First, games. There were plenty of new games I tried. Let’s have itsy bitsy tiny mini-reviews in alphabetical order, as part of my great catchup

• BattleForge – it’s  now also play4free, but you won’t have as much fun with only the 32 cards you get initially – more are obtainable with microtransations. The strategic focus lies in deckbuilding, actual battles are more tactics-based.
• Braid, but it’s less interesting once you completed it for the first time – admittedly, I had to cheat a bit with some puzzles.
• City of Heroes / Villains – it’s a very subjective rating, mostly because I’m horribly bored by the traditional MMO formula by now. But the game does have an incredibly nice character editor.
• Cogs, mainly due to lacking long-term motivation for me personally, but still a great filler and brain teaser.
• Dawn of War II – it’s the epitome of WH40k’s grim future. I particularly like how the single player (more action-RPG) and the multiplayer (deep strategy and tactics without base building, finally) are essentially two entirely different games.
• Defense Grid: The Awakening, a great continuation of the tower defense meme that begun with Warcraft III custom maps and found its way into countless Flash games (like this one) to date.
• Mirror’s Edge – I played through it three times! Splendid how they mixed up the FPS formula. Not that much to do after you finished the game though. (Yes, I did enough time trials to unlock them all.)
• Plants vs. Zombies, which was surprising for me, I do not like any of the other PopCap games this much.
• Team Fortress 2 Sniper vs. Spy Update. Would have been more if it weren’t for how the unlocks were introduced (merely as random drops). And, I still got no hat, what’s up with that?
• Zeno Clash,  but I would like to give it more. It’s so charming and well-executed. It just didn’t make me actually want to finish it, and I can’t even put my finger on why that is.

I guess my rating average is rather high (3.7 stars, which pretty much translates to  “Hey, that’s good!”) – but arguably, that is because I don’t even play the games I know I wouldn’t like.

Have you tried any of these games? Do you agree, or disagree, with my rating? Let me know, I love comments

Left 4 Dead Survival Pack

Left 4 Dead did get a new update a couple of weeks back, which improved the balance a bit. I liked the Smoker changes, but other than that, it was a bit less spectacular than I hoped. However, the slightly more spectacular update is coming: The Survival Pack, supposed to come out “sometime in March or April”. Careful, watching those videos might hurt if you’re allergic to spastic gamepad shooter movement like I am.

Anyway, what’s gonna be in it for us PC users:

• The SDK, so people can create their own maps (exclusive to the PC)
• Versus modes on the Dead Air and Death Toll campaigns (finally!)
• A new Survival game mode, where the survivors are pitted against wave upon wave of infected
• Lighthouse, a new level for that new game mode

I am really looking forward to this, being the old Versus nut that I am. I actually never played the Dead Air campaign yet, with it not being available in Versus.

There also was a minor patch on the 11th that brought some further balance fixes, in particular, who plays the survivor side first in Versus is now determined by who is leading -- those get to play first, as the ones coming second know where all the weapons are, and have a rough idea of where tanks and witches will show up.

Update 2009-03-14 09:45: Just now, new post on boomercharged.net, with essentially this very information, plus they say that Valve named “before April 21st” as release date.

Quake Live Open Beta

It’s running for a couple weeks already, and the comments on my most-commented-on post ever have dwindled ever since the beta was made public and no longer invites-only. Quake Live is still a perfect reenactment of one of the two core roots of today’s online shooters, Quake III (the other one being the original Unreal Tournament).

If you haven’t checked this out, maybe you should do yourself a favour and relive some good old school fun

Team Fortress 2 Scout Update

Ah, the big one. This update for Team Fortress 2 is a few weeks old already, in fact. Like the Goldrush/Medic, Pyro, and Heavy updates, this one features tons of achievements and three new, unlockable alternate weapons for the Scout, and a couple community maps. Have a look at the goodies!

