Nothing To See Here

Barely enough hours in the day to get work done, much less thoughtful blogging - so expect posts to be sporadic. Appease yourself with the Cathode Tan News in the meantime.

TV Watch: Harper's Island

So a quick side story here, The Girl and I jumped on this show via Netflix Instant thinking it was a show that had already aired and passed, but it turns out this is part of Netflix's program to air recent material, and Instant gets the episodes after they air on television.

Most of the season is done with only what appears to be the two episode conclusion to air this weekend. Instant is a great way to catch up on the show to date, especially if you can grab the HD stream (say on your Roku).

The show itself is a pretty by the numbers murder mystery, feeling a bit like a good beach read. And it is good, don't let that factor in as much of a negative opinion. There's a great backstory that the show allows to breath and by the middle act there is quite a lot of fun to be had in trying to guess the various parts of the mystery.

Island is also relatively violent for a network show, so this doesn't feel like a sanitized made for TV affair, but manages to actually offer up some scenes with real teeth to them.

Highly recommended, and we're looking forward to seeing the ending.

Pirate Bay Going Legit

Well known and recently battled in court torrent site The Pirate Bay is being bought and going legitimate:

Pirate Bay Acquired, Will Compensate Content Providers
by Kris Graft
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June 30, 2009

Pirate Bay Acquired, Will Compensate Content Providers
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Embattled file-sharing site The Pirate Bay has been acquired by game networking company Global Gaming Factory for $7.8 million, and will turn the website into a legitimate operation that compensates content providers.

"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site, " said GGF CEO Hans Pandeya in a statement. The acquisition is slated to close in August.

Pandeya said that Sweden-based The Pirate Bay is one of the "top 100 most visited internet sites in the world." He added, "However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers need faster downloads and better quality."

It will be interesting to see what changes this will cause, if the kind of content is radically different or if the legal issues will be handled by the new company or what.

For Sunday: '9' Trailer

Burton's Alice Looking Amazing

Wired has a great preview of Tim Burton's upcoming Alice in Wonderland adaptation:

Game Play: Sims 3 for iPhone

The Sims is one of those iconic franchises which will get a lot of buy-in pretty much no matter where it gets ported, so it is nice that EA has put a lot of polish and presentation to the iPhone implementation of Sims 3.

I don't have the PC version of this latest installment, so I can only compare it to the original Sims and the Sims 2 that hit the PlayStation a while back. How well does this ultra-portable take on the game hold up? Well, there's good and bad.

All of the tamagotchi style play remains intact, you still have to make sure your Sim's bodily functions are being appeased as well as a long chain of wishes that (very) randomly come along. You'll get a house that you can upgrade and furnish, but you can't modify the layout (just buy bigger houses). Those wishing to trap Sims in one room prisons with a stove and waiting for them to catch on fire will need to look elsewhere.

Only one Sim can be controlled, the one you create with various personality traits and some chosen fasion statement. There's no family dynamics save for marriage, although like many things in the game marriage seems to be mostly a status update as my current SimWife has no problem with my romantic interludes with my LiveInSimGirlfriend, even when performed right next to her.

In fact, the game seems to be a lot easier when you more or less try to have sex (oh, sorry, WooHoo) with everyone you meet. I went from the bottom rung on the politics to the top in a single Sunday afternoon by just repeatedly asking my boss (who I was sleeping with) for a promotion. I almost quit right there on the spot.

Jobs are a bit odd, actually, because promotions are slow unless you're a whore and you can earn five to ten times more by fishing than going into work any given day. Fishing is done via a quick mini-game which is about as challenging as playing tic-tac-toe alone. All of the mini-games, which include cooking and repairing things, are about as difficult. Oddly getting better at cooking is less rewarding because it ends up making even a grilled cheese more annoying since you have to juggle four pots instead of two (yes, in the world of Sims, grilled cheese sandwiches are a stew).

In just a few days of playing on and off, I've made friends with everyone, made a nemesis, slept with half the women in town, got fired, became Vice President (who knew towns had Vice Presidents?) and own a pretty snazzy house. Except for fulfilling all the possible wishes, which apparently unlocks the Pawn Shop in town, I've more or less maxed out the game.

So bottom line question - is it fun? The short answer is yes, and addictive as all get out. The long answer is yes, but ultimately somewhat shallow. I miss the wide variety of goods you could buy in previous versions. I miss being able to cultivate multiple Sims in different directions at the same time (in the same house). I miss well established goals which might take longer than an hour to accomplish. There's a serious lack of depth in both the interactions with the game itself, like the minigames, and with the Sims (like not being able to annoy your wife by moving in with another woman).

Recommend, but with a but of a shrug. I'm still playing it, and Sim fans will have already bought it and have made their second or third Sim by now. For those not already into some kind of Sim fetish, though, you might be cautious.

Book Read: Anathem

We just finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem on audiobook last week. We've been fans since Snow Crash, and loved the audio adaptations for both that book and Diamond Age

First, a side note that I'm a bit of fan about audiobooks. It fits easily with the fact that I rarely have time to read for fun anymore and The Girl and I can share the book in tandem. It helps that production of audiobooks has gotten a thousand times better (we can probably thank a certain Jim Dale for that a bit).

Anathem is a fascinating book and a little hard to talk about without getting to far into spoilers. This is partially because one of the interesting things Anathem is a bit of a word game. Stephenson actually opens the book with a bit of a preface about that, but what follows is an interesting set of rules, some ruses and a lot of word play that fits neatly into the book's themes and manages to make some interesting twists and points on the genre in large.

