Dave's Place / Metamusing

Life and times of a webgeek

Monthly Archives: January 2009

Friday fun: Triangle Wizard

Take one dose rogue like, one pinch of 80′s vector graphic arcade game aesthetic, a smidgen of diablo II rpg action, mix up in Wouter van den Wollenberg’s brain, and you get Triangle Wizard, a real time arcade rogue like:

Free, a tiny download, and worth checking out if you’re a fan of any of the above genres. My only real complaint is the walking speed of your wizard is on the slow side – I wish the action was a bit faster paced. Then again, I keep getting whomped at low level so maybe it’s for the best -

Film: Shotgun Stories

Susan got a recommendation for this one from Bob Mondello on NPR and we watched it last night. Disappointing sums it up. It’s a drama about a feud between two families that becomes violent when the family patriarch dies. It’s a meditation on violence that’s not very well acted and not very well filmed, plus there’s a certain lack of….verisimilitude? Authenticity? One character walks around in the same bleached white gauze bandages all movie, another demonstrates his supposed mechanical skills by showing his younger brothers how to tighten a bolt…it just came across poorly. There were a few laughs to be had at the expense of the dim rednecks that make up one of the families, the ending is unusual for a film with this theme, and it exhibits that rare ‘show, not tell’ quality I so enjoy – these are the only positive things I can think of to say about the film.

It’s well reviewed over on IMDB so maybe it’s your cup of tea – it wasn’t mine despite generally liking dramas.

Book finished: Bangkok Tattoo

If you enjoyed Bangkok 8, which is the previous book by this author and features many of the same characters, or if you like well crafted detective stories steeped in local (Thai, in this case) color with generous helpings of raunchy sex and graphic violence, there’s some fun to be had with this book. Others should probably stay away, because the book is flawed. Sonchai, the main character of the first book and one of the main draws, sits on the sidelines in this book for long stretches as a flawed narrator, a beautiful young-ish Thai prostitute, relates how she became involved with the CIA agent who turns up dead in the beginning of the book. Thai prostitute adventures in the USA are fun and all, but I prefer Sonchai’s world to the one I live in seen through the eyes of another. The writing style’s the same, there are plenty of laughs, and there’s still enough Thai color to keep it interesting, but I’d probably give this one a pass if I could choose again.

Bangkok Tattoo over on amazon, if you’re still interested..

Game finished: Lego Batman

Susan and I finished up Lego Batman this week. We had previously played through Lego Star Wars together. Lego Batman is more of the same, basically, but set in the Batman universe instead of in Star Wars. It’s a bit shorter than Lego Star Wars, though both are almost endless games in that there are a ton of achievements and hidden items to collect from levels even after you’ve beaten them. We both felt Batman was a bit easier, especially in the vehicle missions, and that this was a good thing – some of the Star Wars vehicle missions were pretty annoying. The game engine still has issues with perspective and jumping – sometimes you find it really hard to move along a narrow ledge or jump from one platform to another because you can’t gauge your position on the 3d plane – the developers could do more work here. Despite this, I’d recommend the game to anyone who’s a fan of the other Lego games, or who’s looking for a coop game to play with their significant other or kids – it’s great lightweight fun, not too challenging, and often funny.

I’ll probably pick up Lego Indiana Jones next, plus there are rumors of Lego Harry Potter coming this christmas, which seems like a natural fit for the series. I’m not sure what to make of the other rumor, which is that a Lego Rock Band game is coming. Meanwhile, check out the video below if you’re not already familiar with the Lego games:

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Pineapple Express – don’t bother

I watched Pineapple Express over the weekend, which may surprise folks since it’s not really in tune with my tastes, but I loved the Cheech and Chong movies back in the day and enjoyed the 40 year old Virgin and Superbad, which had some of the same folks involved, so I figured why not give it a shot. I shouldn’t have bothered. It starts off ok, introducing the main character, his dope dealer, and the improbable series of events that leads to them spending the movie fleeing a gang of murderous thugs, but the whole thing feels like amateur hour with bad acting, sophmoric humor, a plot full of holes, and an unsatisfying ending. My recommendation? Stay away.

