The Oculus Rift "Sellout"

Yesterday's announcement of the Oculus Rift acquisition by Facebook has already garnered negative reactions amongst gamers and game developers. If you're a bystander, you might wonder why they got such a hugely negative reaction by people who should be their biggest supporters. Introducing a new technology requires high volume and in gaming, usually requires loss-leading hardware sales in order to drive that volume. Who better than Facebook with its deep pockets and huge profits is well-suited to such an endeavor? Google and Apple have deep pockets but both would restrict such technology to their favored platforms rather than more open systems, while Facebook would be more platform agnostic than just about anyone.

The negative reaction can be explained by the principle of reciprocity. The initial kickstarter backers of Oculus Rift and game developers thereof provided a gift to Oculus Rift. The gift was intended to bring about an independent hardware platform that would be (rightly or wrongly) dominated by the requirements driven by gamers. The backers did not intend to provide venture capital for Oculus to make a quick exit, and certainly not to sell out to a big company with a history of indifference towards games, and has a platform that has historically supported games like Farmville, anathema to the hardcore gamers that comprise Oculus' demographic.

As for Facebook, this acquisition is an counter to the usual industry trends. The amount of compute power required to drive something like the Oculus Rift is enormous and power hungry. It is unlikely that the Oculus Rift can be tethered to anything less powerful than a Playstation 4 any time soon, and certainly won't be able to run on any of the laptops typically distributed to a Facebook employee, let alone the smartphones favored by the trendy. It looks geeky, is unfashionable, and looks ridiculous when worn. The only possible good it could do Facebook in the medium term is if it got them into the living room.

Corporate head-honchos at Google, Amazon, and Apple have long looked at the living room game console as the entry point to taking over the entertainment center of the home. The numbers look tempting to the corporate types. Hardcore game consoles from Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo have only penetrated 56% of US households. The other 44% looks ripe for disruption. However, these corporate types tend to have zero passion for gaming, and most have never so much as held a gaming controller in their hands. They tend to envision something like the Ouya or the Chromecast, neither of which provide sufficient power or quality content to get 6 year-olds excited about them, let alone the hard core gamers. They fail to understand that the quality of content (whether it be a video game or high quality blu-ray viewing or streaming) is the reason why so far, the game consoles have had a huge market share for living room usage.

The Facebook acquisition of Oculus Rift runs counter to that type of corporate thinking, and might actually succeed, if it doesn't start off by pissing off so many hard core supporters that it has poisoned the well. That disadvantage is possible to overcome, but only by Facebook doing a thorough job of winning over gamers and the developers through the kind of largesse that so far, only Sony has proven to be capable of doing. Since Sony's morpheus platform would presumably be tied to Sony's platforms, the Oculus Rift is still the best hope for mass market adoption of VR technology.

My prediction is that Facebook will screw it up with gamers (it's very unlikely given its corporate culture that it would do otherwise), and 5 years from now will look at Oculus as a poor acquisition, while Sony's morpheus project will see a very small niche similar to that the Playstation Move has been. Sony simply does not have the financial ability to take big losses in order to drive market adoption, while Facebook lacks the cultural understanding of gaming to be able to do much other than to poison the well with its ideal early adopters.

First Impressions: Nokia 521 Smartphone

Microsoft can't seem to do anything right, so when they paired up with Nokia (who can't seem to make a fashionable smart phone) to make phones, I expected the results to be irrelevant. In the past, whenever I've made a trip to Europe, I've carried an unlocked phone, and bought SIM cards in every country I visited in order to make phone calls or surf the internet. There were several problems with this approach:

• Cyclists tend to visit small towns and rural areas. It's frequently difficult to buy SIM cards in those areas. In 2011, it took multiple days in France before we could buy more than 1 SIM card.
• Pre-paid SIM cards with internet plans aren't always cheap or easy to get.
• You end up with this big collection of SIM cards and swapping them around as well as keeping track of how much money was on each card became problematic.

T-mobile's International Roaming plan changes this dynamic in a big way. Not only do you get unlimited text and data while traveling, you also get calls for about $0.20 per minute in nearly every European country. Now let's couple this with some very specific features of the Nokia 521:

• Off-line navigation and maps. Prior to travel, or any time you have WiFi, you can download maps of any and all countries onto the device. If you're familiar with Google Map's off-line modes you're probably thinking that this is useless. But this is Nokia's maps we're talking about. Nokia owns Navteq, and and it's maps are actually designed to operate off-line. What this means is that routing, address search, etc all works without access to online mode. This is FAR more useful than Google Map's off-line mode. This not only reduces your data use while traveling, it enables you to find destination even in places with no data connection. Yes, the device has a real GPS unit, so navigation while offline is accurate and reasonable.
• FM Radio. This is a very unusual feature, in that it's implemented by using your headphone's wires as an antenna. This means no need to worry about paying for Spotify, etc. Of course, in some countries, FM radio might not get you any English songs or programs, but if you're a cyclist on an independent cycle tour, getting in part of the culture is a plus, not a minus.

