For quite some time, there’s been a parallel universe online with a ton of users and no real competition. Second Life was, well, your second life… a place to get away from the “meat world” and be someone else for a while. It still is, but now they have something to worry about. There’s only a few possible companies that have the resources and expendable cash to throw their hat into the ring. Google is one of those few and they’ve tossed their hat in with their own virtual world, Lively. It’s not much of a surprise that they’d play in this still very open arena. What did catch me off guard is the lack of publicity from a company positioned to turn the virtual worlds crowd upside down.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t really tried Second Life, but it’s not for lack of trying. I actually thought it looked pretty cool (and still do), but I couldn’t get it to install. Not only would it crash over and over again, but I found myself more frustrated just trying to get through to their support. Ultimately, I never got a response and gave up. Lively has its own problems, which I will get to, but it’s also still just in its infancy.

Get your new virtual life
What do you need to get started? Not much, really. One of the great ideas that makes me like Lively right off the bat is that it runs right in your web browser. The advantage of this is that it doesn’t suck up all your computer’s memory or require a powerful machine to play. Aside from a modern web browser, all you really need is a Google account and some free time. The Google account isn’t a bad idea, anyway. If you don’t have one already, you will be prompted to create one.

When you sign up, you create your Lively username that people will see and enter a couple other boring details. Then you get to dive right in and create your second you. This process begins with the selection of an avatar to represent you. The pickin’s are still pretty slim, but not horrible. One thing I found pretty interesting here was the ability to become male, female, or have your choice of a few different animals. If you ever wanted to live life as a pig, now is your chance.
Once you’ve chosen your avatar type, you need to refine it with some details. Start with a hair style and move on to your choice of pants, shirt, shoes, etc. When you’re all done, you’ve got this fully dressed avatar, ready to mingle with the crowd - or walk around aimlessly, clicking on things. The avatar options and finer detail choices still leave a lot to be desired. The selection process is pretty simple and the option variety is OK for the initial launch, but I really hope Google is working on rolling out more options as this thing grows. It’s still pretty new and too many of us look alike.

Walking, talking, dancing and fighting
Lively, just like any richly interactive experience, takes a bit of learning and some getting used to. Some things are intuitive and others aren’t. For example, to interact with a person or object, you just click on it. Simple enough. Try looking around and simple may not be the first word that enters your mind unless you enjoy flight simulators. Eventually, you get used to it, but it still doesn’t feel natural. What is pretty simple is the ability to drag yourself around. Click on your avatar, hold the mouse button down, and drag in the direction you want to go. Take it slow, though. You’re walking, not teleporting.

Once you’ve got your moves down, find a quiet corner and practice your animations. You can dance, applaud, body slam someone, flirt, you name it. Just right-click on your avatar and you are presented with a pretty healthy list of options.

Meet others and make friends (or enemies)
I met someone right away in Lively. I didn’t catch his name, but he beat the hell out of me while I was choosing pants. Rude, sure, but definitely not surprising. Any time you enter an environment in which anonymity is commonplace and even encouraged, you can expect to find people who never aged past 12 years old. The beating wasn’t as bad as the general demeanor of a lot of the people. In my first visit, Lively was only days old and it was full of these types of people. When I went back tonight, there were more rooms (including one called “Fight Club”) and a lot more people, most of whom were acting much more mature.

Getting to know people is pretty easy. Just walk right up, click on someone, and start chatting. You can send a private message by “whispering”, or you take a completely different approach and just start dancing with them. One thing I hope they add is the ability to ignore everyone else for a bit while I discover items, dance with someone, etc.

So far, I like Lively. While I may not have a lot of time for it, I can see myself relaxing in a new environment for a while after a long day. The installation process was very simple and impressed me after Second Live let me down, but in the few times I’ve played with it, it crashed twice after I closed the Lively tab in Firefox. There’s a lot more to learn and a lot for Google to add and improve upon, but it’s a nice start.

Try out Lively for yourself and let me know what you think or share things you’ve discovered that I haven’t found yet.

My wife is not an avid gamer, but she likes her House of the Dead III zombie shoot ‘em up. I’m not either, really, but I have an XBox all the same, and when I play, I’d prefer to play on my 52 inch TV rather than the 27 inch. After all, what’s the point of spending the money on a big screen if I’m not going to get the most out of it that I can? When we found out that House of the Dead III was available for XBox, we sought out to buy the game (used on Amazon) and a light gun to shoot with. If my baby wants to shoot some zombies, I’m gonna line ‘em up and hand her the gun. Sometimes, though, the gremlins sneak in and ruin it for us.

