There are quite a few Flash games in which the main objective is serving the customers by listening to their orders. The player then has to use all of the ingredients in the right order in order to serve the dish or whatever the customer wants to buy and he will earn money this way. Jacksmith follows that simple gaming concept but it also takes it to a whole new level, because this time will not have to prepare burgers or hot dogs - he will work as a blacksmith and he will have to forge weapons for the customers that need to go to war.
In the beginning, he will only be able to create long swords, the most basic weapon. Along with this, he can only use copper in order to create these swords. They are not the best, definitely, but they will do their job at slashing a couple of enemies. The blacksmith will receive some money for these swords and he will be able to either make more or to find new weapon schematics in order to do something new and different that will be more valuable on the market.
There will also be more metals available for forging - there are five different metals in total, starting with copper, then going on with bronze, iron, steel and gold. However, some people will want special weapons that are not created for battle. These weapons are made out of crystal and they require a lot of work in order to get them done, but they are also the most valuable weapons that a player can sell to the customers. After a batch of customers receives their swords, they and the blacksmith will engage in a short battle and the player will have to give his aid in order for them to win.
Jacksmith Mobile
Correction Appended
Ben Popken is an unlikely consumer crusader.
He wanted to be a party promoter, running underground music events. In the meantime, he worked at what he described as a shady online firm. To make a little more money — emphasis on little — he started a Web site with a scatological name that critiqued advertising campaigns.
From that perch in early 2006, Mr. Popken, 24, mocked the editor of the Consumerist (www.consumerist.com), a consumer affairs blog, who promptly brought him aboard.
He now turns his vituperation on companies that treat consumers unfairly. Mr. Popken’s initial impulses were to go for the sensational report like the disgruntled auto buyer who torched the car dealership and committed suicide. But in recent months, he has found himself luring far more traffic to the site with postings on how to get out of cellphone contracts and how to reach a company’s “executive customer service,” which Mr. Ante tomic nba. Popken says is the “ninja attack squad that have superhuman powers to resolve a problem immediately.”
He said, “We were a little more tabloidy when I started.”
Consumer-help features have long been staples of newspapers and TV. The Internet, however, has allowed a variation of consumer advocacy to emerge, one that taps into what Mr. Popken calls the “distributed processing power of the readership.”
By that he means that not only do the readers supply a lot of the tips about corporate shenanigans, but the links the blogs have established with other blogs creates an instant network of readers who quickly hold the company up to ridicule.
Continue reading the main storyConsumers are finding these sites useful to pressure companies into fixing a problem in a way that calls made to the customer service center and letters to the chief executive can never accomplish.
Information is quickly exchanged, vetted and updated. Indeed, the Web consumerism rides another trend of the general public’s finding ways to tweak products or services to get something free or to make life just a little more efficient.
So if some of the advice on Gina Trapani’s Lifehacker.com site seems like “Hints From Heloise” for a digital age, well, that is exactly what she intends. The Lifehacker site has explained to its readers how to download and save MP3s off music streaming sites or how to use Pledge furniture polish to fix scratches on a DVD.
Ms. Trapani was a programmer for Gawker Media, the collection of blogs that also includes the Consumerist; Gawker, a celebrity gossip site; Wonkette, its counterpart in Washington; and the equally high-minded Fleshbot, a blog about pornography. Nick Denton, Gawker Media’s owner, began talking to her over lunch one day about lifehacking, a term coined by Danny O’Brien, a British technology consultant, for the shortcuts people take to make their life easier. Mr. Denton had registered the name lifehacker.com and he wanted her to write a blog about hacks.
The attitude of this blog would be different from the insulting tone that Mr. Denton’s blogs are famous for. “I wanted it to be helpful, to make readers just a little more efficient,” said Ms. Trapani, who worked at Brooklyn College’s computer help desk for four years while she earned a degree in English. (She also has a master’s degree in computer information science.) “We don’t court controversy,” she said.
Many of the entries are about how to tweak the Firefox browser or the Google search box to do more than they were originally intended to do. She is a particular fan of Firefox because of all the plug-ins that have been created to individualize it and make it more useful. “It was built to be bent,” she said.
