STG's

Sine More is an horizontal shoot'em up. It looks nice enough, but the story is somewhere between silly and incomprehensible, and very much woven through the play - every 20 or 30 seconds there is a unnecessary tidbit. It also really likes rotating things into view. While that does give you a warning and time to start shooting, it also seems like the game is trying to point out that yes, it really is a 3D game. You seem to drive a few slightly different ships, specially as the secondary armament goes - you get seeker missiles, extra drones and a massive wave attack - all classics of the genre. These are very much rationed and you only seem to get a few per level. You can also slow time, specially to dodge enemy fire and when maneuvering in close spaces. It is important to dodge enemy fire, because your main weapon power-ups "eject" from the ship when you are hit, and you have to quickly catch them to get them back. The close space sections are fairly annoying, th...

Ready Player One  , by Ernest Cline , is a SF book that takes place in 2044. Things got really messed up, with global warming, energy and food shortages, and widespread poverty is the norm. The one thing that keep most people going is OASIS - a VR simulation with thousands of words, accessed through haptic gloves and laser goggles (which immediately remind me of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash), as well as more advanced hardware. Even schools are available through the VR network. The creator of OASIS died a few years ago, and left all he owned to the winner of a contest - the first to go through a number of puzzles based on 80s games and culture, wins the control of the company as well as a 240 billion dollars. Naturally, everyone is trying to get it. And that is where the story starts, with a poor teenager who knows everything about the 80s games, music, movies and series. He is to be the first to decode the first clue... And then the race to finish is on. I really loved this...

Tows is a town/RPG sim with an interesting twist - the town is on top of a dungeon and you must cater to the heroes than enter it. The graphics are VERY retro (looks like a 80s game), but that is somewhat adequate. The music is very repetitive and annoying, but what really breaks the game is the absurd complexity of the interface. The number of silly steps to do even simple things is amazing. I imagine they either didn't play the same sim/empire building games I did, or if they did they completely disagreed with their choices. Really not recommended.

pid is a platformer with a gimmick. The big gimmick is that you can throw gems that create "beams". You can use these beams to fly above obstacles or dangers, in vertical, horizontal, and diagonal configurations - it all depends on where you throw the gems. You can also use them to kill enemies - moving them into deadly spikes, for example. The game story is a little on the absurd side. You are a schoolboy who slept in the bus and got dropped by the driver in a strange planet, and now you must find your way home. The graphics are unusual but nice. The gameplay is interesting but it is a platformer with puzzles and with a bit of a slow pace, so I'll not be buying it. If you like platformers, you might want to try the demo.

FLY'N is a platformer, but it is a very unusual one. It does feature some of the genres commonplaces, such as jumping and collecting stuff, but there is plenty of weird features. The graphics are beautiful, in an unusual art style, and so is the music. I have no idea what is going on with the game story, but apparently there is an evil overlord who stole something shiny from something like a tree. You are something (I really have no idea what the main character is supposed to be) running around platforms. You can jump, double-jump, glide, and switch between two visions of the world, which you need to do often to continue on your way. All of the enemies I have seen are a red stuff, which you must not touch. The tutorial is very minimalist (and in fact, I had some trouble figuring out what to do on start). On the other hand, I imagine translating the game will be very easy. The gameplay is somewhat interesting, but a bit repetitive. If you like platformers, you might wa...

iBomber Attack is a classic style, top-down tank shooter. You play moving the task with WASD keys. Unfortunately, these point where you are going directly - not W for move forward and AD to turn. This is a pet peeve for me, because a) it is counter intuitive to me and b) it induces the vehicle to make turns where you just want it to rotate, thus making it hit obstacles. You aim your guns with the mouse. You have a main gun and machine gun that you flip through with the right mouse button - I'd rather they were assigned to each button, but maybe there are more guns later in the game. You also have a few bombs that you can drag anywhere in the screen. The bomb might remind you of the other iBomber games, and as I see it a tank game is a wonderful idea -  I mean, they have all these graphic assets and code from their tower defense games, how hard can it be to make a tank game? Music is mute during the actual mission, and sound and graphics are acceptable (on a retro style, of ...

