STG's

Puddle is a physics-based puzzle game. It mostly revolves about rotating your world so that as much liquid as possible reaches the exit. Water-based physics games are nothing new. I remember seeing my first in the early 90s. It was clearly a reflection of Lemmings, and you had a bunch of pieces that you could use to make the water reach the exit (obviously the water physics was quite simplistic - the drops mostly behaved as spheres). That was fun. Puddle isn't. The simplistic puzzle scheme mostly involves rotating to get past heat traps (that evaporate your water), jumping past obstacles and pushing switches. The graphics, physics, sound and music are adequate, but I find the gameplay to be no fun. Not recommended.

Zero Day: A Novel , by Mark Russinovich is a techno-thriller involving an attack using worms with 0-day vulnerabilities - just discovered bugs that can't be properly countered because they were not patched yet. Unfortunately, this isn't SF in any way. We live in a net with a large risk of infections. Recently a simple search found 7200 vulnerable critical  systems online - such as energy, water, traffic control systems, etc. And the 7200 is just the list DHS found critical - the list started with about 500,000 devices! And any vulnerability in the embedded web servers or a bad password can allow them to be cracked. So if anything, the book ending is actually somewhat positive compared to reality. :-( Overall, very good albeit a little depressing read (all those remainders of our state of security). Well, maybe it will make you update your AV, firewall and make a backup.

Stealth Bastard Deluxe is a stealth platformer, but with a twist - instead of being slow and measured like most stealth games, it is much faster paced. In the game you start as a clone with no special equipment. You have a notice of your visibility to cameras at all times, and most of the levels are puzzles that need to be overcome to get to the next level. Some examples of puzzles are syncing to an object that generate shadow or the movement of a camera, pushing objects into buttons, as well as uses of hanging on ledges just above a laser or using them to jump to a specific place. Graphics are retro in a way that servers the game well, and gameplay is fun, although probably only for a limited time at once. You can use an equipment item at once. I have placed screen captures of each. How you earn the items is somewhat interesting - they get unlocked for a sector when you finish the sector boss. And even them, each get unlocked for each level when you play it enough times. ...

Ridge Racer Unbounded is a street racing game. I actually reviewed the demo  before, but since I got the full version on a Steam sale, I realized it was fairly different, and deserved a separate review. The game has a few modes, which actually behave quite differently from each other. There are different unlockable cars per mode, too. Domination race : run against a bunch of other races. You can frag these racers, as well as destroy small pieces of the scenery (such as trash cans, trees, parked cars, light poles, etc). This will give you points, and together with some other actions (such as chasing a car close for a time, drifting, etc) will give you Power. You can use this to accelerate quickly, do major damage to other cars, and destroy specific parts of the scenery - such as trucks (explode with a shockwave that can destroy other cars), building, parts of bridges, etc. You can sometimes get more points with this than winning a race. Shindo Racing: racing with less ...

Dishonored: Dunwall City Trials is the first DLC for Dishonored. Personally, I'd much rather have more regular levels. But some of the challenges are fun. You can't use a methodical, slow approach in most of them, however. The challenges include: - my favorite: on freeze time, kill as many people as possible. - sneak around (undetected) to find clues about who to kill, and then kill them. - do jumps to kill in sequence (nice). - shoot oil tanks from the sky. This one is just bizarre. You have a few different tank types, such as slowing time and giving you health. - try to get to a goal as fast as you can. - on a countdown, get to a red light. each red light adds a few seconds. Overall, it is good enough for the price.

Old Man's War - by John Scalzi - is a SF military novel in the tradition of Starship Troopers or Forever War. The cute twist in the generic formula is that everyone on the CDF (Colony Defense Forces) is recruited from people about to be 75 years old. You see, no one on Earth has the technology to rejuvenate people, but they do, so many people reason that it is better to go fight for the CDF and be young again - even if there are high odds that you will die in combat. The rejuvenation process is kept secret, both on Earth and on the novel till it is actually done to the main character. Still, I imagine many SF readers will guess what they do when the preparation starts. And given the alternatives and their stated tech level, it is what makes most sense, except for the fact the memories are presumed to have a chemical nature. But you can't have everything. Travel between planets is done with the Skip drive. I won't explain how it works to avoid spoilers, but it behaves ...

I Am Number Four: The Lost Files: The Search For Sam - by Pittacus Lore is the latest novel in the I am Number Four series. It continues the story of Adamus, the Mogadorian who got the memories of a Loric - One - and has gone rogue. In this very, very short book (144 pages is the quoted number, but seems like much less ), he manages to get powers, and meet with someone of the Loric team that was on captivity (in a mild stretch of coincidences on the story), and finally goes to rescue Sam.  The ending and story are OK, but as usual this suffers from the tiny serial e-book format. I think it probably has a much better profit margin than trying to sell bigger books, not to mention benefiting from the limited attention span of their target demographic.

Great North Road, by Peter F. Hamilton, is a SF novel. One thing that surprised me in the first few pages, is that while they do have gateways too, it is not a Commonwealth novel. That was a bit of a letdown, but the book made up for it later. The history of the world is important for anything making sense - a long time ago, someone discovered how to make gateways between points, including several light years. Unlike the Commonwealth, these are harder to aim (which makes more sense, and more importantly, serves the rest of the novel too). Several worlds were colonized, including St. Libra - which makes a great part of the fuel used in several worlds - biooil. The biggest of those biooil makers is headed by the North family - mostly composed of clones. Now, and this is the important event that starts the story, a North was found murdered in NewCastle - just the city of the St. Libra gateway. And murdered with an weird, never seen weapon, that had also been used in a mass murder of ...

Happy 2013! In the beginning of last year, I posted an overview of 2011 stats  on my blogging. So counting this, my professional blog  (which I moved early in the year) and my microsites , on 2012: Posts: 232 (last year: 203) Fiction Book Reviews: 51 (last year: 35) Technical Book Reviews: 11 (last year: 9) Game Reviews: 90 (last year: 78) Visitors: 33204 (last year: 19204) Overall, I am pretty happy with my posting habits, and with the many excellent books I read and games I played in 2012. And specially, of course, with the very large increase in my number of blog visitors! Thanks for reading!