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Guns of Icarus is one the best and the most thrilling multiplayer games that delivers real co-op and the most aggravating experiences.

On its deck, most have a role to play. Some will have to man its guns, steer the hulking bird and take necessary action when objects catch fire and alas go to hell. When individuals slack off or work haphazardly, the lives are over. In spite of few glitches and frustrations owing to inconsistent crewmates, there is still a level of satisfaction that occurs from handling an intense battle with the ships held together by chicken wire and duct tape.


Different Duties performed by Gunners, captains and engineers

From scrappy vessels to the flying sluggish fortress, every airship you choose features a distinct visual design, maneuvering and the deck layout. Duties performed here are categorized into three classes that will help in defining your role better. Captains have to indulge in maneuvering the ship while in battle so that gunners get great shots right from their position, making the orders as required, scouting the enemies to mark and flying the airship. But if you are a crappy captain you will earn yourself the ire with the possibility of spurring the mutiny. All the gunners in the scene are specialized in hot leads, pumping rockets and jetting fire into enemies. The Engineers here use handy tools like hammers, fire extinguishers and wrenches to rebuild and fix stuff that is destroyed when you are bombarded.

While duties of engineers, gunners and captains are entertaining stuff in their own rights, it’s all focused but very limited in scope. For instance, it hardly takes any time to get through different properties of each class, after a series of stages and you will realize and wish that you had more content to deal with.

The limitations 

Right now, raking up in the class does not unlock anything or even have a major impact on the character. With different objectives around every stage, most multiplayer games are the same and the tiny choice of map locations are very well designed and are distinct visually.

Guns of Icarus does a great job in shooting the excitement of airship crewing in the motoring combat above the clouds. The rough edges demonstrate work in progress which is much more than visual bugs, finished games and the glitches around. The awkward actions are jarring, considering how polished and beautiful the game feels and looks.

Not considering proper tutorials to demonstrate how the systems and gameplay functions getting acclimated to different roles is slightly puzzling from the moment it starts However, a positive sign is that developer Muse is working full-fledged to improvise the game and increase content to make the game a better one, give greater experience and also get involved better. That is more fun but one would think that there is a long distance to be covered before the game reaches its final potential.


The final verdict

This game has a lot of attractive elements that few other rivals can match. It feels unique, very refreshing and gives a co-op experience. But in spite of the impressive execution and visual beauty, the game drags a bit and tests your patience.

The Apple iPad has always been a special gadget with its HD graphics. It is indeed a perfect tablet for gaming geeks who love playing from any place like a bus, train on the move or even while at home. The gaming experience for Apple lovers has just got better with the new Kolos Gaming Wheel designed for racing fanatics.

A befitting design for iPad series

Custom-made for the 9.7-inch Apple iPad, the Kolos steering wheel is designed to fit Apple iPad 2 (2nd Generation) and Apple The new iPad (3rd Generation). It also fits the Apple iPad with Retina Display (4th Generation). Available in black and grey colours, the 12.3-inch diameter wheel is made out of a light weight, high quality, metallised plastic.

The clamp of the wheel is constructed out of Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) which is lightweight and has great strength. The base of the wheel system is curved and symmetric to the wheel itself. To enhance the stability of the wheel, there are three rubberised large circles for support. It has an anti-perspiration coating to ensure that your hands do not slip off in all the adrenaline-pumped action.

A gripping hold at the start line

It is quite easy to fit the wheel with the iPad. You have to place your iPad in the space provided and pull the clip down on it to lock it in place. The gadget will be locked in tight grips and will remain stable and steady throughout the game. It is designed to accommodate a double or single-handed action, so you can try to swerve on a free virtual driveway packed with action.


Transform your desk into a driving seat

The wheel has a clamping system that can be used to attach to desks. The clamp can be attached to surfaces that are as thick as two inches. You can take it, slip in through your study desk and turn the screw at the bottom to tighten the grip.