I was happy to see that Call of Duty: Black Ops II has a bots option in multiplayer. Just choose custom games and use Setup Bots . Please note that it loses the settings constantly - for no good reason that I can see. Yes, it would need to reset if you have too many bots for a map, but it happens with maps that allow the same number of bots. So if the star isn't displaying on the right side of Setup Bots , go back there, or you will have to restart the game. You can add up to 11 bots in the maps I tested. The nice part is that unlike Call of Duty: Black Ops Combat Training, you can use several game modes with the bots. It overall feels much less fun than Combat Training, because you don't get the full challenges and unlocks that you got in it... The really, really lame part is that if you lose your connection to Steam (or their servers? not sure), your completely local game just stops. That is VERY annoying, and I imagine it is some sort of DRM based idea (at the ...

While playing Call of Duty: Black Ops II I got a bit of trouble on one of the drone sections. Essentially I hit some kind of bug where the drone would detect me by sound even if I was still. Online it was  suggested that I keep following my partner, but for whatever reason that never worked. Walking through the room instead, waiting for the drone to pass and then just walking is what eventually worked. Very annoying, though.

Call of Duty: Black Ops II looks to be just like the rest of the COD franchise. The first 3 missions are regular, rail shooting (from a boat) and stealth - almost like they are trying to keep things exactly balanced. That first section is in flashbacks. The section with the new tech is a lot cooler. There is a completely unnecessary but still fun segment where you climb a vertical wall in a mountain using gloves that stick to it, and swinging from a rope with your partner. Then you use a wingsuit to fly into place (particularly annoying - and the first time I really felt the need to increase DPI of my mouse during a game). Cloaked soldiers in COD: Black Ops II The chinese soldiers have cloaking systems, which are counteracted by your weapon sights. It is a bit hard to view them at a distance, but you do get to see them through obstacles. Before missions you can choose loadout from stuff you have unlocked. One of those is an access kit, which gives you access to differen...

Monster Hunter Vendetta - by Larry Correia - uses many of the classical terror universe, seen in many movies and books - monsters are real, but everyone who knows covers it up. In Monster Hunter International, the hunters are survivors of attacks that survived and were recruited, and they make large amounts of money, from both private jobs and a government bounty program. In the previous book of the series (I just know what I read in this one - I got it in a Webscription pack), the main character defeated one of the Old Ones (Lovecraftian horrors from other universes), and it got pretty angry. And now he is sending a crazy cult leader necromancer for his vengeance... Pretty good, silly at some points but fun and full of epic battles. I'll definitely read the rest of the series. You can get it DRM-free at Baen  .

I have been bothered by the lack of updates on a Windows XP SP3 virtual machine I have. Today I decided to dig into the problem, and after a long, long while I got it to work. One of the clues was following message on windowsupdate.log (just Start->Run and type windowsupdate.log - very useful) FATAL: Service 7971F918-A847-4430-9279-4A52D1EFE18D requested, but it is expired I'm still not sure WHICH of the many fixes I tried worked, but what I did that seems more likely: 1) Downloaded the latest version of Windows Update agent from Microsoft  (it is in the Resolution section, way down) and installed it. 2) Went into Control Panel, Security Center, click on Automatic Update (the link on the bottom), chose Turn off Automatic Updates , and clicked on Apply. Then clicked on Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them and on Apply. At this point, it immediately started to download updates (34 - it had been a while). Please note that restarting the service...

For several months now, I've had a problem where suspending a development VM in VMWare Workstation 8 slows the computer down dramatically for 10-15 minutes. I found that specially surprising because I have 12GB of RAM in this particular computer, and it is a 3.5GB VM, so there were no memory problems. As you can imagine, that was quite disruptive, but till today I didn't find a solution that worked. Luckily my search today led me to the following, simple solution. Just add the following lines to your VMX file: mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE" prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE" prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100" This seemed to fix my problem.

