TechGamesBlog.com

Today we interview Michael Lubker. Michael started in the IGDA and volunteering with conferences. His first job was actually at a cybercafe and then went to QA The Sims and Supreme Commander. Now he helps with business development for a 3D Wii-like controller for the PC at Axelo, and works on his original indie projects. One of these is a vehicle combat game inspired by Hover and Michael is looking for designers and a publisher for it.

Tell us everything about the game.

Michael Lubker: It’s a vehicle combat game… inspired by Hover! Bumper cars… with a bit of Halflife 2 gravity and Tron and Mirror’s Edge graphic style: we have also some cyberpunk style thematics in gameplay.

Sounds cool! When did you have this game idea?

Michael Lubker: In December 2008, our goal is to release a multiplatform compatible game and a 3D game on Facebook which is relatively rare and eventually be iPhone compatible and maybe other downloadable platforms and go for a free release with more themed maps and content sold afterwards. If we are successful in our web/iPhone release we will try to go for WiiWare, Android, XBLA, and PSN.

It is a multiplayer game, right?

Michael Lubker: It will be all multiplayer (so you could jump on Facebook and ask a friend if they want to play a round of what is basically bumper cars online) with various collection modes etc… crazy powerups and unique areas (cyberpunk versions of aztec ruins, a crashed UFO, etc).

When do you plan to release it?

Michael Lubker: I hope at this point to maybe have an early closed beta by October.

Tell us something about the actual industry, how do you see it in our Crisis times?

Michael Lubker: hmm. seems that the iPhone is burgeoning, and the Wii/DS and Facebook and other social games. So that’s our market, and Unity kinda makes that easy because it supports all those. Also find the Zune HD announcement interesting, MS competing with the iPhone.

More on the Crisis, it seems like there’s a lot of focus on same old stuff, space marines, and it seems like the music genre is becoming rather old hat.

So… the future is mobile?

Michael Lubker: Seems like it could be, I also think OnLive is interesting but with the economy and threats like bandwidth caps it could be hard to get going. I think that something like the iPod could be used as a portable gaming/computer memory device, if it had HDMI output it would be perfect for sharing photos etc and also playing games (since it has wifi your phone basically becomes the controller if it can hook to a HDTV and connect to other iphones as more controllers).

The iPhone 3 software seems very interesting and I think the Apple WWDC timing right after E3 this year is interesting.

Are you enjoying a beautiful day outside your office? Do you need high quality printing just where you are, no need to move and to work hard? The easy and reliable solution is PrintingForLess.com, located in Montana amid some of the most pristine wilderness in the country.

PrintingForLess.com is the “America’s Print Shop”, built on sensible alternatives that help sustain the local and global environment, and enable it to keep its prices low on high-quality products.

This is a great way to do business and at the same time preserving the clean environment and natural beauty in which we work and play every day.

PrintingForLess.com uses paper made by Oji Paper Group. Oji is based in Japan and adheres to that country’s incredibly strict environmental standards. Oji obtains 60% of its pulp from recovered paper, and nearly all of the rest from its own well-managed tree plantations.

But the “America’s Print Shop” is loved by the customers also for other reasons, the prices, as example, that are very affordable, and the high number of products you can obtain just with a single click!

You can choose from brochures, business cards, postcards, newsletters, catalogs, booklets and many other printing ideas.

Absolutely a shop and a website to put in your favourites list! Consider that they also invite customers to visit their new 46,000 sq. ft. environmentally friendly facility in Livingston, MT.

Time for a trip to Livingston and Paradise Valley!

Lexar will produce impressive new faster and higher capacity CompactFlash cards. Seems that these new cards will have a speed close to UDMA 6’s thereshold of 100MB/second. This means doubling the speed of actual cards!

Actual top cards from Lexar use UDMA standard, practically a transfer data speed of 45MB/second.

The new “UDMA 6″ cards will have also a capacity of 32GB, but only newer Single Lens Reflex cameras will support this faster technology.

A faster memory card can improve your life as photographer, you can shoot continuously, you can review the data more easily and also trasferring the photos will be faster, of course.

But this is not the maximum speed reachable. In 18 to 24 months will arrive the CFast CompactFlash card standard.

