Village Gamer

Frima Studios and Bolt Interactive have announced today that the Pygmies of Pocket God on Facebook have to worry not only about the gods smiting them, but now their fellow tribe members as well in Episode VIII: Hi-islanders. The latest expansion for the Pocket God world features a brand new item, a LARP rack, which enables Pygmies to duel one another using one of five fantastical weapons, introduces a new god challenge from new rival god Kali, and also expands the amount of in-game content by adding five new solo quests and a plethora of clothing options based on characters from the Pocket God comic book.

Since its debut in December 2010, the Facebook version of Pocket God has grown exponentially and is attracting more players every month. To date, there are more than 700,000 deities who have tortured Pygmies and more than 55 million loyal, unquestioning Pygmies have met their demise—that’s approximately the record-setting number for most votes cast in a single show on American Idol (okay, one more vote: Simon or Steven). Another two million sacrifices can be attributed to friends on Facebook sacrificing other friends in a host of brutal and irreverent ways, including electrocution, shark attack, venus fly traps, tornados, tar pits, and more!

The new updates for Hi-islanders include:

• There Can Only Be One Hi-islander: A mysterious LARP rack has appeared on the island and there’s only one thing to do now that it’s here: kill everyone. The new LARP item dons five video game-inspired weapons and swords, and when two Pygmies each get a hold of a weapon you’ll be witness to a fight to the death until only one Pygmy is left standing. Alternatively, if you dangle one of your hapless devotees in front of an armed Pygmy, your floating follower will be pummeled like a piñata (candy sold separately).

• Challenge Kali and Her Rack: New rival god Kali has showed up on the island, and she thinks that her rack is better than yours. Of course, you agree, and if you try to touch her rack then you best prepare for trouble as she won’t take your advances lightly. Successfully defeating Kali will earn you a weapon rack idol of your own, proving that your rack rules them all.

• Dress Up in Those Snazzy Comic Duds: Pocket God on Facebook is taking some fashion advice from its comic book counterpart and now offers fans the ability to customize their Pygmies with articles of clothing found in Pocket God Comics, as well as control the actual characters from the comic themselves! What’s that? You’ve always wanted to feed Ooga to a shark because he goes against everything the tribe says? Well then, your wish is our command.

• New Quests and UI Improvements Added: As always, we’re making sure to deliver new content for newbies and veterans alike with the latest update including five new solo quests for those deities who like to go it solo, as well as a slew of UI improvements in the Power and Clothing stores, along with some gameplay balances here and there.

Adlib Software has announced the general availability of the Adlib Content Transformation Platform, the industry’s first complete, automated transformation solution for the enterprise. The Adlib Platform is uniquely designed to streamline document-intensive business processes to improve efficiency, mitigate compliance-related risks and reduce costs. It is deployed as a shared service and can scale enterprise-wide, enabling centralized content-to-PDF transformation capabilities to multiple applications, departments and lines of business.

Today’s enterprises are challenged with increased content management demands, and struggle to find efficient ways to capture, manage, preserve and share content. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems including Microsoft® SharePoint® help ease these challenges. However, these solutions don’t always provide the necessary content transformation capabilities needed to enable the efficient automation of document-centric business processes that are important in removing time-consuming, error-prone and costly manual intervention.

Adlib turns volumes of content and intellectual property into digital assets that can be easily accessed, shared, leveraged and archived. For example, a leading international insurance company is using Adlib to increase sales by being faster than their competitors in delivering personalized customer quotes in PDF format. In addition, Pfizer, the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company, is turning patents into profits by speeding time-to-market for its drugs by streamlining and automating the creation of submission-quality PDFs and eliminating the need for time-consuming, costly and error-prone manual quality control reviews. Read the rest of this entry »

Strangeloop has announced that it is the first company in the world to provide a commercial product that automatically offers the benefits of Google’s experimental SPDY protocol without requiring changes to the site owner’s code or servers. The release, which is available immediately to all Strangeloop customers, comes after months of close collaboration between Strangeloop and the Chromium Project team at Google.

“Our goal is to make the web faster for everyone,” said Mike Belshe, Lead Software Engineer at Google. “Strangeloop engineers embraced SPDY from the beginning and provided key data and feedback about their experience. They then integrated SPDY with their Site Optimizer product and moved rapidly from concept to code to product, demonstrating an impressive speed-up in their customers’ site performance.”

Strangeloop’s integration of SPDY within its Site Optimizer suite of products and services have resulted in:

• At least 50% reduction in page load time.
• Minimizing the complexity of deployment. Site Optimizer automates Web Content Optimization (WCO), delivering the benefits of SPDY to customers without making changes to their servers or code.
• Bringing together like-minded people interested in using the power of open-source collaboration to explore protocols as a way of solving latency problems.

“At Strangeloop, we’re passionate about pushing the performance envelope, and we’re always looking for opportunities to collaborate with other industry leaders to do this,” said Strangeloop CEO Jonathan Bixby. “This is just the first phase of our SPDY integration work.” Read the rest of this entry »

OpenText™ has released a new version of OpenText Integration Center featuring an enhanced, native connector to OpenText ECM Suite 2010. Customers can help better leverage their structured and unstructured content to reduce costs and improve efficiency. OpenText Integration Center unifies access to multiple sources of disparate information from OpenText ECM Suite for applications such as business systems integration, legacy decommissioning, in-place content management and content migration.

Most integration technologies focus on either structured data in databases or content in document repositories, but not both. Now with OpenText Integration Center, which inherently understands both structured data and unstructured content, customers can give business decision makers easy access to corporate information assets through ECM Suite 2010. This allows them to take advantage of powerful analytics, semantic search and rich interactive user interfaces to boost productivity and improve decision making.

“The current economic conditions are forcing organizations to reduce the number of information sources by bringing structured and unstructured content together under the roof of a single business process and repository,” said Eugene Cherny, General Manager for OpenText’s Connectivity Solutions. “By combining these worlds in the OpenText ECM Suite, we give customers a powerful solution that helps them reduce costs during a tough economy, while enabling them to do more with their information.”

The latest release of OpenText Integration Center, together with OpenText ECM Suite 2010, provides enhanced, integrated ECM support making it easier to design, integrate, and implement content integration projects. Typical applications include:

Content Migration — OpenText Integration Center offers complete migration features to move content from one or many repositories to any new destination with all its metadata and context. It helps to automate the movement of content while delivering content integrity and operational efficiency.

Legacy System Decommissioning – Finally turning the off switch on old systems can lead to substantial cost reduction. Customers can archive data from any application and automatically apply lifecycle management rules, such as records management classifications, retention rules, and schedules through ECM Suite 2010.

Data Archiving — With a global policy to integrate retention of structured and unstructured content into one archiving system, customers can be assured of speedy and accurate collection of historical information with a full audit history.

Systems Integration — OpenText Integration Center represents a new generation of integration solutions that transforms, cleanses, enriches and directs information across the entire spectrum of decision support systems and corporate applications, for integrations that include data warehouses, data marts, mainframe systems, ERP systems, CRM systems, and content management platforms.

Leading industry analysts such as Susan Feldman, IDC’s Research Vice President for Search and Discovery Technologies, have identified unified information platforms as a new and fast-growing segment in enterprise software. Facilities like OpenText Integration Center will support enterprise strategies to implement such platforms.

“Businesses of all sizes are wallowing in too much information, without being able to make sense of it. Our survey of IT buyers demonstrates that they are eager to fix the information quandary by investing in software that gives them a single access point to all their information silos. We expect this demand to fuel a new wave of growth in information access software,” writes Feldman in a report published in April 2011 titled “Unified Access to Information: Less Seeking, More Finding.”

