STG's

Kerbal Space Program is a spaceship simulator. You can assemble many types of spaceships with many configurations, and then fly them. And subsequently crash them. Or even land them. Flying isn't very hard, and there are some nice tutorials. It is still in beta, but it is already quite fun. I do have random freezes in the sound and occasionally on the game, though. I have also played a simpler, 2D version for iPad which is quite fun - SimpleRockets. I believe it is based on KSP. Recommended if you like this kind of simulators.

Age of Empires 2 HD is a relaunch of the old RTS classic with improved graphics. So, how does it look? Like an old game with improved graphics. If you expected it to look like a brand new game, you will be quite disappointed. That is particularly apparent on the animations, which can look a bit silly sometimes. But overall, if you are a fun of the original, you probably can't go wrong with a better looking version (which I imagine looks VERY dated now - and I understand there were problems even with wide screen modes). If you never played but you have played newer RTS games you might be a little bothered. It goes the classic RTS way of accumulating resources, and using them to build, create your army and upgrade everything.  Upgrades stops in the Imperial Age. One particularly lame move is that the start screen is messed up if you don't have the screen DPI (Font Sizes) on the default. And them they have the nerve to point you to a page (which opens in IE, no l...

Homeland - by Cory Doctorow - is a sequel to Little Brother. Marcus Yallow gets a Wikileaks-style dump with thousands of documents - and if it is released it might change everything. As usual, Cory likes to go onto the limits of tech, with interesting effects, particularly on the protests. I got a little sad reading Aaron Swartz's afterword, though. He committed suicide early this year, just before the book release. Truly a great loss. Strongly recommended. You can download this for free on Cory's page , but I think it is worth paying for it to help him continue doing these free releases, so I got it on Amazon myself.

Equoid - by Charles Stross - is a novella that takes place in the Laundry universe. The laundry is a secret british agency that deals with Lovecraftian occult attacks. I wouldn't normally bother to review a novella (32 pages), but it is worth reading, specially if you like the Laundry series. This one is a tale about unicorns - who turn out to exist, sort of, and to be pure evil. You can get Equoid on Tor  for free.

Game Dev Tycoon is a wonderful industry simulator for game development. These are not new - I remember playing a simple one in my 8-bit computer back in 88 and quite a few since then - but it is surprising how much fun this one is. You start up in a garage, and by choosing a few simple options per game you develop, you can build up to a major company. The system is very nice - you just pick a genre, topic, platform, rating and game engine (you also develop this). After that you pick some choices - how much time are you going to spend on graphics? What about AI? With these, together with the current trends, give a rating to your game, and these influence how many sales it will get. The rating The big office. Also, I don't bother with game names :-) You are also constantly researching new technologies to apply to your games, as well as training yourself and your employees. Graphics and sounds are simple but fit the theme perfectly. My only complaint is the ov...

While it is a big classic and its themes are constantly brought up (specially these days), I had never read 1984 , by George Orwell before. As many of you might have heard (even if you didn't read it), 1984 talks about an empire where citizens are under constant surveillance by the government, which isn't limited by laws, and which constantly reviews history. It is a very, very dark dystopia. It is hard to read the book and not see some disturbing parallels. Governments will keep track of you (in 1984 they only bothered with a smaller percentage of the population - Party members and up) not only through CCTV cameras, but also through your many, many electronic footprints. History can effectively be changed - for instance by having laws that only allow authorized biographies (such as in Brazil) - and also the present, by manipulating statistics (although I guess that might have been done throughout history) or by only supplying printing paper to certain newspapers (as happen...