The CFast cards will use a SATA interface which will boost the transfer rate to an amazing 375MB/second.

The new Atom cpu from Intel will make us work and study faster! These powerful netbook cpus are coming out a bit earlier than anticipated.

We are talking about the new Atom N280 from Intel, with a 1667 MHz clock, it will use 2 watts only. You’ll find the N280 in the Asus Eee Pc 1000HE and Acer Aspire One D150, but likely more netbooks will use it in the next months. Speed and energy savings are not the only features.

Along with the cpu, a new chipset, the GN40, will allow the Atom to play back HD video at 720p. It’s clear that Intel is trying to face the Nvidia Ion Platform which combines an Atom processor with an Nvidia chip, being able to reach 1080p HD graphics.

In april we’ll be able to see also a new Intel cpu, this time the clock will be at 1860 MHz. The name of the cpu is Z540, but I’m sure we’ll see even more features carried out by Intel for that month and the next ones.

In the meantime, let’s buy a new netbook with the Atom N280. Don’t forget to buy also a couple of movies to try the HD video!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the traffic to your website from search engines via natural search results.

Having a Website does not automatically guarantee having traffic, even if you register the site with appropriate search engines. You have to keywording to rank high in searches and find keyword combinations and variations.

How this can be done in a Weblog? First of all, avoid any “strange systems” to improve your ranking. As example, writing a post putting 20 times the same word so you can use it as keyword. It probably won’t be useful on the long run and will ruin your reputation as Blogger.

Focus on the posts titles, finding a good balance between a good title for your readers and a good title for the search engines. Check also the directory structures and permalinks. Must have the full title on them!

Add individual keywords and descriptions for each post. Means you don’t have to use the main page description and keywords for all the posts. Each post must have its own specific description.

The descriptions must be very clear and explanatory of the Blog article. Keywords must be words contained in the article but first write the article naturally and only then think about the keywords. Natural posts are loved by readers, believe me!

This will boost your reputation and word of mouth will do the rest.

The next important thing to do is focusing on the backlinks. They will really improve your ranking. Boosting link popularity is a great way to success! LinkWorth can really help you in this! So check it as soon as possible.

Of course word of mouth will bring more backlinks, means links to your Weblog from fans and other Bloggers who love your posts!

Last but not least, the issue about submitting to the directories. They are useful, as it’s useful using shopping directories for e-commerce sites. But if you build a good backlinks network, you just need a few of them.

Finally, the beta version of the most awaited Windows system, Windows 7, is available. Just few hours more and we’ll be able to download it at the Official Microsoft Page for Windows 7.

Windows 7 is faster than Windows Vista, it will be fast as the old Windows XP but with an impressive number of new features. Faster, reliable and easy to use, these are the words used by Microsoft to explain its new System.

Official Microsoft Blog Windowsteamblog.com, says this:

“On January 9th, the Windows 7 Beta will be available for Windows enthusiasts to download via the Windows 7 page on Windows.com. The Windows 7 Beta is going to be available download-only (we’re not sending out physical media) and available for a limited time to the first 2.5 million people who download the beta.”

Unlike its predecessor, Windows 7 is intended to be an incremental upgrade with the goal of being fully compatible with existing device drivers, applications, and hardware.

Windows 7 includes a number of new features, such as advances in touch, speech, and handwriting recognition, support for virtual hard disks, improved performance on multi-core processors, improved boot performance, and kernel improvements.

I’ve been amazed by the new management of the applications windows and taskbars. Absolutely awesome! Very easy and immediate.

I wish you to be one of the first 2.5 million people who will download the beta!

There’s a new application that will freely let us connecting to Facebook with our mobile phones. Exactly, we’ll be able to check the live status, browse through our friends profiles and read and write messages.

If this is not enough, let’s add the live news feed, the ‘remember me’ mode (to login only once), and an easy navigation using menu options.

Facebook is a free social networking website launched on February 4, 2004. Users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people.

People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profile to notify friends about themselves.

Now, with Snaptu, we can share with our friends every minute of our day, while walking, shopping or just relaxing. We can tell the world everything everywhere and at any time, we just need our phone and this innovative java application.

Happy New Year! Let’s begin this year talking about the new technologies we’ll see in the next months.