Sonomax® Technologies, Inc. has announced that their award winning sculpted eers™ custom earphones will be available to Canadian retail customers this week. The highly acclaimed custom molded earphones will be premiered on Wednesday, June 15^th at Boutique Tone in Montreal, at HearAtLast in Ottawa (Orleans) on Thursday, June 16^th and on Friday, June 17^th at HearAtLast in West Edmonton. The Ottawa (Orleans) HearAtLast is located at 3900 Innes Road and the West Edmonton HearAtLast is at 18521 Stony Plain Rd. N.W.

Sculpted eers, the revolutionary custom earphones which can also be pre-ordered at the sculpted eers website for delivery in August, are molded to the unique shape of an individual’s ear canal in just four minutes. They provide maximum comfort, exceptional sound, and a secure fit even during vigorous activity. Additionally, the acoustic seal delivers a total audio immersion experience so consumers can safely enjoy the highest quality music at a fraction of the volume required by generic earphones.

“I’m thrilled to offer sculpted eers custom earphones to my customers, ” said Boutique Tone Owner and CEO Jeremy Stern. “They’re amazing. I’m always looking for the newest and coolest products on the planet and that’s exactly what sculpted eers are. I saw how people reacted to them at the NAMM Show earlier this year and now that I’ve been using them, I’m even more of a believer. My customers are going to love them.”

Nick Laperle, Sonomax Technologies’ President and CEO will attend the official product launch, which will be from 4:00 until 7:00 p.m. on June 15^th at Boutique Tone, 4292 Saint-Laurent in Montreal. “Boutique Tone is Montreal’s premier specialty music store for guitar and bass players. They are perfect partners for sculpted eers custom molded earphones,” Laperle said. “I’m delighted that I’ll be on hand for the launch and am looking forward to personally introducing sculpted eers to Boutique Tone’s customers.”

Laperle will also be present for the sculpted eers launch at two HearAtLast locations. The Ottawa (Orleans) sculpted eers launch is set for Thursday, June 16^th and on Friday, June 17^th the West Edmonton HearAtLast store will introduce the sculpted eers product. Launch time will be from 4:00 p.m. until 7:00 p.m. at both locations. HearAtLast, a store-within-a-store at various Walmart locations throughout Canada, sells state-of-the-art hearing aids, earphones and other assistive hearing devices. Read the rest of this entry »

Toronto’s Phantom Compass, contributors to the Skatoony Home Game for marblemedia’s Skatoony TV show, among others, has launched their latest project to the masses. Points 4 People is currently in public beta and uses a unique tag to add (or subtract) points for Twitter users.

The premise for the game (as explained on the P4P site), is to provide a global points exchange and leaderboard system for Twitter users like you. Reward your friends, penalize your enemies, or vice versa. Exchanged points are broadcast via Twitter, tracked by Points 4 People and automagically popped into our leaderboards, activity feeds, and profile pages. No additional signup or permission is required. Simply reference someone in your Twitter post, add the hashtag #p4p and a positive (eg. #p4p+56) or negative number (eg. #p4p-42) of your choice.

Phantom Compass Founding Partner & Producer/Director Tony Walsh is currently down in San Francisco, so I conducted a quick email interview with him to find out more about Points 4 People:

VG: How (and why) did you come up with the concept for Points4People?

TW: Our technical director Jos Yule had come up with the idea of Points 4 People as a secret side project. He mentioned the concept to me a few weeks ago while we were on our way to a meeting, and by the time we arrived we decided it had to get made.

As a game company we’ve been following developments in so-called “gamification” for years, and we’re fascinated by how invested people become in reward structures. Points 4 People is an experiment in this area, and we think it’s got a lot of potential for consumer and business use.

VG: How long has Points 4 People been in development?

TW: We’ve spent several weeks on the project but the development time was probably under 40 person-hours. We’re in an ongoing development phase now as we iron out bugs, test new ideas, and implement user feedback.

VG: What was the biggest challenge the studio faced in bringing Points 4 People to life?

TW: Time. We burned a lot of midnight oil immediately prior to launch.

