Reviews

There are 119 posts filed in Reviews (this is page 5 of 12).

Best of 2008 – Movies

Looking back, I really didn’t see a huge amount of movies in the theater this year. So, almost by default, my nominations are three of the six I can recall:

  • Iron Man
  • Wall-E
  • The Dark Knight

Each of these movies is excellent in its own right. Iron Man perfects the idea of a pure fun superhero movie – a pure joy of a summer blockbuster. Dark Knight takes a more mature look at that genre, in the process providing the definitive take on the Batman/Joker matchup. And I’m just going to give Pixar a permanent slot on my movie nominations – they’ve yet to disappoint, and in fact I think Wall-E is their best effort yet. It’s lyrical, beautiful, thoughtful, and an artistic achievement. I own all three on Blu-ray, and each completely holds up to the theater experience upon home viewing.

Crowning one movie over the others is an extremely difficult decision. But ultimately, one film does edge out the others. In a way, more for the experience of the movie than just the hours spent in a darkened theater. I lived and breathed this movie up until release, completely immersed in the ARG created as a marketing campaign. All the minor plot points and major character development I picked up before I even set foot in the theater transformed what was already an amazing film into something above and beyond. My jaw was on the floor from beginning to end of Dark Knight, and I’ve discussed it with someone at least weekly ever since that first viewing. I couldn’t in good conscience give ‘best of the year’ to any other movie.

Best movie of 2008: The Dark Knight
Dark Knight

Review: Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

This review will be free of major spoilers, and is based on a pre-release review copy.

I finished Anathem the other night, staying up far later than I’d planned. It is That Good. The fact that I stuck around for 900+ pages says a lot.

I haven’t read a lot of Neal Stephenson’s other books – Snow Crash was something I mostly enjoyed, but it lost me in the mythology and such. I tried reading Cryptonomicon back when it was first released, but for reasons I can’t remember I never made it past the first 50 pages. I’m told that the man has problems writing endings, that most of his books really don’t have them. Well, Anathem does. And a good one at that.

What is Anathem about? That’s an extremely difficult question to answer concisely. The best I can do is to say that it’s about epistemology, which really doesn’t tell you anything. The book focuses on a group of monks on another planet. But monks isn’t quite the right word – they’re not religious at all. They call themselves ‘avout’ instead. The avout have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of knowledge, largely in matters of the study of consciousness, reality, and other philosophic topics. Avout are segregated into four groups – unarians, decenarians, cenarians, and millenarians. They wall themselves off from the outside world, allowing almost no contact, for different periods of time. One year, ten years, 100 years, and 1000 years respectively. This has been going on for about 4000 years. Civilization ebbs and flows around them as the centuries pass, sometimes sci-fi futuristic and others post-apocalyptic. It’s a fascinating concept. And there’s some definite shades of Harry Potter in both the setting and the story elements inside the concent (the Arbrean word for monastery). The concent serves as a sort of university in this society, but they no longer deal with technology any more than absolutely necessary (for reasons made clear in the book).

I can’t really say much more about the plot than that, without major major spoilers. There is an external threat, and the avout must use their unique expertise to combat it. I guess that’s suitably generic. Anathem covers a lot of ground, and I saw almost none of it coming.

Because this is the planet Arbre, not Earth, they don’t have our history or cultural references. As a result it takes a hundred pages or so to really figure out what’s going on. Stephenson makes extensive use of a fictional vocabulary he created for the book, so much so that it requires a glossary in the back. I had to make near constant use of it for a while, but eventually found myself becoming more and more immersed in the world of Arbre. By the halfway point I didn’t need the glossary at all, and was starting to think in those terms. Truly immersive. That’s the biggest achievement of Anathem, I think – the masterful worldbuilding.

By creating a cast of characters who have devoted their lives to studying knowledge and philosophizing, this book sidesteps my biggest problem with Snow Crash. The extended lectures/treatises in that book completely pulled me out of the story and turned it into a slog. But here they appear as dialog between characters, conversations they have as part of the life of an avout. And the discussions themselves serve to shed light on the characters’ inner workings, so even the duller ones don’t seem like a waste of time. But very few are dull at all; I found most to be downright fascinating. When the book gets officially released, there will be a website with extensive annotations, detailing which of our Earth-based philosopher’s ideas informed Stephenson’s creation of their Arbrean counterparts. I can’t wait.

