Category: Otaku

Review: Peter Davison’s Book Of Alien Monsters

January 31, 2013

I recently acquired this fine tome:

If you’re thinking it look familiar, well it should. However this was the first in the series, and therefore one may presume it doesn’t suffer from the sequelitis of its brethren.

Such a thought would however be patently incorrect, for this is yet another book of short stories that fail to impress, engage or leave an impression. In short, a book written for babies by hacks. With no exception the alien monsters in the book are violent, menacing or dangerous and for that reason I imagine this book would be quite a thrill for kids. But the resolutions are so obvious (or worse, telegraphed) and the stories end so abruptly that I was left wishing for the occasional twist or surprise (“Oh? The alien is actually friendly?”)

Many of the nine stories in this book are very similar, with least half having the same setup: colonists on alien planet don’t realize those dumb animals are actually sentient and aggressive aliens. The other half are equally repetitive: alien life form on Earth hides itself from all but children and ends up possessing and/or eating them. In the world of Peter Davison, there are no good aliens!

Here’s a retelling of the core of many of the stories in this book:

Pletrac huddled in the cave, unsure if the branches at the entrance would be enough to hide them. Vorg groaned quietly at his side, his leg probably broken. Pletrac moved the survival blanket up over his head to try to muffle the sound. How could they have ended up like this? The scouts hadn’t said anything about the creatures being intelligent – or even hostile – and the scans had identified them as one of the best food sources on the planet. The first had offered no resistance at all as they approached, large black eyes watching them seemingly mindlessly. Pletrac could still remember the hideous ululations it had made after Vorg electo-lanced it, and how quickly the others had burst up from the water and onto the land, tentacles coiling furiously. They were amphibious! Somehow they had escaped – the aliens probably afraid of the fire – but there were too many of them, and Vorg was badly injured. Now they would wait in this cave until help arrived. Help that didn’t even know yet that they were in danger…
…Outside the cave Kron-pirr waited, biding his time. The injured one would soon die, he knew, and the other would need sleep. When that time came, Glork’fth would surely be avenged!

Writing that gave me more enjoyment than reading the entire book 🙂

Verdict: save your shekels

Rubber Duck

January 12, 2013

It was an early start yesterday, on the 6:41 am train from Broadmeadow to Sydney.

As with my previous three train trips, I saw only a single Kangaroo on the trip. Once again the glimpse was fleeting and I was unable to photograph it. Here’s an artists impression:

I was in Sydney early, and after dropping my stuff at Adams set out for the city. I had an inkling to hit the shops!

I did the usual places – Kinokuniya, QVB, Pitt Street – before heading to Darling Harbour. There was something there I had to see…

It’s a 3-storey tall inflatable duck art installation, which is floated in Darling Harbour for the Sydney Festival. I’m lovin it!

As I got closer to Darling Harbour I began to see signs advertising dugongs at Sydney Aquarium. I’d never seen a dugong, so decided it was worth a look.

The cost was $38, and the first few displays were decidedly underwhelming. I’d been to this aquarium several times before and feared it may have gone off a bit.

My fears were unjustified! The displays are now themed, and it was just that the first set – Australian river fishes – were just a bit drab. As I wandered through the next I was treated to a kelp forest, a sunken ship, a steampunk themed crab and lobster display and a remarkable ray tank:

And then, the dugongs! Seeing them float around happily almost brought a year to my eye 🙂

They have two, a male and female, who have been there for three years. They are two of the only six dugongs (a south pacific relative of the manatee) in captivity in the world. They eat 50 kg of lettuce each a day!

They are in one of the giant walk-through tanks at the aquarium, which are submerged under the water level of the Harbour.

It’s a very peaceful and special way to see the animals.

There is a mural painted on the walls of the ramp leading down to the bottom of the dugong tank. It details one aspect of man’s history with these beasts:

Sailors jump from a ship pursuing a lovely mermaid…

But mermaids don’t exist and it’s a dugong!

But then later on we discover there is a real mermaid after all 🙂

Fancy a real dugong? Well that would be difficult, but the shop sells the next best thing:

There wasn’t a price tag 🙂

Overall the aquarium was spectacular, and I’m very pleased I visited.

Changing tack a bit, the above is ‘Dark Escape 4D’, a new light gun shooter I played (for $4 a go!) The game is in 3D (you wear glasses) and has a moving seat, an air gun that blasts your face and even a pulse sensor in the gun handle that makes the gun fail if you panic! It *is* a scary game (you sit enclosed in a dark room), but it’s a bit slow for my taste.

