Star Trek

Now this is how you reboot a franchise! The movie starts off with a bang and moves along at breathless pace throughout. The plot is about Kirk and Spock's time at the Starfleet academy and their first posting on the Enterprise in a totally new time-line.
The special effects are top notch and the movie is chock full of edge of the seat moments, not to mention quite a bit of comic relief between all the action.
This is a fantastic movie by JJ Abrams that breathes new life into the Star Trek franchise, its a must-see for fans as well as non fans alike.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

You would think that Hollywood had learned how to adapt comic books into movies for audiences aged six and up after seeing the recent Batman and Iron Man movies. Sadly, after seeing this movie you realize how good those movies were and how big the margin of error can be.
We have almost everyone flying through the air, Kestrel's vanishing effect is comparable to a 70s B-movie compared to Nightcrawler in the earlier X-Men movies and some of the action scenes are just lame (e.g. Kestrel vs. Sabretooth).
To add the long list of follies we have Wolverine posing, posturing & shouting throughout the movie for what are presumably the emotional / character building scenes. However these over the top sequences stick out like rabbit teeth on an anteater.

Sony E3 2009 Impressions

 

Sony started E3 with a big handicap because of the PSP Go being leaked, it was one of their major announcements and definitely stole some of their thunder. They didn't fret over it much, rather the conference was peppered with jokes about stuff not leaked. However Sony did have a few other aces up their sleeve.

After the initial number crunching stats the conference really started off with same game play demos. There was an excellent demo of Naught Dog's Uncharted 2 which was followed by an equally impressive demo of Assassins Creed 2. Both games looked sharp and more importantly the looked like sequels that would be actually worth playing.

Sony also demoed their motion controller which unfortunately was nothing special, but that was to be expected after Natal. Then is was the PSP Go's turn to be officially announced after a joke about naming it the worst kept secret in gaming history. The hardware finally gets rid of the UMD and is lighter and smaller the old PSP model. In addition to the hardware a lot of games were also announced for the PSP including Gran Turismo 5. It should do well assuming third party developers increase support for the platform.
To wrap it up Sony bought out the really big guns. First up was the shocking announcement of the next Final Fantasy game exclusive to the PS3. It was really odd considering that FF XIII is still nowhere near release.
The game play demo of the show was definitely God of War 3 - with the series' signature ultra violent game play in glorious HD no other game really had a chance.
Even though Microsoft has Natal and Alan Wake the best conference was definitely Sony.

Nintendo E3 2009 Impressions

 

People were really disappointed with Nintendo's conference last year. Unfortunately this year was no different, Ninty served up another veritable snooze fest. In fact it was so predictable that I was able to guess most of the stuff before hand. I remember reading a comment on Gamespot's live blog about how little has leaked from Nintendo's line up before E3 - well it turned out to be prophetic in a twisted way.

They started off with some boring statistics and promised a lot of surprises. The first new game displayed was another Mario game with 4 player Co-Op. Hardly anything new or exciting here but things got worse as they started praising Wii Fit next followed and up by showing off the imaginatively titled Wii Fit Plus.

Reggie then took the stage and revealed the Wii Motion you-guessed-it Plus and demoed some games. All this would have been slightly interesting if Natal hadn't been announced a day back. Then we're shown some new DS games which seem okay but nothing surprising here either.

The next segment was a really long speech about casual gamers from Iwata that could put  he Road Runner on a six pack of Red Bull to sleep. He then continues on to introduce Wii Vitality Sensor which should go on to become the best selling video game accessory in rest homes and hospitals.

The next segment was about actual gaming the next Resident Evil and Metroid games were revealed and they looked pretty good leaving the graphics aside. Even more interesting is the fact that Metroid Other M (yes that's the name of the game) is a collaboration with Team Ninja. It was a decent finishing touch, throwing a bone to the hard core gamers.

I wasn't expecting much from Nintendo being a hard core gamer rather than a casual one but the conference managed to underwhelm my meager expectations.
Image from Gamespot.