Unlike with the previous updates, Valve themselves didn’t provide own maps or even new game types this time. I have played all the maps they officially release now months ago, too -- although an official release like that gives them more exposure of course. On the other hand, with payload, control point, capture the flag and arena, there’s plenty game types in TF2 now.

Sandman User Guide

As before though, the unlocks aren’t necessarily better than the original weapons, but different. For example, the Sandman allows you to knock out an opponent, but foregoes your double jump. And you give up your ranged weapon, the pistol, for the Bonk! energy drink. If you’re using the Force-A-Nature and the regular bat over the Sandman, you’ll have a triple jump even, counting the gun’s knockback -- which is awesome, I love it, it gives the Scout even more flexibility and speed and allows you to reach places way faster or even at all. Just watch:

Sorry about the distinct lack of sound, I didn’t switch the recording device for Fraps

Anyway, that’s it for now -- we’ve got plenty of shooter goodness to get us over the coming weeks.

Now, why is that? Of course, it has everything to do with the recently released patch 2.0, and the Titan Pack expansion, and that aforementioned free weekend, and the fact that the game is 40% off until the 15th still; there’s hope the game sales rise to Steam #1 for some time at least and show yet another time how important game updates are, particularly when they’re free.

While we’re on the subject of Steam, my own copy was bought back before UT3 even was on Steam, but there is a way of adding it to Steam meanwhile: This tutorial is really nice and explains how to activate your retail copy on Steam. I’m not sure why I did this, considering the game worked a treat without Steam, but I did it anyway, and it worked.

Anyway, what is in that patch, actually? Have a look here, trailer and screenies! There’s a full Titan Pack preview on BeyondUnreal. Or directly watch the trailer below:

When I first heard about the expansion, my reaction was “gee, I hope they do something against the Biohazard/Deck/Suspense spam”. Well, they did! The new maps are really nice, at least the half-dozen that I already played. There’s new game modes -- Greed is great and works particularly well with titans, Betrayal is fun and spices up instagib enough for me to like it. The titans are awesome, both when being one and when fighting one. And there’s a new voting system in place.

Plus the server browser is way better than before (some say, it now has basic functionality, but that’s what we wanted), with pasting IPs and adding IPs to favourites and better filtering and displaying players (and bots!) on a server.

Really, if you tried UT3 before but decided you just couldn’t overcome some of those shortcomings that stood in the way of great fun, there’s way less between you and the fun now. Epic did fix the game. Now go buy it, and add “haslo” to your ingame friends list

Get the patch through one of these mirrors, or download it via Steam.

In other news, I’ll post another shooter news thingy, probably in a mere few hours.

Update 2009-03-11 12:28: That free Steam weekend that left many players unable to play? Gee, there’s another one, starting this Friday! If you feel like participating, better start preloading now, so you have the game when it’s free Via BeyondUnreal, and visible on the game’s Steam page.

Update 2009-03-19 11:09: Rock Paper Shotgun just ran an article about the amazing turn UT3’s sales took with those free weekends and the discounted price and the big free update. Gulag’s comment sums it up nicely:

RARRGH! Internet Game Gods From The Future Ate My Pre-Historic Business Model!!!

Stomp stomp stomp.

So much for “PC gaming is dead”.

Dead Space

I had heard a lot of positive buzz about Dead Space, the new EA SciFi horror shooter, so my expectations were naturally high. When Steam finally had it (funny enough, I’m one of those odd folks who are up in arms against any form of too rigid DRM except when it’s Steam), and in English too (something that’s nigh impossible to get here in Switzerland in retail, but that’s another issue), I bought it.