There is so much more I want to say about this book, but can’t for the sake of not spoiling major plot elements. Read it. Get through the first 100 pages, you’ll be immersed and hooked. I’m planning on re-reading a number of sections of it, and that’s not something I ever do with books.

Oh, and the book comes with its own soundtrack. The included CD is full of the pseudo-Gregorian chants the avout use in Anathem.

I’m off to register some domains based on the book’s glossary 🙂

Anathem will be released on September 9th, 2008.

Review: Braid (Xbox 360)

Here’s the short version: you should go play Braid. It is amazing.

Longer version:

Braid is a brilliant independent game developed mostly by one man, Jonathan Blow. At first glance, you could easily mistake it for yet another 2d sidescrolling Mario clone. But it goes much deeper than that. You play as Tim, who is questing for his princess. The story of their relationship is revealed as the game progresses, and their relationship has a surprisingly mature and adult tone. The story takes some major twists and turns, and is open-ended enough that it practically demands critical thought and interpretation of what happens. It’s the kind of story that sticks with you and completely draws you in to a mood and tone.

Tim can manipulate time. As you journey through the game, this ability is necessary to solve puzzles. Each puzzle is extremely creative, and some require twisting your brain into severe knots to solve. Players could blaze through this game in just an hour or two, as the puzzles are almost entirely optional. But that would be robbing yourself of the vast majority of what Braid has to offer. I spent about 5 or 6 hours on the game total, taking my time. Some puzzles I solved as soon as I looked at them, and others took an hour on their own. Most fell somewhere in between, and solving each one brought a huge sense of accomplishment. This is alternately a very frustrating (in a good way) and rewarding game to play.

The creator maintained a blog chronicling the development process, and it makes for fascinating reading. I want to point out his post identifying the game’s haunting soundtrack in particular, since I fell in love with the music during the game. Each track is available as mp3s from Amazon for $.89 each.

Braid costs $15, and is only sold as a downloadable game for the Xbox 360. A PC version is forthcoming at a date yet to be determined. Some people have taken a bit of umbrage at that cost, which is more than for all but a handful of previously released Xbox downloadable games. But Braid is art, and I like knowing that I’m supporting an independent developer with something new to bring to the gaming world. I got far more than $15 worth of enjoyment out of it.

Braid plays like no other game I’ve ever had my hands on. Play the free Xbox demo, and I’ll be surprised if you’re not hooked.

iPod Touch: Better than cargo pants

Way back in 2005, I made sure to jokingly praise my cargo pants for being “perhaps the most underappreciated tech accessory on the market today” after going to a conference and noting how much stuff I could haul in them. For every conference between then and now, I wore cargos daily and got similar use.

But then this year at ALA I simply didn’t need them – thanks to my iPod touch, a device I’m completely enamored with. It represents a nice compromise for someone like myself who wants an iPhone but doesn’t want to pay the high monthly contract fee for one.

The Touch is missing two main features of the iPhone: internet connectivity via cell network, and GPS. The Touch does get internet access via wifi. I spend about 80% of my day within wifi coverage, thanks to the Chapel Hill campus and municipal networks, so that’s one problem overcome. And I really don’t have a huge desire for ubiquitous GPS access.

For conferencing it let me carry in one compact device: my calendar/schedule, my e-mail, my web access, my address book, and some basic notes. I was able to leave my laptop in the hotel room, which was extremely nice.

This is a wonderful little device, and I highly recommend it.

Hulu & Netflix: Watching TV Online

In February of 2005, I pointed out that Battlestar Galactica’s premiere episode was available for free online viewing. (Side note: Have I really been blogging that long?) At the time, streaming full content like that was almost completely unheard of. Now that things have advanced a bit, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at two of the better options for online TV viewing: Hulu and Netflix.

Hulu is a joint venture run by NBC, Fox, and a few other content owners. They’re a blend of current tv shows, ‘classic’ tv shows which no longer air, and a few movies thrown in for good measure. Generally speaking, new episodes show up the day after they air.

What makes Hulu great is the interface. The ‘lights down’ option (dimming the site’s color scheme to make viewing shows easier on the eyes) is a nice little touch, as is the ability to embed just a short custom clip of a show on an external site. And I find that kind of thing abounds throughout the site – I’m constantly being pleasantly surprised by an option I wouldn’t have thought to look for. They even provide RSS feeds to track when new episodes become available. Image quality is nowhere near HD, but it is very watchable on a computer monitor. I really like their blend of popular hits and more obscure stuff like Total Recall 2070, a show from 1999 which isn’t even currently available on DVD. Short ads are shown during commercial breaks, at a far reduced rate from what you’d see on broadcast TV. It’s a very bearable, non-annoying setup. All shows are free.