The Nokia 521 is available on Amazon for about $68, which means that for a trip to Europe, it's less than 5% of the cost of a typical plane ticket during high season. You might imagine that for that price, you're getting a slow, old phone. And you'd be wrong. The phone is fast! It's faster than my 2 year old Galaxy Nexus, and that $248 phone even now at loading e-mail, and browsing the web. It's the same speed as my wife's Galaxy Note 2, which is a $400+ phone. It's hard to imagine that the same company that produced the slow, bloated Windows Vista produced Windows Phone 8.

The phone has an SD card slot, so you can load up with videos, music, and a replaceable battery, if you're not going to be able to charge it for a while. It has a rear camera which is lackluster, and interestingly enough, is missing a front camera, so you can't easily video-Skype with it. The battery life is incredible, easily going a couple of days without charging (though expect that battery life to fade quickly if you're navigating).

The lack of apps is a problem. Fortunately, the only apps I care about when traveling in addition to the above listed ones are Facebook and Amazon Kindle, both of which are available in the appstore. I don't expect Google+, Blogger, etc to be available any time soon, but the web browser on the phone is perfectly functional for those websites. The phone even comes with WiFi calling, which disconcertingly uses your T-mobile phone limits, but does come in useful for those of you who (like me) live in houses with poor T-mobile connectivity.

All in all, this is going to be my approach for the 2014 edition of the Tour of the Alps, and I'll report back on how useful everything is at the end of the trip. In any case, if you're running T-mobile, I highly recommend this phone as a backup phone or even for general use. It is as fully featured a phone as you can imagine, and much faster than other phones that cost double or triple what this one costs.

Cameras for Kids

If your kid is anything like mine, he's at this point had plenty of photos and videos of him, and has by now figured out to pose for pictures. This weekend, he not only decided to pose, but also has asked to review photos on my camera after the shot was taken.

I took this to mean that he's now ready to have his own camera, and I set out to try to get him a camera. If you read the various photography blogs or search for a toy camera on Amazon, you end up with links to the VTech Kidizoom Camera. This is a 1.3 megapixel camera, and contains a few games and have on camera editing, but has very limited storage (128MB), and is clearly not a real camera.Unfortunately, my kid has figured out what is real and what's a toy. If you want to splurge, you can buy the 2 mega-pixel version for $137. This comes with 256MB, and a few video games.

But what really caught my eye, was the Canon A1400. For $62, you get a 16 megapixel camera running off 2 AA batteries, with a real zoom, 720p video, and for another $5 you can get a 8GB storage card. It's clearly a real camera, and even has a viewfinder, which is a rarity these days. Of course, real cameras don't stand up to drops and spills, but you can buy an additional warranty for $8. I don't expect any of the "kid cameras" to last more than the warranty period anyway, and a camera dropped by a kid doesn't fall from as high as one being dropped by an adult, so Canon's quality should take care of ensuring you're not sending it back for repairs all the time.

In person, the camera's quite a bit smaller and lighter than it looks on Amazon's web-site, easily comparable to the Canon S100 and much smaller than the RX100. This is a good thing. Kids' hands are small and there's no reason why they can't handle small cameras. The hardest part for Bowen is the shutter button: you have to hold it down for about a second, and he had a hard time doing that at first, not to mention holding it steady while doing so. He spent the first hour doing nothing but turning the camera and on off, and then trying to rip apart the lens protector. So far, the camera has withstood his abuse just fine, though I'm not about to bother cleaning the lens any time soon.

Bowen's first few pictures are blurry, upside down, and not much fun to look at. On the other hand, a kid's perspective is very different than an adult's. They're much lower, and what they care about is very different. Here are a couple of shots from Bowen's camera:

As you can see, there's no IS, but it's fun to see what I look like from his perspective, and touching to see that the object he most wants to take a photo of is his security blanket. It might be that I'll look back on some of those shots in the future with nostalgia, but for now, it's a relatively fun toy for him, and he hasn't tried to use it as a hammer --- yet.

Recommended.

Review: Caffeinated

It's true. Being a parent can drive anyone to try drugs. I'm definitely a testament to that: after being a parent, I started getting a cup of coffee every other day. Hence when I saw the NPR article about Caffeinated, I checked it out from the library. It's a short quick read, but unfortunately didn't provide much more information than another book, I'd read recently, Buzz.

Buzz spends a lot of time on the physiology and biology behind caffeine and the effects it has on your body. Caffeinated, however, spends more time on the commercial side. For instance, it covers not just coffee and tea, but the plethora of energy drinks, pick-me-ups, and military applications of caffeine, as well as various food incidents that caused the FDA to take action. For instance, it mentions that the earliest documented source of caffeine was from chocolate, which I thought was interesting, since I'd always thought that the use of Tea in China and India long predated that.

It did provide several pieces of information that I previously didn't know, such as the fact that the orange soda drink, Sunkist, contains caffeine! And a significant amount of it at that! Fanta, by contrast, does not. It never ceases to amaze me what the FDA is or is not allowed to regulate, and the book provides quite a list of kid-enticing snacks that surprised me as containing caffeine.