I wandered over to The Star casino, where I would boggle at the variety of machines and how geared to Chinese Tourists they have become. $10 of my hard earned dollars went – in equal portions – into the paired games Ice Horse and Fire Horse, mostly because I was attracted by the pretty fantasy horses galloping through the videos 🙂

A bit later I visited an Uggs shop in which no employees seemed to speak English. Do you think Chinese tourists buy a lot of Uggs:

I wasn’t there for the shoes though. A stuffed animal had caught my eye:

Yes it’s real fur, but the price tag scared me away! Will I return?

Two more photos to end this epic post. First, a magazine from 1990 I bought at a comic store:

And lastly, this…

Game Over?

December 20, 2012

I won’t be buying any more games this year, so now is as good a time as any for my annual review of my game-buying habits.

The news isn’t good. In 2012 my game buying dropped to a fifteen-year low, with only 64 games purchased during the year. Dollars spent on gaming dropped to a twenty-year low, with those 64 games costing me just a few pennies over $1k in total. Have I lost the gaming spark?

Here are the much beloved plots:

^ The above shows purchases by % of totals. With 34 games bought, iOS leads the pack by far.

^ The above shows % by dollars spent. Mac is a surprising contender here, mostly due to World of Warcraft.

Here are some observations I can make from my game buying this past year:

1) The PSP and DS are very much on the way out. Only three years ago I bought an average of 1.25 DS games per week. In 2012 I only bought four in total.
2) Although I still buy a lot of iOS games, I bought much less in 2012 than I did in 2011.
3) The 3DS has taken off nicely. I expect to see strong growth in my purchasing of 3DS games in the next few years.
4) The Ps3 fell off a cliff, as far as I am concerned.

So what happened? Well I theorize a few things, foremost among them being work. As my job takes up more and more of my time, I obviously have less free time. In addition, I do a great deal of work at home, often spending at least a couple of hours working on email and various administrative tasks almost every single day during the semester. Add to this the fact I taught a summer class and I simply ended up with less free time in 2012.

Secondly, I went on two vacations over the summer (Florida, and NM/CA).

Thirdly, even though I am buying fewer games, I find myself spending more time on average playing those that I purchased this past year. Warcraft counts in this category.

The fact remains that gaming is still by far my favourite hobby, and I still play games essentially every single day, it’s just that I don’t seem to be buying as many!

So what were the highlights this year? Well, let’s start with the years biggest disappointments in reverse order:

3) Bug Princess 2 Black Label (iOS) – A massive ripoff from Cave, in which they add a difficulty level to an existing game and deceptively repackage it as a brand new game. I bought this on the strength of all their other titles, and couldn’t believe I’d paid $15 for basically nothing I didn’t already have (even the achievements are identical!)
2) New Super Mario Brothers 2 (3DS) – Don’t get me wrong, this is a great game. But it’s too familiar, too identical to the Wii game. Nintendo did this once before (compare the DS and Wii Animal Crossing games), and I wish they hadn’t done it again.
1) Diablo 3 (Mac) – Not just the biggest disappointment of 2012, once of the biggest game disappointments of all time. I played Diablo 2 for hundreds and hundreds of hours. This one, I could barely manage a hundred. Upon release it was full of mind-bogglingly unusual design decisions that stymied fun at every turn. Patch after patch failed to remedy the situation, and I eventually turned my back on it forever I suspect.

For every bad game there must be a good one, and here’s the best of the year in my opinion:

3) World Of Warcraft: Mists Of Pandaria (Mac) – How do you breath new life into an 8 year old game? Release an expansion as good as this one. WoW feels as fresh as it ever does, and I’ve enjoyed every minute I’ve spent running around Pandaria (especially with Fyrenze the bear!)
2) Kid Icarus Uprising (3DS) – Nintendo has been slight on brand new games in many years, and I’ll admit I had few expectations for this on-rails 3DS shooter based on a 30 year old NES game. But holy cow, this one ate me up and just wouldn’t spit me out. In some ways, it was Monsterhunterian in it’s addictiveness, and I reckon many years from now I’ll still be pointing to this one as amongst the very best 3DS games. The online modes are awesome as well 🙂

1) Xenoblade Chronicles (Wii)

This one isn’t just the best of 2012. It’s not even just the best Wii RPG, or even Wii game. This one goes beyond all that, and I don’t hesitate when I label it as one of the very best RPGs I have ever played. It was crafted by a team that included people that had worked on various legendary RPGs (Xenosaga, Baiten Kaitos, others) and uses an MMO-style exploration and combat system to tell a truly amazing story involving two gargantuan warring robot-continents and the races that live on them. With twists and turns aplenty, and a genuinely likeable cast of characters, I could barely put this one down and when I finally put the controller down after the final boss battle almost 125 hours had passed. I only wish it has lasted longer. If you have a Wii and like RPGs, this game is a no brainer.

Robot Claw