Gaming taken to a new dimension

Since the wheel holds the iPad, you can play all one-finger touch games without having to hold it. Moreover, the wheel is detachable. So, you can have fun with air gaming anywhere with the easy and compact design. The best part is the Kolos wheel is not just for racing, it can be used for playing any touch game or motion sensor air game on the iPad.


iOS games for KOLOS play

A few examples of racing games enhanced by KOLOS are Asphalt 7: Heat, Highway Rider, Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, Riptide GP, Carmageddon, etc. Apart from racing, action and air games like Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy, MetalStorm: Wingman, Boost 2, etc., can also be played on the iPad attached to the KOLOS wheel. One-finger touch games like Fruit Ninja HD, Angry Birds Space HD, Facebook games, etc., can be played hands-free using KOLOS wheel base system to hold the iPad.

Since both tennis and table tennis are in the Olympics, perhaps you're wondering: if there's soccer, why not "table soccer?" Of course, we know table soccer by another name; and while foosball may not be an Olympic sport, we still cheered Nathan Johns and Jan Backes—two members of our Search Quality team—as they brought home the foosball silver medal at the search engine foosball smackdown at SES San Jose.

"Smackdown" doesn't quite equate to "Olympics," but check out the intensity—you could hear a pin drop!


The gold medal (cup) went to the search engine down the road. :)


Just to be sure they weren't ringers, I quizzed Daniel and Jake, "How can you prevent a file from being crawled?" They correctly answered, "robots.txt."

Gold cup well deserved.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Want to know what's new on the Webmaster Central YouTube channel? Here's what we've uploaded in the past week:

Maile Ohye gave a webmaster-focused presentation about Product Search.

Matt Cutts answered a new question each day from the Grab Bag:

• Do dates in URLs determine freshness?
• What impact does "page bloat" have on Google rankings?
• What types of directories are seen as sources of paid links?
• Should I include my logo text using the 'alt' attribute or CSS?
• What's the preferred way to check for links to my site?

To get you started on watching this latest batch of videos, here's Matt's answer about directories and paid links:



Feel free to leave comments letting us know how you liked the videos, and if you have any specific questions, ask the experts in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

Chatting with webmasters often reveals widespread beliefs that might have been accurate in the past, but are not necessarily up-to-date any more. This was the case when we recently talked to a couple of friends about the structure of a URL. One friend was concerned about using dynamic URLs, since (as she told us) "search engines can't cope with these." Another friend thought that dynamic URLs weren't a problem at all for search engines and that these issues were a thing of the past. One even admitted that he never understood the fuss about dynamic URLs in comparison to static URLs. For us, that was the moment we decided to read up on the topic of dynamic and static URLs. First, let's clarify what we're talking about:

What is a static URL?
A static URL is one that does not change, so it typically does not contain any url parameters. It can look like this: http://www.example.com/archive/january.htm. You can search for static URLs on Google by typing filetype:htm in the search field. Updating these kinds of pages can be time consuming, especially if the amount of information grows quickly, since every single page has to be hard-coded. This is why webmasters who deal with large, frequently updated sites like online shops, forum communities, blogs or content management systems may use dynamic URLs.

What is a dynamic URL?
If the content of a site is stored in a database and pulled for display on pages on demand, dynamic URLs maybe used. In that case the site serves basically as a template for the content. Usually, a dynamic URL would look something like this: http://code.google.com/p/google-checkout-php-sample-code/issues/detail?id=31. You can spot dynamic URLs by looking for characters like: ? = &. Dynamic URLs have the disadvantage that different URLs can have the same content. So different users might link to URLs with different parameters which have the same content. That's one reason why webmasters sometimes want to rewrite their URLs to static ones.

Should I try to make my dynamic URLs look static?
Following are some key points you should keep in mind while dealing with dynamic URLs:

1. It's quite hard to correctly create and maintain rewrites that change dynamic URLs to static-looking URLs.
2. It's much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters.
3. If you want to rewrite your URL, please remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL.
4. If you want to serve a static URL instead of a dynamic URL you should create a static equivalent of your content.

Which can Googlebot read better, static or dynamic URLs?
We've come across many webmasters who, like our friend, believed that static or static-looking URLs were an advantage for indexing and ranking their sites. This is based on the presumption that search engines have issues with crawling and analyzing URLs that include session IDs or source trackers. However, as a matter of fact, we at Google have made some progress in both areas. While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.

