Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys
...ruled. It might be his best work yet.
The audio book is incredible -- the narrator, Lenny Henry, really makes the characters come alive.
January 31, 2006
He's a published author and everything!
Old pal Peter Drake makes good: Data Structures and Algorithms in Java. The book is well organized, and extremely readable, and Pete's trademark wit subtly shows through throughout. With any luck, coming soon to a syllabus near you!
Congrats, Pete!
SXSW
For the first time since 2001, I'll be attending SXSW Interactive -- parts of it, anyway. Hopefully this will refill some valuable Austin Points (tm) for me.
Auto Assault Beta part deux
I grabbed it and tried it. It was very pretty. I got through the tutorial and quit.
Why? Mostly because the play mostly seemed to be "drive your car around using the keyboard, and try to shoot at people." I didn't see any indication of the richer combat systems I've come to expect from the MMORPG genre. And I kind of hate racing games, especially if you're trying to control a car with a keyboard -- acceleration and steering really require analog controls, which I (perhaps unfairly) associate with consoles.
I also wanted to see some content in the tutorial where I got out of my car and engaged in some person-to-person combat. Maybe that's in the game, but I couldn't see a "get out of the car" button in my scan of the controls. So after spending 90% of my character creation time dinking around with my person avatar and 10% of my time picking a paint job for my car (and not otherwise being able to customize it), I then proceeded to spend 100% of my time staring at my car. Meh. I assume as the game proceeds you get cooler cars, etc, but still.
I didn't see any indication in the tutorial as to how my "class" differed from anyone elses. I picked the "rogue" class, but how does that work if you're driving a car? I didn't seem to have any special abilities -- really, all I could do was drive and shoot. Ummm. OK.
Also, I kept getting video card crashes, leading to 10-20 second delays while the card reset itself. The final straw was when I got through the tutorial, and the faction's intro movie played, and I saw nothing and had no way to fix it. Yeah, I could have take the opportunity to go download some drivers or something, but I just wasn't captivated by what I'd seen in the tutorial.
So maybe there's this whole awesome game in there that, if I'd downloaded a new driver and fussed around and done the quests that follow the tutorial, I would have been really excited by. But I didn't get to see any of that. Every other game I've tried of this sort got me using my special powers immediately, so the message I received here was, "duuude! you get to DRIVE AROUND AND SHOOT PEOPLE -- POST APOCALYPTICALLY!"
It was pretty, though.
January 24, 2006
Auto Assault Beta
This almost slipped past me -- Penny Arcade has Auto Assault Beta codes for a beta event this weekend.
Auto Assault is a post-apocalyptic car-drivin' MMORPG. Think Car Wars.
Booth Babes banned at this year's E3
January 22, 2006
Fables
I just picked up book 5 of Fables; man, this series just keeps getting better and better. The basic conceit is that fairy tales are alive and well and living in New York City. To oversimplify, I'll describe the series as being kind of like Sandman but maybe not quite so self-conscious. Or late '80s.
January 18, 2006
City of Heroes offline character creator
Special for peterb, who no doubt already read this Joystiq, since we all know he has no shame either: Create a superhero - offline (Joystiq)
(Note the instructions link for running it in English.)
It was madness. It was insanity.
A few years back, I want on a short Robert Ludlum jag in my Audible subscriptions, since it turns out that technothrillers work really well in the audio form. I noticed a common theme in the books: both books featured clandestine agents who were betrayed; both books were read by the same guy. Both books prominently featured -- usually when this secret agent was confronted with evidence that somebody in the (GASP) intelligence community had betrayed him -- the phrases "It was madness!" or "It was insanity!" No, really. Both books. Both phrases. Both read by the same narrator.
So, when I started to listen to the Da Vinci Code (what can I say, the movie trailer got me interested, and hey, it was better than the Margaret Weis fantasy drivel I'd gotten a few hours into), I noticed that the narrator's voice was familiar. Sure enough, it was Paul Michael, who'd narrated the Ludlum books. So I joked to Carrie that it was only a matter of time before the phrases came up.
Yeah. You can see where this is going.
Now I'm wondering if this guy has some kind of contractual obligation to narrate all audiobooks that are chock full of madsanity.
January 17, 2006
This is the ultimate showdown
of ultimate destiny. (Flash animation.). (Been making the rounds.)
How do we make money? Volume!
Yeah, I know there's a bit of new toy going on here, but my god I'm so much more willing to post when I don't have to actually fire up Radio to do it. (Or leave Radio running, and watch it keep my CPU pegged at 50-80% while it incessantly walks the directory tree to find "new files." Or use Radio's weird little textedit box.)
I'm actually using MarsEdit 1.1 as my posting tool, largely because I <3 NetNewsWire, and my NNW license also applies to MarsEdit. I still want to find something with simplistic WYSIWYG editing (I don't need much -- just italics, bold, bulleted lists, links), but mostly I like the tool a lot. I especially like the parts where I don't have to resize windows or reload web pages.
Bye bye Paragon City
Watching Teen Titans definitely reinforced the same superhero nostalgia trip that was at the heart of my time spent in City of Heroes. I didn't realize it until I started watching the show, but my main blaster shared some eerie similarities to Starfire. COH was a lot of fun to play; it helped me understand the appeal of the mass RPG without the high leadup to having fun that a lot of the examples of genre had at the time. As Kevin has pointed out before, COH dumped you straight into the "hey, you're a hero -- go beat up the badguys!" No killing of ten rats for you!
In general, the game had a great casual flavor. Highlights included:
- Right off the bat, you could make your own costume, rather than spend hours/days/months searching for the +10 Robe of the Bloviator.
- Instanced missions were always scaled to be appropriate for your group -- there was no requirement that you spend an hour forming an appropriate team.
