STG's

The Technician - by Neal Asher is a book in the Polity Universe. Most of the action happens in Masada, the homeworld of the ancient race of the Atheters. It was discovered previously that they erased their minds and created mechanisms to destroy all remains of their civilizations, and to keep their minds erased to the levels of animals. But during the fall of the Theocracy in Masada ( In the Line of Polity ), a proctor was almost killed by a special Hooder (one of Atheters biological war machines) called The Technician. His face was stripped and something was placed into his brain... Now, 20 years later, the proctor's mind is getting back together, and what it contains may destroy Masada and the whole Polity. This book has cool battles, a lot more exposition about the Atheter and their biomachines, and the development of the nature of The Technician during the book was very interesting - as usual, Asher makes the best crazy monsters actually have a clear purpose and logi...

Unstoppable Gorg is a great looking Tower Defense (TD) game with a space - and 60 sci-fi movies - theme. The game mostly consists of placing defensive satellites to defend planets from attacks of several different alien races. The gameplay is reasonably fun, and its main difference from the average TD game is the use of orbits - which allows you to rotate the positions of your satellites. This is particularly important because it is common to have changing paths from the aliens. This results in extra strategy, as all objects in the orbit move together, and so you have to think about how to optimize their positions to handle two or more simultaneous waves. You get the average defense mix - Fast fire (Vulcan), Stronger but slower fire (Cannon, missiles), Money/Energy (Solar Collector, Plasma Generator), Research, etc. The 60's SF theme allows for a funny ambiance, with some LOL moments. Graphics and effects look great. Overall, very much recommended for TD fans. 4 out 5...

I have just installed VMWare Workstation 8 over my old VMWare Workstation 6.5 on Windows 7. On my first run I already got the error message: Could not get vmx86 driver version: The handle is invalid. You have an incorrect version of driver "vmx86.sys". Try reinstalling VMware Workstation. Failed to initialize monitor device. Obviously, I was concerned, but there is a simple way to solve it - just right-click the VMWare Workstation icon and use Run as Administrator. This is a bit annoying, but at least it is easy to solve. Update: I forgot to mention it, but as Dave said on the comments, you can right-click on the program shortcut, choose Properties, Compatibility tab and check Run as Administrator so that it will always run properly. Thanks, Dave!

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 (MW3) is the latest of the hugely successful series. A common complaint is that it is exactly like the last couple of Modern Warfare. I can't disagree. It really is. The thing is, that model works - and it works very well. So it is an awesome game, with the same problem it always had - it is mostly on rails. That is, you have a nearly exact sequence of actions that you are expected to follow. There aren't half a dozen radically ways you can complete your objectives, as there was, for example, in Far Cry or Crysis (1, definitely not 2). That can be good or bad, of course. Personally I'd really prefer it, but that is not to say that I didn't enjoy MW3. On the contrary, it is very good, and I like not only the regular campaign, but also the Special Ops missions. My sole complaint so far is that - again - several of the Special Ops missions require two players. I'm really not into multiplayer, and thus this is a big annoyance for ...

The Secret Armory of General Knoxx is a DLC package for Borderlands! . Overall it is good, and has OK missions and plenty of new guns. It also has new vehicles, and the Monster has homing rockets. There are lancer vehicles and drones everywhere you go. That is very annoying, as they are trivial to destroy with the homing rockets, but you have to stop at a distance, fire a few times, and continue. Again, and again, and again. It gets very tiresome after a while. One of the other problems with this DLC is the fact that the clever scheme they used to add the DLC - just go to a fast travel point and jump there - doesn't seem to expand properly. I imagine they could just add extra items or a tree expansion for extra places inside the DLC, but they didn't. So if you stop at a mission at any point, you have to start from the beginning. For me that is really annoying, and means that I can't really recommend it.

Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot is a DLC package for Borderlands! . Mostly it involves fighting in arenas. The arenas are quite clever, and you get waves of enemies of different types - melee, bosses, etc. This is further mixed up with clever bonuses - for example, you may have pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, headshot bonuses. This really makes it more exciting. The problem with Moxxi's is the exact same problem that all Borderlands! DLC (and many of the original missions) have - it expects that you have a lot of free, continuous time. You can't just stop at a specific wave after an hour of play - you have to keep going until you finish it. For me that is really annoying, and means that I can't recommend Moxxi's.

I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: Six's Legacy, by Pittacus Lore, is the third book in the Lorien Legacies series. This one tells the story of Six, before she meets Four. If you perhaps read Power of Six , you have basically read this book. Sure, there are a few extra bits here and there, but it is almost all exactly as re-told in Power of Six. Quite disappointing. At least it was cheap...

2011 was an interesting year for me as a blogger. I found that I quite enjoy writing these little posts - I get to vent or praise about whatever last game I tried or book I read, and it is good exercise. I was a bit curious about the numbers, so I went and collated them. So counting this and my professional blog , on 2011: Posts: 203 Fiction Book Reviews: 35 Technical Book Reviews: 9 Game Reviews: 78 Visitors: 19204 I was a bit surprised about the post totals! So a big thanks go to all of my readers.

Micro - by Michael Crichton (who died while still writing it) and finished by Richard Preston, is another thriller where humans are reduced in size. I've seen quite a few of those. However, the book is surprising by the depth to which they go in interesting facts about animals and physics in the micro scale. The descriptions are quite vivid and imbued with a sense of wonder of the biology. Pretty good, recommended for SF fans.

The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned is DLC for Borderlands! . As you might imagine, it is zombie themed, and mostly revolves about killing a ton of zombies while carrying out missions, in the regular Borderlands! style. The difficulty was adequate and killing zombies was reasonably fun. There are a lot of funny dialogs throughout the island, too, including Dr. Ned's Claptrap and the constant Jakobs Corporation announcements. There are a few annoying things. First, you only have a single fast travel point for the whole island. This means that you spend a lot of time walking around. There are no vehicles. And of course, a lot of the time you'll have to kill zombies on the exactly same point. Where you spawn, there is a nice obvious place to jump that cuts through quite a bit of the walk - in theory. In practice, when you jump you are instantly respawned at the island entrance. VERY annoying. There are a few spots where if you walk to far from the coast the same happens - that ...

I just tried the P3 profiler plugin for WordPress. It gets data on what plugins are slowing down your page loads. It is a very nice plugin and provided plenty of data (somewhat unexpected slower plugins) - on my Linux site. On my Windows site, it killed my WordPress blog completely! Just in case someone have the same problem, you have to rename/delete both the wp-content/plugins/p3-profiler AND wp-content/plugins/mu-plugins.