Raj Agrawal – Page 11

Darksiders 2 – Can Death Bring New Life To A Dying Genre?

October 24, 2012 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

As ironical as the title might sound, it’s true. The Fantasy Action/Adventure genre is dying. While games like God of War might still be going strong, they’re really the last beacons of hope in an industry primarily dominated by shooters. Prince of Persia is a series which has been done to death and is now stagnant with monotony. So with Darksiders 2, there comes a plethora of expectations that it will perform, and perform outstandingly well. But can it?

darksider 2 still — A still from Darksiders 2

Darksiders 2 is the sequel to Darksiders, which tells a deep and intriguing tale about how the fight between heaven and hell came full circle to earth and destroyed the planet, and how War – one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse was caught in the middle of it. While the first game established the story and the setting, the second game expands upon it to a great degree. Care has been taken to ensure that handling Death feels different compared to handling War. The environments are more expansive, and have much more packed into them to make the game a complete package.

Having played the game to “Death”, I think one should really appreciate what Vigil games have created here. Gone are the days where action games would have long campaigns. Under the pretext of making a focused experience, developers these days get away with making 7 hour campaigns that feel severely underdone. So when a game almost 40 hour long graces us, it’s difficult not be thankful to the developers for it. While the main storyline can be completed in 20 hours, the many side-quests in the game can easily eat out another 20 hours of your life, giving you that satisfied feeling of having played a long game, something which is becoming increasingly rare.

In the end, the success of the game really depends on how popular it can become. Word of mouth does help, but these days people are only concerned about specific franchises, and are generally reluctant to give a chance to something new and unique. Even though the first game sold over a million copies, these days a million copies just doesn’t cut it. Production costs are on the rise, which makes game development a less lucrative proposition than what it was before. Hence, a single game can be a make or break affair for many companies, which is the reason why we’ve see many studios closing down in the recent past. In such times, it is necessary for games like Darksiders 2 to succeed. The game is great; no doubt about that. All it requires is the fan-base to appreciate it, and the sales that it deserves.

3D-Printing Our World – 3 Amazing Projects For Humanity

September 29, 2012 by Raj Agrawal 1 Comment

UPCOMING TECHNOLOGY – 3D-printers have become increasingly popular in recent times, especially with recent provisions to enable printing of 3D objects at home. 3D -printing is a revolutionary technology and a type of manufacturing technique that involves building successive layers of 3D objects using certain materials. The beauty of 3D-printing technology is that it easily seeps into any manufacturing domain that is involved in construction of objects, regardless of their physical structure and complexity.

At home, you can now print and use actual and fully functioning items like utensils, crockery, mechanical spare parts and even toys with utmost precision of design. At the industrial end, 3D-printers have been used to build fully functioning parts for air-planes, cars and even complex furniture! This is just a tiny gist of how powerful and useful 3D-printing technology is to mankind. I’ll now talk about a few projects aimed to solve some of the most complicated problems in the history of mankind; all with the help of 3D-printers!

Automating the production of habitable houses

Among the many disparities, our civilisation continues to face a state of uneven distribution of rights, like shelter for instance. The lack of adequate shelter is largely witnessed in 3rd world countries and there’s inadequacy with the conventional methods of building residential houses, which commonly arises a number of risky and unlawful problems.

Due to incessant rise in population, especially in urban areas of the world, the number of slum dwellers is rising. One billion people worldwide live in slums and the figure is projected to grow to 2 billion by 2030 – An excerpt from Wikipedia; statistics forecasted by United Nations.

But, there’s good news. A project is under cooks that is focused at eradicating all the negative outcomes of constructing houses – the project is called CRAFT – Centre for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies. It is aimed at scaling the 3D-printing method to a level of automatically building a much stronger, completely habitable house within 20 hours and at the cheapest costs of production. And guess what, apart from it being an automated process, it’s also environmental friendly and capable of building exotic structures at no additional costs of production!

Printing precise exoskeletons to overcome certain physical disabilities

For years, the concept of a wearable exoskeleton for humans has been associated with cyborg-like suits that amplify human strength, typically intended for military purposes. They’ll take time to be perfected. But now, wearable exoskeletons are gradually working with smarter prosthetics for certain disabilities in people. The exoskeletons have been usually intended for adults and conforming to their physical size. One exceptional case of a 2 year old disabled child invited the need for an alternative way to build an exoskeleton for children.

This is very indicative that we’ll see more developments in coming years in the field of smart prosthetic. The video briefly explains how a child suffering from a permanent disability called arthrogryposis, was only able to use an exoskeleton because of 3D-printing technology.

3D-printed blood vessels are now a reality

Yes, you read it right. It is now possible to generate/ build functioning blood vessels. A news report talks about a new process called Dynamic Optical Projection Stereo-lithography, or DOPsL, that promises printing of blood vessels in mere seconds. Read more about 3D-printed blood vessels using DOPsL at Neatorama. This being done, we could soon print all parts of a human body. However and whenever it happens, growing human limbs and organs would be outstanding. While 3D-printed human kidneys and potentially other organs are under development, they could take some time to materialise as an available solution.

The video explains and demonstrates the 3D-printing process of blood vessels with sugar – A technique that was much in news before DOPsL.

LG Optimus 4X HD Launches In India – First Look

July 27, 2012 by Raj Agrawal 1 Comment

LG isn’t a newcomer when it comes to high end smartphones. They’ve been in the mobile space for a long time, but have never quite been able to penetrate the market as effectively as some of their peers. They were one of the first companies to release handsets with dual core processors, and although the same cannot be said for the quad core sector, they’re here, and they looking to create a stir. With phones such as the One X, and the Galaxy S3, one may say that the quad core scenario has already peaked in terms of popularity. Even so, there is always room for improvement, and the LG Optimus 4X HD seeks to prove as a worthy adversary to the aforementioned heavy hitters and make a name for itself.

At first glance, the Optimus 4X HD looks like a larger version of the much acclaimed Galaxy S2. The edges aren’t rounded, well they are, but they’re still square edges only slightly rounded at the very tip, and the phone is ultra light, exactly the reasons why we loved the S2. Hardware wise, it’s no slouch. The 4.1 core Tegra 3 processor is speedy and keeps response time to a minimum. It comes packed with 1 GB of RAM, 16 GB storage, an 8 mega pixel snapper, and almost all the features you’d expect from a high end smartphone. The screen size is 4.7 inches, on par with the One X and the Galaxy S3, and for such a huge phone, it is surprisingly light. The screen looks gorgeous, but the glare is apparent while viewing the screen under direct sunlight.

But that’s not all the phone has to offer. Quick memo offers the users the ability to quickly edit their photos and videos. Also possible is video zooming with the ability to pan across different sections of the zoomed video without much loss in quality. Using the newly implemented Icon Customizer, you can now have custom icons for all of your apps. Also added is the ability to share files via other devices with the use of NFC. You can also quickly change the settings of the phone with the use of the awesome NFC tag, plus the system. The phone will come packed with three such tags and each can be rewritten to accommodate several settings that the user wishes to achieve. The settings will then change everytime the user simply taps the tag. Also added is the ability to remotely control your phone via your computer using a DLNA specific service called Smartshare.

The 4X HD also sports some India specific features, at the center of which stands LG mobile TV, a television media service which will stream a select group of channels straight to the phone. The service is free for the first 3 months, and will be chargeable after that. There is no online media library on the phone at the moment, but it is in the works and might hit the phone late next year.

The LG Optimus 4X HD is priced at Rs. 34,990

Overall the phone feels like a good edition to the high end paradigm, and although it won’t be giving Samsung of HTC nightmares, it is still looking like a very nice alternative to the other phones in a saturated market. Our little hands on with the phone left us cautiously impressed, but i’m definitely looking forward to seeing more of the phone, to better understand whether it can actually stand the test of time, or fall like countless others. The fact that it even made me contemplate asking that question, is an achievement in todays world, where no two products are very dissimilar or genuine.