Review: Telltale Games The Walking Dead Season 1 (PS Vita)

I got The Walking Dead as part of my PS Vita package. However, the loading times for the game was so long and the loading frequency was so high that I gave up, only to restart again when The Wolf Among Us persuaded me to give it another shot.

Just as with The Wolf Among Us, The Walking Dead is an old style point and click interactive adventure. It claims that the game adapts to the choices you make, and that your decisions can affect the rest of the game down stream. This is true, but only to a very limited extent. For instance, characters will remember the decisions, speeches, and actions that affected them and talk to you about them later. Sometimes, you might have to choose between rescuing one person or the other, and that decision will carry over to the next episode. However, the combinatorial explosion from providing a fully branching story-line would be too much even for the 2.5GB of storage the game consumes on your memory card, so the game cheats.

The problem with this cheating is that it robs you of the game's promise, and it's particularly obvious during emotionally tense moments of the game. For instance, episode 3 has a mystery that the player solves very quickly by meta-gaming: there's one character you're not allowed to interview or accuse, and of course, that character did it. Well, that's frustrating by itself, since there's a reveal in episode 4 and you're supposed to be surprised. But the worst thing about this set up is that the result is that one of the characters you saved previously is shot and killed instead, and another character is left behind. It's one thing to be not smart enough to solve the mystery, it's another to not be allowed to solve the mystery even when you know what happened and who to accuse.

If this was an isolated event, I'd be inclined to forgive and forget. But something extremely similar happens in the last episode, where despite your pleading to the contrary, the plot moves ahead and removes agency from you. Now, you'll note that I was more than happy to forgive and forget Uncharted 2 or The Last of Us despite both games being essentially linear with zero control over the story, but The Walking Dead kept reminding me at the start of each episode (there are 5 in total, plus a 6th collection of related short stories) that I'm constantly reminded of the failure to fulfill that promise. Furthermore, both those afore-mentioned games are primarily action games which do their jobs really well.

The Walking Dead, however, is full of technical glitches, at least on the Vita. The game frequently stutters, sometimes even loops, and has unsatisfying controls. If you use the touch screen controls, you don't get to selection actions on objects when you touch them, but at least the "action" portion of the games like shooting zombies is easily achievable. If you use the joystick controls and buttons, you have much finer control of the action, but the "action" portion of the games (like in episode 4) are virtually unachievable, taking me upwards of 6 tries. This would be fine if the game allowed you to use both interfaces at once, but no, you have to pick one or the other and can't switch during the episode.

In any case, I cannot recommend this game for anyone other than die-hard fans of the comic books or TV series. The story is decent, and many have reviewed the game as having a better story than the TV series, which saves me the time of having to ever watch the TV series. Even for those die-hard fans, I would suggest either the PS3 version or the PC version, with the PC version preferred for $8.50. If you can wait for a steam sale you can get the games for under $5. The reviews for the game online are nothing short of stellar (and Sony believes those reviews, since it created a bundle for the holidays), but for this reviewer anyway, I felt the premise of the game was not delivered because of the technical problems and the ham-fisted approach to plot. Not recommended.

When will the next generation of game consoles launch?

While I'm thinking about why game consoles are likely to be around for quite a while, it was instructive for me to take a look at what the most likely launch period for the next generation of game consoles would be. This is discounting Android consoles such as Ouya, the future Amazon game console, and whatever Apple or Google cooks up. My expectation is that those game consoles will be under-powered and unattractive to hard-core gamers and will not attract AAA titles.

The one possibility that could derail my predictions is if Steam boxes take off, but given that Steam boxes will run Linux, and not support much of the existing game library, I do not expect them to be a major player. Steam boxes have a bunch of issues, not least of which is that each steam box would have a different configuration, meaning that the uniform platform that game developers would get as far as consoles are concerned wouldn't exist. I expect steam machines to combine the worst defects of both PCs and consoles.

The driver for the next generation of consoles will most likely to be 4K TV. If you look at what would be acceptable for 4K gaming today, the anandtech analysis would be that no less than 4 Titan GTX video cards would be needed to drive a AAA 4K game at 60+fps. This is at max settings, however, and consoles do not need max settings to be good enough, so maybe 3 GTX video cards would be sufficient. Each of the GTX video cards is about $700 today, so 3 of them would be $2100. If we assume that the consumer part for these devices have to get down below $200 in order for them to be commercially viable, that would be four Moore's cycles to get to $132 for the compute equivalent of 3 GTX video cards.

The traditional Moore's cycle is 18 months, but in recent years, it's been more like 2-3 years, or 8-12 years. However, there are several factors. First of all, it might not be necessary to deliver games at the full 4K resolution. The 7th generation of game consoles only delivered 720p resolution to HDTVs, and it's entirely feasible that the 9th generation of consoles would deliver say, 2560x1440 resolution rather than "true" 4K. This would be particularly attractive for whoever lost the 8th generation console wars, since that vendor (currently Microsoft) would be more motivated to start the 9th generation wars earlier rather than allowing the 8th generation to be dominated by a major competitor. It's entirely feasible that Nintendo could do this as little as 4 years out, but given their recent statements, I do not expect them to try to compete on the basis of CPU or GPU horsepower with Sony or Microsoft. Secondly, it's quite possible that dedicated gaming hardware that has software written close to the metal will outperform Anandtech's benchmarks. Put all this together and I expect the next generation of consoles to be deliver within 5 years, rather than the 8 years between the PS3 and PS4. This is made much more likely now that both consoles are on the x86 architecture rather than custom hardware, enabling more frequent updates.

I have to say that I'm fairly excited about 4K, though I disagree that 4K streaming is necessarily a good thing. HD streaming already looks much worse than Blu Ray to my eyes, so my guess is that it would take a higher bandwidth delivery format than Blu Ray for 4K to truly take off.

Are you surprised by the success of the game consoles?

If you read reviews in general interest newspapers or magazines like the New York Times, you should be surprised to learn that the PS4 has been out of stock nearly everywhere. This is surprising since not only do the consoles face competition from tablets and PCs, but also a range of devices ranging from Roku to Chromecast. One would think that those cheaper devices would out-rank expensive and "difficult to use" game consoles for Netflix streaming, but NPD reports that 39% of Netflix users who watch movies on a TV watch it on a game console! This figure is even more amazing when you consider that only 56% of US households have a game console, meaning that those game console owners are much more loyal to their devices than Roku or Chromecast owners. By the way, this unexpected use of the game console as a media device explains why the Wii U had such low adoption rates: the Wii U cannot double as a blue ray player, nor can it play movies from an external device.

The mystery becomes much less of one when you consider recent computer ownership trends. Most laptops simply do not have the GPU capable of running modern games. For instance, the highest end Apple Macbooks and iMacs have an Nvidia GT 750M inside them. This is a 722 GFlop GPU with 384 stream units. That sounds very impressive, until you consider the PS3 and PS4 each have more than 2 TFlops of performance, with the PS4 running 1152 shader units. But that's not all, the high end Apple machines are driving 2880x1800 displays or 2650x1440 displays, while the PS3 is only driving 720p output and the PS4 is only going to drive 1080p output. In other words, the game consoles have more than 3X the GPU power but are driving 1/4 the pixels of the laptops.

Tablets are even worse, as they frequently have the same resolution as the above, but have to be optimized for battery life of 10 hours or more. The iPad Air has 76 GFlops (1/10th the power of the high end Mac), while driving the same number of pixels. For reference, the PS Vita has 38.4 GFlops, but is driving a display that's 1/6th the resolution of the iPad Air, so it's got 3X the equivalent power of the iPad in terms of pushing pixels around. Note that the Vita has a battery life of 3-5 hours, as opposed to the 10 hours that you would expect from an iPad.

Gaming PCs are a different story, since they don't have to run at low power, but if you look at a typical PS4-alike PC, not only do you not manage to hit the $400 price point and end up with a much larger case and lower memory bandwidth than the PS4, you also run out of budget to buy a blu-ray drive or controller. You could buy an Alienware PC, but now you're looking at a budget well over $400, and you're locked out of Sony's exclusive games for the PS4, which judging from the track record on the PS3, would be a fairly substantial loss. This explains why my PC gamer friends were disappointed with the PS4 and XBox One announcements, while the market has proven that those consoles are selling very well. The typical PC gamer will have a $1,000+ PC that will outperform any of the consoles, but will also be an increasingly small percentage of the population compared to the number of folks toting Macbook Airs.

The problem with PC gaming recently has been the focus on lower power rather than higher performance. Intel has simply chosen to use its real estate on the chips to increase performance/watt by delivering more cores rather than deliver more GPU. While most consumers couldn't care less about reduced power consumption on their machines (most PC users still turn on and off their machines, and don't run their machines at full capacity often enough for the power bills to matter),
Intel's primary customers for high end processors are the companies running high end data centers like Google and Facebook, rather than the individual consumer looking for maximum single-threaded performance. In addition, it's hard enough for you to get others in your household to use the controller for movie streaming, let alone a mouse and keyboard that's required to manipulate a PC UI.

The net result of this set of trends is that unlike many other pundits, not only do I not think that console gaming is dead, I expect to see a console-like device in about 50% of homes for the foreseeable future. There will be a 9th generation of console, and beyond. The typical household doesn't consider PCs/Laptops anything other than work devices, and will continue to buy separate game consoles both for streaming video and for playing high-end games.

Review: The Wolf Among Us Episodes 1 & 2

If you're an old fogey, you'll remember the old point and click adventure games: you know, you click on a graphical environment and you have dialog, picking up items in your inventory, etc. Well, Telltale games have brought them back on modern machines, including tablets, PS3, PCs, Macs, etc. The twist they have on them is that they release episodes on a regular schedule, and they're more like interactive comic books than they are like adventure games. For one thing, you can't actually affect the outcome of the episodes (unless you die and then you get a game over screen and restart). Secondly, adventure games were long, taking hours and hours to finish, while each Telltale episode's designed to last at most 1-2 hours, about the length of a movie.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of the Telltale approach to games. I tried The Walking Dead on my Vita for about an episode and a half, but it's quite obvious that the Telltale games doesn't employ any Silicon Valley engineers (they're in San Rafael). The game loads every 10-15 minutes, and the loading time is pretty long, considering how little content is in each segment of a game. Unlike a video, you can't actually play these games at double speed, which is annoying because in a very slowly paced game like The Walking Dead you get pretty annoyed at having to slowly point and click at everything. I got bored to tears and switched to playing more interesting games.

Well, Sony had The Wolf Among Us for sale at $9 this week, and I decided that this was about the same price as the Fables comic, so if it had about as much content it was a reasonable price. Prior to this sale, I wasn't even aware that there was going to be a Fables game being worked on. This is probably how Telltale's business model works: they don't really sell to people want to play games, as much as they sell to people who are already fans of the licensed property and want more of the comic book or the TV series. I wasn't a fan of the Walking Dead comic or TV series (I actually did read several issues of the comics, and they were so lackluster and filled with cliches about the Zombie apocalypse that I didn't bother reviewing them for this blog), so I couldn't get invested in the game, but Fables? Count me in! I was also hopeful that the PS3 wouldn't suffer the loading time issues involved in the Vita version.

Set prior to the events of the comic book series, you take the viewpoint of Bigby Wolf, who's easily one of the best characters in the series. As sheriff of fable-town, he has to investigate all crimes involving the Fables in New York, and while this case starts innocuously enough, it soon degenerates into a murder mystery. The characters are well depicted, and you do get to meet almost all the characters you've met earlier in the comics. Unlike The Walking Dead on the Vita, The Wolf Among Us on the PS3 with a hybrid 7200rpm SSD actually loads pretty fast. I don't really know whether it's because I'm more invested in the story, or that the game actually has less content, but I went through each episode fairly quickly, and it didn't feel like a burden. Furthermore, "playing" the game at 1080p on a big screen TV is a better way to experience this than on a small screen.

The game does have more action sequences than The Walking Dead, and they come on fast, so you do need some reflexes to be able to "play" this interactive story. The mystery is fair, and I figured out who the murderer was before the reveal, which felt pretty good. The downside is that the game is still fairly glitchy, and froze up once, forcing me to replay a section I'd already played. For $9 for 5 episodes, this is money well spent. I'm not sure I'd pay much more. Nevertheless, if you're a PC or Mac owner, a Steam sale is bound to come up sooner or later and you can snag it at $5 or less than. Recommended, but not at full price. And if you've read this far and haven't read the comics, go buy and read them right now!

Review: The Last of Us

The Last of Us is a weighty game. It lets you know this the moment you start it up, because to even start a new game requires lots of disk churning and whirling. I once timed a game startup at 15 minutes, though after the game got cached onto my hybrid SSD startup became a much more manageable 3-4 minutes. The characters move as though the weight of the world is on their shoulders as well. Joel, the main viewpoint character, grunts and moves slowly, and even on the occasions when you play Ellie, the girl he's supposed to protect, she doesn't quite dance, either.

The first 80% of the game absolutely drove me nuts. Part of it was my own fault, and part of it was the game's. I'd read many reviews saying that this was a game where you could stealth your way past a lot of enemies, and so I set out to do precisely that, only to be frustrated time after time by an exit that required making noise and therefore led to my having to kill every moving object in the arena. This was my fault: I shouldn't have paid any attention to reviews.

And then sometimes I would try to stealth a section and for no apparent reason monsters would descend upon my location and the game would frustrate me no end. I couldn't apparently shoot my way out of the encounter, nor could I find a way to avoid the monsters! This was the game's fault. In many ways, the first 80% of the game felt like the first day you attended an English class that wanted to teach you LITERATURE. Until that day, you enjoyed reading, and you loved stories. What that English class taught you was that LITERATURE means you can't have any fun reading whatsoever. The stories would have to be insipid and boring, like The Merchant of Venice, instead of Flowers for Algernon. You would have to read Things Fall Apart instead of A Wizard of Earthsea. In many ways, The Last of Us does for action games what The Merchant of Venice would do for Shakespeare: make you hate it. Instead of the beautiful state of flow you can achieve in Among Thieves, you got a character, Joel, who plodded instead of ran, couldn't aim a weapon straight, and of course, ran out of ammunition at every opportunity. Even the "realism" rankled, because your enemies would shoot infinite bullets at you, but when you finally killed one you'd try to loot his body and discovered that he'd apparently used his last bullet just before you killed him. The first 80% of The Last of Us felt like I was being made to atone for years of being a rat-bastard DM. And yes, I was playing the game on EASY mode! Nowhere did the word fun enter into the game play. I played the game hoping for a payoff, but watched in despair as the hours racked up on the PS3 without a sign of me becoming actually good at it.

Then in the last 20% of the game everything finally clicked. First, I'd finally upgraded Joel and his weapons to the point where I didn't feel like he was incompetent at everything. He still ran out of ammunition frequently, but I finally learned that nail bombs were for humans and Molotov cocktails were for monsters. The repetition finally drilled everything into me. Then the game switched me over to playing Ellie, the girl he was trying to protect, and her encounter with the enemy David sent chills up my spine, tingling with suspense. That's followed by a gorgeous sequence in Salt Lake City where every cliche would have had Joel running after Ellie as she ran head-long into danger, and instead... we got giraffes in a beautifully rendered post-apocalyptic urban setting. Make no mistake, this game is gorgeously rendered. Naughty Dog has managed to motion-capture and program its way past the uncanny valley of character animation and facial expressions. Every nuance of the characters, from body language to little ticks and smiles is rendered in such a way that the game feels very much like a feature film, and I'm not talking about the cut scenes. If this is what Naughty Dog can manage with an 8 year old CPU/GPU combination and 256MB of RAM, I can't wait to see what they do given modern technology and 8GB of RAM.

There are minor glitches in the game, though the most glaring one was the stealth-kill button when you play as Ellie. The game prompts you to push the triangle button, but it really should be the square. This bug cost me no small amount of frustration.

What's more, the game does all the right things in terms of story. For instance, I agree that one of the problems with Tomb Raider was the character called Sam. Naughty Dog could have gone that way, with you having to rescue Ellie all the time, but in fact, didn't. Not only does Ellie rescue herself, but during combat she frequently helps Joel, which is one of the reasons the relationship between Joel and Ellie is believable. By the end of the story, you understand that these two will do anything for each other. On top of that, the story is extremely self-aware: the violence is brutal, and the game doesn't shy away from it, and Ellie gasps when Joel does something particularly nasty. The game does for the zombie game what Unforgiven did for Westerns.

The soundtrack is also well done, full of quiet beauty, and quite unlike anything else you might have heard in video games. I was content to let the ending credits roll and just listen to the music when the game was over, but rather than feel satisfied that I had done something, I just felt relieved that I didn't have to play this game any more.

Thus, I am left with a dilemma. As a technological tour de force, this game is a must play. For the moments of beauty in a post apocalyptic world, it's clear that the teams of artists that worked on this game did not waste their time. With great voice acting and a reasonably decent story (though unfortunately I spotted the plot twists miles away), the characters draw you in and make you believe in Naughty Dog's creation in a way that lesser games struggle to do. But is the game play fun? Not really. It's repetitive, and the amount of work you have to do to gather objects, etc., overshadows the moments of brilliance. And you really just care about the story, you could just watch the entire game on youtube. Nowhere does the game actually let you make substantial choices, so you wouldn't be missing much.

If you haven't played games for awhile, play Among Thieves or Tomb Raider first. Both those games excel at putting you in flow, and being fun. Then when you have had enough fun, and want to eat your vegetables, play The Last of Us. And in this case, it's OK if you never get to your veggies. You won't get constipated if you don't.

Review: Ghost in the Wires

Ghost in the Wires is Kevin Mitnick's memoir of his time as a hacker and fugitive from the law. It's great reading and very entertaining, not least because it can be read at several levels.

As a thriller, it's every bit as much fun to read as it was for me to watch Catch Me If You Can. Mitnick (or at least, his co-author) brings in entertaining details about how he socially engineered Novell, Sun, DEC, the various phone companies, and security expert Tsutomu Shimomura. The book's very light on technical details, and it's not clear if Mitnick actually did anything with the gigabytes of source code he downloaded from the various companies he hacked except for VMS, which he did write a number of exploits for. What's clear, however, is that no amount of computer security is going to help if you fall for social engineering, which would be very difficult to inoculate against in any organization with any semblance of cooperation between departments.

Now, if you treat this book as a work of fiction, it's also fascinating because Mitnick's clearly an unreliable narrator with a singular goal: to make you believe that he was doing what he was doing for fun. It's quite clear that he enjoyed duping people (social engineering is just another term for "lying," as he admits in this book), and hacking into police chatter, and his consistent attacks on certain individuals clearly violate their privacy in a way that would repulse most people who stopped to think about it. Given his personality, it's not surprising that it took about 8 years in prison for him to change his ways.

What's amusing to me is that Mitnick himself was socially engineered on numerous occasions, by "friends" and people otherwise close to him. He called these people "betrayers", but the fact that he went back to these "friends" several times after being betrayed showed that he himself was a poor judge of character, largely because lying was so much a part of his personality that he couldn't fault his friends for doing it to him!

Are there any useful bits in the book? Yes. The last section includes a list of tips on improving your personal security. Again, it's pretty amusing, since he claims that Windows is actually more secure than OS X, it's just that Windows is far more popular so there are more people trying to exploit its vulnerabilities. (It's notable that Mitnick never hacked any Windows systems himself, nor does he runs Windows personality) He does note that ChromeOS is very secure by virtue of not having anything to attack.

In any case, I'll recommend this book for anyone interested in any of the topics he discusses, as well as anyone who loves heist movies.

Review: Batman - Arkham Origins

I don't usually review current games, since I have been away from video games for so long that I have a backlog that's cheap. But Arkham Origins came with the PS3 I bought to replace one broken by my son (he fed 2 disks into the blu ray player at once), along with The Last of Us. I fully expected to play and enjoy The Last of Us, but found myself getting stuck early on in the game, and after finishing Arkham City, decided to try Arkham Origins while I still had my Batman reflexes.

Arkham Origins has its problems, partly because the game designers/writers on the game made a major change to the boss fights. Shamus Young's analysis on this game is spot-on, and I'll defer to him on this point, since I have nothing to add:

The rule in movies is “Show, don’t tell”. The rule in games is “Do, don’t show.” The writer is yanking control away from the player at the very moment they want it most: The moment of victory. I realize it’s not as exciting for a viewer to sit there and watch the fight end in button-mash beat down #7, but this is a game, not a movie. The focus should be on making something fun to do, not just fun to watch.

Regardless, however, I found the game relentlessly playable. There are several factors for this. First, I was already familiar with the game from previous games in the series. This is a big part of the reason why sequels are so popular in games, movies and novels. Once you've invested in learning about the world and how to navigate it, it's so much less effort to play another game in the series than to learn a whole new UI. Secondly, the game doesn't try to be too challenging, especially in easy mode, which is a problem I've had with many other games. Finally, Arkham Origins now has a new crime-investigation mode which while shallow, fleshes out the "Batman as Detective" angle much better than it did before, adding fun to an aspect of the game that was previously just "follow the augmented reality markers." Given that Rocksteady's a critically acclaimed publisher while Warner Games Montreal are new to this, that's a significant improvement and one frequently overlooked by critics of this game.

Finally, the game is short enough that I never found myself wondering why I was wherever I was. While Arkham City had tons of information overload, I never felt that way in Arkham Origins because the story clearly pointed me onwards in many ways. The story is also better than previous games in that Batman actually changes and develops as a character. In Arkham City, he tolerates huge losses near the end of the game, but he seems as unflinching as Judge Dredd would be.

My biggest problem with the game? The fact that you had to fight Bane too many times. You fight him no less than 3-4 times in the game as a "boss", and I think once is plenty. Sure, the mechanics is different in the last Bane fight, but why couldn't they have picked someone else?

My take on Arkham Origins is that it's gotten a bad rep simply because Rocksteady was a tough act to follow. But many critics overlook that it's a better game than Arkham City in many ways. Arkham Asylum's still the best game in the series, but I wouldn't pass up Arkham Origins or treat it as a lesser creation compared to the other two. Recommended.

Review: New York Times for the Kindle

There's no question that the Kindle is by far the best device for reading, especially long form reading. But the Kindle's New York Times is more expensive than buying the paper newspaper or subscribing to the website. At $20/month, it's $5 more than the web-only digital access subscription. But the price difference could be worth it if you end up reading more. The New York Times offered a one month long trial, so I picked it up, since I expected to cancel it within a month.

Reading on the Kindle is very different from the web-site. For one thing, there are no ads! There's absolutely no distraction whatsoever from the content. As a result, you sweep from one story to the next in record time, and what would take an hour to browse through on the paper version would take about 15 minutes. This is despite the interface on my basic Kindle being less than ideal: you have to use the directional pad to move from article to the next, and one section to the next. Woe unto you if you were to accidentally switch sections if you didn't intend to. You'd lose your place in the paper and then have to restart your browse.

One of the unexpected difficulties I ran into was that you can't directly share articles from the kindle to any of the social networks. All you can do is "clip the article", whereupon it would show up as a text file called "My Clippings" which you can read by attaching your Kindle to a computer via USB cable. So what this means is that I'd read the day's paper, clipping articles I found interesting, and then when I had time, I'd link my cable to the computer and then share those articles by searching on Google and clicking through. This is additional effort, but not necessarily a bad thing: it forced me to curate the New York Times articles I shared more carefully. On the other hand, I could easily see myself not doing it for a while and then accumulating a backlog of articles that's never shared. Given the time spent doing so, it also meant that my shares would be delayed by significant amounts of time, possibly days or weeks.

By far the biggest problem with the Kindle version, however, is that just like a delivered dead-tree paper, it's yesterday's news. The up to date web-site is more timely, and has more interesting news. The printed page also has some advantages. For instance, the page on FPS on Sunday's New York Times looks much better on the page than on the web, and never finds it to the Kindle version. You also don't get the Sunday review of books, which I discovered after the fact to be an actually useful addendum to the New York Times.

Whether you should get the Kindle version of the New York Times depends very much on your reading habits. I think that it could be worth the $5 premium simply because of how much better the Kindle version reads. Nevertheless, missing the photos, additional content, and having mostly yesterday's news would probably be a turn-off for most readers.

Review: Batman Arkham City

Arkham Asylum was the first game I ever finished on the PS3, and Arkham City came with extremely high reviews, with many critics saying that it was even better. Unfortunately, by the time I got around to starting Arkham City, Bowen was born and I was too busy to play. A recent upgrade of a video card and a Humble Bundle sale meant that I could continue on my PC with its 1440p screen and all the glory thereof, albeit several years later.

First of all, to properly play this game on the PC pretty much requires an XBox 360 Controller. For a while, I used my PS3 controller using DSTool, but then one day DSTool went and took over my Logitech Wireless receiver, which was not cool. And yes, I did try a cheap Logitech knock-off controller, but it was unsatisfying and imprecise, so I can't recommend any of the alternatives to giving Microsoft money. At least the Microsoft wired controller provides vibration control, so you do get something.

Once you've got everything set up, the game plays well, and it's a beautiful game, provided you like night-time or indoor spaces. If I'd never played Uncharted before, I would say that this was a great game, but having compared to the best of the story-based games, I have to say that Arkham City has several flaws, even when compared to Arkham Asylum.

First of all, the game is a bit too open, and tries to bombard you with information overload the entire time. This is par for the course if you're Batman, of course, but seriously, we already get plenty of information overload during our daily lives, I'd think that an escapist video game wouldn't need it. You could barrel along at full speed through the main story and ignore all the side missions, but that's not how the game was designed, so you'll find yourself ignoring the ticking clock the story points you at and do a few, just to get enough experience points to upgrade Batman a few times.

I played the game on easy, but even then, in some places there were just a few frustrating places where you felt that the controls just didn't work. The remote-controlled batarang, for instance, were an exercise in frustration with keyboard and mouse (I bought the controller to get over this section). Even with the controller, it's not perfect, and just barely workable. The fight with Joker and his underlings was a major difficulty spike: none of the rest of the game is nearly as difficult or challenging. It took me about 6 tries to get past that.

The story, of course, is incredibly well written. The writers pulled out all stops and didn't balk at eliminating the possibility of a sequel (though, as we find out a few years later, the franchise tries to get around the problem by providing a prequel). I think this is easily one of the best Batman stories ever told, in any medium, and the fact that it ties in with the Arkham Asylum very well as a direct sequel is a strength. The penalty, however, is that it's overly long, and uses way more of Batman's portfolio of villains than you can keep track of. I clocked about 17 hours finishing this game, and that's without trying to do all the side missions or the additional DLC.

The game also enables you to play as Catwoman several times during the story, and she plays differently enough from Batman that it's a fun adventure in its own right, though relatively short and fairly easy. It's a good relief from all the craziness that Batman usually gets.

Having said all that, the game does a great job of making you feel like Batman. The controls are fast and responsive, and whenever you work around the room or environment picking off one goon and intimidating the rest, you get a thrill of what it means to be Gotham's greatest detective.

Overall, I recommend this game, but I think it's a bit too hard core for a general audience. If you're not a hard core gamer, you might discover halfway through that you've bit off quite a bit more than you expected. Arkham Asylum's quite a bit better in that regard, so if you haven't played that, do that game first. Both games are relatively old now, so are cheap to get.

Review: The Emperor of All Maladies

If cancer doesn't strike fear in you, it should. I've had a friend die of cancer, and it was scary to watch and difficult to forget. Dr. Murkherjee subtitled The Emperor of All Maladies "the biography of cancer,: and that's as descriptive a name as any.

It discusses the history of cancer discovery and its remedies, from the primitive (early surgeons worked without anesthesia, so you can imagine how horrifying it is) to the modern (like Genentech's invention of Herceptin). Along the way, you get all the fascinating stories of heroes and villains that aren't just interesting to read about, but as fascinating as any exciting adventure novel.

For instance, early anesthetics were cocaine and morphine. Doctors frequently experimented on themselves, and as a result, many surgeons were themselves addicted to cocaine and morphine. In fact, the history of cancer research seems full of doctors who bravely experimented on themselves, including a much more recent account of a doctor who swallowed a glass full of bacteria he suspected of creating an inflammation that could eventually lead to cancer!

Since it was written by a research oncologist, the book is strongest when it discusses recent research, where details about how new targeted cancer drugs are developed and how they attack the cancers they target. Dr. Mukherjee also does not flinch from describing cancer prevention and its villains, chiefest of which is the tobacco industry. The account of the fight between the medical profession and the big tobacco companies is detailed, and exposed many things I didn't know about. For instance, smoking was so prevalent in the 40s and 50s that no one thought to consider smoking might be a cause of lung cancer. When the researchers involved made the connection, they immediately stopped smoking, but in at least one case, it was too late. The researcher had already developed metastatic cancer. Even so, the tobacco companies won reprieve after reprieve by using the familiar phrase, "correlation is not causation."

The creation of the National Cancer Institute and the politics involved is also thoroughly explored. I generally find politics less interesting, but Mukherjee did a great job tying the cancer movement with what went on later with regards to the AIDS epidemic, as well as the consequence of approaching cancer via a directed "therapy first" project as opposed to the traditional vision of government funding basic research without particular goals in mind. I wasn't excited to read it, but in the end was glad the author saw fit to cover it.

The genetic origins of cancer is thoroughly explored, and provides a great discussion of how our genes operate, and why cancer is fundamentally part of our genome and a consequence of evolution.

If there's any flaw in this book, it's that the book flinches away from discussing detailed statistics behind cancer survival rates. There are references to statistics showing that the survivor rates for cancer is still abysmally low, despite the new therapies. If the new therapies are so good, why does it not affect the population of cancer patients statistically?

In any case, the book well deserves its Pulitzer prize, and is well worth the time spent reading it. Recommended.

Review: Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons

It's hard for me to review Brothers as a video game. It certainly has all the credentials of a video game, being available on the PS3, XBox 360, and as a PC download. It requires a decently strong video card, and is probably best played with a controller in your hand, as opposed to mouse and keyboard.

Yet, it is much more of an interactive story than it is a video game. For instance, the game, while ostensibly a puzzle solving adventure game, doesn't actually have more than a couple of puzzles that aren't completely intuitive. Only a handful of puzzles would be considered challenging by even a puzzle-game-hater like me. The game deliberately eschews many of the conventions of video games. There's no leveling system, there's no real escalation of puzzle difficulty, and the designers even wisely omitted the trophy system from the main story, eliminating the usual carrots games usually dangle in front of you to keep you playing. The only thing that keeps you playing is the story, which is whimsical, charming, and gorgeously rendered. The game even provides many benches from which you can sit and just admire the scenery, which is something I used more than a couple of times. The story is told completely without dialog, just murmurings between characters, and a soundtrack that hovers barely at the edge of your perception.

The story begins with two brothers going off on a quest to find a treatment for their ailing father. What's interesting about the design of the game is that you control both characters with one controller. This sounds challenging, and it is, to the point where the design nicely eliminates time based puzzles, for instance, since most humans would have a hard time completing anything too quickly. There are a few places where you have to move by a certain time, but they're far and few between and not a big challenge even if you're not a twitch gamer.

The game excels at putting you in a state of flow, because the puzzles are well designed and intuitive. You really feel as though you're there, linking one puzzle to the next, and encountering one interesting event after another without being bogged down. The adventures are a lot of fun and the game teaches you everything you need to know as you go along without hints, prompts, or dialog. To me, this is the hallmark of an excellent UI and a coherently well-thought-out design.

It's only at the climax of the story that you realize that the game's major goal was to get you attached to the characters, learning their quirks and differences. This enables the director and story to take you places emotionally that most games cannot touch. I won't spoil it for you, but the game takes about 5-6 hours to play through and the ending defies conventional fairy-tale, movie, and video game endings.

Brothers is short, non-violent, with very few elements of horror. It's reasonably priced, at $15 full price and is currently free if you're a Playstaton Plus member. In short, you don't have any excuses for not playing it, and you should. Recommended.

Review: Tomb Raider Reboot

I've never actually played Tomb Raider, so when I saw that it got a 2013 reboot, I decided that the stellar reviews it got and critical acclaim meant it was worth a try. As an engineer, I tend to over-rate engineering achievements, and I have to say, the game engine underlying this version of Tomb Raider is amazing. The graphics are gorgeous, the controls relatively snappy, and the end result is very pretty. If while playing the game you think to yourself, "This looks like a million dollars!", you'd be right, because the budget for Tomb Raider was $100 million. By all accounts, the PC version of the game is the prettiest, especially if you have a strong graphics card to take advantage of it.

What the game designers have chosen to do with the engine is also fairly enjoyable. The game in it's main story line, plays a lot like an Uncharted game. In fact, the first few hours of the game is just as intense as the best of the Uncharted series, with superb writing and great visuals moving the plot along. In fact, the emotional connection the player has with Lara Croft might even be stronger, as she seems more vulnerable than Nathan Drake ever is. And yes, the game passes the Bechdel test, on multiple occasions, not surprising considering that the writer is Rhianna Pratchett.

If the game had continued at this level of intensity through the experience, it would be a better game than any of its competitors. Unfortunately, the game falls apart in the second half of the story. The story isn't to blame. What happened was that the game tries to integrate the experience mechanic of the Batman games, along with the side missions like the optional tombs. If all the side stuff was truly optional, then you could just barrel along and ignore all that, much like the treasure collection in the Uncharted games. Unfortunately, the experience system and weapons upgrade mechanics means that unless you get certain upgrade progressions, the later parts of the game become harder, so you end up scrounging around collecting collectibles for the sake of collectibles.

Now, some of the side missions are fun. The tombs themselves are entertaining puzzles that would take you about 10-15 minutes each. The document discovery stuff is also interesting, since it gives you some back story on the other characters in the game. These pieces fills out the game somewhat, and I have no objection to them. The salvage system, GPS caching, and challenge systems, however, are just silly. They do nothing for the game, forcing you to basically explore the locations thoroughly outside the story, and they dilute the experience severely. Basically, these elements of the game further reinforced for me why the Uncharted games are successful: Naughty Dog studios had the courage to stick to the story that they wanted to tell at the expense of alienating part of the potential audience for their work, while Crystal Dynamics doesn't feel as though they were willing to do so. Ironically, I think eliminating the ancillary systems would have made the overall game quite a bit stronger.

The other thing that broke the flow for me was the way the game let you have a lot of cheap deaths. By this I mean that there are some things that you would never do as a human, but given the limitations of a controller, might result in a death unless the game designers caught it. For instance, if you're standing on a ledge and tip a joystick by accident (or because you're reaching for some other button), Tomb Raider would have Lara fall off the ledge and die. By contrast, every time I've done that in an Uncharted game, Nathan Drake would just grab the edge of the ledge instead, allowing me to recover from an accidental touch. Incidentally, the cheap deaths result in famously gruesome death animations, which are the main reason why I'm not letting my kid touch this game for a while. What's crazy about these death animations is that the one time an NPC dies gruesomely, Lara turns away from the scene. You would think that if you were going for an M rating you might as well do it all the way.

Finally, I wish Crystal Dynamics had spent some of the $100 million budget on giving us a full score for the background music behind the game. There is background music, but it's relatively muted and you only notice it during the cut scenes. It's nothing noteworthy, which made the game feel like it was punching below its weight otherwise. The other place where the game doesn't quite pull it's weight is that Lara Croft is alone all the time. None of the NPCs are helpful outside of the cut scenes, except in a bridge traversal scene, and even then it was obviously scripted. There's essentially no interaction between Lara and the other characters in the game outside of cut scenes.

I just spent several paragraphs complaining about the game. But it was overall, a fun experience and especially in the first half of the game, well written and an intense experience. I'd recommend the game (especially since it has no zombies, unlike some other AAA titles out there), but if you have limited time, try Among Thieves or Arkham Asylum first.

Review: Soy Sauce for Beginners

I picked up Soy Sauce for Beginners as part of the Kindle First program. For one, it's a book about food. Secondly, the author's from Singapore, where I grew up. Any book from a Singaporean about food has got to be good, right?

One of the smartest people I know once said to me, "There are only two types of people who like Singapore: women, and foreigners." It's a deep insightful statement if you know Singapore well, but unfortunately, it's clear that Kirstin Chen doesn't share that insight. The novel is about Gretchen, who at 30, discovers that her husband has been cheating on her and moves back to Singapore to take a break from her disastrous marriage.

She then plunges into her family business of making soy sauce, not as a relief from the mess of her life in San Francisco, but as a burden. Her white friend from her Stanford days joins her, and she starts dealing with her mother's alcoholism, dating as a soon-to-be-divorcee, and possible return to San Francisco. This could all have been interesting, but Gretchen engages in all the stereotypical behavior of an Asian woman you could think of, and no, Chen isn't making an ironic statement about it: she's just oblivious.

For instance, Gretchen only dates white guys. This is pretty common, but she's also oblivious enough to be proud that she was the first Asian woman her ex-husband dated. She's then devastated that he cheats on her with another Asian woman. Her white friend in Singapore gets a lot of attention (as white people would), and Gretchen is appropriately jealous of her, but also without insight.

The references to food, the use of Singlish, and notes on the culture are somewhat appropriate. They're also divorced in general from how non-rich people live in Singapore. There's a deep assumption that people get around in cars, which of course, isn't true in Singapore or any major Asian city. There's no reference to the mass transit systems there, nor is there any reference to a single sympathetic Asian man other than the protagonist's father. This gives you an idea of how skewed Chen's world view is.

I should note that most Asian American fiction is essentially a body of work by Asian American women: very few Asian men are represented, so to some extent this is accepted and standard for a novel that's considered "literature" or "literary fiction." But life is short and you only have so much time for so many novels, so why read yet another standard Asian American novel?

Ultimately, the ending is predictable, as though written for a Singaporean audience, in complete contradiction, of course, to the author's real actual life. I wanted very much to like this book, but I'm afraid I cannot recommend it as a good use of your time.

Review: Among Thieves

I approached Among Thieves with trepidation. First, the reviews for it have been nothing short of amazing, but I'd been a little bit disappointed by both Drake's Deception and Drake's Fortune. Neither were as good as Golden Abyss. I was starting to think that I enjoyed the Uncharted series only because I was new to the genre when I played Golden Abyss.

I needn't have worried. Among Thieves is quite simply the best video game I've ever played. Midway through Chapter 14 (there are 26 chapters in total), I found myself thinking: I hope this game never ends! I'd already died 3 times, I was getting my ass handed to me, but I was never frustrated, and just wanted to keep going. The scenery was gorgeous, set high up in the Himalayas, the action was perfect, keeping the player in a state of flow that made even me, a mediocre video gamer at best, feel like a competent action hero.

Ultimately, that's what video games shine at. They're not great story telling vessels, as deaths and puzzles break up the story flow. They're not even that great for puzzles, since computer interfaces aren't as open ended as a real life puzzle game would be. But Rock Band could make you feel like a rock star, Arkham Asylum could give you a taste of what it feels like to be Batman, and Among Thieves makes you feel like Indiana Jones.

Which is not to say that the story-telling is poor in Among Thieves. It has the best story I've seen among video game properties. You come to care about Nathan Drake and his relationships with his cohorts. You even learn to hate Flynn, the guy who roped him into this mess in the first place. The scenery is nothing short of amazing, especially when you consider that it's being rendered for you by an 8 year old piece of hardware with crippling small amounts of RAM (both the HDD and the blu ray drive on my PS3 spun like crazy while playing this game).

The music is amazing, sounding more like a major feature film soundtrack than any other game in the series. This is big-budget game production at its best, and it's impossible to feel cynical about the entire enterprise by the end of the game because it's been executed so well.

Where Drake's Deception and Drake's Fortune got wrong was in the pacing. Both those games had places where it felt like the action had gone on just a bit too long, and you just can't wait for it to end. Among Thieves has no place where you feel that way. Even the penultimate chapter's fights are broken up into bite-sized chunks, enabling the player to rest and recover between bouts. None of the puzzles are so hard that you get stuck, and none of the individual fights are so challenging that you feel demoralized. Whenever I got frustrated by either Drake's Deception and Drake's Fortune, I would switch to playing Tomb Raider for a bit. Once I put Among Thieves into the PS3, I never found myself even tempted to play another game.

And the set-pieces are amazing. chapters 13, 14, and 15 flow as well as any action movie or novel that I've seen or read. Chapter 19 and 20 make you really feel like you're high up in the Himalayas, helping villagers defend themselves from an invasion. And chapter 16 just shows off how confident Naughty Dog was: they put in a chapter solely as a breather after the intense action that happened before, and don't feel compelled to throw in any puzzles, fights, or other inanities that a lesser video game maker might consider. You simply have a chapter consisting solely of moving through a mountain village, granting you vistas, and watching the authentically moving NPCs. You feel like you're in a magical dream.

Now, the rendering isn't as drop dead gorgeous as Tomb Raider (that game came 4 years later). But the art direction is far better in this game. Tomb Raider feels like it's doling out pretty scenery one drop at a time, as  if in fear that your eyes might get used to natural beauty and then what it showed you wouldn't be as effective. Among Thieves has no such restraint. It throws stunning vistas at you, one after another as though it was the last hurrah of a lost age.

The only disappointment I felt upon finishing the game is that now that I've played through the entire Uncharted series, I'll have no other games in the series to play until Uncharted 4 comes out for the PS 4. Needless to say, Among Thieves comes highly recommended. It would be worth borrowing or buying a PS3 solely to play this game.

