Month: April 2011

Well the third Humble Bundle is now over and once again it has proven that the 1% market share value that so many Windows lovers love to quote is absolutely incorrect.

Linux buyers paid an average of 3x as much as Windows buyers and 2x as much as Mac buyers plus there were more Linux purchases than there were Mac by around 10%.  This proves Linux is an operating system game developers should support.

Now this third bundle was not as successful in sales as the first two with just over $900,000 earned BUT we must remember that three of the games most gamers already own.  If those three games were not already owned by gamers then this bundle may have performed just as well as the previous 2.

I was lucky to scrounge up some money so I could purchase the bundle, unfortunately it was only $8.00 instead of $20 like I would love to have paid.  Paying less than $20 to me is kind of an insult to the game developers.  I just hope that if there is a bundle #4 that it either be announced or start on the first of the month when I am doing my tight monthly budget.  I don’t mind lowering a bill payment for a Humble Bundle purchase.

The Humble Bundle is back for a third time in a year and is once again looking like a hot seller even though one game is still in development and the other is a project that was cancelled when the financial backer dropped out.

All but the cancelled project will have a native Windows, Mac and Linux port.  The cancelled project however only has a Windows port but does come with the source code for those smart enough to to know how to port the game over.

The three complete games in the bundle look pretty good graphics wise and although they are not really my kind of games, I would love to make a purchase just to help support Linux gaming, unfortunately like the previous two bundles, this deal is released mid month, a time when I usually never have any income because of being on welfare.  I have sent in my request to please start having these bundles run at the first of the month or at least get some kind of notice out on the first that a new bundle is coming so people like myself can budget for it.  I did receive a reply thanking me for the idea but something tells me it won’t happen.

Well back to the bundle.  The games included in this bundle are: Trine, Shadow-grounds, Shadow-grounds: Survivor, Splot (not yet released), Jack Claw (the discontinued project).  In less that 24 hours, bundle #3 has over 70,000 sales for a total revenue of over $367,000.  The average payment people are making for this bundle is as follow: Windows – $4.24, Mac – $6.10 and Linux – $11.88.  That’s right, for the third time Linux gamers are donating double that of Windows and Mac gamers proving once again that the demand for native Linux games does exist.

If you wish to take part in this third bundle deal, head over to http://www.humblebundle.com then scroll down the page where you can input any amount you wish and decide how you would like your money to be divided between the developers and the charities.

Well I went ahead and performed an upgrade on my laptop taking my Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 Beta 1.  Now normally doing upgrades for any operating system, whether it’s Windows or Linux is usually a BIG no no because of the problems that will usually occur during or after the upgrade; However this was not the case this time.

The upgrade went flawless with no hiccups at all during the upgrade process.  After the upgrade, the only thing I experienced was the Ubuntu Software Centre not displaying the list of programs for any of the categories I clicked on or programs I searched for.  This however fixed itself after I rebooted the laptop and performed an update.  The update simply updated extra components that I guess did not get done during the upgrade step.

The unity side menu is nice although I do find that if a program is maximised to full screen, I am unable to get the side menu to scroll back out from the side until I take the program out of full screen.  Other than that one minor issue, I feel the unity desktop kind of gives Ubuntu a little more professional/pleasing look.

There is more mouse clicks now that one must do when browsing through the programs list which can get annoying if you are in a rush and I don’t really like that the programs menu will disappear after so many seconds of no mouse activity but hopefully there is a setting someone to change that.  Another thing I am not that pleased about is browser slider.  With this new Ubuntu, the standard wide slide you see along the right of your browser on long web pages is replaced by a very thin line.  If you want to scroll down, you need to hover your mouse pointer over a section of that thin line and a scroll button will appear with two arrows for you to scroll up and down but like the Unity program menu, this can disappear on you when you don’t want it to.

Overall, I like what I see, I just hope that come April 28th when 11.04 is officially released, the two or three little problems mentioned will be fixed or have an option to be changed by the end user.  If you have a spare machine I would recommend installing 11.04 and give it a try yourself.

I saw Wrestlemania 27 at Cineplex this past Sunday and overall I really enjoyed it.  Snooki was a shock to most people I think of how quick she moved in the ring, it’s just too bad that match was one of the quickest matches of the night.  The only match that was quicker was the 8-man tag match.

The order of the matches was a shocker to everyone.  The first match was Edge vs Del Rio, would love to know why it wasn’t left until later.  The biggest disappointment of the night was the Sheamus vs Bryan match being turned in to a Dark Match leaving the PPV viewers without any footage.  I have not yet watched last night RAW so I hope they had the match again on RAW.