kerimsatirli.com

The summer holidays are coming to an end, at last and that means that a whole bunch of young women and men will soon be joining the ranks of students in higher education in the Netherlands.

In order to kick-start the college experience for “our” new students, CMD Breda will be conducting a three-days-two-nights introductory camp in De Mussenberg, Loon op Zand, The Netherlands.

Naturally, yours truly will also be there, helping where help is needed and making the experience a most pleasurable one for our newbies.

One of my favourite indie-bands, Destine, will also be performing on stage, complemented by our Dean and a few other tutors - so this ought to be interesting.

And finally, Thursday night, I will be attending Feest.je, just for the fun of it and hopefully manage to meet a few contacts of mine, too.

We have all been there: Minigolf courses that looked great from the outside and plainly disappointed when you actually had to play on them. In the digital age, you do not have to put up with these things because you can just grab yourself a game of Minigolf for your Pocket PC.

In fact, there are so many different Minigolf games for Pocket PCs available, that I decided to do a head-to-head review of the two that impressed me the most: Super Putt Xtreme (SPX) and Pocket Mini Golf 2 (PMG2).

Tee off!

Minigolf is often called a lighthearted approach at the all-too-serious sport of Golf and both games seem to continue this idea in their respective visual style.

Both games are using what is referred to as an isometric perspective, which means that 3D objects are represented in a 2D manner. Technical terms aside, both developers did a great job at designing their respective titles.

PMG2’s setting looks clean and crisp, with the occasional comic’esque item such as a rattlesnake or a shark that swims on by, whereas SPX’ style is just plain cute. Huge heads and funny character animations make this game equally enjoyable to both minors and adults.

Golf Teams

Contrary to PMG2, SPX’s characters are just funny, while the various avatars in PMG2 each have a different strength or weakness and may be better suites for one course than another.

SPX tries to make up for that by providing the player with extras, such as sneak peaks at the balls trajectory or homing balls that magically move toward the hole once the ball stops.

While the extras are a nice addition, I find the character system to be more enjoyable, because choosing a character really impacts the way you score and may make or break your way towards a trophy.

Game Intermission

In order to showcase a scene from each game, I created two short clips that show you how the game looks like in full swing. If your PC has the Flash Player installed, just click on either of the following links and an inline window will show you the clip.

As you can see from the clips, both games utilize a very similar way of aiming your ball. The process is as simple as tapping and dragging your stylus to where the ball goes. Both titles allow you to adjust the strength of the swing to make the most of your points.

Once you made your first swing, your character is placed near the ball so you can continue the game. So as to not obstruct your view, SPX utilizes a semi-transparent character if you are aiming in a certain direction, PMG2 on the other hand, lets you rotate the whole view in four steps.

On Par

With games like these, it is always fun to see some data on how well (or bad) you perform. While SPX goes for the simple listing of points per level, PMG2 decided to make a statement:

The game includes a metrics feature that shows you the scores per player (character) per course per weather per difficulty and as if that was not enough to satisfy you, PMG2 also has an online leaderboard where you can submit your scores to see how good you are on a global scale.

Green Fee

Casual gamers looking for a fun mini golf experience with four different characters, 72 levels and a couple of extras can get their swing on for a mere $10 with SPX.

Twice that money will get you a highly customizable mini golf game with 60 levels, six characters, various weather conditions and an online leaderboard.

the verdict

It is said that there are only so many ways of realizing an idea and it holds true with both of these games. Both Super Putt Xtreme and Pocket Mini Golf 2 have a great selection of features but in the end, one has to carry and one has to roll

In this head-to-head review, Pocket Mini Golf 2 takes home the trophy because of the five expansion packs that give you access to a whole new set of levels that will increase the replayability factor by a lot.

For $35, you can get your hands on both the main game and three expansion packs, thereby, basically, getting one of the expansion packs for free.

On this day, a year ago, I launched lifeofacoder.com 2.0; my third attempt at blogging. My goal, back then, was to blog at least once every three to four weeks and share some insights about my college with anyone interested.

Now, a year later, I have managed an average of two posts a week, much more than I originally anticipated. I have sparked quite a few discussions amongst friends, both virtual and analogue.

Then, back in June, I switched from lifeofacoder.com to kerimsatirli.com. I never really blogged about that, but the reason for the whole move was rather simple:

Names are brands and it was about time that I started working on my own brand. I like the <firstname><lastname>.com concept a lot more than <random-name>.com; mostly because I never came up with something that I was really content with as far as <random-name>.com goes.

With a <firstname><lastname>.com however, the whole thing is a lot easier. It is simple to remember and makes a lot more sense than discussing the life of a coder, especially since I am no real coder (anymore).

With the domain switch, I also decided that it was time to adjust the style of the blog and hey, what do you know, after looking through a myriad of themes, I finally found Journalist. It is clean, lean and does not take away focus from the part of the site that matters most to me: content.

In an effort to improve my language skills, I have also switched from a relatively casual style of writing to a more professional style, but the judges are still out on a verdict for this one.

That said, there are a couple of entries I would like to highlight, mostly posts about things that I found worthy to share and entries that I am proud off:

In December 2006, I wrote about Micro relationships, which is my take on Relationship 2.0. The article also, partially links up with my thoughts on what identity really means.

Also during the final days of December 2006, I posted my Thank you article. While I am not religious in any sense, I think it is important to remind ourselves every now and again that this is a group effort, not a solo gig.

Valentine’s Day 2007 saw a post called Here’s to you, which is my ode to a person that I care about a lot, even though I never really had the guts to show it.

During March 2007 I blogged about the perception of life and how others are able to distort it.

There are, of course, many more items that I am happy with and sometimes even proud of, but these are the ones I personally liked the most.

On very much related note, two people I value immensely are celebrating their respective birthdays today, too.

Here’s to you, Ben and Judith!

It would seem that people like my reviews. It may sound arrogant, but I can back that up with feedback I get from both users and developers / manufacturers.

Recently, one developer was so happy about one of my reviews that they decided to do a huge sale on all of their Gamebox products. They even used part of my review as the title for the whole “Train your Brain” sale.

The above sale lasted until August 8th, 2007 and customers could save as much as 83% on any title. Pretty nice move on PDAmill’s part, even if it is just another way of attracting new customers during the slow(er) summer months.

I just received an email from a user at xdaflameusers.com asking me about some general information on the device in question and so on.

While I would rather see said person asking their question in the forums, so that everyone can benefit from the answers, I still decided to type up an answer, but that is not the point of the email.

After sending my reply, I decided to do a quick lookup on the person I was “talking” to and grabbed some of the data that was available from the email header and forum software.

The name revealed a profile on a popular Dutch social networking site but other than that, did not provide me with any more information, so I used the second piece of information I had, an IP address.

It turns out that the IP address that was used to register on the forums is part of a block that was delegated to Achmea Active. After searching around a bit, it would appear that the IP was mainly used for vandalism on Wikipedia.

For the sake of clarity, I should note that, in this case, the IP is shared amongst a great number of users and I do not believe that the person that mailed me is amongst the group of people that vandalized Wikipedia, but it made me think about how digital communication could evolve (for me).

In real life, I do not talk to people I know have a bad reputation, especially if they did something that goes against my core values and I am thinking of adopting a similar system for online communication. This kind of background-check would take some time to conduct, every time, but it could be limited to those contacts one is not familiar with; those contacts that contact you out of the blue.