KingsAge - fully upgraded city

Today I had some more spare time. I tend to have a lot of that lately. So I decided to find something to do. Being at work, I couldn't exactly play Starcraft, so I began browsing the web in search for a nice little browser game. I came across KingsAge so I gave it a try.

The first thing that stood out was the fact that the map overview resembles the one from TribalWars so I thought that this one is made by the guys at InnoGames. But it's actually made by Gameforge Productions GmbH, the creators of Ikariam.

Now here's the funny part: Grepolis (from InnoGames) looks like Ikariam (from Gameforge) and KingsAge (from Gameforge) looks like TribalWars (from InnoGames). It's like these guys just copy each other :). I'm kidding of course.

But back to KingsAge. I always find it more exciting if I know what I'm going at. In other words, when it comes to browser based games, I want to know what my village/town/polis or whatever it's called, will look like. I want to know how a fully developed city will look like. And since I already made a few mock-ups with Grepolis in the past, I thought I'll give this one a go too.

And here it is, a KingsAge fully developed or upgraded city. And I must say that it looks pretty nice. I don't know why but it reminds me of Age of Empires. As almost any strategy browser game, most buildings have 3 different images that show their level of development. So there are 3 images below, each showing the buildings in the 3 different stages. Some buildings (like the Memorial or the Hideout) have only one image no matter the level and that's why they look the same in all images. The Residence has two images.

I can't really form an opinion on whether I like the game or not. I'll have to play it for a few days. But so far I'm not really impressed with anything in particular. It looks like it's just one more browser game.

PS: These are mock-ups, manufactured images, don't think I've reached that level and that my city is fully upgraded. I might even quit playing in a day or two. Please don't ask me any questions regarding the game also. I'm a newbie too. Check the Help pages and the Forum. You'll find all the information you need there.

aTokens from Entrecard - a new currency platform

A few days ago I remembered that there once a website/service on the Internet that got a lot of attention in the past. I remember every single blogger talked about it and everyone thought it was such a great service. Important players on the "make money online" sector made it really popular and people flooded in. It was called, and still is, Entrecard.

Both praises and critics emerged in regard to that service. Some people, including me, thought it is in no way beneficial to building a community. All it did was attract mass droppers and that's about it. Contests were held and prizes were given. It was a really agitated time for Entrecard. And then nobody seemed to pay attention to it anymore.

By accident I stumbled on a Entrecard drop box about a week ago and I remembered all about it. So I created a new account just to see what else is happening with it. Apparently the community, even if it's not that active anymore, is partly still there. The large players have left. But new people still join.

But this post is not about Entrecard, but rather about a new service they are promoting: aTokens. It seems it's yet another virtual currency platform, but aimed at the social networking area this time. aTokens stand for (a)ppreciation tokens and it's meant to be a way to show your appreciation towards someone. I still don't know what that means in the real world.

The creation of the account is rather simple and it allows you to connect your account with your existing Twitter account, for faster registration. It even has a built-in messaging system similar to the one Twitter has.

To fuel your account you can purchase aTokens through PayPal at a price of $4.99 for 100 tokens. The tokens can latter be transferred between users or can be redeemed for cash or coupons. The main advantage I'm seeing with the redeeming part is the fact that it will attract a lot of people and that's a good thing for a website like this. For any website for that matter. The good part is that aTokens don't just sprout out from the ground. They are created only in exchange of real cash. I guess that creates a stable economy.

Even if it sounds pretty good now i doubt it will last. The thing I suspect will happen is a lot of dead accounts will populate aTokens and it will soon roll over and die. Unless some real hot-shot from the high players makes it popular and some high-traffic online shop adopts it as a form of payment. I hope I'm wrong.

In any case, head on over to aTokens and give it a try. And hey, if you found this post useful I don't mind if you send a few aTokens my way :)

Social Share 2.0 Widget for Blogger

The latest and probably last version of the Social Sharing Widget for Blogger is here. Now at version 2.0, for no particular reason.

The generator has been simplified, no more height/width adjustments. It just fills the space it has. The icons have been changed with the Aquaticus.Social pack from jwloh. A few icons have been created following the same template since there were not in that pack.

In total I have added 11 new social networking sites: Friendfeed, Newsvine, Mixx, SurfPeople, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! Buzz, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster and Diigo. There are a lot more out there, but these should be enough. If you have anything else that you would like to see added, just leave a comment below and I'll think about it.

So just select the ones you like, change the order as you please and enjoy!

Select items

Select below the items you want to appear in your widget. Make sure you select at least one. An empty widget serves no purpose. You can also drag them to specify the order you would like them to have.

If you have already installed the previous version, make sure you remove it if you plan to use this one. I doesn't matter if you remove it before or after you install this version.