Back in 1994, EA and a couple other game developing companies decided to make a game drawing from the insane popularity of the basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, commonly known as Shaq. That’s how Shaq-Fu was born, and to be honest, it was a complete flop. Called the worst game ever. By the makers of the game itself. There is even a website out there called Shaqfu.com which is dedicated to collecting and destorying all copies of the original Shaq-Fu and stopping the production of the new one.
That’s right. Shaq-Fu is back. After 20 years since EA’s disastrous release of the game, Big Deez Production decided to team up with Shaq to bring it back. Supposedly, they had gone through many other Shaq themed games, such as Shaqman, O’Neal Of Fortune and Shaq To The Future, but ended up picking Shaq-Fu. This may seem like a bad (or at least misguided) choice, but Shaq and Big Deez seem set on recreating a better game and clearing Shaq’s name in the gaming community. On of their slogans is ” This time we won’t FU it up.”, poking fun at their previous failure.
Shaq-Fu is basically a fighter/beat-em-up type game. It is Shaq against some evil looking enemies, with your health bar at the top right and the enemy’s in the top right. With modern technology (such as 3D characters and better visual effects), if they do it right, the game could actually be good. So far, what they have put out looks cool. I mean look at this. Shaq looks like the Hulk. No wonder he’s funding this. Who, with the money, wouldn’t fund a game about themselves.
Since Shaq is incredibly wealthy, he could easily pay for this game all by himself, with extra money to spare for his custom size 23 shoes, but they want to bring it to the public and show potential investors that they have the public interest. So Big Deez put it on Indiegogo, and I have to admit, they have some pretty sweet “perks”. For instance, for only $150, a motion capture artist will make a custom move based off of a video of yourself performing you move, or you can make a voice over for one of the characters. For 400, Shaq-Fu artists will create you likeness into a Shaq-Fu style character. Some of the rewards are ridiculous, though, like the $35,000 perk where Shaq will DJ your party. And someone payed for it.
The whole game is a big maybe. After the flop of the original game, it might be hard to convince people that this game is much better than it’s predecessor. The goal of Big Deez is “to build a game that would kick ass even without Shaq.” This wouldn’t really work, unless they got another celebrity to fund it, but well just have to wait until the release to see what they do and the quality of the game they create.
With all the recent talk about Google Glass, and the releasing of Galaxy Gear and Pebble, it was inevitable that someone would eventually say “What if we put all the useful things from your phone on a ring to!” Sure, a ring is something small and not noticeable, but really, taking out your phone doesn’t take that long. Still, it’s not like it wouldn’t be helpful. So now that everyone is putting technology on every wearable item there is, the creators of Smarty Ring jumped right ahead and made a, you guessed it, smart ring.
Ok, so maybe watches, especially smart watches, are not for everyone. The Smarty Ring is a good alternative, unless of course you don’t like rings either. Then you would go for the more expensive Google Glass, but for the sake of this article, lets just say you do. The Smarty Ring, based off of their Indiegogo campaign and conceptual designs, is a stainless steel ring, with a curved screen on one side and some media (play, pause, ect.) controls on the side. It’s very sleek, and a cool ring by itself even if it just showed the time, but lets see what how useful it is with the other functions added in to.
The Conceptual Smarty Rings
Smarty Ring can handle anything a normal smart accessory would. Of course, it can show the time, but it also has a stopwatch (or stopring), a timer and an alarm. It notifies you when you have a email, text, call (which you can pick up on your phone as usual), or updates from Twitter, Facebook, Skype and Google Hangouts. Smarty Ring claims that it could reduce the times you check your phone a day by 60%, but when it notifies you that you have a call or a text, you just take out your phone and answer. They say that it stops you from digging around to find your phone just to have no notifications, and I admit, that has happened, but maybe 60% is a bit much.
The Conceptual Smarty Ring Charger
And that’s pretty much it. You can control music and other media on your phone through the Bluetooth controls, but if you take away the phone it’s connected to it’s just a fancy watch ring. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be helpful, but unless you spend every second of your free time checking Facebook or Twitter, the Smarty Ring isn’t really necessary. Though it pretty cool.
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