Reviews Archives - Page 10 of 12

E-reading Update

I’ve been discovering a bunch of quality net-published fiction recently. Here’s a couple worthy of your time.

David Wellington’s Monster Planet is on track to wrap up this Friday. Wellington started the ambitious blog-based trilogy in April of ’04 with Monster Island, a story of a zombie-infected Manhattan a few months after the outbreak.

He followed it up with Monster Nation, the prequel of just how the zombie outbreak progressed across the United States.

Monster Planet brings everything to a head – grand fantasy, horror and characterization on a global scale. The pentultimate chapter hits on Wednesday, and the finale on Friday.

You might think that zombie stories = mindless crap. And in some cases, you’re right. But Wellington wisely focuses on his characters, and just how the situation affects the ensemble cast. He’s got a couple of “big ideas” that play with the genre conventions too, which I won’t spoil.

Half of the fun has been following the comments readers leave after each chapter. In some cases Wellington has subtlely shifted his story arc thanks to audience input. Not an entirely collaborative story, but there are elements. In perhaps the most obvious one, the main villain of Planet is named after a very frequent and loyal commenter. Elsewhere, when fans felt that it was left up in the air whether a particular character survivied, the author made sure to spell out in a later chapter just what fate had befallen the man. One reader was having a rough time with his relationship, and Wellington obliged him in a cathartic bit of fun by making the girl a zombie-ized background character. The list goes on.

The serialized, ‘cliffhangerized’ format is addictive. I plowed through the first two novels in just a few days after discovering them. And hey, its free!

In other options, there’s Cory Doctorow. I’m a bit of a latecomer to the BoingBoing founder’s fiction, but he’s got a pretty decent archive up on Salon.com.

Currently, Themepunks updates with a new chapter every Monday. This is a story of Doctorow’s vision of the 21st century economy, and where collaborative technologies and abundance of raw tech materials will eventually take us. There’s a thousand and one points in here where I paused to think about the implications of the astonishingly realistic setting.

If you’re at all interested in the development of societies in massively multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft, 2004’s Anda’s Game is fascinating. You have to trudge through Salon’s somewhat clunky ‘sitepass’ system to read these stories without subscribing, but the result is worth it.

In other news, Harvey Danger released their newest album (for free!) in MP3 format today.

Serenity! Go! Now!

If you’re a sci-fi fan at all, you owe it to yourself to see Serenity. My mouth was on the floor the whole time! Part of this is probably due to my love for Firefly, the cancelled TV on which Serenity is based. I’d be genuinely interested in how a movie viewer who never saw the show perceives it.

I’ll write up a full review eventually, but I don’t want to spoil anything right off the bat.

Nintendo DS

Last weekend I made a trip to the Unclaimed Baggage store in Scottsboro, Alabama. They gather up all the stuff people leave in their, well, unclaimed baggage at airports and sell it rather substantially discounted off of list price. Flickr pictures are here.

The big find of the trip for me was my Nintendo DS. It has some scratches on the outside, and is missing a couple of unimportant accessories, but the discount made up for it.

After a week of playing with it on and off, I’m extremely impressed. I know I’m a bit late on the bandwagon for the system, but I still feel it is worth talking about. I only own three DS games, and two of them are extremely innovative. This is largely due to the touch screen. The lower of the two screens is manipulated via a stylus, and this new method of control really revolutionizes gameplay.

Super Mario 64 DS is a remake of the Nintendo 64 Mario game with a few extra features. I never really liked the original, so wasn’t surprised when this one underwhelmed me as well. Thankfully, the new mini-games make extensive use of the touch pad and are worth a play. This game came with the system or I wouldn’t own it.

Meteos, my next purchase, instantly claimed hours of my life. The game is a twist on the old “blocks falling from the sky” puzzle style that Tetris made famous. This time you manipulate the blocks directly on the lower screen with the stylus. The gameplay feels more immediate somehow, really putting you in the middle of the action.

Today I celebrated my first paycheck by purchasing Kirby’s Canvas Curse. Unlike Meteos, which has an option to play via control pad, Kirby can only be moved around via the touch pad. The player has to draw paths for him to follow, and tap the little pink dude to nudge him along the way.

Neither of these games would be particularly remarkable, or even playable, if controlled via a standard control pad and buttons.

As a bonus, the DS is backwards compatible with Game Boy Advance games. I scooped up the original Super Mario Brothers game very cheaply. This back catalog is a big plus. And to top it all off, the system is wireless-capable. I don’t know anybody else to play against right now, but this fall’s highly anticipated DS Mario Kart game promises to be enabled for free internet play. Sign me up!

The Playstation Portable may hold the ‘sexy’ spot in the handheld gaming market, but the DS delivers a unique and fun gaming experience at more than $100 less. Kudos to Nintendo for trying something different.

As a disclaimer, Nintendo does have a high nostalgia value for me. I grew up on their consoles, and their consoles alone. It almost feels like coming home again 🙂

Podcast roll call

I’m new to the podcasting world. In the pre-iTunes era of podcasting, I only listened to two: Open Stacks and This Week in Tech. iTunes was the killer app for me – its so easy now for me to subscribe! I haven’t quite figured out how to provide links to the podcasts in iTunes, but they can all be found by searching Apple’s podcast directory inside the program.

Here’s my annotated and growing list, in alphabetical order:

ABC News Shuffle – Two reporters’ perspectives on major news of the week
CNN News Update – An hourly news summary from CNN Radio
CommandN – Amber Mac and Mike Lazazzera from Canada’s Call For Help tv show make web picks of the week and cover a bit of tech news. Note, this is a videocast.
Diggnation – Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht of Digg.com discuss the top stories on the site each week.
iTunes New Music Tuesday – Snippets of new music for sale on iTunes each week. Song selection is a bit of hit or miss for me, so I often end up skipping portions.
KFI’s Tech Guy – Leo Laporte, formerly of TechTV, podcasts his weekly California radio shows one week after they air.
OPAL Podcast – Online Programming for All Libraries. The gaming show was particularly interesting!
Open Stacks – Greg Schwartz, the Godfather of librarian podcasting, runs a library commentary ‘cast.
Science @ NASA Feature Stories Podcast – Someone at NASA reads major press releases. Its blatantly obvious that the speaker is reading from a page, but the content is still interesting.
This Week in Tech – A whole bunch of former TechTV hosts get together and shoot the breeze each week.
Xbox Live’s Major Nelson – “Major Nelson” is in charge of Microsoft’s online gaming Xbox Live community. A great insider perspective.

Braaaains!

I just lost almost 2 hours to reading this:

Monster Island

Its a novel, serialized in blog form. MI is a zombie story, set months after Manhattan has been overrun. But like the best of the genre, there’s characterization instead of merely mindless gore. And even better, author David Wellington is a rather creative guy. There’s a number of twists and turns I never saw coming, but in retrospect make a bunch of sense.

Monster Island is first in a trilogy, too. Books 1 and 2 are complete and on the site, and 3 is in progress. I’m hoping to catch up before it finishes. Novel via blog is a very interesting way to publish your work; I haven’t run across it before.

My only wish is that there were an easily downloadable format. I’d love to load this onto my ebook reader and take it somewhere more comfortable. There’s an iPod-formatted version of book 2, but nothing of 1.

iPod reviewed

As I mentioned briefly before, I got an iPod as an early birthday gift! Its a standard 20GB model, no fancy photo features or anything which I probably don’t need anyway. And I love it!

I’m primarily amazed at the usability of the interface. Everything I want to do with the unit is right where I expect it to be, even if I’ve never used the feature before. Putting music on it via iTunes is a breeze as well. Much simpler than I expected it to be, given my past experience with using proprietary software to transfer files.

I also got an FM transmitter/charger for the iPod, and utilized it to great effect on my 5 hour return trip to Pittsburgh yesterday. Much more powerful and better sound quality than my previous attempts at such devices.

One thing I haven’t figured out so far: is there a way to delete songs from my computer, but leave them on the iPod? My main laptop hard drive is only slightly larger than the iPod’s, so if I ever reach the 20GB mark of music it would get quite cramped in here for other software.

I really only have two complaints.
First: the mirrored finish on the back of the iPod is far too easy to scratch and mar. The unit looks so nice aesthetically that the accidental marks are really a shame.
Second: the included headphones (despite being a status symbol) rather hurt my ears while resting in place for more than a few minutes. That problem was easily fixed with a replacement pair, but I’m surprised Apple hasn’t redesigned the earbuds since I’ve heard others complain as well.

Now I’m off to dig up the blog posts I saw a couple weeks back about various things to do with your iPod!

The Force is strong with this one

Lego Star Wars – Xbox

My rating: 4 out of 5

I’ve found myself with some unexpected free time this week, while classes spin up into full speed.

I decided to fill it with Lego Star Wars for the XBox.

This is a brilliant game, one of the best all-ages titles I’ve ever played. The concept is simple: What if everything in Star Wars were made out of legos? Crazy, I know. But it works in some strange indefinable way.

The game (also available for the PS2 and Gameboy) very faithfully recreates episodes 1 through 3. I managed to finish episodes 1 and 2 in a few days, but refuse to play the third until I’ve seen the movie. I still hold out vain hope that it will be good. But that’s a rant for another time.

LSW is not a hard game by any measure. You run around the levels as any one of a plethora of legoized Star Wars characters, blasting or light sabering your way through lego obstacles and enemies. I especially enjoyed how use of the force is implemented. Since everything is made out of legos, the force simply rearranges them into various helpful forms (or in some cases makes objects dance around amusingly while Cantina music plays). There’s a bit of puzzle solving involved, though nothing that will stump you for too long.