Compared to his other books, the story starts off slow (OK, slower than Snow Crash and Diamond Age at least) with a lot of explanation - this is not just for exposition but also sets up foundation blocks for questions and mysteries that crop up in the second and third acts of the book. There's some work to stick with, but there is a great deal of payoff in the end.

Highly recommended.

Amazon's Gold Box Loves PS3 Today

Amazon has some great PS3 game deals right now.

Anathem Book Trailer

I didn't even know this kind of thing existed, but this was a promotional trailer released for Neal Stephenson's Anathem:


The World of Anathem

Diamond Age Miniseries

This is one of those bits of information that's so old, it's new to me. George Clooney's production company is working on several things with SciFi Channel, including a Diamond Age miniseries. Diamond Age being a novel from Neal "Snow Crash" Stephenson. That was announced in 2007, and apparently development got wrangled up in the writer's strike, but production continues.

We're about finished with the Anathem audiobook here at the Cathode Cave, so it couldn't come any quicker.

Lost News Clippings: Natal, Pachter, and Digital TV

Posting is going to be slow for a couple weeks, peeps, thanks in large part to a heavy workload. I have a few emails I need to catch up, but I thought I'd catch up on some news stories of late.

The news mill has pretty much announced and denounced that Microsoft is issuing a new 360 to coincide with the Natal launch next year. I'm siding with the latter, as the former feels like a) pretty high noise to signal interference that stemmed from an excitable quote about how big the Natal launch will be and b) the real launch is still a bit too far away to know how big the Natal launch will be. Big, I'm sure, but there's a lot of factors involved and I don't really know why Microsoft would be doing anything other than a bundle for the new product. Redmond is going to have enough work on Natal adoption itself, they don't need to compile that with new console hardware as well.

Pachter hit the news again, with both decrying and then apologizing about decrying Sony's PSP Go price. I'm rather with Pachter here, I think the Go pricing is a bit odd. Sure, they're going up against the iPhone - but why go up against the iPhone if you don't need to do so, especially with the 3GS just being announced. Hopefully Sony is trying to balance out some PS3 losses and has done some decent math. Honestly, they could make $99 and they still wouldn't have convinced me to get one. My DS is gathering enough dust as it is.

And I don't think any link is necessary here - digital TV took over analog this weekend in the much reported and recently delayed rollout which kills the analog signal for more bandwidth for digital providers. I can't really complain, we've had cable for years and anything we would get over the air would be digital at this point as well, but I do still remember watching the Dukes Of Hazzard in my brother's room on a tiny black and white set. So let's hope it goes quietly into the night.

Game Play: Boom Blox

Boom Blox is one of those games that will remind you why you got a Wii. You could sparsely describe it as "Jenga with bombs", but that simplifies a deceptively complex gameplay structure which include several mechanics revolving around the basic theme of "fun with physics".

Players can take turns tackling the blocks, depending on the subgame you'll pull, throw, explode or shoot at the things in an attempt to score as many points as possible - and each of those actions have variations of their own like bowling balls and water hoses. With others, you can either cooperatively try and take down structures or go head to head for the most points.

There's very little flaw in the game. I'm not a huge fan of the shooting aspects of it, since it seems a bit like a cheap light gun game to me, but nearly everything else about it plays great and makes for an excellent multiplayer experience as well.

Highly recommended.

Zero Punctuation Reviews InFamous

So posting has been slow this week, in due largely to a long week at work. So in lieu of more posts about Wii-nis envy, here's Yahtzee:

Game Play: Sacred 2 (PS3)

I've already posted about Sacred 2's bizarre coop setup (bizarre being a friendly term there), but since we got past that weirdness, we've been able to jump into the game with more earnest.

Let's deal with some of the bad first. Framerates drop. Bugs crop up here and there - we had one instance where our characters stopped responding to our control and nobody could take any damage. The Girl resurrected once somewhere she couldn't move, until she was knocked aside by a giant squid. When working correctly, the game's rules are a bit arcane and sometimes even when it is working - it almost feels like it isn't. We've been playing it on and off for a few days now and I think we're finally getting a hang of the statistics, what some of the items do, managing the characters, etc.

So this is not a pick up and play kind of game. You have to put in some time just to get the hang of it. While still using a very much a Diablo-style format, the game employs some pretty serious mechanics to it.

The good is that once you get the hang of it, Ancaria is a huge and well realized world. Few games in this genre, especially for the console, allow you to roam so freely about, picking up side missions and honestly just exploring. The non-linear aspect is a huge bonus, compared to the specific chapter flow of most games of this ilk. There is a decent amount of diversity that we've seen so far, although at some point you wonder what in T-Energy made the rats just so darn mean. Still, you get the impression you are adventuring across a vast landscape, not just fulfilling task A which will be followed by task B.

Truth is, now that we're in the thick of it, this is honestly one of the better two player hack and slash RPG's we've had on the console. The game shines when you head down a hill and meet an army of monsters and get engaged in brief but somewhat epic battles. In fact, the game is better at throwing ten or more creatures at you than it is at boss fights so far.

I have an armload of fixes and tweaks I'd like to see in a patch at some point, but the game is definitely recommended for fans of the genre - with the caveat that it takes a little bit of time and frustration to enjoy.

For Sunday: Scotty Got An Office Job (The Cliffhanger!)

This is the latest in a long running series. Excellent, if not a bit tragic - but bonus points for the use of the word bung: