Items from the Mail Bag – Prizes, Discounts, and Volvo

Time for a return to this irregular feature where I pull items from the blog’s email in box and display them for all to see.

I haven’t done this for a bit because most of the blog email has been music industry press releases or people asking me to please review their iOS or Android app.  However, aside from the Pet Shop Boys (and I am sorry for you guys if it has come to sending press releases to the likes of me) I haven’t a clue about any of the musical acts.  And as for iOS and Android apps… well… most of them were unimaginative knock-offs of other games from indie devs and I have a general editorial policy of not posting about such things if I do not have anything nice to say.  Big companies or big names can survive some mocking.

Still, a few items worthy of mention or mockery have shown up, so on to that.

Raptr Gives Me Some Hats in Rift

Raptr is the game time tracking tool I have been using since late 2010. (See me here)  It is a competitor to Xfire and was, in fact, created by some of the same team that originally created Xfire.  My main complaint about Raptr is that they do not display game time stats the way Xfire does, so you cannot do things like Nosy Gamer’s weekly Digital Dozen.

Instead they are trying to be more of a social network.  They want you to interact with your friends there.  They want you to do reviews there.  They want you to blog there.  And the really want you to hook Raptr into your other social networks.

I have done the latter primarily because I have a special crap Twitter feed you should not follow and a Facebook profile you probably shouldn’t be friends with. (Because look what happens.)

And, they offer up special deals, which usually amount to “please come play this game, we’ll give it to you at a steep discount and/or free.”  But once in a while, something I actually want comes up, like hats.  I just got this in email last night.

This was part of a push to get you to connect Raptr to Facebook I guess, but it actually came with a prize I might wear in Rift.  While I can run around with awkward mis-matched armor, I will go out of my way for a good hat.  So I get this next week when Storm Legion goes live.

A hat and goggles!

I am also eligible for a helm that looks like it was inspired by Half-Life 2.

Good for the aspiring cyclops

I think I will just stick with the hat and goggles.  I wonder if they can be dyed?

Meanwhile, if Trion is going to work with Raptr, I wish they would get Rift achievements hooked up into Raptr the way Steam and Blizzard have.  Ah well.

World of Tanks and Veterans Day

Wargaming.net is doing a special for Veterans Day and Remembrance Day.  They have a charity offer for veterans organizations, plus the usual buffs; 5x bonus experience for your first win of the day in each of your tanks and they are giving credit bonuses to a few tanks I do not own. (B1, T-34, M4 Sherman and PzKpfw VI Tiger)  Details here.

And they are giving away 24 hours of Premium service, which enhances your experience and credits earned even further.  The code for this is VETERANSDAY and you can read about how to redeem the code here.

LOTRO – Spend More, Save More

Lord of the Rings Online also has a deal going this weekend which basically amounts to the false economic proposition of “the more you spend, the more you save!”

The offer

If you were planning to buy something expensive, this might be a boon.  However, I cannot see myself spending 3,000 Turbine Points just to save 30% off of something.

EQInterface Prize

The team at EQInterface, which hosts UI mods for EverQuest, along with sibling sites for EverQuest II, Vanguard, and World of Warcraft, was celebrating their 10th anniversary back in… August I think.  They had a trivia contest about the site and I apparently was a winner.  I got a notification about it back in September.  However I still haven’t gotten anything because they are still trying to get in touch with all of the winners.

So I continue to wait, but I still endorse their site for UI stuff.

Crash with Volvo

I keep getting notices from Volvo about their new iOS/Android game called Volvo Transporters.  I suspected it would mostly be an ad for Volvo, but I grabbed it because it had the virtue of being free.

Volvo truck off the rails

And, yes, it is something of an ad for Volvo.  It throws little Volvo factoids at you like how much food in the EU is hauled by Volvo trucks or that if you lined up all the Volvo buses ever made you would be well on your way to simulating the 405 freeway at 5pm on a Friday.

Basically, you drive a truck… a Volvo truck no doubt, but it is too small to see the logo… and have to drive over power ups to transform your truck into the vehicle appropriate for the hazards in the area.  So for fires, you need a fire trucks, garbage requires a garbage truck, piles of muck require a front loader and so on.

Front loader in action

I will say I was happy the game was not one of those tilt-to-steer apps.  I find that the iPad has too much mass to steer smoothly or accurately and so the big reason I think that Sonic the Hedgehog racing game is horrible is because I cannot steer very well.  That and it is such a complete rip-off of Mario Kart games I am surprised that Sonic doesn’t feature a mustache and a little red hat.

That said, it requires a finger swiping action to steer which, combined with the odd “two-thirds off the rear quarter and fluctuating” viewing angle, wasn’t exactly winning me over.  But then again I have big hands with all the agility of a cinder block, so maybe I had best stick with board games like Ticket to Ride on the iPad.  You can see a video of somebody who can actually play the game here.

All in all though, I came out of the game having crashed often and with no additional desire to buy a Volvo.

Which is to say, I would still like an 1800ES.  But that desire goes back a long ways.