The game also boasts a surprising amount of humor, especially in the cut scenes. And being legos, the violence in the game is greatly toned down. Enemies don’t burst into splatters of blood and gore – they fall apart into their component legos.

Considering that the vast majority of Star Wars games have been somewhat less than great, Lego Star Wars is extremely welcome. It appeals equally to kids and adults, though there are a few levels that I can’t imagine a child getting through without adult help. I got very frustrated in the cursed podrace level, and I imagine it would be even worse for a young’un. Speaking of podracing, I’m now convinced it was only put in Episode I to provide an easy level design for every Star Wars game made since. And it has never been implemented well in a console game that I’ve seen.

Ahem. Back on track. If you don’t have kids of your own, LSW is probably a better rental than a purchase. While there is some limited replay value in unlocking some secrets once the pretty quick main game is complete, it isn’t overly compelling. But I do admit the prospect of unlocking and playing as Lego Darth Vader holds a certain allure.

AIM Triton

I just did a bit of experimenting with AOL IM’s new beta version, “Triton”.

How is it? Let’s just say its already off my computer.

I’ll keep in mind that this software is still an early beta, but a number of fundamental design elements just really bug me.

First of all, the banner ads. Using deadAIM and now Gaim has made a lack of ads in IM seem normal – there’s no way I’d go back. The ones that play audio are particularly bad.

Second, I got a popup ad from Triton. I haven’t seen a popup ad in who knows how long thanks to Firefox and previously the Google Toolbar. But 3 minutes after logging in, there one was.

Third, it installed other software along with Triton. I have no idea what it did. There was an AOL icon in my taskbar, which gave me the option to ‘Sign in to the AOL network’. This functionality seems to be completely unrelated to using Triton. I could be signed into one of the two and not the other. Very confusing.

Fourth, the interface seems to have been rearranged with no logic whatsoever. It took me close to a minute of poking around to figure out how to set an away message.

In summary, I’m not impressed. While gaim admittedly still has a few bugs (my buddy list tends to disappear into the system tray at random), it remains a superior product to Triton. AOL has some serious work to do in bringing Triton out of beta, if they want to recapture their own network’s power user software market.

Webcasting

At the end of last year Fox started airing a ‘reality’ show called My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss.

The Premise: On the surface, a clone of The Apprentice.
The Catch: The boss doing the firing, and everyone else besides the contestants, is an actor. The whole thing is a setup.

The boss and company then proceed to mess with the contestants hilariously. My favorite challenge was the paintball one: Each team must try to protect one of their members from a paintball attack from the boss, while accomplishing everyday office tasks.

Unfortunately, it was cancelled after just five of the ten episodes aired.

Thankfully, Fox put episodes 6-10 online! They’ve been up for about a month now it appears, but somehow I’d missed the anouncement.

First Battlestar Galactica, now this. I’m crossing my fingers that studios are finally catching on to the possibilities of online TV show distribution.

Homeward Bound, by Harry Turtledove

My rating: 4 out of 5

Wow, I actually managed to finish a book not class-related!

Harry Turtledove has been a favorite author of mine for a number of years now. Back in High School I discovered his Worldwar series. Basic premise: In the early days of World War II, aliens invade. That was an epic four novel series, resulting in humans fighting their lizardish enemies (called “The Race”) to a draw. The Race ended up with about half of Earth under their control.

Turtledove followed up Worldwar with a three novel Colonization series. It followed the arrival of the lizard’s main colonization fleet in the 1960s, who expected Earth to be completely subdued by the preceeding conquest fleet.

Homeward Bound is a single novel to put a cap on it the series. It’s nice to really get some closure. The Race’s society changes at a pace fundamentally slower than ours. Very little has changed for them in the last 100,000 years. They surveyed Earth hundreds of years ago and saw knights in shining armor; that was what they expected to still find when the invasion fleet arrived. Thus they were unprepared and forced to end in a draw. Humanity stole and improved on the alien technology, and by the 1980s was starting to pull ahead in important technological areas.

The United States sends its first starship to Home, The Race’s planet, to open negotiations for formal recognition as equals. Those negotiations, and one final giant leap in technology for humans, form the crux of Homeward Bound.

If there was one problem with Turtledove’s earlier books in the series, it was an overabundance of main characters. He wisely cuts down on the cast here, keeping only the most interesting ones. Thanks to the technology of cold sleep hibernation, some of the characters even make it into the mid twenty-first century.

There’s some great philosophical exposition as The Race slowly realizes that humanity is quickly eclipsing them and tries to figure out why. It’s hard to discuss in a review like this without spoiling much.

I do feel like the novel could have been 50 pages shorter and not lost much. Some of the points were made over and over again, to the point of head-smashing obviousness. As a standalone novel, it wouldn’t really work – too much background knowledge is necessary. But as a capstone on an 8 novel opus, Homeward Bound is fun and satisfying.