STG's

3.5 out of 5 stars Capsized is a platform game (also called run and gun). The style reminds of Abuse , which I believe was the first to use this control scheme. You just crashed into an alien planet, and you are trying to survive and save your shipmates. The graphics are awesome - particularly the light effects from the gun and flashlight on dark levels, although they are very good everywhere. The developers - Alien Trap - say the levels are hand draw, and it really shows. The sound and music are pretty good, too. There are plenty of guns, albeit so far they are just the classics. A nice touch is the heavy use of physics. You get a hook that not only allows you to swing from place to place, but you can also use it to pull objects and throw them, which is both part of the puzzle and a nice way to kill enemies. Some things I think are missing: destroyable terrain and better path-finding for flying enemies - these lock up all the time. The flying enemies that just ignore the t...

Polity Agent, by Neal Asher, is the 4th book in the Agent Cormac series. It follows from the events on The Polity Line. Skellor was finally killed, but Jain technology is far from extinct... There are a number of revelation on this book - we discover that runcibles are capable of time travel, the true intentions of the Makers,the Dragon spheres and the purpose of the Dracomen, and the true nature of Blegg. The capabilities of Cormac are left undefined, however. There are plenty of cool battles, as usual, and by the end of the book, we discover that the Polity just discovered a new enemy and is now going to have to prepare for war - in the next book of the series - The Line War. Very good, and definitely recommended for everyone that read the rest of the series.

Review: 2 out of 5 Pound of Ground is a 3rd-person-view zombie game. It looks great, with a somewhat comical style, but the gameplay is more annoying than fun. The part that is available in the demo consists of 3 quests. In the first, you must lure zombies to a certain place where someone else shoots them. The second, you go around smashing zombies with a baseball bat to find stolen items. In the third, you bring explosives to destroy the machine that is making zombies. I didn't find the level design any fun. Mostly you walk around the level, going around knee high fences (because you can't jump), and smashing the zombies. There is a long presentation of the situation, by a general supposedly reviewing what happened. The presentation was more annoying than entertaining, and the dialogs seemed very stilted. Based on the demo, not recommended.

Just a quick heads up, I got Portal 2 locking up as you rise from the fall at the very beginning of Chapter 6. I just got frozen looking at a flame, no controls worked. Re-loading the last savegame did nothing. Loading the one before that did help and it unlocked.

I've just started playing Portal 2. It seems pretty awesome, just like the original, except even funnier. The bits at the start with Wheatley the AI were simple great, and the delivery of the voice actor was perfect. The gameplay is pretty much exactly as the original - a FPS with a bunch of super clever but very understandable puzzles involving your portal gun - which connects two areas of space - and various items such as cubes, lasers, mirror cubes (a mainstay on the light puzzles since the early 90s, at least) and oh so much more. GLAdos is back, and as funny as ever. I'll update this post as I play more. Update (27/Apr/2011): I've finished the single player campaign. The new additions to the Portals were awesome - speed, bounce and portal gels and the funnels. There were some pretty impressive puzzles. I'm not going to lie - I did have to check walkthroughs several times... And there was a nice final confrontation, with a funny (albeit not nearly as fu...

One thing that has been bothering me since I got Windows 7, is that the normal shut down button always wants to install updates. I do realize how important updates are, but quite often I'm going to sleep, or turning the computer off because there is a lightning storm. I really don't want to wait several minutes... The simple solution is pressing ctrl+alt+del. The red button on the right corner has an arrow - click on it and you have several options, including the simple shut down.

A very cool video of a program that allows object recognition with a regular camera. The bit on 2:22 where it picks a photo of the face it was tracking looked pretty cool... The software is open source and available from http://info.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/Z.Kalal/tld.html .

Just realized that I never posted a comment on the Frozenbyte Humble Bundle, although I bought a copy the day it became available... It's another Humble Bundle - a bundle of indie games that you can pay whatever you want for, in which part goes to the authors and part for charities. You decide how the amount is split, too. There are several games in the bundle. I was surprised to find out that I never reviewed Trine . It is a fun platform game, where you play as 3 different characters, each with different abilities. It is pretty fun, and has great physics puzzles. The reason that I never reviewed it - I remember now - is that I never got around to finishing it. Some sections on the end were too hard and annoying! Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds:Survivor are shooters. I have played demos of these in the past, and didn't like them enough to buy them. Splot is not ready yet. Jack Claw is a prototype, and comes with source. It is certainly worth looking at, specia...