Review: Do You Believe in Magic?

Do You Believe in Magic? is a book about alternative medicine. It is a very well balanced book, considering the topic. I don't think I would have been as restrained in my criticism of alternative medicine practitioners given all the facts on display in this book.

For instance, there's a section on why the FDA is not allowed to regulate supplements, and how messed up the supplement industry is:

Of the 450 supplement manufacturers inspected, at least half had significant problems. One, ATF Fitness, substituted ingredients without changing the product label. Others didn’t even have recipes for their products. And some manufactured products in buildings contaminated with rodent feces and urine—in one facility a rodent was found cut in half next to a scoop. (Location 1143)

Offit covers all the usual suspects: cancer cures (including the alternative medicine practice that killed Steve Jobs), homeopathic medicine, the anti-vaccine movement, the vitamin pushers, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and even some doctors who're selling questionable "cures."

Offit doesn't just discuss the many failings of the supplement/natural foods/health foods, including the huge amount of effort and money spent so that the FDA does not even have the ability to stop herbal supplement sellers from making untrue medical claims. The depiction of this lobbying would be enough to make your blood boil. The stories of how parents would treat their children by taking them to quacks instead of using proven medicine is terrifying.

Offit does cover why certain alternative medicines appear to work by invoking the placebo effect. At one point, he reveals an interesting anecdote where Albert Schweitzer points out how witch doctors actually perform a service by providing placebos for psychological ailments, while pointing patients to effective western doctors for diseases which can be cured by medicine.

All in all, I found this book to be a great read, and very enlightening. Recommended. The book is currently available from Amazon at $1.99.

Review: Drake's Fortune

It's my contention that now is the best time to buy a PS 3. Not only is the system cheap and easily available, it's also mature, with all the streaming media options (such as YouTube) available that aren't available on the PS 4, for instance. If you choose to use the machine for playing games, PS 3 games are also dirt cheap. I picked up the Uncharted Dual Pack for $10 over the holidays and started playing Drake's Fortune whenever I got frustrated at Drake's Deception.

Video games are the only genre of media where sequels are usually better than the originals. Game engine technology improves as developers learn to optimize for the console, and this goes triple for the PS3, which had a famously unfriendly processor to program to. Also, as game developers gain confidence with the console, they get to spend more time developing stories or new methods of game play that add quite a bit to the game, not just in terms of fun game play, but also in terms of aiding the story telling.

Drake's Fortune takes place mostly on a tropical island. As with the other games in the series, I love the art direction. Things are brightly lit, and most of the game takes place during the day, with caverns and underground environments less than 30% of the time. The game features cover-based shooting, traversal, and some light puzzles, but no chase sequences, which to me is the biggest thing I missed coming over from Drake's Deception.

The pacing is also much less even than Drake's Deception or Golden Abyss. There are several long sequences that feel like a shoot-fest that's dragged out more than I enjoyed. The jet-ski sequences are also less than enjoyable: the controls aren't very responsive, and at first you're trained to use the jet-ski like a tank, and only at the end are you encouraged to just accelerate and blind-fire to make it past the stage. Neither of these hiccups occur in later games, showing that the game designers actually learned from experience. The game also uses the dual-shock's motion sensor control, which aren't precise enough for me to consider fun. Fortunately, the few times it's necessary aren't frequent enough to annoy you.

Not everything is bad compared to the Drake's Deception, however. First of all, the easy mode is just challenging enough for an out of touch gamer but fair enough so that I didn't get too frustrated. It did give me a good feeling when I finished the game. I can't say the same for Drake's Deception. The jeep sequence was also fun, and also paced appropriately. What I like about the story as well is that the female lead, Elena, is no mere damsel in distress, unlike Marisa Chase in Golden Abyss. She rescues Nathan Drake as often as she is rescued. The music was also outstanding. It's scored by Greg Edmonson, who also scored the Firefly series. I have the theme song from the game stuck in my head now, and that's no mean feat. I don't know why I didn't think much of the music from Drake's Deception, but the music in Drake's Fortune stands out.

Nevertheless, this was my least favorite Uncharted Game so far. Despite that, it's still a lot of fun and certainly well worth the price I paid. Recommended.

Make Your Own Baby Monitor

The baby monitor my brothers gave me a couple of years ago died, the battery on the screen no longer charging. The cost of a replacement is $240, and I blanched at that. It's 2014, these things should be dirt cheap.

I bought a Tenvis JPT3815W, which is a wired/wifi internet camera. For about $45, this thing boasts night vision, streaming to Android, Chrome, iOS, and just about everything except IE. (For whatever reason, I couldn't get the ActiveX plugin to work --- this is what happens when companies don't hire Silicon Valley engineers to write software) There's no audio, but that's ok: our 2 year old is quite capable of screaming loud enough for us to hear from anywhere in the house. It also has the advantage of now enabling us to stream the video output outside the house, as long as our smartphone data plans can take the hit.

Setup is a bit of a pain. First, you have to plug in the device into your wired LAN router. Then, you run the wizard and tell it the SSID and password to your wi-fi network. After that, you're good to go. There's an LED light on the device that can't be turned off in software, but electrical tape taped over the LED does just fine.

One item that the baby monitor had that the Tenvis doesn't is a temperature sensor. I replaced it with a $15 wireless thermometer meant for outdoor temperature reporting. Nothing says you have to put the outdoor temperature sensor outdoors! It works fine, and tough the reviews for this unit are mediocre, you'll see that they're all because the temperature sensor isn't waterproof. Not a problem if you use it indoors.

All in all, I'm much happier with the new setup than with the old one. For one thing, since we have plenty of smartphones and tablets lying around the house, we can use our favorite devices rather than passing the old monitor around. Secondly, once the toddler grows up, this can be re-purposed as a security camera for the house. Finally, being able to get at the video from any computer is awesome, since you can monitor your kid while writing a blog post, for instance. And of course, it's $200 cheaper than the dedicated units.

The only way the dedicated units beat this setup is if you don't already have wifi in the home and don't have smartphones/tablets/laptops already sitting around.

Highly recommended.

P.S. Happy New Year!

Review: The Speed of the Dark

The Speed of the Dark is Elizabeth Moon's science fiction book about autism. The science fiction parts of the book aren't very apparent. It's set in the future where autism can be cured in the womb, and follows Lou Arrendale, one of the last autistic people left. He's a high functioning autistic, and can live on his own, hold down a job doing pattern matching, and goes fencing. The novel is told mostly from his point of view.

The central conflict in the novel describes a new director for Lou's job, Crenshaw, who decides that all the extra amenities and facilities that Lou and his colleagues need to be able to work are perks that should be cut. To that end, he "encourages" Lou's colleagues to try out an experimental treatment for curing autism. Crenshaw is a stereotypical corporate villain, and is never fleshed out, which is the biggest flaw in an otherwise excellent novel. But his attack on Lou brings up several issues: if you could cure a deep psychological problem like autism, would it be desirable to do so. If someone has come to an accommodation with his condition, wouldn't the change be traumatic, and possibly be effectively eliminating that person's former self? The novel explores these issues from Lou's perspective.

The best thing about this novel is it's use of the first person perspective to grant insight into how an autistic individual works. If you're a Silicon Valley engineer, reading this novel will give you a very strong sense in how similar many engineers are to an autistic person, and where the big differences are. Jeff Bezoes is quoted as saying, "I learn more from fiction than from non-fiction books," and this book is illustrative: it's more insightful than even autobiographical books like Born on a Blue Day. The treatment is extremely sympathetic, and extremely well written.

For some novelists, the central conflict's resolution would end the novel, but not Moon. She goes on to explore all the deeper issues involved in the novel, and the conversation Lou has with himself is a lot of fun. This is an excellent novel, and I can highly recommend it.

Review: Tearaway

I'll come right out and say it: I dislike mario-style platform games. I don't think I'd ever finished a platform-style game in my life, not even when it was Braid, written by my college friend (now video game illuminary) Jonathan Blow. Part of it is that most of those games are too difficult (and yes, Braid definitely falls into that category), and geared towards hardcore gamers or kids with a lot of time on their hands with which to get good at anything.

Yet the metacritic scores for Tearaway are simply amazing, with review site after review site proclaiming that if you bought a Playstation Vita, you should play this game, as it is not a game that can be played on any other platform. Thus when the Playstation Network had a holiday sale at $18, I jumped on it. As of this writing, Amazon still has this game at $19.99, but it is out of stock and could take a while to ship. It'd be worth the wait though.

The conceit of the game is that you're controlling a paper message with an envelop making it's way through a world made out of paper from kindergarten arts and crafts projects to you, the player. Everything in the world you wander through is made out of papers, from trees to waterfalls. The rendering is very well done, and has a very natural feel to it. I was never any good at those arts and crafts projects when I was small, but I still enjoyed the visual look and graphic design behind this game.

The word most frequently used to describe Tearaway is "Charming." Despite my prejudice against platform games, Tearway certainly charmed me into playing it. For one thing, the game is not too frustratingly hard, segmenting itself so that you can make it as difficult or as easy as you like. By this I don't mean that the game has difficulty settings: it doesn't. The sidequests and optional goals are what let you adjust the difficulty: if it's too hard you can proceed on with the story without much loss. Even though I dislike platformers, I found myself playing some of the levels in a mode of flow, indicating that the game designers did a good job of making you feel competent despite the complexity of some of the inputs: the rear touch pad, motion sensors, shake sensors, joysticks, and buttons all come into play.

The game makes a great effort to include you in it's presentation. This ranges from displaying a photo of you in the sun "teletubbies-style", to breaking the fourth wall, directly talking to you, the player. In fact, the entire game revolves around delivering a message to you, the player. In particular, one of Iota's idle animation sequences is to turn to you and look adoringly. Early on, the game asks you to draw a picture of a crown using the touch screen, and then immediately uses it when displaying characters to you. The game also lets you shoot photographs in game, in addition to using both front and rear facing cameras to capture textures for in game use. This is a game that truly makes use of every facility on the Vita, and uses it with a facility that puts other games to shame.

A lot of the complaints that hardcore gamers have about the game is that it is too linear. I'm definitely not going to complain about that. You never have to guess as to what you have to do next, and the game provides plenty of hints if you get stuck.  The story is fairly shallow, though I still found it exciting enough. Other criticisms are that the game is short, but I'm of the opinion that the game was just right: any longer and I might have the time or patience to play it through, and some of the mechanisms (especially the motion control) would overstay their welcome if they were used more liberally throughout the game.

There's some evidence  that girls should play more video games for the cognitive benefits thereof. If you're the parent of a girl, Tearway would be an ideal introduction to video games and 3D-style spatial thinking. Not only is the game non violent and without many horror elements, throughout the game when you snap pictures of white objects you gain access to PDFs of constructibles so you can make replicas of game world object out of paper you run through a printer. Any kid that can be trusted with scissors to build these replicas would be a good candidate to play this game.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that this game was worth buying a Vita to play. For my taste, Golden Abyss is still a more fun game: I wanted more Golden Abyss at the end of that game, but I'm not sure I wanted Tearway to last longer. Nevertheless, the game is creative, innovative, and worth your time to play. I hope it succeeds and Media Molecule (the creators) are encouraged to make more games for the Vita. And if they do build more content for Tearway, I'd probably buy it and play it. Recommended.

Review: The Everything Store

The Everything Store is a history of Amazon from inception to circa 2012. Of all the tech companies that affect our lives, Amazon is the least sexy to the business press. There's nothing more boring than retail, and it's easy to categorize Amazon as a simple retailer. The truth is, there's nothing simple about what Amazon does. I remember first ordering books over the internet from a bookstore that is now defunct. When I called them up to ask about my order, the woman said, "Oh, it's so nice to talk to you! So you're the guy who's been ordering these great books that I wished everyone would read." Further discussions led to my realization that she and her husband were basically doing all the shipping themselves, and were too overwhelmed with orders to do anything interesting with the website like setting up a review system, etc. When Amazon launched I ordered books from them instead (largely because of the large discounts they offered), I was impressed immediately by how complete their review system was.

Fast forward to just a few years ago, and it's astounding to see what Amazon has done with their razor-thing profit margins that Apple, Google, and Netflix would all sniff at. Amazon has dominated cloud services to the point where Google is an also ran with AppEngine and Google Compute Engine. Amazon has effectively outflanked Apple with the Kindle and continues to dominate ebooks even despite Apple's attempt to raise prices for consumers by entering the market. And I'm not a Netflix subscriber, but as an Amazon Prime customer, my son watches Blue's Clues and Curious George in addition to getting his diapers delivered by Amazon. My wife and I once calculated that the savings from buying diapers alone from Amazon as opposed to Babies R Us more than paid for Amazon Prime.

The book does a fantastic job of describing Jeff Bezo's background and how he came to start Amazon. We get interesting insight into several business decisions, including how Amazon negotiated to buy Diapers.com, and what happened back then. There's also some details about the launch of EC2 and S3, and Stone does a great job of debunking the myth that Amazon launched those cloud services because of excess capacity. And here's information I head from a former Amazon employee that's also in this book: that Amazon initially launched it's cloud services at a loss. "Fat Profits only attract competitors," is a classic Bezos quote.

Lest you think the book paints a rosy picture of Amazon, there's a lot of the ugly exposed as well, which is something that I don't see in books about Apple or Google, for instance. Stone does not shy away from the stories of burnout, the executive politics, mis-steps, and ruthless competition that Amazon imposed on others in the industry. It's quite clear that Amazon is willing to take deep losses in order to hurt competition, but that ruthlessness is tempered by one thing: Amazon's never willing to hurt the competition without also helping its customers, and Amazon is willing to work hard to understand its customers in a way that other successful companies don't.

All in all, this book is well balanced, and does not go overboard in worshiping Jeff Bezos or treating Amazon as a company free of blemishes. In a world filled with books written by sycophants such as Steve Levy, that's a rare thing and worth a read. Recommended.