STG's

I have been using Apple Music since shortly after it became available. I have used it on an iPad Air, and on my PC. My smartphone uses Android and there is support for it so far. I have only used it at home, with a 60 Mbps internet connection. Apple Music has a great selection. Still, there are clearly some restrictions, at least for Brazil, as some music will appear with a faded title and isn't available to play. That is not very common, though. The playlists on For You are usually excellent, and a good portion are very relevant to what I like. In that aspect, the service is pretty good. The playlists on New tend to be good though, but they are clearly not as focused on what I like. Overall, this seems much better than my (relatively short) experience with Spotify. The iPad app is, quite simply, spectacularly bad. It will crash again and again, and not while doing complex things - just returning to a playing music will sometimes crash it. Adding a music will crash it, starti...

Hitman:Sniper is a new version, mobile version of the pre-sale game for Hitman:Absolution. In both, the plot is very simple - you are Agent 47, carrying out an assignment, sniping from a distance. You get challenges - headshots, number of guard kills, kills that look like an accident and so on. The game is pretty fun, but it can feel a little repetitive because you only get the one level. You can also unlock new weapons as the missions go by. The game has an unwelcome pay-to-win component as you can buy some of the better weapons outright. They aren't cheap either - US$9,99 for the best one. Personally, I feel the interface is acceptable, given the mobile possibilities. Shooting felt much more precise and fast when using a mouse, though. Maybe they will release a PC version as the pre-sell of the next Hitman game... Overall, pretty good, but a little too repetitive.

I 'm   was going to keep this brief (but got carried away), because Far Cry 3 is pretty old. But I only got around to trying it a few weeks ago, way after the Steam sale where I got it. I really liked the original Far Cry. The engine was great, but the nicest thing is that the game didn't care how you accomplished objectives. You could come up with plenty of ways to do things, many of them nowhere near being imagined by the designers. Far Cry 2 had the annoying malaria part (which is jokingly mentioned in 3), and for these and other reasons I never played more than the start. I am mostly enjoying Far Cry 3. I like the whole open world style, and the "destroy enemy bases" mechanism. Speaking about those, I really like how the whole stealth thing goes, but that you are still not forced to be stealthy (it is just much easier). Also, the bases have very nice varieties, so every approach can be a little different. Some are a bit too easy, though. Graphics are prett...

Armada, by Ernest Cline, is a science fiction book with lot of eighties pop culture references - just like his previous book - Ready Player One  . The books are not related, and while Armada is pretty good, I recently re-read Ready Player One and it wins easily. Armada is clearly inspired by The Last Starfighter, and quite mildly by Ender's Game. I imagine most people who have seen both movies or read the books already have a pretty good idea where this is going. The main character is Zack, who is 18, still at high school, and on a class he suddenly sees an alien spaceship - which looks exactly like one from his favorite game. Is he losing his mind? His father had a crazy notebook with theories about aliens... Personally I felt that it felt too derivative until the middle, but then things pick up and it is pretty good till the end (which allows for continuations). There is also heavy mentions of mix tapes left by Zack father - which certainly reminds me of Guardians of th...