In any case, the book does explain why in recent years, it's been harder and harder for me to find power-gel or gu type products that don't contain caffeine. It appears to have been used as a performance enhancing drugs by professional athletes ever since it was removed from the prohibited list in 2004!

All in all, I'd say that the book's a quick read and well worth a shot, but I found myself skimming several chapters in boredom as the author never wants to say in a paragraph what he can use an entire chapter to write about. Not really recommended, but as I wrote this review, I realized I learned more from the book than I thought I had, so I can't really dismiss it either.

Price Reduction: Independent Cycle Touring

Spring is here, and if you're planning a bike tour, now's the time to do it. I've reduced the price of the PDF copy of Independent Cycle Touring to $4.95, which is 50% off it's previous price. It is no secret that of all my books, this is the one that has sold the worst, but took the most time and effort to write. Nevertheless, it's also one of the books that I'm proudest of, and the information in it is timeless, for as long as cycling touring is practiced. If you've not tried the book, at $4.95, you cannot go wrong.

I went through the book this morning looking to see if there was an easy way to convert it into a Kindle book. The truth is, it's way too graphics heavy to do well as a Kindle book, and I would feel terrible doing an automatic conversion: the results would be truly horrendous. So buy this book on PDF or on Paper. That' the way it was designed, and that's the way it should be read. I know that makes me a holdout, but when you see the book you'll understand why.

Update: The print copy of the book has been price reduced to $25.16

Review: The Rise of Superman

The Rise of Superman is ostensibly Steven Kotler's book about Flow, as experienced through extreme athletes. In reality, it seems to be Kotler's attempt to break into the corporate consultancy/sponsorship world, using pseudo-scientific words (such as his organization's name: The Flow Genome Project) to try to get corporations to buy into his brand of "mindfulness extreme" as the next big competitive advantage.

The way you can tell Kostler's a poseur is that he uses terms like "source code" inappropriately through the book, as though trying to show that he has some deep insight that he is uniquely qualified to tell. No engineer or computer scientist worth his salt would use the words "source code" the way he does, and on closer inspection, it appears that Kostler did a "search-and-replace" for "source" with "source code" throughout the text.

I'm not dismissing Flow or Mindfulness in any way. Nearly every unimpoverished human has experienced flow at one point or another in his life. I've threaded harrowing descents down Italian mountains with inches to spare between my handlebars and a pick up truck coming up on a narrow winding road, and piloted boats out of ports with sidewinds where mistakes would mean disaster, but I don't claim to have any deep insight to flow that are inaccessible to others. More prosaically, nearly every video gamer that has played a perfect level of Tetris or say, Naughty Dog's sublime Among Thieves has experienced flow, since of all the genres of media, video games are the best at eliciting and enabling flow.

Kotler, however, is after the multi-billion dollar corporate contract, so writing about how video game companies engineer flow into their games wouldn't be interesting. Instead, what he has to do is to flatter corporate head-honchos into thinking that they can be compared with such luminaries as Shane McConkey, who pioneered extreme skiing. The reality is, most corporate VPs or CEOs (Richard Branson and Gary Erikson excepted) couldn't do an independent cycle tour in the alps without a supporting entourage, let alone do any of the death defying stunts described in this book. Even the late Galen Rowell would have been happy to tell you that a National Geographic expedition is anything but flow-inducing, with 300 porters toting huge amounts of camera equipment and film.

Now the stories in this book are  interesting, and are the saving grace of the book. Since I'm not a big fan of Surfing, snow sports, or BASE jumping, this was my introduction to athletes such as Laird Hamilton, Shane McConkey or J. T. Holmes. Of course, note that McConkey died trying to do one of those death-defying stunts, as did several of the athletes described in this book. Any sane person would say, "Yeah, this shows that no amount of flow-hacking can eliminate the laws of physics and probablity", but of course, Kostler merely claims that McConkey's survival for so long doing so many insane stunts shows that Flow enables you to be a superman.

Kotler's attempts, then, to link the extreme athlete's in-the-moment flow to the businessman's startup, or investment, or management of a meeting, is laughable in the face of all this. Certainly, nobody's life is at risk when attempting a corporate takeover (though several livelihoods are, the members of the 1% who do this aren't risking anything except next year's bonus, if that), or investing in a startup, or doing the next performance review. As my college class mate Jonathan Blow said, "anyone conflating the risk of business with the actual risk a rescue worker has to take is either stupid or wants to take your money by flattering or impressing you."

All in all, the book is worth reading for the stories of the extreme athletes in it. That's the only reason to read it. All the other business mumbo jumbo needs to be ignored. And for heavens sake don't give Kotler any business if you can help it. Check the book out from the library or borrow it if you're an Amazon prime member. Do not buy!

PSA: New RSS and Atom Feeds

I was previously using Feedburner, which is now dead. As a result, your existing feed reader probably is no longer receiving updates for my blog. I've constituted new feeds for Atom and RSS, so please update your feed reader accordingly.

These disintegration of services I used to rely on, like Google Reader are annoying and painful, but none have been irreplaceable yet, though I still have yet to find a suitable replacement for Reader. My deepest fear is that Google Voice will be discontinued, and that for me would be an irreplaceable service.

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.