VG: Will there be a monetization aspect to this gamification of Twitter?

TW: Absolutely. We’ve got consumer and B2B options cooking. We’re going to be very careful with how we handle the commercialization.

VG: I know you’ve only just launched – but has anyone taken the game too seriously yet? (I was meaning from an over-praising/vindictive perspective, but Tony’s answer is good news, too!)

TW:Yes, there’s already been unofficial interest from one of the world’s largest technology companies.

VG: Where do you see Points 4 People going – what is your hope for the game?

TW: We are paying close attention to what our users want and how they are using Points 4 People. As we plan for a Facebook implementation we’re also getting great feedback on the Twitter-based system and making changes on a daily basis.

VG: Thank you for your time, is there anything else you’d like to add?

TW: #p4p+1000 @villagegamer

🙂

Toronto studio March Entertainment has released its first Android game to the Marketplace. The bubble-popping puzzler Cranky Cat is a free to try title, with more levels available through in-app purchasing. There are more than 250 hand-crafted levels in Story and Puzzle modes, as well as three variations of “infinite” mode. A free demo can be played on the official Cranky Cat website. An Apple iOS (iPad, iPhone and iPod touch) version will arrive in the coming weeks, as well as full online and downloadable versions.

Fast-paced and addictive, the game features a cantankerous Victorian-era cat trying to create a youth elixir by condensing chemical compounds in a steam-powered centrifuge. Cranky Cat is March’s first game not tied to an existing intellectual property, and marks the company’s foray into “pure” casual gaming just for the fun of it. Cranky Cat is OpenFeint-enabled and was built in the Unity game engine, another first for March Entertainment, which has previously built games primarily in Flash, such as The Great Canadian Trivia Shootout and Dex Hamilton’s Bug Quest.

Last month the studio’s groundbreaking web-to-TV animated comedy series Chilly Beach became available in the U.S. for the first time on Hulu and the Hulu Plus subscription service, via a deal with distributor Duopoly. Originally produced for the CBC, Chilly Beach ran over three seasons and garnered a large and enthusiastic following through a combination of broadcast play and the property’s dynamic, interactive website.

Along with Chilly Beach, two original series-related movies released after the TV series, The World is Hot Enough and The Canadian President are also available on Hulu and Hulu Plus. The series and movies are viewable for free on Hulu.com to U.S. viewers.

“Chilly Beach was the first web-to-TV series in Canada and we are delighted to launch this flagship comedy franchise to U.S. audiences for the first time on Hulu,” said Catherine Tait, President of Duopoly. “We’ve seen impressive viewership numbers for great Canadian series like Odd Job Jack on Hulu and believe it is a valuable option for producers seeking to monetize their content in the U.S.”

Flew The Coop is a very simple game with very simple mechanics featuring auto-run and 2D retro-styled graphics. This pick up and play title was developed by Jason Kaplan and Damian Sommer, with Troy Morrisey and Ryan Cox of Darc Productions providing the sound and music.

The premise of this game is to help the renegade chicken avoid the Farmer in his attempts to run away from the farm. You do this by jumping on other farm animals – pigs offer a little extra bounce to chicken-powered flight, by the way. Some quick thinking strategy and running across hay bales or jumping on crows to reach the barn roof will get you to the weather vanes, which can help to propel the renegade chicken beyond the reach of the fun spoiling Farmer.

It is necessary to jump the other farm animals, because running into them is not good for your health and slows you down. Simply tap the screen for a quick jump or hold your finger down for a longer flight – sometimes a longer flight is needed, so time your taps carefully. Your success in Flew The Coop is measured in the distance you covered before being nabbed by the Farmer, and the faster you run, the more ground you’ll cover. Unless you run into the Farmer, that is.

Flew The Coop is available now on iTunes for 99 cents USD, supports Game Centre and is rated 4+. The game is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad devices running iOS 3.0 or later. I can attest to it working on a 2nd gen iPod Touch with the current operating system. The developers may port the title over to Android, WP7, and possibly XBLIG, Steam, or the Mac App Store in the future.