So yesterday I tried to play it, with those high expectations, and with disastrous results. Those were my first impressions:

• Odd strafing … When a game moves you forward with speed X when you press “W”, and moves you sideways with a speed close to X when you press “A”, you’d expect pressing both “W” and “A” would move you roughly in a 45° angle? Not in this game, here the angle is closer to 4.5°. That’s a common shooter standard that you chose not to implement there, and it is annoying.
• Aim mode … You can only shoot if you enter aim mode first, which displays those nice targeting dots, but which also slows down your mouse a lot. You know, EA, I do have this custom-built gaming rig with an insane-res laser mouse and a huge mouse pad, and I do play with low sensitivity. I can aim perfectly well without you slowing down my mouse – in fact, I can aim way better if you don’t keep changing my input. This is not a console. At least give me an option to change it.
• Mouse smoothing … Turning off VSync helped a bit, but the smoothing isn’t gone (with 50+ FPS). And there’s no option to switch it off. My mouse movements are rather smooth, thank you very much, and having them artificially smoothened further disconnects me from what’s happening on the screen. And I’m not alone (although I wouldn’t use such strong language).
• Save function … There is none. I have no clue if the game is supposed to autosave or if there’s checkpoints and forced save spots or whatnot. And honestly, I don’t care. A PC game without a save function has to explain to me why it doesn’t have one, preferrably within the first minutes of play. And then the reason better be good, too (like the one in PoP: Sands of Time was).
• Program crash … Right after shooting the first monster, my game crashed. Not just the game, the whole system halted. It managed to do something I didn’t know was possible: It put the video card into an error state where a soft reset didn’t help anymore (the BIOS then beeped “video card error”), a hard reset did luckily. I’m sorry, EA … is my run-of-the-mill 8800GT (market share according to Valve: 12%, drivers updated) too exotic for you?

All in all, I can confidently conclude that something is wrong in the EA PC testing department. And I can even point to what it is: The ones testing PC games there are not actually PC gamers, but console gamers who have to test the PC version as well. No way those huge bloopers would have made it into the final obvious console port otherwise.

It’s just another game that alienates PC gamers by screwing with their conventions in favour of a game experience similar to the one on the console. In case you haven’t noticed: The demographics of PC players and console players might overlap, but have distinct histories and premises.

Now if you’ll excuse me, work first, and I’ll need some Quake Live (or possibly Left 4 Dead) this evening to calm down. Maybe I’ll give Dead Space another try afterward, the story seems to be great so far after all.

Zombies!!!

Quite some time ago, I bought this game, Zombies!!! – yep, that’s three exclamation marks. To say it with Terry Pratchett, “Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign for a diseased mind!”

Considering we’re talking about zombies, that makes sense, too. Particularly if the game has the slogan, “This one’s a no-brainer!”

If you wonder what this post is about and why it isn’t a review – I wrote a little ruleset that allows you to play the game with all its expansions, all at once, and with some improvements. I present to you…

Totally Zombies!!! v1.3

Zombie!!! Dogs

Anyway, back to the game. It is, as I guess you can tell, about zombies. Many zombies, in particular. And I’m not talking about dozens, but hundreds. And it doesn’t just have regular zombies, but also government enhanced zombies (with minis that glow in the dark), zombie dogs, and zombie clowns.

So we established that the game is awesome now.

Dark Humour

The game isn’t for everyone, however. It is mostly based on luck, as such quite the opposite of Starcraft (where not even combat is rolled with dice) and still quite far away from Twilight Imperium, on a strategy-to-luck scale, and closer to Munchkin and the likes. It’s really important to draw good event cards, and to roll well for combat – although drawing good event cards allows you to slack when rolling. It also has quite simple rules, of the “can be explained in under five minutes” kind, where unexplained stuff at the start can easily fit in later. Finally, the art (particularly on the event cards) is pretty graphic, involving intestines and the likes.

Hundreds of Zombies

Even for people who like it (like me, obviously, I can’t resist hundreds of zombies), it has some frustrating things. Like too slow movement at times, death setting people back too much in the long run yet not being punishing enough in the short run. Or the expansion bits not being tempting enough, and, when multiple expansions are used, rather unbalanced (some too tough, some too easy). And the end game rewards the player who had the least action until then, too.

So I went and looked far and wide, and found plenty of tweaks and house rules that make the thing better. What I didn’t find though was one rule set that allowed to play all expansions together, using those tweaks and then some more to glue the whole thing into one game. So I went and wrote one.