Let's now look at some of the widespread beliefs concerning dynamic URLs and correct some of the assumptions which spook webmasters. :)

Myth: "Dynamic URLs cannot be crawled."
Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. It's always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.

Myth: "Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters."
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic). You may be able to remove some parameters which aren't essential for Googlebot and offer your users a nice looking dynamic URL. If you are not able to figure out which parameters to remove, we'd advise you to serve us all the parameters in your dynamic URL and our system will figure out which ones do not matter. Hiding your parameters keeps us from analyzing your URLs properly and we won't be able to recognize the parameters as such, which could cause a loss of valuable information.

Following are some questions we thought you might have at this point.

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static. One example would be to generate files for all the paths and make them accessible somewhere on your site. However, if you're using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good. Feel free to serve us your standard dynamic URL and we will automatically find the parameters which are unnecessary.

Can you give me an example?
If you have a dynamic URL which is in the standard format like foo?key1=value&key2=value2 we recommend that you leave the url unchanged, and Google will determine which parameters can be removed; or you could remove uncessary parameters for your users. Be careful that you only remove parameters which do not matter. Here's an example of a URL with a couple of parameters:

www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo?language=en&answer=3&sid=98971298178906&query=URL

• language=en - indicates the language of the article
• answer=3 - the article has the number 3
• sid=8971298178906 - the session ID number is 8971298178906
• query=URL - the query with which the article was found is [URL]

Not all of these parameters offer additional information. So rewriting the URL to www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo?language=en&answer=3 probably would not cause any problems as all irrelevant parameters are removed.

The following are some examples of static-looking URLs which may cause more crawling problems than serving the dynamic URL without rewriting:

• www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/3/98971298178906/URL
• www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/language=en/answer=3/
  sid=98971298178906/query=URL
• www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/language/en/answer/3/
  sid/98971298178906/query/URL
• www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en,3,98971298178906,URL

Rewriting your dynamic URL to one of these examples could cause us to crawl the same piece of content needlessly via many different URLs with varying values for session IDs (sid) and query. These forms make it difficult for us to understand that URL and 98971298178906 have nothing to do with the actual content which is returned via this URL. However, here's an example of a rewrite where all irrelevant parameters have been removed:

• www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/3

Although we are able to process this URL correctly, we would still discourage you from using this rewrite as it is hard to maintain and needs to be updated as soon as a new parameter is added to the original dynamic URL. Failure to do this would again result in a static looking URL which is hiding parameters. So the best solution is often to keep your dynamic URLs as they are. Or, if you remove irrelevant parameters, bear in mind to leave the URL dynamic as the above example of a rewritten URL shows:

• www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo?language=en&answer=3

We hope this article is helpful to you and our friends to shed some light on the various assumptions around dynamic URLs. Please feel free to join our discussion group if you have any further questions.

Written by Juliane Stiller and Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality Team

Using iTunes?

Inability to input text in native language has been a problem for many non-latin script based languages. This may happen for many reasons. Sometimes, users do not have the keyboard layout for their native language installed in the system they happen to be using (for example, a tourist using an internet cafe in a foreign country). Sometimes, such a keyboard layout is not well developed or not widely available. It is worse for web developers because there is no way they can ensure that their users have access to this very basic input technology.

To address this issue, today, we added Virtual Keyboard API into the Google AJAX Language API. With this API, developers can help their users to input text, regardless if they have the native keyboard layout installed in their Operating Systems or not.

Another advantage is the ability to provide a better user experience for multilingual web sites. For example, on a Russian/Thai bilingual dictionary editing web site, users would type in Russian in the header, and then see a Thai description. With the Virtual keyboard API, developers can load a Russian virtual keyboard layout and bind with all the Russian text fields, and load a Thai virtual keyboard layout and bind them to Thai fields. The Virtual Keyboard API then will automatically swap to the corresponding keyboard layout depending upon the user action.

Sometimes users may not be familiar with the key assignment of their keyboard layout. Virtual keyboard also shows the key assignment inside the page to allow users to input text by either pressing key or by clicking mouse on the virtual onscreen layout.