Dragon’s Lair 2: Time Warp, developed by Digital Leisure and published by EA Mobile is the one and only true follow-up to the landmark Dragon’s Lair created by renowned animator Don Bluth. Just like the famous arcade classic, players can continue the adventures of Dirk the Daring as he bumbles his way through feats of strength and valour.

Only you, Dirk the Daring, can save Princess Daphne from the clutches of the Evil Wizard Mordroc in this fully animated arcade classic from the legendary animator and director Don Bluth. It is a dark time in all the land. The Evil Wizard Mordroc has spirited away Princess Daphne to a wrinkle in time, scheming to force her into marriage. As Dirk the Daring, you must race through time to rescue her. A bumbling old time machine (and all the courage you can muster) will transport you on your mission. But you must hurry. Once the Casket of Doom has opened, Mordroc will place the Death Ring upon Daphne’s finger in marriage – and she will be lost forever in the Time Warp!

On your quest to save Princess Daphne, you will visit 8 different dimensions and eras in time. Encounter characters from literature and history such as Alice In Wonderland, Sleeping Beauty, and Beethoven. As Dirk the Daring, you might wind up in the Garden of Eden, Ancient Egypt – or even in prehistoric times battling dinosaurs.

Customize your adventure – the responsive and intuitive controls let you play with or without move guides. You can choose to use 3, 5, or even infinite lives. And exclusively with iPhone & iPod touch, you can play through the Original version or the new Director’s Cut, which features an alternate ending. Prepare for a grandly goofy good time, whether you’re an arcade enthusiast seeking to relive the adventure or the brave of heart seeing the Daring One shriek at the sight of a monster for the first time.

Dragon’s Lair 2: Time Warp is available now in the iTunes App Store for $ 2.99 USD and is Rated 9+ for the following:

This game is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad devices and requires iOS 3.0 or later.

Rock Hippo Productions Ltd has announced that the free to play online cartoon style third-person action shooter, MicroVolts has officially launched.  Featuring all new content, players can expect non-stop fun and fast-paced action in this much-anticipated release.

“We want to thank all the MicroVolters who participated in the open beta phase of the game and invite them, along with new players,  to experience all the new content and gameplay we have in store for this huge launch ,” said Howard He, President and CEO of Rock Hippo Productions. “We are really stepping up the clan competitions and with the addition of a huge new map, all new weapons, costumes and more, new and returning players alike will all be treated to a great experience in the newly launched MicroVolts world.”                  

Players will be able to create their own clans and select the best members to join special teams. These teams will form the core of each clan, with reserve members fighting for those spots. This extra level of clan management will bring new strategy options to the game, especially for tournament players. More features such as comparing clan stats and clan leaderboards will be coming in the near future.

Celebrating the launch with a new map, The Studio. A huge new map with an incredible amount of levels and hiding spots, The Studio is a map that Zombie Mode enthusiasts will  especially enjoy as it gives plenty of options for evading those pesky zombies. Just don’t get too freaked out by the giant clown hanging out of the toy box.

Also released with the game’s official launch are new weapons, costumes and character set. The new Colonel Crac  costume set includes the C.H.I.P. character and allows players to outfit themselves in the style of the legendary Colonel. In addition, all characters will receive fresh new parts and accessories, available for both Micro Points and Rock Tokens.  But no character is complete without their awesome weapons.  MicroVolters will be introduced to three new ones including the Steel Hammer (melee), DareDev (Gatling Gun), and Mimic (Rocket Launcher).  Players should also be on the lookout for all new advanced versions of different weapon types!

Rock Tokens currency currency can be purchased from the MicroVolts Web Shop and will be used to purchase special customization items and extend gameplay options. Game modes include Free for All, Team Deathmatch, Item Match, Capture the Battery, Elimination, Zombie Mode, and many more featuring various maps designed by toy concept.