Ready to battle as giants, ninjas and pirates?  The PlayStation Network game Fat Princess finally got its first slice of downloadable content, and I do have to say it has made the game a whole lot more fun.   Fat Princess: Fat Roles is out and is a lot of fun.

I will do a quick breakdown on each new class, and what is there to love.

Also worth mentioning is the fact that each new class can not press triangle to change from level one to level two of a class.  This has been replaced with a special move that is unique to that specific class.

Review of the New Fat Princess Classes

Ninja – The ninja come packed with ninja stars, a sword and a lot of fun.  Also, as a nice little touch – when a ninja dies, he falls on his own sword.  Also, you can get sneaky by turning invisible, walk through the other team’s castle doors, and pickup the princess.

• Regular Attack: Sword
• Charged Attack: Throws Ninja Stars
• Special: Turns Invisible for a few seconds or until another action button is pushed

Pirate – Cannon balls are a flying with this new class.  With a special that launches a cannon ball attack at your opponents, the Pirate might be the most powerful of the new classes launch into Fat Roles.

• Regular Attack: Sword
• Charged Attack: Shoots handgun
• Special: Bombard the map with a cannon ball attack

Giant – I might have had the most fun playing as the giant class.  There is strangely rewarding about charging up your attack and then bulldozing through a bunch of people that are storming towards your castle.  Plus, as your special – you get to eat people on the opposing team.  How does that not scream out awesomeness?

• Regular Attack: Giant Slap
• Charged Attack: Slaps the ground taking out anything in its path
• Special: Eat Somebody on the Other Team to Gain Health

How to Play as Giants, Pirates and Ninjas in Fat Princess

To play as one of these new classes, look for the special magic hat machine inside of your base.  They spawn slowly at first, but the more machines you get upgraded – the faster the special hats will appear.

The only negatives to the updates posted yesterday that I could find thus far is it does seem you get dropped from games more often and they took away some of the unique jumps in the game.

If you haven’t yet – I would highly recommend buying Fat Princess and the Fat Roles DLC for a fun time on your PS3.

I’m happy to announce that version 2.6 of WordPress.org is now available, almost a month ahead schedule. Version 2.6 “Tyner,” named for jazz pianist McCoy Tyner, contains a number of new features that make WordPress a more powerful CMS: you can now track changes to every post and page and easily post from wherever you are on the web, plus there are dozens of incremental improvements to the features introduced in version 2.5.

Also here are some of the improvements, updates and upgrades:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

You can read more (and watch a video tour) from WordPress.org about it here:
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/

You can download WordPress 2.6 here:
http://wordpress.org/download/

Also looks like somebody has already found the easter egg in it too.

For those of you using cPanel/Fantastico to manage your install and upgrades, the upgrade for you might not come for a couple of more weeks.  Are you excited about WordPress 2.6 yet?

Well I guess it finally happened sometime last night. The nice sleek and clean interface of Yahoo! Mail became ad-tastic. As an AT&T DSL customer I was getting the “plus” E-mail pack with my Web mail from Yahoo. I have been over this story before though.

I don’t mind ads on Web sites that are more “general” – that isn’t what bugs me. I just don’t like ads in my applications – such as Web mail, feed readers, ect.

Here is some feedback from others who don’t like being in the same boat:

I am on the phone with Yahoo At&T right now and they maintain that this is a part of their world class service. They are actually telling me that over the phone! It does get better, they are trying to give me a case ID that….you guessed it….they cannot send via email! I am a mail plus customer as well, no way I am sticking around and paying for something like this. Off to Google and GMail.

I’m a paid AT&T/Yahoo Mail, and first the very fist time I’ve found it being “decorated” and “laced” with all sorts of ads. I suppose I’d just have live with them now.

The ads hit my inbox tonight. Unacceptably obtrusive and annoying. I cannot believe paying DSL customers are being treated this way. No way I’m gonna send AT&T/Yahoo more money for an ad-free “plus” account. That is part of what I’ve been paying for the past several years. Time to change my homepage to Google and set-up a G-mail account.

So looks like I have two options that I’d consider going with. Go out and find a Greasemonkey script to take ‘em out or go give my money to Google for their apps service. I’m starting to lean towards the Gmail option – just got to find the time to give Yahoo a swift kick in the rear and a wave goodbye.

Now what I am really waiting on pins and needles for right now is for us to get out of this “Vista is wonderful and great and pretty and will change your life” phase and get into the Vista sucks phase.

Back when Windows XP first came out, it didn’t take too long for people to go from saying:

“The interface is a welcome change from the colorless existence we once had…”

to

“The interface looks like a children’s toy. Where is the mature look and design I want?”

This time around though (or maybe I am not paying as much attention) it seems like the “this sucks” phase is taking a little longer to roll out into the mainstream conversation.

Here are my four reasons I am not excited about Windows Vista.

1. You Are Taking Me Out of My Element!
I don’t want to have to re-learn a whole new way of getting things done. Sure, much will be the same – but I am comfortable now and I am also not being a good enough reason to change.

2. I Like Things How They Are!
My current computer setup is customized the way I like it. I have my own visual styles going, and all my programs run as they should. Should I give that up right now?

3. I Am Afraid of the Beginners Bugs!
It is going to take a while for Microsoft to get all the beginners’ bugs worked out of the system. After it has been beat on by a larger group of people, I’ll give it a go.

4. I Am Not Made of Money!
They made the thing way too expensive. I am not going to bother trying to upgrade my current machine. I’ll just wait till a buy a new PC and get Vista pre-installed. I might pay the upgrade price for my laptop, but it is going to be a while before I fork over cash.

Now I am not an anti-Microsoft guy, I am just a user. I am a user that wants a painless user experience. To get that with Vista, I might just have to wait and see what happens.