Microsoft E3 2009 Impressions

 

I watched a live stream of the Microsoft E3 press conference last night and was quite impressed at the stuff coming out in the next year or so. Luckily I missed the first few minutes due to streaming issues so did not have to sit through the Rock Band: Beatles part.

The highlights of the show were definitely Splinter Cell: Conviction, Alan Wake (finally!) and Project Natal. 

Conviction had a novel way of communicating mission details to the player with mission name and target appearing in game on the walls and the graphics and game play part wasn't half bad either.

Alan Wake was finally demonstrated with some nice game play which looked like a mixture of Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark. Graphically the game looks good and given the recent trend of survival horror games it might turn out to be a hit (over hyped as it is).

The center piece of the show was definitely Project Natal. A motion capturing, voice detecting control system demoed with a mixture of prerecorded videos and live action. The prerecorded part was amazing but the live action part needed a little work as can be expected. The Avatar in the live action demo was doing stuff that would shame a contortionist, nothing that a little rag doll modeling won't fix though. Peter Molyneux's studio also prepared a video showcasing the technology that seemed a little too good to be believable. The fact that it will only be shown behind closed doors to a selected audience only strengthens my suspicions.

The conference was nicely organized with the some big games shown up front and then an announcement was made saying that everything from that moment on would be exclusive. Other newsworthy items were ODST, Forza 3 and Kojima himself coming out to confirm that he next MGS was in development on the Xbox. Games for Windows was conspicuously missing from the conference, which is surprising considering the fact that some big third party games were released last year that supported it. Ah well, one more nail in the coffin for PC gaming.

Image from Gamespot.

Pulsar 220 after 4000 K.M.

 

Now that one and a half years have passed since I posted my first impressions about the Pulsar 220 its time to post my impressions about how this bike holds up after 4000 K.M. in 18 months. As you can gather the bike hasn't been used a lot (what can I do, my office is close to my house) but the amount of problems seems to be disproportionately high.

I've been changing the engine oil at almost every service and all the services till now have been completed according to schedule. I've made a couple of extra trips to the service center for the rear brake screeching but other than that the bike was running okay.

At the first paid service I changed the spark plug, air filter as well as the engine oil. Now after a couple of weeks the bike started giving starting problems, the RPM meter used to get stuck sometimes and the rear brake was screeching again. I went to the service center again and they replaced the fuel filter this time and cleaned the rear brake. The bike seemed to be working okay there so I took it back home.

That evening the troubles started again, the starting problem had gotten even worse when the bike has been parked for a while so I have to keep pumping the throttle in neutral to keep it above 2000 RPM otherwise the engine shuts down. The rear brake started screeching within a week and the bike's average nosedived as well. A new problem that cropped up is that the fuel meter displays empty when the bike starts and it takes around 3-4 KM traveling to get it to report the correct amount of fuel left.

Now I don't know if all Bajaj Pulsar 220 bikes are terrible quality or I am being robbed by Bajaj's Pro Biking service center but one thing is certain - this is my last Bajaj two wheeler.

Oh and I didn't want to post a picture of the piece of crap Pulsar 220 so I posted an image of a bike that isn't.

Fahrenheit 451

 

Ray Bradbury has written a really thought provoking book in Fahrenheit 451. I initially thought it would be about how children have stopped reading but this book has a much bigger scope. Not that that's much of an issue these days with the Harry Potter books making reading cool again worldwide (and that five point something book for teens in India). Otherwise people only read books from the bestseller list so that they could talk about something at parties (socialites preferring non-fiction).

The story is about a fireman who's having second thoughts about his job but the twist here is that in the book's time line firemen have become instruments of destruction of books. Their job is to burn any books found along with the house they were found in. The protagonist is influenced initially by a flaky teenage girl whose family moves in to the neighborhood, he is forced to take stock of his life during fairly innocuous conversations with her. The catalyst to his eventual disillusionment is an old lady who chooses to burn herself with her books rather than leaving them.