More than 70 percent of Lifehacker’s readers use the Firefox browser rather than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, compared with about 10 percent for the general population.
“We live this stuff,” said Ms. Trapani, who says she is still amazed that she can remotely control other computers from her desktop with one of the hacks she wrote about.
So apparently are a lot of other people. The site, which first appeared in January 2005, got 10 million page views last month, one of the biggest audiences in Mr. Denton’s blog empire. It now exceeds Gawker.com with its 9 million page views, though Lifehacker falls far short of the 30 million page views recorded by the tech gadget site Gizmodo.com in January when it covered the new gadgets displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Frugality is a frequent theme among these sites, like GetRichSlowly.org. John David Roth, a 37-year-old office manager at a Portland, Ore., box manufacturer, was an avid reader of financial self-help books when he started a blog to summarize them. “You can find a lot of information on how to get rich quick,” he said, “but I know what it is like to be broke. For years, I struggled with debt.”
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His site, which receives about 300,000 page views a month and makes him about $1,500 a month from advertising, reminds people of the simple things in life. For instance, he tells them to borrow books from the library, instead of buying new ones. Minecraft slender the arrival maps.
He just started another site, MoneyHacks.org, with more common-sense advice as well as links to other sites that save a person money, like priceprotectr.com, which tracks price drops.
The Consumerist has its share of helpful hints. It explained how to get decals off of car bumpers — a few squirts of WD-40 silicone lubricant — and how to wash a cat. But the key to its success is that companies are now reading the consumer complaints.
When a reader related how Sprint would not let him cancel the phone contract of his recently deceased brother, a Sprint public relations representative asked Mr. Popken to put her in touch with the reader so the problem could be quickly resolved.
Dell responds with polite notes to customers complaining about problems with their PCs.
Mr. Popken can see from software monitoring traffic to the site that employees of Wal-Mart Stores regularly watch his site, though the company seems to have ignored his crusade to stop the retailer from selling T-shirts decorated with a death head symbol used by the Nazis. “We have to move on,” he said. “We have other things to do.”
There are scores of other useful consumer sites. Here are some that have proved popular and that also link to a broader network of similar sites:
43Folders: This is the place for a Mac-centric view of technology with a smattering of life hacks. Netsupport manager 11 torrent download. The author is especially taken with the productivity tips of David Allen, who wrote the book, “Getting Things Done.”
Blueprint for Financial Prosperity: (www.bargaineering.com/articles/)The site gives advice on a broad range of topics like car leases and deals on compact fluorescent light bulbs. It takes a keen interest in credit card offers.
FiveCentNickel.com: Another blog obsessed with credit cards, its other attraction is the frequent encouragement to live frugally. But cutting one’s own hair may be going too far.
AllFinancialMatters.com: Investing gets more coverage here than on many of the consumer sites, with tax planning running a close second. It actually found humor in Internal Revenue Service instructions.
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IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com: A recent Stanford University graduate tells college students how to start saving money, not by hectoring them to be frugal, but by changing their mind-set.
FestivalofFrugality.com: The weekly compilation of money-saving advice from various blogs gives a wide range of tips on frugal living. Like the sites in this network, the postings vary in quality and in usefulness from the ridiculous, like a $12 device to squeeze out the last bit of toothpaste, to the dangerous, like credit card arbitrage.
Make: Blog (makezine.com/blog/) : This Web auxiliary to the printed Make magazine captures the ethos of the tech-oriented do-it-yourselfer movement. Amid the crazy projects like how to make a lamp from scanner parts or a desk from 35,000 Lego bricks, there are handy tips like how to implant a $2 chip under your skin — O.K., the whole site is pretty geeky.
THE FOLLOW-UP: Fidelity, Vanguard and State Farm offer their customers the opportunity to file their tax return free using TurboTax software online. Intuit says the online version is the same as the software in a box.
Correction: February 7, 2007An article in Business Day on Saturday about the availability of consumer-help features on the Internet misstated the address of one such site. It is GetRichSlowly.org, not GetRichSlowly.com.