This is conceptually interesting - Amazon is launching a Kindle with Sponsored Screensavers and special offers, for US$25 less. I imagine a lot of people will be buying this version. If the ads stay as they seem to imply, they will only show when it turns off (if you haven't seen a Kindle, the display doesn't erase when you turn it off, it just switches to a beautiful image, such as an old book photo of animals, or a photo of a famous author), and on the bottom of the home screen. I might even check it out myself for the special offers - looks like they will have an app to add this "functionality" to older versions...

Switched - by Amanda Hocking - is a fantasy book about a girl that finds out she was switched at birth. Turns out she is a troll (well, you can't really say that THIS has been done to death, at least), which is why she has special powers. And now she is being hunted by another tribe... I find it hard to write more without adding even more spoilers. This is a pretty short book, and I really enjoyed it. It is also pretty cheap - US$0.99 on Kindle. Definitely worth the price, and your time if you like this kind of fantasy.

A pretty crazy idea for DLC for a wizard game, but the first DLC for Magicka is about Vietnam! Including rocket launchers, machine guns and air strikes.

I've been a fan of Orson Scott Card for decades. So when I heard he was starting Intergalactic Medicine Show(IGMS), his own online magazine - and with Ender stories too - I immediately went to check it out. That was several years ago - 2005. Unfortunately, it was available only as a web page, which meant the either I had to read it on the computer - which is relatively uncomfortable - or convert the stories one by one to my e-reader of the time, which was a Palm Tungsten E. It was really bad compared to my standard at the time - Analog and Asimov, to which I subscribed at FictionWise.com and were a simple download per issue. So I stopped reading after a while. But recently I received a message that they were available for the Kindle (and since it is a Mobipocket file, for many other reader and most smartphones), so I decided to get a subscription, which I feel is very cheap at US$15 per year including all past issues. As several other systems do, you can get the issues on ...

Anomaly: Warzone Earth is a somewhat unusual game - a reverse tower defense. While this has been seen in a few flash games and in one of the modes of Plants vs Zombies , it is still far from popular. You are placed on 2018, after aliens crashed into Earth. Turns out these aliens spawned a whole lot of towers, and you will have to guide your troops to reach various mission objectives. You are the commander, and you walk around the map using your special abilities. The graphics of the game are quite impressive, specially given its indie status and the casual nature. It looks just like what you'd expect from a current AAA game (if you take into consideration the top view). The gameplay is somewhat interesting. You have to choose directions on a tactical map (to skip phony anomalies and extra numbers of towers), while using special Abilities, such as repair and smoke screens. Not very surprisingly, you can buy extra units or upgrade them, as you collect money along the way. O...

Brass Man Reviewed by: Luiz Marques Review Date: 2011-04-07 5 out of 5 stars I'm still reading Neal Asher's Ian Cormac Series, and the latest was Brass Man . Brass Man continues the events of The Line of Polity. There is no way to continue the review without a lot of spoilers regarding the previous book, so you really should stop reading now if you don't want them... Well, if you are still reading, either you don't mind the spoilers or you skipped the previous paragraph. If the latter, sorry. In the of Line Of Polity, Skellor, the super powerful scientist with Jain tech and an embedded AI got his ship blown away. If you paid attention, you might remember that there was a nice setup for his escape on the way the ship twisted the bridge out of visual range just before it was destroyed. So it's not too surprising that he survived, and is back for more. One of the fun parts, and the reason for the title, is that Mr. Crane is brought back, with a sensi...

Hoard is a strategy/arcade top-view game where you are a dragon that tries to increase your gold hoard, while burning down towns, carts and crops and fighting knights, wizards and other dragons. Basically you go around using your fire breath to burn items, which gets you gold. You also have a few special items that pop up from time to time, such as extra hot damage, freeze powers, extra speed, etc. You can also make towns afraid of you by causing damage, at which point their archers won't attack you, and they will send you gold carts periodically. It is a cute game mechanic. The graphics are reasonably good. The sound is adequate, and the music is quickly annoying. I wasn't captured by the gameplay - to me it feels mostly like a chore. The demo is available at Steam , among other places. If the concept seems interesting to you, I recommend you try the demo before you buy. Steam has a 25% discount right now.