The book points to some interesting trends that led to the banning of books. People wanting instant gratification and hence preferring TV to reading, the dumbing down of popular media to appeal to a larger market and removing offending books to appease minorities. All in the name of easing the everyone's mind.
Even though the dialogue can be a bit melodramatic at times this book is recommended for everyone with the hope that the events in the book don't turn out to be prophetic. Oh and if you are reading the 50th anniversary edition of the book then don't forget to read the coda section.

The State of PC Gaming

 

Having recently purchased three PC titles in quick succession I was surprised by the amount of effort that was needed to start playing these games. The titles in question being Grand Theft Auto 4, Dawn of War 2 and Call of Duty: World at War. Yeah I know these games released last year but I was waiting for my ill fated CPU upgrade to finish before playing these.
Anyway lets go through the effort required one by one, patching World at War to v1.4 requires downloading and installing 3 huge patches with a cumulative size of over 700MB. Of course one of the patches adds more multi-player maps but its still huge. On starting the game you have to create an account with the developer and you can start actually playing the game.
Dawn of War 2 was unbelievable in this regard, it installs Steam (then Steam updates itself), then it installs the game itself, then it installs Games for Windows LIVE (GFWL), then Steam updates the game, when you finally launch the game GFWL updates itself. Whew... then you can finally play the game after signing into Steam as well as GFWL.
GTA 4 requires online activation after installation finishes (in addition to SecuROM) and requires an account with Rockstar Social Club before playing and on first start it updates GFWL as well as the game itself while the status is shown as updating GFWL. So after creating all these accounts and downloading the patches it almost feels like setting up a new system from scratch and installing all the drivers and updates.
What is going on here, are all these companies into email address harvesting or something? You can't properly play a single player games without signing into three online services.
Now to the actual single player games themselves, since when did single-player gaming become an add-on to games and multi-player the main component? GTA4 is the only game out of these which can be called a single player game, others contain small single player campaigns with the main focus on multi-player gaming and maps (as the change logs suggest).
Image courtesy VisualPharm.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

The movie is about a boy who loses his father at a young age and has to live with his stepmother. Even though his stepmother loves him he thinks that he is alone and she is stuck with him.
Wait a minute! Isn't this movie supposed to be about an alien landing on Earth to wipe out the human race so that the planet can survive? Who cares about a smart ass kid who thinks he knows best and tries to mess up everything.
The plot notwithstanding the movie feels like everything is subdued for some reason, there are very few shots of GORT while we're made to watch endless scenes of a deadpan Keanu Reeves and a pleading Jennifer Connelly. Overall a pretty dull movie with all stereotypical characters and very few action scenes to redeem it. I couldn't fathom why it was released in IMAX when there were so few action scenes. Not even recommended for Jennifer Connelly fans.
Lest you loyal readers complain that I'm being to harsh in my criticism I will point out three good things about the movie - Watchmen, Star Trek and X-Men Origins: Wolverine;  rather the trailers for these three films were screened before the movie.

Dragonlance Trilogy

This series was a welcome comeback to high fantasy after trudging through the Farseer trilogy. The first book is pretty good even though the glaring absence of the protagonist's girlfriend is a little odd initially. Of course by the second book you realize what's coming and the planned plot twist falls rather flat.

Some tips for the authors, when you want to make a character mysterious you either narrate their actions only to the readers or you make the other characters slightly suspicious of them. You don't make the characters simply refuse to answer direct questions and accusations, that just gets on the nerves.

The magic in the books seems to be purposefully doled out like the porridge in Oliver Twist's workhouse. The wizards seem too inconsistent with their powers and sometimes it feels like the authors used a deus ex machina.

Another odd thing is the choice of story segments the authors chose to relate in summary (traveling to the location of the dragon's eggs) or in a poem (ice wall). Its strange that situations ripe for some thrilling action and suspense were relegated to a couple of pages while much more was written about the dwarf's sea sickness.

Aside from these minor irritations the series is quite good to read and recommended to everyone.