This extended rules set is what I call Totally Zombies!!!, and its version 1.3 is available for download right here. Or on Board Game Geek, too.

Please comment if you like the rules, or if you’d change something else as well

World of Goo

The game we’re looking at is World of Goo, created by the independent developer 2D Boy. It’s out since October 13th, was available on Steam but isn’t anymore in Europe due to some contract confusion – but you can still buy it directly from 2D Boy. I preordered mine from there, and it went entirely smooth.

Oh, something of note: The game comes without DRM! From the mail I got that told me my preorder copy was ready:

World of Goo has absolutely no copy protection or DRM at all, since we want to give you (and everyone) the best experience we can. Thanks for not distributing this, and helping us make this possible!

This means that I’d have bought the game even if it’d have been less great Too rigid DRM has the effect of not letting me buy it, last time that happened was with the Spore I was looking forward to so much

Graphics:

The graphics are utterly cute and charming, perfect for a casual game like this.

Miss World of Goo

Every level has a unique style, the goo balls have a quirky personality and hop around, the backgrounds and level overviews are marvellous. Each chapter has a distinct style, too, four of the five are seasonal and the fifth … is a secret.

Sunset with Goo Balls

The reason why you don’t see five stars here is because the (fixed) resolution they chose is merely 800×600 – while actually playing the pixels don’t bother that much really, but it’s not perfect, and only perfect gets 5 stars.

A nice touch is that the low resolution kinda reminds of those retro classics we all love so much…

Sound:

The only nitpick I have here is that the tracks are rather short (about a minute each) – there’s plenty of them (although they do repeat towards the end), and they greatly support the gameplay and feel of the levels as well. The goo balls make cute little “plop” or chattering noises whenever you pick them up, or drop them, or fling them, or whatever else you can do with them.

Gameplay:

The goal couldn’t be simpler in principle: Guide the goo balls to the exit, collect as many of them as you can by building close to the exit pipe and letting them jump out. The first level has a great sign showing how to do things:

First Level

That’s all the instructions you’ll ever need. Well, and the time trackback feature, another such shield.

The complexity doesn’t come from an overly complicated user interface, but from the different types of goo, and the levels themselves. Whenever you start thinking you might get bored by what you’re currently doing soon, there’s a new level with an entirely new challenge, new types of goo, new ways in which they stick to each other, new ways of interacting with them, and new obstacles to overcome.

But the changes are introduced so carefully that you barely notice you’re playing an entirely different game, it feels totally the same although you’re not using the same mechanics nor components anymore…

Different Way of Doing Things

Some of the levels really are positively hard. For one, I even had to cheat and look it up in their forums.

If you’re bored in the end after all, you can always ramp up the difficulty by trying to get OCD flags for the levels (Obsessive Completion Distinction Criteria) – those require you to finish the level faster, or bring more goo balls to the pipe, or only use a select number of turns.

Fun:

Oh, as if I hadn’t mentioned “fun” enough by now. This game is the most fun game I’ve played in years, period. With some social criticism and dark humour thrown in, of course. The learning and motivation curve are just perfect – you really see that these developers have something so many titles lack these days: Love for their game.

The game isn’t really meant to be one that wastes your time for years and years, like MMOs or online shooters are, so longevity is less of a criterion. Nevertheless, the OCD help there as well, and going back to earlier levels after more experience in more complicated ones is a rewarding experience. Additionally, the game is entirely a puzzler but nevertheless has a story worth of note.

And there’s always the World of Goo Corporation’s tower building minigame to keep you interested after you finished the levels, I had the 25th-highest tower worldwide for a few seconds. Too bad I had built the top bits a wee bit unstable and it crashed horribly.

Overall:

I was very, very tempted to give 5 stars, but the game does have some shortcomings. Since everything else is totally awesome, and it’s easy to find reviews that list what’s good, I’ll list those shortcomings here:

• There are some remaining bugs – I had a two or three crashes. One of them actually deleted my entire profile as well, so I had to start from scratch – luckily, that happened shortly after I reached Chapter 2 for the first time only.
• The music does get a bit repetitive – not because the tracks themselves wouldn’t be great, but because they’re so short.
• The game overall is somewhat short, although Ron Carmel (one of the devs) was probably right when he said that “Beyond the moon chapter in the European version, there will be no extra content. I think we’ve reached the point with this game where more is not better.”

But keep in mind that the game only costs $20, and is from a studio that consists of two people. And has no DRM. Before that background, I should maybe give the fifth star after all (but I won’t, can somebody bind my hand on my back please?)…

Anyway: Go buy it, now! This game finishes the discussion whether games can be art, simply by being art.

Update 2008-10-15 15:24: Gee, if you’re not convinced, there’s a demo now (the entire first chapter), via Rock Paper Shotgun. And you seem to be able to change the resolution with a little hack, although it didn’t quite work for my 1280×1024 (1024×768 went fine though).

The mixes I made so far (you can order them as well, or expand upon them, by entering their codes here – unfortunately, there’s no way to link directly to a mix – Edit: Links added, see comments!):

• Schoggifrucht (Mix 54802): My first try, tasted too much like Mango I found, but maybe that was just due to bad mixing. The approach was right, but I didn’t find enough nuts in there.
• Schoggifrucht II (Mix 55349): More nuts, awesome, and my favourites (Pecan and Cashew), too. But suddenly, the “Frucht” bits were too sparse, I needed those Mango back.
  
• Schoggifrucht III (Mix 55510): The perfect mix! Fruity and chocolatey and corny, no raisins or other stuff I don’t like.
  

mymuesli

I hear that the mymuesli site makers were on TV and all over traditional media as well meanwhile, so this might be old news already. For me, it was a revelation: I never started eating Müesli for breakfast (and often, didn’t eat breakfast at all), because I just hadn’t found one that I liked, and eating through all of them just to find that there’s yet another one I don’t like didn’t sound all too appealing to me.

So my personal alternative to mymuesli isn’t really “eat local Biomüesli”, but “eat refined Kellogs stuff or even nothing at all” – and suddenly, it’s way more biological (all the contents adhere bio guidelines and have certifications and whatnot, too), and makes a lot of sense from a health and nourishment point of view as well.

Anyway, a thorough recommendation: If you live in Switzerland, Germany or Austria, and feel like trying the user-friendly web2.0 interface and tinkering your own (rather expensive, but worth it) Müesli, there isn’t really much that should stop you

Twilight Imperium 3rd Ed.

This game is one I’ve been looking forward to actually playing for quite some time now. I bought Twilight Imperium 3rd Ed. (or TI3 in short, official site) and its expansion, Shattered Empire, quite some time ago, but alas, finding a time when everybody has time to actually sit together and play a game that lasts a whole day is not easy.

So with Doodle we went and started planning, and after much ado I finally had a group for today, and everybody was actually here on time too (although I’m really sorry for those who came a bit early because I hadn’t told them properly when we’d start…).

I’ll follow a similar vein here as with the TF2 review from a few weeks back: I’ll try and make categories that apply to as many games as possible, so I won’t have to change the review structure later.

So here we go, with a review that can still be called “first impressions”, strictly speaking – after all, I only have 3 2-player and one 4-player game under my belt meanwhile.

Update 08-09-15 12:43: Thanks to Sternenfahrer-MUC for pointing this out – I’m talking of the base Twilight Imperium box plus the Shattered Empire expansion in this review. Many balance inconsistencies (like Fighters being overpowered, or the strategy cards having balance problems) were fixed through some alterations to the tech trees and rules variants, and quite some optional rules were introduced that look really fun too (although I haven’t been able to try them out yet). I’d go as far as saying, TI3 without SE isn’t quite complete.

Components:

Twilight Imperium Components

Gee, awesome! If you’re looking for a game that has over 400 plastic spaceships, nearly 100 cardboard hex tiles for creating a new board every time you play, over 600 little cards with tech and actions and resources and politics, and several hundred cardboard counters, this is the one.