PSA – stop using Safari until Apple releases a patch

There’s a pretty nasty security vulnerability in Safari having to do with RSS feeds, the news of which is getting drowned out by all the inaugural hoopla, so I’m doing my bit to bang the drum. The details are here, but the bottom line is, if you’re on OSX 10.5, either stop using Safari or follow the step at the link, otherwise you’re risking the privacy of your data. If you don’t trust Mastenbrook’s info you can read up on the issue over on secunia as well.

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Friday Fun: A New Zero

If I told you someone’s managed to build elements of the Battlefield series of FPS along with elements of combat flight sims into a tiny ~400k executable, you wouldn’t believe me, so instead make your way over to Cryptic Sea’s page for their upcoming game A New Zero. It’s in public beta right now, is a tiny download, and has fun multiplayer in a tiny download. It’s all a bit spartan right now but they plan for much more and it’s worth checking out even if only to marvel at the achievement. This is Windows only at present, sorry mac folk. Here’s their trailer to give you a sense of the gameplay:

Game finished: Defense Grid

image courtesy of Kotaku - check out the their coverage of the game

image courtesy of Kotaku - check out their coverage of the game

Defense Grid: The Awakening is fantastic. 2008 was definitely the year of the tower defense games, at least for me. I played and enjoyed a ton of them, most notably PixelJunk Monsters, Desktop Tower Defense, several Warcraft III mods, and now as the coda to the list, Defense Grid. This is a commercial release you can pickup off of Steam and later this year on your Xbox360 via XBLA. It’s $20 for the PC and worth every penny. It distinguishes itself from the pack with excellent graphics and audio, a really well designed UI, great unit and tower balance, and a healthy dose of replayability. I’ve listed this as ‘finished’ because I’ve beaten every level now at the default difficulty level, but there’s a ton more to do, including replaying the levels at a higher difficulty level and medaling in each level. The developers have more planned for this game if it sells well, so please consider it if you like tower defense games – there are few better ones than this and it’s a bargain for what you get.

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The day the 1up died

Actually it was yesterday. This is a pretty major bummer. Craptacular web portal ‘ugo’ purchased 1up.com yesterday, shuttered EGM, laid off a significant percentage of the staff, and canceled all 1up podcasts and the 1up Show video blog. This has been rumored to be in the works for a while, but the extent of the changes is surprising. EGM was one of the longest in-print gaming magazine and one of the few remaining ones published in the US, and while I was never a regular reader I was a huge fan of the podcasts and video blog that it spawned – I was listening to at least 5-6 hours of 1up audio content a week and I’m really sad to see them end. Here’s hoping they land on their feet in this down economy. Meanwhile, this is further evidence of the death of print, which seems to be happening faster than most folks, myself included, thought it would. There’s a good piece over here by Clay Shirky that talks about this and other media-related subjects.

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Just finished: Crystal Rain

So I just finished reading Crystal Rain. I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the reviewers over on Amazon, but all in all it was an enjoyable read. Strengths would be: imaginative setting (descendents of an Aztec and carribean islander diaspora battle it out on a world fallen far from it’s starfaring origins, proxies in a war between interstellar powers trapped on the planet with them), action packed. Cons would be writing quality, cardboard characters, unsatisfying ending. It’s the authors first book, so he deserves some slack, but I’m not sure if I’ll continue on to the subsequent books in this setting.

New Year’s resolution

Last year my resolution was to give up my daily diet coke habit, and I actually succeeded, so this year I’m going to go for two resolutions. We’ll see how it goes. My first resolution is similar to last year’s, but this time I’ll focus on coffee. I drink way too much. My daily intake looks like: 2 cups before I get to work, a cup at work in the morning, and another cup in the afternoon after lunch. Things are even worse on the weekends, when I often drink three pots of coffee with Susan. For this year I’ll keep it simple, and resolve to lose the cup of coffee when I get to work.

My second resolution is to revisit one I madeand failed to keep a couple of years ago. You may notice the new lifestream in the right column of this site, and I’m going to do my bit to populate it by resolving to record every book and movie I read this year, much like I started to do in this booklog and movielog back in 2006. Part of the reason I abandoned the logs back in 2006 was it started to feel like a chore. To make this easier, this time around I make no guarantees as to how much I’ll say about a given book/movie/whatever – the resolution is to simply at a minimum record the fact that I did it, and maybe a sentence or two about what I thought. We’ll see how it goes.