STG's

Fruit Ninja is a Kinect game for XBox 360. The theme sounds spectacularly silly - you have to use hand moves with Kinect to slice fruits in mid air, while avoiding bombs. There are also special fruits, such as frozen bananas, which slow down time. I wouldn't even have tried it, except that the same friend who convinced me to get the XBox told me to try it several times. I was pleasantly surprised - this is quite fun. You get oriented by a shadow version of your Kinect image - which both fits the ninja theme well and is very helpful. The one thing I noticed is that I have to take it easy in this game - if I overdo it I get really sore shoulders the next day! I really recommend trying the demo .

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II looks pretty good. The effects and sounds are great, and the cutscenes look nearly perfect. The force powers are well spread along the controller, too. However, I pretty much hate it. Why? I'm not sure, but I really don't like this particularly top view with flipping relative fronts. Maybe it is because I'm too used to FPS, and because I really liked Jedy Knight II and the others in that line. But the end result is that The Force Unleashed II feels too arcade for me. Note: I only played the demo. Given how I really didn't like it, I doubt the full version would change my mind.

I've recently got a XBOX360 and Kinect, and so far this is the game I've liked the most. It has a few sports and minigames. Soccer: The system is quite clever - you don't really play soccer per se, but get a bunch of semi turn based situations that are a lot like soccer. For example, you can intercept passes, kick the ball, try to defend goals. It is pretty fun. Volleyball: pretty good too. You mostly have to touch the balls as they come in, as well as jump for the shots over the net. Track & Field: not so much fun, and a bit hard on my knees. I have to run with knees really high for it to work properly. Bowling: I didn't really like this one. Probably the control system is annoying me. Table Tennis: pretty fun. I really played a lot of the real thing as a kid, and this version is nice. Of course, you just need to contact the ball, but at least you can put a spin on it. Boxing: nice. It is not as therapeutic as putting on gloves and hitting a dummy, but...

I just got a XBox 360 with Kinect. It is my first videogame console since 88, when I sold my Intellivision (to buy more computer hardware, of course). I have been playing all that long, but only on the PC. What changed my mind was Kinect (and a friend who just got one talking a lot about it). You see, I'm pretty happy with the keyboard and mouse. And I've always felt that console games were, in sometimes subtle ways, less complex and interesting than PC games. The games I've played so far didn't change my mind in that aspect. Kinect Adventures or Sports, with a regular controller, would be generic and silly. But with Kinect, they are quite cool. I enjoyed pretty much every game on Kinect Adventures, and got a serious workout - even though I go to the gym three times a week and still do light exercise on most of the other days. That is, of course, something that I can't say for any other game I've every played. So, how good is the tracking? It is just...

A Beautiful Friendship - by David Weber is a larger version of a story previously published on one of the Honorverse anthologies - More than Honor. The story follows how an ancestor of Honor Harrington, who just moved to Sphinx, discovers and then forms a relationship with the telephatic, sentient local life form - the Treecats. It is pleasant, but it does feel like a young adult book. In fact, overall it very much feels like a B direct-to-TV movie, with a young hero which is oh so much smarter than the adults beside her, and with the help of her pet saves the day.

Rochard is an interesting platformer. Your main gun mostly acts as the Half Life 2 gravity gun, except that it can also fire lasers, and you can also reduce the local gravity. Gameplay is mostly about knocking out enemies, bots and auto guns, by launching and dropping box and explosives or firing at them. A big part of the puzzles is also the use of fields. Each color has a function - red won't allow people to pass, yellow doesn't allow equipment, etc. So far I like the puzzles, but I'm not sure if it won't get too repetitive - that was a complaint in some reviews. Graphics are pretty good and I really like the music. The Orchard Soundtrack is available as DLC on Steam. Overall, I recommend checking out the trailer and buying the game if you like what you see (unfortunately, I couldn't find a PC demo right now).

I've recently purchased Rochard (my Rochard Review ), and I since I liked the trailer soundtrack decided to purchase it (it is pretty cheap when you buy the game). I couldn't find any obvious place to get me to it on Steam. A quick search on the Steam folder found it on c:\games\steam\SteamApps\common\rochard\Rochard - The Original Videogame Soundtrack It includes the music on 320kbps MP3s, as well a very nice cover JPG and a nice looking PDF booklet. There are some very nice songs in there, specially Grinder's Blues and Rochard Main Theme. Space Debris and John's Theme are pretty good too.

One thing that has bothered me for a while is the fact that every one of my blog post page titles starts with the blog name. While in my case that is very short (just STG's), it still is worse for SEO than just the post title. A quick look showed me how to fix it . It is very easy to hide your blog title on Blogger. You just need to do a simple edit on your template (Design->Edit HTML on Blogger) Then you find <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> And replace it with: <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'> <title><data:blog.title/></title> <b:else/> <title><data:blog.pageName/></title> </b:if>

The Voyage of the Sable Keech , by Neal Asher, is the second book in the Spatterjay series. In the first book of the series , a reification - a high tech zombie that is driven by a recording of his own mind (usually) got resurrected by nanotech. What isn't clear in the first book is that not only this isn't common - it just has never happened before. Thus, a mass of other reifications are coming to Spatterjay to try to get themselves resurrected too. Obviously that is not going to go very well... Most of the characters of the first book are back. Of interesting note is that Captain Ron now flies spaceships, Olian Tay made a sprine bank that now is the basis of Spatterjay's economy, and the adolescent Prador, of course, survives. Also, Janer is involved in a skirmish between hive minds that may destroy Spatterjay... As usual on Asher's books, the Spatterjay virus leaves people, Pradors or Giant Whelks capable of almost anything, including massive, nearly instan...

Lost Adventures is the latest DLC for Orcs Must Die! What you get is: - Five New levels: these seem to be more or less on the same level of cleverness/difficulty/fun as the original levels. The Reverse Tower is a bit of cheating - it is The Tower level from the original game in reverse, with the doors on the upper two levels and the Rift down below. - Two New Enemies: the Frost Bat, which is basically the regular HellBats from the regular game releasing ice, and the Cyclops mage, which is OK. - New Trap: the Mana Well can supply you with mana. Not very exciting. It doesn't add a lot of stuff, but for US$3.99 it is good value if you already like the game. If you still want to upgrade any of the traps, the extra skulls (up to 50) should come in handy. It wasn't obvious (at least to me) how to play the new levels. I'm posting on a separate article how to play the new levels in Lost Adventures .

When you buy Orcs Must Die: Lost Adventures it is not all the obvious how to play the new levels. However, it is very easy - just click on Play and look for the button Change Campaign. Click on it to change to Lost Adventures and you can start playing.