The Best iPhone Game

In my experience, Jellycar is by far the best iPhone/iPod touch game on the platform. Full of great music, hilarious sound effects, and always a great challenge, Jellycar is a must have. Best part it’s free!

Jellycar’s main screen is a bunch of little thumbnails of the maps, that slide and bounce around as you tilt your device. Tapping an icon will first pop up a dialog with the best time, and asking you to confirm your choice for the level.

When you load a level, you start as a small car, with a continuously counting timer. In the top left hand corner there’s a progress bar of sorts. The controls are simple: tap and hold the right side to go right, tap and hold the left side to go back, tilt left and right to roll the car, pinch to zoom, tap with all three fingers to pause. But that’s not it! Tap the car to convert your car into a monster truck.

You only get a limited amount of time with this car (as shown by the progress bar), but it’s usually required at some point in each level for completion.

Why is it called Jellycar after all? Well you see, your car and the level is made of a pliable jelly-like material. You bounce, deform, and squish your way through the level, usually laughing the whole time at the silly sound effects.

If you think these levels are easy, think again. Each level is challenging in its own way, and until used to the controls and the dynamics of the game, it’s actually extremely difficult.

If you don’t have Jellycar, and you have an iPhone or iPod touch, I highly suggest you give it a try. It’s probably the only App I actually use from the App Store.

iPod touch as a gaming machine

I read this article earlier today, and I’ve heard the same thing said before, so I thought I’d comment on it, and see what your thoughts are as well.

Apple really seems to be throwing down at both Nintendo and Sony with regards to the iPod touch as a gaming platform. Why? And why not iPhone?

I believe they aren’t so much marketing iPhone as a gaming platform because of battery life. If you’re intended (as per the marketing) to play a bunch of games on your iPhone, you probably won’t have much juice left for calls. So right now it’s only iPod touch marketed for games.

Is this a possibility? I’m not very confident the iPod will ever entirely dethrone the DS — there are about 85 million DS consoles around the world right now. That’s a huge hurdle, and while the iPod touch will likely be incredibly successful, it’s hard to judge who buys it with games in mind and who doesn’t.

The other hurdle for iPod touch are the controls. There are no physical buttons which can be used for game controls on the device. Instead you have the touchscreen and the accelerometer. Using the device’s [arguably] flagship game as an example, Super Monkey Ball, it uses touch for menus, and the accelerometer for controlling your character. And it’s really, really difficult. Most other games which use the “tilt-to-move” paradigm are also pretty difficult to control. I think these issues will eventually be resolved as time goes by. Developers will learn the system better and develop more controllable games. But currently controls are a little difficult.

The absence of buttons is seen as a deficiency for a gaming device (as in “it sucks because you don’t have buttons and you can’t do X without buttons”), but I think it’s more of a paradigm thing, again. Given time, developers will come up with novel ways of controlling the games. This is a strength of iPod touch in the gaming sense. No, it’s not going to be the same as A, B, and a D-pad, but that’s getting pretty stale anyway. The device also has WiFi, a microphone, and is location aware. Those are three more new inputs to play around with. So I think it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing more novel games appear which will start to threaten Sony and Nintendo.

But here’s where Apple really has the advantage: the App Store. I honestly can’t believe neither Nintendo nor (especially) Sony hasn’t done something like this already. The App Store is where you get your iPod touch apps (or Games in this case). Apps typically cost between $0-$10 as opposed to $30 on the other consoles. But more importantly, there are no cartridges or discs to worry about. If you lose your game, you just download it again. One game can go on all of your iPods. They are backed up in iTunes. You can download them wherever you have internet access. Are you getting this Sony? Nintendo? This is where Apple has the potential to dominate.

It will be interesting to see where this goes in the coming years. As an aside, I fully believe Apple will eventually move all of their iPods to the iPhone OS (with touchscreen, accelerometer, etc). When they do this (nano touch, anyone?), they will really shine.

Getting System Information from Linux

Most of the information I gather for my Linux version of my uptime program comes from procfs.

/proc/sys/kernel/hostname

Provides me the one word hostname of this kernel. I’m planning on switching this and /proc/version to a uname() syscall (see man 3 uname) to provide better compatibility on systems without /proc.

/proc/uptime

Provides me the raw number of seconds (including factional) since the computer booted, as well as the total number of seconds this computer has been idle (the second bit I discard)

/proc/loadavg

Provides me with the three load averages

/proc/version

Provides me with a long kernel version, which is different than the one supplied by uname -a.

/proc/meminfo

I get all of my memory information from here, but I don’t use all of the information available to me. Most of it is pretty useless, but I do get:

• Total Memory
• Buffered Memory
• Cached Memory
• Free Memory
• Total Swap
• Free Swap

I get ‘memory used’ from the formula: “int memused = memtotal – cached – buffers – memfree;”

Please Make it Stop!

Why am I continually assulted with an election that gets more press coverage in Canada than Canada’s own election? People complain about Canadian Politics, but that’s because everybody’s so fixated on the wrong country.