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Affilliation
So, What Have I Been Up To Lately?
Regular visitors might notice that I’m significantly more quiet this week than last. So, what have I been up to?
Basically, this turned out to be an errand, gaming backlog, and investigation week. I’ve been busy doing errands and various maintenance stuff for myself and my home Related to these, I’ve also been preparing some paperwork (heh, for someone who ain’t workin’, I got a ton of paperwork on my backlog). All of these are mundane, no need to get into details.
As for the stuff I’ve been investigating, they are, briefly, the following:
- Xfire IM client
- PlayLinc IM client
- Great Games Experiment and MobyGames
- how to best track the books I own/read
- how to automatically add multiple social bookmarks in every post
For now, I’ll just talk about Xfire and PlayLinc.
Remembering a previous post, my thoughts wandered around the possibility of the standardized “gamertag”. After looking around in related topics, I eventually ran into the Xfire IM, and I quickly realized that 1) I should have found this sooner, and 2) this is how those people at various gaming forums are posting gamertag-like signatures.
For my current state, the main issue I have with Xfire is that, well, I don’t have any online pals that’ll use it. I typically play with a random set of people, and I don’t have a set of people who I regularly play with yet. Given this, it’s not very useful for me in the IM sense.
It is, however, almost exactly the kind of time-tracker I’ve been looking for. In my previous office, the management has been trying out various software to track your application usage, for productivity purposes. Well, I’m not too keen on that, but something to track my gameplay would be super! Xfire does track how long you’ve been playing your games, and allows you to display your stats in a banner. Unfortunately, the games I play don’t support stats, but other games (particularly shooters) have other stats that can be displayed.
Of course, Xfire has other features like being a game server/lobby, auto-joining on going games in games that support it, and in-game chatting with Xfire buddies. All great features. I won’t be using these features soon, though. For now, the game-time tracking feature is enough reason for me to keep using Xfire. Besides, I get to contribute to the stats that tally which games are most played.
In line with Xfire, I also ran into PlayLinc. Boasting some additional features and enhancements, I thought I should try it out. I ran into several disappointments in the onset, however.
For one, you choose among two (for now) installers, each with a different “theme” (aka, corporate sponsor?). Although annoying, this is quite superficial, so I let this slide. After installation, I learned that it’s tied with AOL and ICQ, so it appeared that I could use my old ICQ account (and that it uses AOL/ICQ as its messaging platform). I logged in, and there were several hiccups regarding not being able to access certain servers, but I did somehow got in the app. These, I’ll let slide too, as I don’t use a lot of features related to server hosting, searching, etc.
What did annoy me was that, it only detected only 2 games of mine (Warcraft III and Frozen Throne). In fairness, Xfire wasn’t able to detect some games of mine too (like Puzzle Pirates, Bang! Howdy, and Bookworm Adventures), but the games it didn’t find were somewhat understandable (Bang! Howdy should’ve been found IMHO, Puzzle Pirates is heavily Java, so it probably doesn’t detect Java based stuff, and Bookworm Adventures is probably under their bias). PlayLinc, however, wasn’t able to detect anything except for Warcraft. Hell, it didn’t even detect Guild Wars!
To add insult to injury, I played a few Warcraft games to see what it can do, and I wasn’t even able to detect me playing the game, not to mention track how long I played it! Given that that’s the only reason why I actually need this type of software, I decided that yes, the negative comments about PlayLinc that I read had a solid basis, and yes, I can’t make use of it. I gave it some more runs in Warcraft to try and detect, but I eventually removed the app in frustration.
For now, Xfire has my support, even if I don’t maximize it.
PS:
More on the other items I’ve been investigating at a later post.
