A new Hello Kitty Laptop? It looks less blingy than the other one and has a printed coating look with various Hello Kitty printed all over it, cute!

What a day! Even if it won’t last for that long…China leads not only in Gold medals by a stretch, but also it leads the total tally of medals ahead of the United States!

If there is ever a chance that China could beat the US as the country with the most decorated athletes, this is the one on home ground! Unfortunately for China, the US in their last olympics went home with 102 medals, 36 of them gold vs. China with 32 gold but only 63 overall medals. The surprise is that this year Russia looks like it is no longer as a Federation, so its medal count evaporated from pervious years.

The team at Wowinsider did a really cool April Fools joke, I had no idea how nuts it all was, many posts of turning a World of Warcraft site into a Hello Kitty Online, so cool (and cute of them too!!)

But what I don’t get is why they stopped it, afterall, users voted in favor of keeping it! WOW! The last comment made in the Wowinsider forums say it all

 Well I loved the whole exercise, and I loved the fact that it wasn’t a half-hearted one or two articles, but dozens of them. Bravo! Awesome April Fool’s. It’s nice to see some creativity and imagination, after several years of WoW those qualities were starting to wear a bit thin.

To the aggressive complainers out there: how much WoW news could there possibly be, and how much can any reasonable person honestly consume in a sitting? Enjoy the April Fool’s and be thankful for the variety and zaniness!

Fighting for the Kitty World Order, funny! I wonder who won, the fight is apparently already over.

Ronald McDonald is teaching us how to play Dance Dance Revolution, a bit weird ?? It’s funny to watch.

Both GigaOM and Sciam have been reporting about the growth of the new Barbiegirls flash MMO game having a reported 3 million members growing at 50,000 new members a day but have they checked their facts? To quote Sciam:

Last night at the Digital Life preview a Mattel rep–who, just to make the conversation extra surreal, actually looked sort of like Barbie–told me that in the first 60 days of its existence, the new online virtual world Barbie Girls has signed up three million members, and they’re adding new ones at the rate of 50,000 a day.

Look at graphs by compete and alexa you can certainly see that there has been a spike in growth, but compare it to Neopets, Disney or even lesser web properties and it is left in the dust and I wonder where the 50,000 new member figures comes from, and how many are actually truly active? Just looking at the graphs demonstrates a pop in traffic since launch, but is nothing close to 3 million members. Or perhaps it has 3 million members but they’ve only signed up once and are gone, how many log in each day?

It’s traffic compares just about with Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post which I am sure does not have a readership equal to half of Hong Kong’s population (it’s english only).

I tried the game, I’m a fan of web games and even non-web games like Maplestory. The game is very underwhelming, and I saw at most a few hundred people online at any given time, I wonder if GigaOM and Sciam have bothered to try the game to see if it’s really that popular?

The game was incredibly underwhelming, and is a mix of habbo hotel, hompy and flash games but the only real community experience is the chat and it is enjoying the same kind of Second Life Hype because it’s supposedly focused to people like myself, young women but outside of the cute and stylish interface it has missed the mark, it’s not really fun, it’s mundane and gets dull easily because I cannot really play but above all it’s massively censored!

For a game that is supposed to be a kind of social chat, I cannot write anything without being censored! I was not writing swear words or anything like that, I would write “hello come visit my blog” and it would censor blog! It even censors common words like “but” (presumably because its close to butt) but I couldn’t even write confused! I tried c o n f u s e d and kon-f-us-ed and it wouldn’t work. Every brand was censored too, be it pepsi, sanrio, hello kitty, disney (kitty was censored too but not hello). In the end, I gave up in frustration as I could no longer bear how Barbieville was trying to reach me how to write. The image below is just an example, I promise I did not type anything rude!

A game that censors this heavily can never be a success in my view, we play to escape, we play to have fun, we play to enjoy a kind of freedom not experienced elsewhere. This game is 100 times more censored than my country (China) and for you western folks, that’s saying a lot.

Barbiegirls is going through a silot of hype and of course it’s still a Beta but if the Beta is considered almost complete I would be surprised that the community will continue to hang around for long, just chatting online in a slow flash interface isn’t going to cut it, we are not simpletons, we need more sophistication than this!

ps: Was this game designed by women for women or from men for women?

pps: There were a lot of people trolling around claiming to be “dudes”.

I really like this rendition, it’s nicer than the first Rikku of Final Fantasy in my opinion…softer too and more real. I wonder if they are making a new version soon….

At her best! Like totally awesome….

 People Daily’s article discusses China’s new policy on online gameplay to stop the online game addiction. The system is as quoted:

The government yesterday issued a regulation, which takes effect on April 15, demanding online operators set up a “game fatigue system” that encourages players under 18 to play less than 3 hours a day.

It’s interesting because it creates an in-game incentive for people to play less, but MMORPG’s are just not the kind of game system that will work, it means that 17 year olds are always at a disadvantage to 19 year olds or up. I also think that it will cause a massive case of fraud reporting on real ages to circumvent this.

A long  but interesting post on the taking down of a fan based video which also happens to be one that I like a lot as well.

Produced by Adarahs, Ultimate Utopia is a fan parody of Final Fantasy (and I’m a BIG FAN of Final Fantasy) if you didn’t already know that.

The main point made is that this is not about copyright at all, otherwise why take down a Final Fantasy based parody, not related to Viacom at all but instead that it is “old media” trying to hurt the whole user generated content business and using copyright as a kind of excuse.

The Video is available still on a variety of places, including here and here.

Viacom should try that in China…I don’t think they will get very far!