But all is not perfect. Hulu has a nasty habit of removing episodes from the site after they’ve been there a while. On one hand, I can see this making sense – the studios don’t want to cut into their own DVD sales. But I wish the cuts were made with consistency. 30 Rock’s entire season is available, but The Simpsons is currently limited to the most recent four shows and one from earlier in the season. This kind of patchwork coverage leaves viewers in the dark and confused, with no defined policy as to what will disappear when.

Additionally, I wish I could use Hulu on the Wii or PS3’s web browser. This is Adobe’s fault, not Hulu’s, as for some reason Adobe won’t release an updated version of the Flash tools that Sony or Nintendo would need to make this happen. But if Hulu could come to that many living room TVs so easily, I feel it’d be a killer app.

Many of these shows are also available on NBC and Fox’s separate network websites. But I dislike their interfaces so much that I will never use them when Hulu is available.

Netflix is on the other side of the playing field, in that its online streaming options aren’t free. For all their rental by mail plans with unlimited deliveries, customers also receive unlimited ‘Watch Now’ privileges. While the Watch Now library focuses largely on movies, there are a substantial number of TV shows covered there as well. Unlike Hulu, Netflix’s library focuses largely on older shows. Some of the shows which have interested me so far include Sliders, Quantum Leap, The A-Team, Knight Rider, and Seaquest. Some newer options are also available, such as The Office, but only what has been released on DVD. Netflix does not get new episodes right after they air, which is a definite disadvantage. But there is still no shortage of content. Video quality is near DVD levels, and HD video is in the works.

But the best thing about Watch Now, for me, is that it works easily on my TV. Thanks to a Windows Media Center plugin called vmcNetFlix, I can stream any of the Watch Now options via my Xbox 360’s media center extension functions. It’s a bit technical to get set up, but works like a charm. Alternatively, there’s a new $100 Netflix-sanctioned box which will stream TV & movies directly to your TV. And the service has no ads of any kind!

So the major disadvantage is the aforementioned lack of current shows. The movie selection has similar issues in that very few new releases are available via Watch Now.

There’s no question that we’ve come a long way since streaming of Battlestar Galactica in the dreaded RealPlayer format. But for every step forward, it seems there are also major ones back. Hulu no longer posts current episodes of BSG, though they did until recently. New ones are now delayed by 8 days, which does nothing but annoy consumers. Miss an episode? You can’t watch it until the next one has already aired on TV. A delay of a day or two is reasonable, but 8 days is far too extreme. As for Netflix, their player only works in Internet Explorer on Windows machines. They’ve pledged to add mac support by the end of the year, but there haven’t been any updates on that recently.

Hulu and Netflix are not really competitors in this space. Their areas of focus barely overlap at all, and in fact they complement each other quite nicely. The moment Hulu adds both HD shows and an easy way to get their content off my monitor and onto my TV, I will be cancelling my cable (which I currently have down to the bare bones, less than 30 channels package anyway). And for older catch-up viewing, Netflix is already more than sufficient.

The Tyranny of Alternatives

I’ve come to the realization recently that there is such a thing as too much choice. It is easily possible for too many options to be available. Consumer electronics, web services & protocols, even simple reading material can all fall victim to a sort of tyranny of alternatives. Modern technology has opened a lot of doors, and I find that if I don’t shut a few then I never get anything done.

One example is Sony’s Playstation 3. Back in the earlier days of video gaming, choice really didn’t play a big role. You picked from a small circle of competitors (Nintendo, Sony, Atari, etc), bought their console, set it up, and played their games. Today it is not nearly so simple. The PS3 has had five different hardware configurations so far, each with distinct plusses and minuses. Hard drive sizes differ. The number of USB and card reader ports differ. Wi-fi access differs. Even backwards compatibility with Playstation 2 games radically differs: Some variations can play no PS2 games at all, others can play most PS2 games, and others yet can play almost all of them. To complicate matters even further, not all five configurations are still manufactured. Try explaining all this to the average consumer, someone who just wants a game machine to set up in their living room. But, at least all of these variations are functional. Microsoft has split the Xbox 360 into two very different camps – those that come with a hard drive, and those without. Sure, buying the version with no hard drive will save you about $70. But with no hard drive, you can’t save game progress. You can’t download anything from Xbox Live. Purchasing a memory card to offset this disadvantage, which is the cheapest storage option available, eats up $42 of what you saved. And the comparatively meager storage on it will run out very quickly. It’s a false choice really – the cheaper xbox is near worthless.

The issue of these choices also applies to flooded marketplaces. The rush to create web applications and protocols in the last few years has created a fractured marketplace. Users can only give attention to so many products and services; even the most worthy of new entries has a very real chance of going unnoticed in the mess. Wikipedia lists 17 separate IM protocols. A little over two years ago I tried using a new IM service, Meetro. Their main feature is the ability to see who is logged in physically near you. But nobody near me used it at all, so I quickly gave up and moved on. I wondered then, and I still wonder now: how can a new service break through the established choices and reach the critical mass of users necessary for success? As social applications grow, this question only becomes more and more relevant. The best social service in the world is useless without souls to populate it. The only solution I know of right now is effective marketing with a heavy dose of open standards, but of course that’s a very vague answer.

Meanwhile, I’ve hit complete overload on blogs and websites that I want to read. RSS feeds make pulling giant piles of content into one place possible. Unfortunately, the format does not also provide me with giant piles of time in order to read it all. Or even if I do spend what time I do have reading everything I want to, I’ve still lost serendipity. I don’t stumble across many things that I don’t even know I want to read. For me, magazines fill this gap. I really look forward to getting Wired in the mail every month. Having someone else choose what articles I’ll see for me feels oddly refreshing. Sure, I could replicate most of this experience with the magazine’s website. But I still can’t flip through the pages, quickly seeing what catches my eye.

These choices are harder to make than ever before, and I expect it to only get more complicated as we move forward. Recommendations from trusted peers becomes more and more relevant, even necessary. With so much raw information out there to process, we have to distribute it among social circles and be able to rely on what conclusion gets spit back out. That, or sacrifice needless and countless hours.

So, here’s my recommendations:

  • Buy the 60gb PS3, if you can track one down. It’s not made anymore, but has the best mix of features. You can replace the hard drive with a larger one off the shelf if that becomes an issue later.
  • Buy the Xbox 360 Elite. It’s the most expensive model, but has a much larger hard drive. Microsoft only allows proprietary hard drives, and upgrading to a larger one later is absurdly expensive.
  • Subscribe to a few print magazines. I current get Wired, Newsweek, and Smart Money.

Best of 2007 – Movies

I really don’t feel entirely comfortable proclaiming a single movie as the best of 2007, because I really just didn’t see very many.

That said, here’s my (revised) favorites of what I did see:

  • 300
  • Stardust
  • I Am Legend
  • Hot Fuzz
  • Ratatouille
  • Transformers

300 is a visual feast, but I really can’t recommend it to everybody. As a rule I tend to enjoy highly stylized art, and this more than fit the bill. But I can understand if the violence puts off a lot of people. I Am Legend almost took the top spot, until the ending… it is completely different from (and inferior to) the book, and even negates the entire reason for the title. I will not say more to avoid spoilers, but really… I was extremely disappointed. Hot Fuzz, a sendup of action movies by the guys who brought us Shaun of the Dead, was the funniest movie I saw all year. But again I don’t think it’s for everybody. Ratatouille is not Pixar’s best effort, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t excellent. I had a smile on my face the whole way through. Same thing with Transformers – if you want a Big Dumb Action Movie, look no further.

In the end, Stardust tops this list. I don’t think a lot of people caught this fantasy film in theaters, but now it’s on DVD so go catch up! It’s relatively lighthearted, and reminded me of a slightly less comic version of The Princess Bride. It stays pretty faithful to the original Neil Gaiman book, and the changes it does make really enhance the film. Stardust really has something for everyone: Comedy, romance, action, adventure, and strong characterizations. Walking out of the theater, my friends and I agreed: this is a rare movie, one that we can see ourselves watching over and over again and never tiring of.