They’re well-crafted, look great, and if anything should be broken anyway, Fantasy Flight Games is well-known for great customer support: If something’s missing, they’ll send it after you free of charge (this didn’t happen to me with TI3, but I did have a broken miniature in my Starcraft box and it was replaced no questions asked).

Oh, you will need more dice than they provide though. 4 just don’t cut it when you have to roll for 30 ships.

Game Box:

TI3 Box Sectioning

Having so many such great components also means that it needs proper stashing, and a box that can hold it. Now, the game box isn’t quite up to that task (being just a box and all, without any sectioning whatsoever). The only really good thing about it (apart from the box art) is that it is fittingly huge.

TI3 Box Interior

Eventually, I ended up sorting the game components into those plastic boxes you can buy for tools and screws and whatnot in DIY markets (I know I used the picture to the left before, but there’s not much point in creating another one). This works very well and makes transporting the game easier too, and I also made custom boxes for the sorted card stacks (to avoid having just one mess), that helps a lot for stashing too.

Overall though, storage is a concern when buying this game, and the provided solutions don’t cut it to the extent that they don’t exist at all.

Rules:

TI3 Rules Documents

For a first timer, the very volume of the rules makes them very hard to get a grasp on. There’s the turn sequence, there’s the various actions you can do in the action phase (where every player gets just short actions before the play moves on), there’s all the strategy cards that involve politics, trade, research, then there’s the tech tree and all the different unit types and system types on the board … it’s huge.

Which is exactly the good thing once the volume of the rules is understood: There are plenty of options for things you can do, and they all make sense and have rather intuitive and consistent rules gouverning them.

The rulebooks (available online) are very clearly laid out and explain things rather well and with examples, there’s a FAQ (same place) that clarifies many problems, and if anything remains there’s still the FFG forums where plenty of resourceful and knowledgable individuals gather.

Still, some things could be better. The reference for quick lookups during the game is severely lacking, I and printed out quite some player aids for the various stages, and a tech tree that my players (including me) actively used. Not all too many additional things were needed though, overall.

Another weak point is politics, and with it the worth of planets with high influence values – politics are somewhat trivialized, and although it’s possible to win a game without a single fight (our winner today did just that) it’s not really necessary to do that with many won votes and introduced laws. In fact, it’s pretty possible to ignore politics cards for the most part.

That last thing doesn’t mean that it’s even remotely possible to ignore actual politics between the people playing – trade agreements are made and bargained for (and strategically broken at times), attack routes are influenced and bought, goodwill and other goods are exchanged for strategy cards and play sequences. It’s just that the actual things called “Political Cards” are less central than they maybe could be.

Replay Value:

I do believe I’d give the game 5 stars here already even without the community. Every time you set up a galaxy, you create different routes and strong and weak space regions in the galaxy, new hotspots and sneaky paths, and the somewhat random victory conditions together with the vastly different racial play styles (with the trade-centric Hacan, the spying Yissaril, the warrior Embers of Muaat, the ground force centric Sol empire – 14 distinct races included) and deep tech trees and politics guarantee that the game doesn’t get boring quickly.

But the community exists, and creates new rules all the time – from variant strategy cards over new races to new ship types. As a matter of fact, many of the Shattered Empire rule expansions were inspired by community authors and similar things were found on forums (mainly the BoardGameGeek one and the FFG one) first.

An interesting discussion about the board’s influence for the final SE rules was sparked by my asking whether this last paragraph was true by the way, read it here on the FFG forums.

Fun:

TI3 Players

I actually asked my wife here if I should give 4 or 5 stars – it turned out to be a clear vote for 5. The four players today had great fun, she actually tried to sleep this afternoon and couldn’t because we were laughing all the time.

I guess my brother and me having our little infights with him pushing me back to a mere four three systems over time (and my revenge with fighters later), while the other two had a cold war type of thing going on between them did it’s own – but that’s just the kind of scenarios the game enables.

