XBox 360 and PS3 supported additional features like “why do I need a camera SD slot in a gaming console” or “who would use a game console to surf the internet”, but the features remained and grew to include social media integration, youtube, streaming home video on demand (RIP, Blockbuster) and most importantly, the ability to play with friends over the internet. Yet, these were still just gaming consoles, right?

Nintendo bets against it. Boldly racing away from anything that resembles high-definition video, it debuts the Wii, with balance-board and gyroscope outfitted controllers that turned gaming into personal home fitness, dance-along gaming, and a whole new generation of immersive entertainment. It may have missed the giant demographic bullseye that had become FPS-obsessed, but it succeeded in other ways. In addition to its celebrated, kid-friendly core titles like Mario, Zelda, Metroid and Donkey Kong, the Wii today is also used to help the elderly maintain coordination and as treatment for degenerative disorders like Parkinson’s disease. Sony and Microsoft each follow in suit with motion tracking add-on devices for similar gaming experiences, like the Microsoft Kinect, which requires no handheld device at all to play.

Despite growing to be educational and physical therapy tools and home entertainment powerhouses, a recent CNN article suggests “console gaming is dying“, citing a four year decline in the market, emergent mobile gaming, and other economic factors. If true, lead game pioneers aren’t letting us see them sweat. Activision-Blizzard is wagering the opposite, launching their historically PC/Mac-only Diablo series on the PlayStation 3 and 4 later this year. The PS4 supports the new 4K HD video output most homes don’t event have yet, and next-gen blu-ray native support. No word yet on the competing offering from Microsoft, tentatively called the Xbox 720, but both are likely to feature highly social online gaming experiences along with the next generation of on-demand, streaming “cloud” gaming.

In the last year, we have seen Microsoft’s Windows 8 desktop and tablet OS evolve to look more like gesture-friendly home gaming consoles – almost exactly like the Xbox 360 – instead of the other way around. We’ve also seen tighter integration between our smartphones and tablets with the home gaming consoles. For systems like the Xbox 360 that are already more powerful than most cable “tivo” boxes for movies and tv, I’d say the PS4 and Xbox 720 are poised to take more (not less) of the non-gaming streaming content, potentially biting into the immovable broadcast giants themselves. Oh wait, I’ve watched all of my pay-per-view cable events on Xbox Live… not to mention the Mars Rover landing. If my internet provider were on the list, I could get ESPN Sports on it too. Microsoft points out that 40% or more of Xbox Live traffic is non-gaming today.

They may not brew coffee, do dishes, fetch beer or make very good toast (I strongly recommend against it, no matter how hot your unit gets), but they certainly do way more than just games and have risen to be the hardest working component of our home TV, movie and entertainment setups.

I believe the reports of console gaming’s death are greatly exaggerated.

Below are some clips from the PS4 announcement trailer showing off the next gen graphics.

12_destiny 246183-dc1 ps4-killzone-shadow-fall-gameplay-video-4 gaming-deep-down-screenshot

%d bloggers like this: