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.

Quantum of Solace

How low can a popular action franchise like James Bond sink, if you want to know then you should definitely see this movie. This movie manages to do so many things wrong that its difficult to know where to start. I'll start with the story first - its pathetic. Instead of a story about international espionage and political intrigue we get a story about an angry boyfriend (he can't sleep because of his grief) who wants to avenge his girlfriend's death.
There's some silly background story about political instability in South America being encouraged by the CIA because they want oil while the dastardly terrorists only want to sell expensive water. But that's all it is , a backdrop for the angry hero to go around killing people while the bad guys kill off his friends and the movie can be slapped with the James Bond brand.
There are no gadgets, no car and the ending is perhaps the lamest one you'll ever see in an action movie. This one is definitely not recommended to anyone.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

The movie starts off some time from where the previous one ended, the animals (just the penguins really) have managed to repair an old airplane to fly them back to New York. The movie starts of with a bang and is pretty much relentless in delivering comic scenes and lines. Of course their plans go awry and they end up in Africa instead of reaching New York.

Thankfully the movie does not suffer from the sequel syndrome, the jokes are fresh and don't feel silly or over the top (symptoms seen in many comedy sequels). Highly recommended for animation or comedy lovers.

Farseer Trilogy

The trilogy starts of rather steretypically with a bastard child of a prince being delivered to a keep and doesn't stray far from the basic fantasy formula. You have the young ignorant boy with immense potential and a wise old self-sacrificing mentor who served the boy's father.

The three books themselves pretty much have the same repetitive plot, the boy get injured then heals and does something half stupid and half heroic getting injured again in the process. There weren't any interesting plot twists to keep the reader engrossed and protagonist's idiocity really starts getting on your nerves after while. To top it all off when the author finally decides to leave the formula behind (after a much belabored climax) it is to spoil the ending. Instead of a happy ending to appease the readers after going through three novels its a rather hollow ending. I wouldn't recommend this series at all.

Hainish Series

 

After having a less than enjoyable experience with the Earthsea series I turned to the author's award winning science fiction novels.

The Dispossessed deals with a comparison of capitalist and communist (albeit non-authoritarian) economies. Only this time they're on different planets, both systems have their pros and cons as felt by the protagonist during his stay on the capitalist world while the story of his life on the communist planet unfolds as flashbacks. The story starts of well but then dies a slow and torturous death as nothing seems to happen for long periods and the anti-climactic ending does nothing to improve the story.

The Left Hand of Darkness brings back the author to her favorite subject of gender distinction. The idea of a society with androgynous members who become male/female once a month for mating is interesting but again instead of basing a story on this backdrop the author makes the exploration of this society as the story. Sure, the alien representative from a galactic federation and first contact is supposed to be the main theme but story constantly changes focus and in the end feels flat.

The Dark Knight

I finally managed to get a ticket for an IMAX show and it was definitely worth the trouble. The movie is fantastic, sure its not as much of a step up from Batman Begins as that movie was compared to the earlier Batman trash but this movie is definitely a must see.

A special mention must go the the portrayal of the Joker, this is the first time the Joker is actually scary rather than just looking silly and everything about the character is so exquisitely done from the make up and dialogues  to the acting that you walk away with the feeling that this movie was all about the Joker.

There's something for everyone in this movie and its so well balanced that no one should be disappointed whether they were looking for action, drama or even (yuck) character development.

So this movie is highly recommended even if you dislike superhero movies (which anyone would after watching Superman Returns).

A note about the IMAX theater though, I did not understand why they've built seats so close the screen that the metal railing in front of the seats actually does not allow the viewer (even from the last row) to see the  lower corners of the screen.

Earthsea Series

The series started off as a fairly decent (i.e. nothing special) boy-turns-into-powerful-wizard type of story that reminded me quite a bit of REF's Magician. Barring the boring chase and pursuit of the unnamed evil section the book was quite good.

The second book had a different protagonist which seemed odd at first but the book itself was enjoyable enough and has a satisfying ending. The third book again returns to the standard fantasy template with the wise wizard taking a young apprentice along on a quest to save the world. This book although suffers from the same prolonged climax that ails the first one. The story ends with the wizard losing his powers and the young apprentice being crowned as king after fulfilling a long foretold prophecy.

The last book I read in this series was Tehanu, it may surprise the readers but almost nothing happens in this book. At least nothing to classify it as a fantasy novel. The wizard returns in this book after losing his powers and mostly lies around while the female protagonist from the second book tries to keep him alive. This book feels like something a angry women's lib activist with no creative talent would write after reading the other Earthsea novels.

I didn't understand how these books could have won so may awards so I've ordered some of the author's Sc-Fi books to see how that goes.

Iron Man

Now this is how a superhero movie should be made. Having watched some Iron Man cartoons on TV a long time back I didn't have high hopes for this movie. It was one of the few superhero cartoon series that I didn't like and this from a guy who loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series.

However I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the movie, there was never a dull moment and casting Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark was a masterstroke, he really does fit into the role very well. The movie itself was very well paced and there's hardly a dull moment in the film. The special effects are top notch and twist at the end really had me surprised.

This movie is certainly going to be a hit and we can only hope that its a sign of things to come this summer.

Golden Compass

Much has been written about the movie that released based on the first book of the series (Golden Compass). With an all star cast and excellent special effects the movie did look like a hit but it failed miserably at the box office.
The series starts of in a parallel universe where humans have daemons as their animal companions somewhat analogous to the concept of souls. The first book is nicely paced and the story of a young girl trying to rescue her friend is quite engaging. However from the primarily adventurous journey in the first book the sequels turn increasingly towards theology and the second and third books feel tacked on to complete a trilogy and in the process encash upon the success of the first book.
The second book is based on a totally different alternate universe with only the protagonist Lyra being the common thread. The plot takes a turn for the worse and Lyra befriends a boy after they escape. The story then becomes about the Magisterium trying to prevent Lyra from committing the original sin.
Go figure! I've never seen such an abrupt plot twist (or rather U-turn) in any series. It totally threw me off, for a moment there I thought I'd started reading another series. Nevertheless I laboured on to finish the series somehow only to be assaulted by the hotchpotch climax at the end.
I would still recommend the first book to fans of alternate reality/ universe sub-genre but proceed at your own risk after that.

Gears of War

I've played quite a bit of the game on the 360 and I was waiting to pick up the PC version, finally managed to buy it at a local store last month. The game looks quite good and I liked the cover mechanism employed during combat. The missions are very good and the skirmishes are staged evenly with the area always providing lots of cover. Even though I prefer more realistic shooters (i.e. no monsters/ aliens) I really liked this game. The story does progress nicely through the missions and provides a good backdrop for the game and its sequels.
The game requires a higher spec'd PC than Half Life 2 but its still easier on the system than Crysis without managing to look too bad. I would recommend this game to any first person shooter fan. Oh and please tell me how to use the chainsaw effectively because somehow I can't get the hang of it.

Crysis

Got this game along in November last year too. This was the reason why I upgraded my PC and as it turned out I could barely play this game in DX9 with high graphic detail. I was even more unhappy when Nvidia launched the 8800GT at a lower price compared to my 8800GTS and it performed much better.
The game looks absolutely gorgeous, hands down its the best looking game bar none. The trouble is that most gaming PCs can either run it with all the eye candy turned on or run it with playable frame rates and the eye candy turned down.
I didn't think that the nano suit concept would be very useful and started playing the game as any other FPS game. Pretty soon though the game does require you to use the cloaking ability or fight a huge amount of enemy troops, which isn't easy even on the easy setting (Ok, so I admit that I play games on the easy setting).
The game play though lacks a certain something, it isn't nearly as fun as it should be and the story falls flat most of the time. For all the open sandbox game play promised by the game I felt that most missions were designed to force the player to use one of the nano suit's abilities and that takes away a lot from the fun factor.
This is only recommended to people wanting to benchmark their gaming PCs.