STG's

Just installed and played Gridrunner Revolution. Llamasoft is a name that instantly brings to mind a shooter in the early 90s (not sure if it was theirs or a clone of one of their games). Gridrunner Revolution reminds me a lot of that game, but not completely in a good way. The gameplay would be probably be very nice in the early 90s, but now I'm not impressed at all. The graphics are interesting, but together with the sound it's just too loud for my current taste. Not recommended.

I've recently finished reading Exodus - The Ark , by Paul Chafe. This is the continuation of Genesis, which I recently blogged about, and is from Webscriptions too. Genesis speaks of the creation of a human multi-generation ship to another star, in a ten thousand year voyage. One of the practical effects of that time frame is that (in the book, at least) almost no technological artifacts will survive this long - thus they must fall back to an agrarian society. Thus all of this intermediate book takes place with minimal tech (for us), in the middle of high tech world. What I found most aggravating was the constant rise of the crazy religious dictatorship, which happens more than once in the books so far. There are a few hopeful moments (SPOILER ALERT), such as when the previous religious order converts to a natural history society, or the very ending of the book. I'm not complaining about the lack of realism - in fact, the awful turn of events that happens more than once in the ...

Just read the first episode of the Shadow Unit - Breathe. It's a free experiment in fiction on the web, or so they say. It looks like they have LiveJournals for the characters, and plan to add more stuff in time. The first episode was pretty good. I've just learned that they have Season 1 in Mobipocket format, which means I'll probably read the rest in my cell phone.

Yesterday, I watched a very interesting seminar about Adwords by Dave Collins, of the recently renamed Software Promotions (it used to be Shareware Promotions, but unfortunately, the shareware name has fallen into very hard times). Several ideas were interesting, these were my favorites: - run a Search Query Report. Google sees Broad matches a little too broadly for most people. My campaigns are tiny, but still I found a dozen or so clicks of meaningless terms, which I added to the negative word list in my campaign. - Geographic Performance Report - useful for figuring out which countries are working best for all. He mentioned one should probably use a pivot table - after checking the report out, he is completely right, otherwise it is too much data to be useful. - Content Network: using competitor's product names to piggyback in their promotion. - Segmenting campaigns per country can get you cheaper clicks. I've started a tryout of this for UK/Canada as opposed to the USA. - L...

This is a very cool looking interface concept. I don't think it's very useful (I mean - how inconvenient is having to look on multiple faces of your device for regular use?!?!), but it's still worth checking out.

I've recently had an annoying problem with Winamp. Everytime I run it, and also on every wake-up from an hibernate, I'd get a message about how CEUTIL.DLL couldn't be loaded. While it did run fine afterwards, that was still annoying. Looking at the Winamp forums, it seems like it's caused by a confluence of the Plays for Sure plug-in, WMP 11 and ActiveSync. I didn't like their suggestions much - installing ActiveSync (which I didn't like already when I needed it for my only CE device, a VERY troublesome iPaq) or uninstall WMP 11 and runtime. I tried uninstalling the pmp_p4s.dll plugin. That didn't work, but just going to Winamp's plugin folder and deleting it solved the problem.

I've just noticed Galcon Fusion on Steam, and downloaded the demo to check it out. I've already played the original Galcon, and some other clones. Galcon is a "simple" game - you own planets, each with more or less ship production capabilities, and you move ships around to conquer other planets. I quoted simple because it can be quite complex to play well, as it is easy to lose planets by leaving it too uncovered, or not send enough ships on a conquest and waste them. Galcon Fusion seems to be exactly the same, except with much nicer graphics. It does have a few other modes, but, alas, they are not included in the demo...

I've recently purchased Zuma's Revenge, when PopCap was holding an Haiti donation of 100% sales of the day. I did play the trial, and wouldn't have bought it without the donations. I was a big fan of the original, and played it through several times, as well as a few of the clones. The new Zuma is very similar to the original. There are a few extras, but they don't have that much impact. One thing that is considerably changed is the graphics. They are quite beautiful, particularly the water and the volcano levels. Overall the game seemed a bit easier, specially the ending. There a few extra modes. So far, they seem almost identical to the main story. One funny thing in Heroic Frog mode - the bosses (at least the first one) openly remark about the rematch, and not doing any better than the first time when they lose. Pretty funny. And if you thought the main game was too easy, you will probably like Heroic Frog mode - it's MUCH harder. Overall, if you like the ball-s...

I've recently read Genesis, by Paul Chafe, the first book of the Ark series. The main focus of the book is the creation of a gigantic multi-generation starship, on a ten thousand year voyage. While the overpopulated and in serious trouble Earth is easy to visualize, I find it hard to imagine a project on such a scale being done, specially given the lack of a return in the investment. It's also hard to imagine it actually working without any human maintenance for the whole trip - it's supposed to fall back to a simpleton agrarian society, because there isn't enough people to maintain an industry, not to mention the lack of extractable resources. The whole space elevator arc of the story sounded reasonable, though. There are still real projects looking at the feasibility of the concept with current materials, I can't help but hope that eventually we'll be able to make it work. Some of the religious outrage reminds me of Exit Earth, by Martin Caidin - an excellent,...