- Travel was mostly fast, once you got past level 14.
- The teamplay was always fun and fast-paced.
Unfortunately, the strengths also turned out to be weaknesses. The accessible nature of the content, in many ways, makes it feel trivial. You do the same basic set of missions over and over again, in randomly generated dungeons that don't substantially differ from each other, so the randomness mainly just means you have to explore how the nodes intersect yet again. The level grind gets painful, quick, since in the end, that's all there is to do. There's no real in-game economy, or ability to differentiate your character outside of combat.
What I had the most hope for was the base building that was introduced with City of Villains. Unfortunately, base building turned out to so oriented towards massive teams grinding for reputation that it was completely inaccessible to the casual players that heretofore, the game seemed solely aimed at. Now, all the sudden, you DID need a forty man team of heroes grinding for rep. And, in the end, my heart just wasn't in it.
So, when my debit card got lost last month and I had to cancel it, and when NCSoft sent me a polite e-mail about how they cancelled my account when the old card # was declined, I realized that I was done being sentimental about characters I wasn't even playing anymore. Cya, Paragon. It was a lot of fun. Really. But it turns out I'd rather be riding my giant horse made ENTIRELY OUT OF FIRE or turning into a bear or something.
Bye bye Teen Titans
I just watched "Things Change," the final episode of the last season of the apparently now cancelled Teen Titans. It was a sentimental, bittersweet ending to a series I always had a soft spot for. The show was a fun mix of US and anime styles; it revisited a lot of the DC universe in interesting ways; and the sappy, aimed-at-12-year-olds endings never failed to bring a tear to my sappy eye. Plus, Starfire rules.
/biganimetears
January 16, 2006
Futurama to return from the grave?
Inside Move: 'Futurama' may get new lease on life (via Inner Bitch.)
Now, let's fix this whole Arrested Development cancellation problem.
Commenting
...should now be enabled. Apparently I screwed up when I tried to enter my own URL for the site before I got whisked away into the comfortable EZ ride of the "wizard," so the wiz didn't actually change my bogus URL into the correct one. Ooops.
The Matrix: The Path of Neo
I'd picked this game up a little while ago, since the reviews made it out to be "the game we wanted Enter the Matrix to be." That is to say, a game that hewed more closely to the plotlines of the movies, and that had a higher fun to dreck ratio. Also, the Agent Smiths turn into a giant robot at the end, after a little self-mocking cameo by stick figure versions of the Brothers Wachowski. (No, Really.) Unfortunately, it also turned out to be picky about my clearly non-standard Soundblaster Live! card, so I grudgingly went and picked up an SB Audigy, although, let's face it, the odds are that my gaming needs (with my little crummy two speaker setup) could possibly require the services of something more complicated than the cheapest of audio solutions are pretty low.
But yeah, I bought the card, then got distracted by other shiny things (as opposed to by the existing Shiny thing -- ok, that was a reach), and the card sat on my floor over the holidays. Yesterday, I finally picked it up again and installed it, and -- huzzah -- the sound works in the game now. So, imagine my bitter and yet somehow expected disappointment with the actual game.
I don't know if my expectations have shifted, but I seem to recall the one thing Enter the Matrix did OK was faces. The hullaballood scalable graphics meant that, sometimes, just sometimes, you saw some really pretty, highly detailed textures and pretty areas. That appears to have gone out in the window in the meantime. The main thing I noticed when turning the graphics slider up to 11 (well -- 8 -- they really should have made it max at 11) was the introduction of a "blur" effect that really just made the graphics seem lower rez than they were.
I was also looking forward to seeing movie footage interspersed with gameplay elements -- making it feel more like watching the movie with playable bits. However, the footage has been recut by somebody who gets bored watching MTV, to give you a little "previously on The Matrix" feel. Skip skip skip. Skip. Oh goodie, now I'm back to the savepoint-driven gameplay.
The gameplay itself is trivial. Jab the one and two buttons to create "combos." Get weapons that will break after a while, and don't have a significant impact on how your gameplay evolves. Do "stealth" content that involves moving from green highlighted area to green highlighted area. From the very get-go, the gameplay diverges substantially from the movies -- instead of getting caught by the agents, Trinity rescues you on her motorbike. Whoah. Bored now.
Once you get through the initial area. you're dumped into a tutorial that reads like the Quentin Tarantino fanboy theater. Learn how to do the four-hit combo! It's only a 20-minute tutorial against a Japanese sword master! I know sword-fu! Hmmm, wait -- I'm not sure I understand how to press the first button four times. Thank god the tutorial is 20 minutes. To be honest, this is where the game lost me -- I did 3 tutorials, and then discovered there were something like 30 of them. When I finally got to the end boss on the third tutorial, and lost, and discovered there was no checkpoint, I "jacked out." "Took the blue pill." "Went back to leveling up my rogue in Azeroth." Whatever the cool kids are saying these days.
So yeah, for the nonexistent person who (a) reads my blog and (b) might have gotten suckered into this game and (c) hasn't done it already -- um, don't do it. Go play God of War instead. Now there's a self-involved violent fantasy setting that I can get into.
January 15, 2006
What the...?
I'd been using Radio to power this blog, and I'd been having mixed feelings about it -- largely because Radio is client-based, which meant I could only ever update from the laptop, and that I had to use the crummy Radio web interface. Well, my laptop died, and I hadn't backed up my Radio install in a while, which made the decision simpler.
Why? Because if I were to keep using Radio, it would cheerfully blow away several months of blog posts. So, buh bye. I'm trying out Movable Type now -- we'll see what I think. Next step -- getting away from the default theme.
By the way -- here's the old stuff: http://www.ology.org/radio-index.html.