It’s of course important that the group fits together, that everybody has enough time and no stress, as with any complex game. We started 11am today and played until 7pm (including a brunch, that is, and closing with a dinner).

So with the right group, the game is as fun as a 4X space soap board game gets. I’m really looking forward to introducing leaders (racial heroes) and distant suns counters (random encounters on planets) the next time we play, and maybe adding the “create the board” phase before the actual game too – all of which we didn’t use this time, to keep things simple(r).

Overall:

Yes, this is my favourite game right now. It’s also the only one that I gave 10 points on BoardGameGeek so far. It’s certainly more fun for our group than the still somewhat fun, but comparably static and more convulted Starcraft (which is from Fantasy Flight Games too), and the common tech trees and unit types for all races make getting into it for starters a bit easier too.

Definitely a must-have for any friend of non-trivial board games.

Chrome Phone Home

Maybe you heard (I hear it was even on TV?) that Chrome loves E.T. and likes to phone home. Yes, it does, but not that much more so than other browsers: Google’s Matt Cutts has the details. (Yes, I added that link to the other post later on as well).

Selection mine, he has a few more points:

If you’re just surfing around the web and clicking on links, that information does not go to google.com.

If you are typing a search or url in the address bar, Google Chrome will talk to the current search service to try to offer useful query/url suggestions.

Google Chrome checks for automatic updates every 25 hours.

Every 30 minutes, Google Chrome downloads a list of 32-bit url hashes of urls thought to be dangerous (malware or phishing).

Essentially, the same as every other browser. And less than IE, who sends URLs to Microsoft for Malware checks if you opt in (and doesn’t have a malware filter if you don’t). Their Internet Explorer Privacy Statement reads:

If you opt in, addresses not on the legitimate list will be sent to Microsoft and checked against a frequently updated list of websites that have been reported to Microsoft as phishing, suspicious, or legitimate websites.

Terms of Use

Another outcry in the community (details here at TapTheHive) was about Google’s terms of use, in particular the lengthy part 11 which allowed Google to use all data anybody ever entered in Chrome, basically. They’re not the first ones with evil TOS, but the ones that were watched best I guess, with the paranoia that I partially share and all. They changed it, it now reads:

11. Content license from you

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

The German version didn’t change yet, but the English version works retroactively for people who accepted the old one as well.

More, Way More

I guess everybody wants to see more objective data as to whether Chrome’s speed really is better than that of Firefox (let’s not talk about IE). It is, slightly: Speed tests! But the Firefox team is working on a faster JS engine.

Then, a funny little exploit to crash all of Chrome’s tabs (via der-link.de).

And finally, interoperability: Get the best of Chrome’s features in Firefox via, who’d have thought, plugins (I didn’t know a few of those). And, associative art with the Chrome logo – is there a hidden message somewhere (via Basic Thinking)?

Update 08-09-12 10:59: Yesterday’s news (well, actually, from the 8th), Google now anonymizes the 2% of traffic they log from Google Suggest after only 24 hours. And since this addition will send another trackback to the Google Blog, hello in advance

haslo.ch in Chrome

Google Chrome is what must be the most written-about browser, ever – it’s hard not to write about it in your blog, peer pressure and all. Announced just Monday, and in blogs and big media alike from the moment it started.

It is special though, admittedly, has several unique approaches that make checking it out definitely worthwhile:

• Each tab is a process, instead of each tab or even the whole browser being a thread – meaning, if one tab crashes, the browser doesn’t, and garbage collection when closing tabs is more thorough as well
• Popups are not intrusive, “contained” within the tab until the user actually drags them out
• The JavaScript VM is actually meant for web applications and not tiny scripts, with proper garbage collection and JIT compilation (getting JS closer to Java by the way, while still being distinctly a unique language)
• It’s developed with security in mind from the ground up, including sandboxes for browser tasks and built-in malware scans
• It’s open source! Meaning, anybody can extend it, anybody can use the research Google put into it, and anybody can look at what the browser does under the hood (except Microsoft that is, as they certainly won’t go OS with their IE any time soon)
• With WebKit, it’s powered by a proven, standards compliant and fast rendering engine
• It was introduced with a comic book!