For every PC enthusiast, I can tell that next processors will be really impressive, with Intel Core i7 that represents a real breakthrough since years! This new year also Intel will introduce its 32nm process. I’m sure this will bring tremendous more power and clock speeds.

Memories will be all DDR3 (Intel Core i7 has triple channel DDR3 memory), exactly 1,066MHz DDR3.

About graphics, Nvidia will produce the first GPUs to support GGDR5 memory. These will be the result of a 40nm process technology. The upcoming card from ATI will be practically another monster, enabling 1920×1200 in 16x AA/AF at 100 fps and even more.

About hard disks, there are rumors that manufacturers will be able to quadruple actual limits (1TB). Practically we’ll have high end hard drives with 4TBs and cheap drives of 1 and 2TBs. Dreams or reality? I just hope will be the same also for pendrives. These tiny little gadgets are sometimes even more useful than the bigger cousins.

This is the first Christmas for my new Weblog. Of course I would like Santa to bring me visitors and fame!! But there are many other nice things:

A solution to the Global Crisis. Yes, seems obvious, but it is not… by the way, considering the good amount of shopping and sales, this month, worldwide, the solution is very near.

A 120GB Zune from the Microsoft Store. Up to 30,000 songs, or 25,000 pictures, or 375 hours of video. A very nice gadget!

An RC Helicopter at HandHeldItems.com. Electric radio control helicopters are the new trend of this year! Like modern helicopters, they can ascend, hover, yaw to the left and right, go forward.

A good book from Alibris. Yes, why not? It is not true that tech people read less. We always love a good book!

I wish you a Merry Christmas and beautiful Holidays with family and friends! Next article will be in 2009, a great year for everyone, I’m sure.

2008 has been an amazing year for videogames, many beautiful titles for all the consoles and Pc.

Fallout 3 (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3). This is absolutely my favored game. Fallout 3 is an action role-playing game released by Bethesda Game Studios. It is the third major game in the Fallout series, which has also spawned the spin-offs Fallout Tactics and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel.

It takes place in the year 2277, 36 years after the setting of Fallout 2 and 200 years after the nuclear war that devastated the game’s world. The game places the player in the role of an inhabitant of Vault 101, a survival shelter designed to protect a small number of humans from the nuclear fallout. When the player’s father disappears in mysterious circumstances, the player is forced to escape from the Vault and journey into the ruins of Washington D.C. to track him down.

Grand Theft Auto IV (Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3). I always loved GTA series. I’m a big fan of all these kind of games as well. Grand Theft Auto IV is a video game developed by Rockstar North, preceded by Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

The game is set in a redesigned rendition of Liberty City, a fictional city based heavily on modern day New York City. It follows Niko Bellic, a war veteran from Eastern Europe, who comes to the United States in search of the American Dream, but quickly becomes entangled in a seedy underworld of gangs, crime, and corruption.

Fable II (Xbox 360). Fable II is an action role-playing game developed by Lionhead, published by Microsoft Game Studios. The sequel to Fable and Fable: The Lost Chapters, it takes place in the fictional world of Albion, five hundred years after Fable’s setting, in a colonial era resembling the time of highwaymen or the Enlightenment; guns are still primitive, and large castles and cities have developed in the place of towns.

The game begins in the city of Bowerstone, where a young child known as Sparrow and older sister, Rose, dream about living in Castle Fairfax, the home of Lord Lucien. The game then develops into a great epic drama, when Sparrow becomes adult and an hero, fighting Lucien that reveals to be the evil guy.

X³: Terran Conflict (Pc). Last but not least, my favored space sim series. X³: Terran Conflict is a space combat simulator from German developer Egosoft and is the culmination of their X series of computer games. It complements the known story of previous games with the history of the solar system in the years after Kyle William Brennan’s jump into the X-Universe and the events after the end of X3: Reunion.

Compared to X3: Reunion, Terran Conflict features a larger universe, more ships, and entirely new missions which were created though the new Mission Director system. The flight control using a mouse was improved and the interface reworked to feature a new context menu system. The Terran faction was added with their own set of gigantic stations, powerful ships and technology. Many new weapons systems were developed such as smart swarm missiles and ships with multiple missile turrets.