With this initial release, we are launching 5 language layouts. These are: Arabic, Hindi, Polish, Russian, and Thai.

We plan to roll out support for more keyboard layouts in the future. You can find more details by reading through the class reference and trying the Code Playground samples. Feedback is always welcome in our support forum and IRC channel.

Underscores vs. Dashes
Webmasters asked about the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in URLs. In general, we break words on punctuation, so if you use punctuation as separators, you're providing Google a useful signal for parsing your URLs. Currently, dashes in URLs are consistently treated as separators while underscores are not. Keep in mind our technology is constantly improving, so this distinction between underscores and dashes may decrease over time. Even without punctuation, there's a good chance we'll be able to figure out that bigleopard.html is about a "big leopard" and not a "bigle opard." While using separators is a good practice, it's likely unnecessary to place a high priority on changing your existing URLs just to convert underscores to dashes.

Keywords in URLs
We were also asked if it is useful to have relevant keywords in URLs. It's always a good idea to be descriptive across your site, with titles, ALT attributes, and yes, even URLs, as they can be useful signals for users and search engines. This can be especially true with image files, which otherwise may not have any text for a search engine to consider. Imagine you've taken a picture of your cat asleep on the sofa. Your digital camera will likely name it something like IMG_2937.jpg. Not exactly the most descriptive name. So unless your cat really looks like an IMG_2937, consider changing the filename to something more relevant, like adorable-kitten.jpg. And, if you have a post about your favorite cat names, it's much easier to guess that a URL ending in my-favorite-cat-names would be the relevant page, rather than a URL ending in postid=8652. For more information regarding issues with how Google understands your content, check out our new content analysis feature in Webmaster Tools, as well as our post on the URL suggestions feature of the new Google Toolbar.

Moving to a new IP address
We got a question about changing a site's IP address, and provided a few steps you can take as a webmaster to make sure things go smoothly. Here's what you can do:

1. Change the TTL (Time To Live) value of your DNS configuration to something short, like five minutes (300 seconds). This will tell web browsers to re-check the IP address for your site every five minutes.
2. Copy your content to the new hosting environment, and make sure it is live on the new IP address.
3. Change your DNS settings so your hostname points to the new IP address.
4. Check your logs to see when Googlebot starts crawling your site on the new IP address. To make sure it's really Googlebot who's visiting, you can verify Googlebot by following these instructions. You can then log into Webmaster Tools and monitor any crawl errors. Once Googlebot is happily crawling on the new IP address, you should be all set as far as Google is concerned.
   
5. To make sure everyone got the message of your move, you may want to keep an eye out for visits to your old IP address before shutting it down.
   

Proxies
A few webmasters were concerned that proxy services are being indexed with copies of their content. While it's often possible to find duplicate copies of your content in our results if you look hard enough, the original source is most likely going to be ranked higher than a proxy copy. However, if you find this not to be the case, please drop us some URLs in the Webmaster Help Group. There are many Googlers including myself who monitor this group and escalate issues appropriately.

In our previous post, we did some source code housekeeping -- just in time for the holidays. But once users have landed on your site, how can you make sure they’ll know how to get around?

As it turns out, easily accessible content on your site can make a big difference. Users tend to have a better experience when a site helps them find and understand its content. Having an accessible site not only empowers users, it also helps search engines understand what your site is really about.

Let’s explore how these features can make a site’s navigation more intuitive by looking at one of our submitted sites, Philanthropedia.

Thanks to this site’s clean navigational menu, users can find all of the site’s important pages within a few clicks. Wherever users end up on the site, they can always click on the “Home” button to return to the main page, or on any of the links in the menu to return to the site’s important subpages. Like all of the links on this site, the links in the navigational menu are text-based links, which make it easier for both search engines and users to access the site’s content. Finally, Philanthropedia has included a user-viewable site map, shown below, in case visitors are looking for a specific page not listed in the main menu.

Contributors: Aditya Goradia, Brandon Falls, Charlene Perez, Diara Dankert, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nelson Bradley