The first purchase (boring details)
First, I purchased a used light gun on Amazon, through a third party seller. It never showed up. I wish I had seen the Re Sell It’s horrible feedback rating before I purchased. After waiting almost a month and contacting the seller with no response, I let Amazon know that I wished they didn’t let people with that kind of selling reputation sell there. Or maybe have a red flag pop up before I buy. In any case, I filed my claim and moved on.

The second purchase (boring details)
After wasting my time with that one, my wife suggested that we get TWO light guns. This makes sense. Sometimes I don’t know where my head is. Advice noted, I ordered two new Game Elements light guns. This time, I was careful to choose a reputable seller, Classic Game Source Inc.. I don’t know if they respond to customer queries, but that’s because I didn’t have the need to make one. Shipping wasn’t lightning quick, but I had them in a week, which is quick enough.

Remove the Head. Destroy the Brain
Writing this, I’m reminded of Zombie Girl’s song, GO ZOMBIE, which I am now listening to as I write. In the lyrics, she sings, “Remove the head. Destroy the brain.” That, my friends, is much easier said than done when you’re in the middle of a pack of zombies and your aim is all over the place, despite calibrating the light guns. My best guess is that my TV is simply not responsive to the light gun as it should be. We moved the whole shabang into the other room and played on the 27 inch, where zombies did, indeed, fall to the incredible aim and natural zombie-killing instincts my wife was throwing around.

Watch out zombies. We’re armed (and calibrated).

The other day, I decided to bust open one of my Cube World cubes to see what’s inside and to begin a plan to hack it. For those who don’t know, they’re little cubes with digital stick men living in them. They come in different characters and you can put a couple cubes together to make them interact like below:

Anyway, I’ve had them for about 6 months and I had been meaning to pull one apart and play with it, so I did. Here’s how they come apart:

(This is at your own risk)
1. Unscrew the back screw and remove the back panel / battery cover.
2. You now have access to 4 tiny screws via 4 tiny holes. Unscrew them with a tiny screwdriver.
3. Carefully pull the two halves apart. Careful, they’re still connected.
4. Pull the black connector panels from the inside to the outside.
5. You should now have access to 3 new screws. Unscrew them to pull out the display.
(that’s about as far as I go for now)

Once I got it apart, I realized that although it’s cool and all, I still have no idea what kind of hack I can do to it. First, I tried turning it back on to make sure that everything worked. No problem there. Then I messed with connections, shook him up, etc. I tried all sorts of things to make him do anything other than what is expected out of the box, to no avail. Then I connected him to another Cubie the right way, the wrong way, forwards, backwards, etc. Other than them both getting pissed off and duking it out, everything was fine.

(The whole set of full-sized images is here.)

As you can see, I haven’t accomplished anything too exciting yet. This is where I want your help. What should I do (or try to do) to him to make him work in a much different way than intended? I’m open to any suggestions, but if I wind up with something cool, I’ll give it away here later, so I’ll be trying to NOT break it.

Thoughts?

When I had a Sony PSP, I was jumping on just about every mod and hack. I wanted to push it to its limits. The only thing I feared was the dreadful possibility that one of my hacks would “brick” the device, leaving it unusable. Eventually, I sold it because I just didn’t use it much and had hacked it to the point that I became bored. Had this been available when I still had my PSP, I may have never sold it, taking advantage of all the possible hacks there were to come.

Finally, there’s an easy way to unbrick that dead PSP and get hacking again in minutes. Take a look at the video proof below.

[via Joystiq]

I still have a bunch of great domain names for $75, but I’ve also decided to list one of my sites. 2007 will be my year to focus on just a handful of sites, so watch for a couple more I’ll post soon.

Here’s the goods:
http://www.afternic.com/name.php?domain=MeemPool.com

Details:
- Site is at http://www.meempool.com
- Site contents are auto-updated via user submission
- There are over 30,000 links in the system.
- The traffic is low and I don’t have time to really promote this and then maintain it when the traffic comes, but the site is built already, so all you have to do is get it some more traffic.

I have about 15 sites at the moment and I plan to get that down to around 10 or less so I can focus on making what I have better. So, again, I’ll be dropping a few sites on Afternic for $75. Stay tuned.