I've recently setup an account on Humble Bundle. This means that all of those old purchases showed up in the same page. Naturally, the last is Zen Puzzle Garden, which I didn't remember trying before. I can only imagine I saw what it was about and ignored it. It is a very old style game (feels like an early 90s game), in graphics and sound, where the puzzles focus on raking sand on a path that doesn't repeat itself, with rocks in the middle so that you have to make a complex path. You also have to pick up leaves in a specific color order. I didn't like it. At all.

Waking Mars is an unusual puzzle platformer. In this game, you are a scientist with a jetpack going through a cave on mars. As you go around, you find somewhat forced puzzles that require you to increase the biomass on cave sections to continue. You do this by throwing several kinds of seeds around to achieve the intended effect. You also have to avoid acid pools and dropping rocks and acid. The graphics are OK (the semi static popup faces are quite good), the music is acceptable, but I didn't find the gameplay particularly fun. There is also an Android version.

Eufloria is a Galcon clone. That means that basically, you have planets with differing production capabilities, and you move your ships (in this case, seedlings) around to attack and take over enemy planets. Eufloria does have cute graphics, and a mildly annoying soundtrack, but I find the gameplay to be more of a chore than fun. update: I've played a few levels more, and now I like it. the interface still seems to take much more of an effort than I'd like, though. The PC controls are better than the touch screen version. Other than that, they seem to be identical, except that the graphic detail looks better on the bigger PC screen.

Eufloria is a Galcon clone. That means that basically, you have planets with differing production capabilities, and you move your ships (in this case, seedlings) around to attack and take over enemy planets. Eufloria does have cute graphics, and a mildly annoying soundtrack, but I find the gameplay to be more of a chore than fun. It is also available for Android. The PC controls are better than the touch screen version.

Just watched Battleship yesterday. It is impressive (and ridiculous) how they managed to make a movie out of such a simple game... The actual Battleship game part of the movie was quite silly, but was fairly watchable if you pretend that it makes sense. Overall I liked it for the action. But still, pretty stupid story.

The quest Breaking the Bank, on  Borderlands 2 , broke on me when I tried it. At a certain point, a skag had to eat the explosives. But instead it attacked me, and I killed it. There were a bunch of suggestions around, but just using Quit, going to the main title screen and returning with Continue solved it right away for me.

I was just looking around a local store when I saw the iPad Smart Case. I didn't get the Smart Cover before because it didn't protect anything else - just the glass surface. I never used it, but I keep hearing that a common problem is people trying to hold it by the cover and dropping their iPad. The case fully encloses the iPad so I imagine it should do better. One thing I was a bit impressed is that the case's case :-)  is very easy to open. Just remove a label and push a tab, and the front opens. Then just press the iPad inside the case. Overall just 20 seconds from closed case to it working. Turning the iPad on and off with the cover is surprisingly pleasant, too. I imagine the folding action is good if you use your iPad on the side. Then the cover can hold it slightly tilted or full upright (on a hard surface, such as a table). I don't use much this way myself, though. It comes on a bunch of colors. I got the one that matches my iPad best - light gray. ...

Hacker news 23 has a few interesting items, although it was much weaker than usual. The Cicada Principle , by Alex Walker shows an interesting way to make seamless tiles in CSS. Suffering-Oriented Programming , by Nathan Marz - the most thought inspiring piece in this issue. The basic principle is that for any problem, make it possible, then make it beautiful, then fast. The basic idea is that trying to generalize when in a new problem domain tends to go badly and waste time because you don't understand all of it at first. Making a quick hack to solve it can be more effective - you can create a good solution later, when you have more detail. And only at that point you should optimize. Automate Everything , by Tom Blomfield - a look on the way they used to automate expense reports. Short, but clever. Uncloaking a Slumlord Conspiracy with Social Network Analysis , by Valdis Krebs - this may sound like a Facebook thing, but it actually shows how to data was visualized to sho...