Best of 2007 – Video Game

And the nominees are:

  • Super Mario Galaxy
  • Portal
  • Halo 3
  • Rock Band
  • Picross
  • Bioshock

A few words about each:

As with other categories, each and every one of these games is worth your time. Super Mario Galaxy is the best Wii game I have played, bar none. The level designers have done amazing, mind-bending things, and unlike many other wii games the motion-sensing controls manage to not feel tacked on. Portal is a work of art, another example of brilliant level design, but also coaxes an in-depth plot out of minimalist surroundings. Halo 3, while still fun, somehow didn’t quite live up to my expectations. While the gameplay was fun, ultimately no sequel can live up to the original Halo’s story. Rock Band is an amazing party game, and once you get over the fear of looking (or sounding) silly it provides a brilliant gaming experience. Picross was a surprise, an addicting DS puzzle game that I’ve played almost every single day since I got it, for at least a few minutes. Bioshock’s art direction and storyline are excellent, bringing vivid life to a decaying underwater city. Unfortunately the storyline falls apart a bit near the end, but up until then it is one of the most genuinely mature and deep stories I’ve seen in a game. The much-hyped moral choices that a player supposedly gets to make in the game really don’t amount to as much as I expected, but how those choices are handled is brilliant. No game has ever managed to make me think about the very nature of choice in a video game before.

So, I really wanted to give the honor to Bioshock. It truly is a work of art. And, I admit, I am a sucker for anything with such a heavy art-deco visual style. But the ultimate whimper of the plot’s resolution gave me pause. Couple that with somewhat limited replayability, and I have to regretfully pass it over. Still, I don’t want to downplay the game too much. Go play it, I doubt you’ll be disappointed with the purchase.

Now on to the winner:

Rock Band


Almost two years ago, my friend Matt and I sat in his living room, playing the first Guitar Hero game and idly speculating how awesome it would be to have a game just like it, but with drums. And a microphone. And online play. Sure, brilliant idea, but naaaaah! It’d never happen! I was glad to be proven wrong: Now I own that game, and Matt and I played it together over Thanksgiving.

The day Rock Band was released, some friends and I played it for almost seven hours straight. And we’ve had a number of sessions almost that long since then. If that can’t justify a selection as game of the year, then I’m not sure what does. All other games have been pushed aside for us, and this is pretty much all we play right now. The track list is near-perfect, and the addition of downloadable content provides near endless replay value as new songs are added. I’m not sure I can fully describe why i love the game so much, largely because so much of that justification is based on intangibles. After finishing a song next to my friends, we all feel amazing, like we just accomplished something awesome. Sure, we aren’t really playing the music. But I will never be able to play these songs on ‘real’ instruments, not without more time than I have to put into practicing. Rock Band captures what I imagine is the full feel of being in a band, and concentrates it down into something the rest of us can experience.
I’m going to cut myself off before I over-gush about this game, (what’s that? Too late?) but I think this XKCD comic sums it up quite well:

If you can get over your fear of looking a bit silly, many hours of quality entertainment await.

 

Best of 2007 – Book

Here’s a recap of the full nominee list:

  • World War Z, Max Brooks
  • Pattern Recognition, William Gibson
  • Halting State, Charles Stross
  • The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick
  • I Am America (And So Can You!), Stephen Colbert
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling

Each of these is worth a read. I was tempted to give the award to Harry Potter, if only for the massive societal upheaval and hoopla that the book’s release caused. I have never before stood in line to buy a book at midnight, and expect that I never will again. Pattern Recognition, while not a new release, connected with me on a fundamental level. I relate to the characters and the lifestyles they lead more than any other book I can remember reading. World War Z is pure fun, with fictional interviews of survivors of the first great zombie war. Alternately horrifying and thought provoking. The Invention of Hugo Cabret swapped back and forth between traditional text and large page blocks of gorgeous illustrations telling some segments of the story. The end result is a book that reads surprisingly fast for 544 pages, and inspired me to do some research into the history of film when I finished. I Am America made the list simply because Stephen Colbert makes me laugh so much. But, in the end one book just blew my mind:

Halting State, by Charles Stross

Set in a near future Scotland, the novel opens with a bank robbery inside an online game, and from there eventually spins into high level international intrigue and espionage. The entire book is written in the second person (“You enter the room…”, etc.), which while jarring at first is ultimately a perfect choice for a book so focused on gaming and its impact on our culture. All plot aside, Stross’ world building is extremely thought provoking. ‘Overlays’ on goggles provide constant streams of data to anybody who wants it, gaming is seamless with everyday life, pseudo-VR interfaces are ubiquitous, etc.
Halting State even manages to pull off a standard Big Dumb Action Movie cliche plot element, and make it seem semi-realistic and plausible. I won’t go into specifics for the sake of avoiding spoilers, but I was more than able to suspend my disbelief around it.

If you are at all interested in how gaming will develop in the next few years, and the effect that might have on our culture, read this book.