But there are also a few things speaking against Chrome:

• It’s a great competitor not only to the IE, but to Firefox (although their CEO’s reaction was pretty positive, via Basic Thinking in German), Safari and Opera: Tech-savvy people care what browser they use, non-tech-savvy people just use “the internet”, and consequently many tech-savvy people don’t use IE and will try Chrome
• It’s yet another tool for Google to collect more data to turn into profit (link German); the anti-phishing feature sends all your URLs to Google (link German – just like the IE phishing filter by the way), and is opt-out instead of opt-in. Edit: This was actually wrong, not every URL is sent to Google, instead the browser regularly downloads hash lists and then locally compares URLs to those lists. However, for the smart search, everything you type is sent to your search engine, which is by default Google.
• Being new, the browser still lacks the plugin support Firefox has (more on this below)

So, does the positive outweigh the negative? And even more important: Is the browser easy to use, fast and as standards compliant as it was promised to be?

User Experience

The browser really is fast! JavaScript is fast. Page loading is fast. Loading the browser in the first place is fast. Switching tabs (even with processing-intensive tasks) is fast. Kicking tabs is fast.

The speed advantage really is objectively measurable too – in this JavaScript speed test here, my computer lets Chrome rattle through in 200 ms. My Firefox 3 takes around 350 ms (still very fast), while the IE is sitting at over 2500 ms.

The whole browser is very simple and easy to use, with little to no configuration required (or possible) – which has downsides for both users who aren’t happy with the defaults, and for people like me who like fiddling with settings to personalize stuff.

I’m less happy with the browser trying to fill stuff everywhere, whether he knows the site or not. It leads to all kinds of odd behaviour, like the first time I’m trying to log into MyDoodle, the user name shows as “1979″.

All this leads to an odd situation: The browser is a black box, more so than any other, despite being open source. I really have no clue what the browser is doing there when it tries to think for me. I don’t like that.

Anyway, the simplicity and ease of use do work towards making the browser also a competitor to the Internet Explorer, not only geek browsers: It’s easy to install, possible to install (and uninstall) per user without admin rights, doesn’t ask many questions and just works right out of the box. So many non-geek users will find this a viable alternative to the behemoth IE.

Plugins

The plugin thing is a big one for me: I’m using about 20 Firefox plugins right now. Most prominent and essential among them are NoScript and AdBlock Plus, surfing without them is horrible. Of course CustomizeGoogle is a favourite as well.

There’s way more: StumbleUpon and TwitterBar are used very often, too (although I try to cut down on StumbleUpon, it’s horrible – don’t install it if you value your sleep and free time). Developing web applications or even mere websites without the Web Developer Toolbar is unthinkable.

While I’m at it, I’ll also plug the great Download Statusbar, DradDropUpload for Gmail, and Pagerank Status. And of course there’s Gears, which is built into Chrome from the start.

While I’m sure that eventually, plugin support for Chrome will be great (the framework is in place and thought-through after all), right now due to being new the browser simply lacks features that I like and I’m used to.

Conclusion

Well … it’s another new browser. Not bad, very fast, and with several innovative approaches that will revolutionize browsers no matter if Chrome will be successful or not.

As for myself, I’ll keep using Firefox for now. The combination of little added value, no added geek value (Firefox is open source too), and actual missing features make it less than tempting to switch main browser.

(And I may be starting to get a tiny bit paranoid when it comes to Google’s data collection frenzy.)

Edit and post aftermath: The first public Chrome security hole, and I didn’t even realize Google doesn’t support RSS discovery (link German, a feature of Firefox that I love). Finally, Google’s answer to the conspiracy theorists (via tou.ch).

And gee that trackback to the Google blog brought traffic – hi folks