This is particularly true of gamers who, in this next gen age, tend to favor gifts that can be both difficult to find and expensive. However, a product does exist now that can serve to help in getting an inexpensive gamer-friendly gift for that button masher in your family, but still giving them something that has the all-important personal touch.
The name of this wonder program bears the name Rocketlife, which was created by a company called Visan in order to make the gift giving process somewhat more streamlined. The basic tenant of the program is that it eliminates a lot of the hassle of shopping by allowing you to create personalized gifts that can be emblazoned on a wide variety of products from mugs to monthly calenders to t-shirts. Originally, it seems that this was intended for use with family photographs taken with a digital camera that could be applied to these various articles. However, there are uses for this when shopping for gamers which can approximate their original function (a calender of convention photographs for example), or in many other unique and original ways. However, for the sake of this article, let us say we wish to make a t-shirt for our unnamed birthday-gamer-to-be.
Having decided on the product, then, the rest of the procedure is simplicity itself. First you download the software available from www.rocketlife.com and then return to the website and press the green Launch Rocketlife button. The program will activate itself and you will be taken to a screen where you can begin to create the particular product you had in mind. There are a total of 16 items to choose from arrayed at the bottom of the screen and, as you select one, the image will change to reflect the item chosen.
Once the t-shirt, or whatever item it is, is selected the next step is to choose the image or series of images to be used. One word of warning, however: Rocketlife has been designed to use only high resolution images, such as those from a digital camera, so you have to somehow ensure that the picture you are using is an HR image or else risk a sharp reduction in quality of the image.
Once you have selected the image you want to use the program will ask you whether you want the resizing and placement to be automatic or manual. The division is rather self explanatory; selecting the automatic mode will mean the program will take charge of managing image size, style, and other options. The design of the program sports a variety of tools from rotation and cropping of the image you’re using, to a variety of image effects that vary depending on the product in question.
For the t-shirt design, for example, there are a total of six categories of themes to choose from that will be duplicated on the shirt itself or will simply border the image. At any time you can go back to the Catalog page to see how your finished product will look, or to select a new one altogether; the images you’ve chosen will automatically be transferred onto the new item.
For purposes of this review I decided to create an Aperture Science t-shirt from Valve’s Portal puzzle game. I found an image of the Aperture Science logo, applied it to the shirt, centered it and made my size selection(they have small to XXL) and asked them to send it economy rate because that is what I would choose if I had planned the gift in plenty of time (they do have a faster rate for more desperate shoppers, however) and asked them to mail it.
The shirt cost 16.95 plus 5.99 for shipping and arrived in about a week. The shirt was of good quality and made out of a very comfortable material and the image was perfectly transposed atop it. All in all I have to say that Rocketlfie is a program that is easy, creative, and fun to use in addition to being a very unique way of acquiring tokens of affection for the gamers in your shopping list without breaking the bank at the same time.
”
