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Posted on 01.29.02 by ScottC @ 6:04 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.   Written by: China Miéville In the front of the book Perdido Street Station, you are given a simple map of the city of New Crobuzon: its precincts, rail lines, and rivers. But it does nothing to illustrate the complexity of this city built under the ribcage of a gigantic skeleton. The architecture is a confusion of grand houses, billowing factories, crowded markets, and grimy rookeries. The population is an unruly mix of humans, khepri (women's bodies with insect's heads), vodyanoi (amphibians who shape water like clay), cactus-men (self-explanatory), and other more unusual inhabitants. Even science includes the psychic Remaking of flesh into bizarre and obscene forms, computers made of gears and sprockets, and alchemy is studied alongside atomic theory. New Crobuzon is a city always on the edge of crisis and all that is required to tip it over is a little push. This push originates from Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, a scientist whose controversial theories have gotten him shoved from the mainstream. So he takes jobs where he can find them. One job comes from Yagharek, an outcast member of the garuda (a noble race of nomadic birdmen from the desert). For the crime of 'choice-theft in the second degree', he had his wings cut off. Yagharek hungers for the sensation of flight and offers a lot of money to Isaac to make it possible. Isaac begins by getting all manner of birds and winged insects to study their modes of flight. One particular specimen is a multicolored grub that will only eat dreamshit, the newest drug on the street. What the grub becomes when it emerges from its cocoon will lead Isaac, his friends, and the city itself into a waking nightmare they might not awaken from. Categorized as: Books andReviews
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Posted on 01.20.02 by ScottC @ 5:40 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Film: Written and Directed by: Luc Besson Released by: Sony Pictures My Advice: Borrow It. A big ball of Evil is heading straight towards Earth. Assisted by the evil businessman and gunrunner Zorg (Oldman), it will extinguish all life on the planet. Why would Zorg and the ball do something like that? Because they're Evil. The only thing that can stop them is the Supreme Being, who is actually a young woman (Jovovich) who doesn't speak any English. She happens to runs into (or crashes into) cab driver Corbin Dallas (Willis) who just happens to be an ex-soldier. Along the way, the flamboyant DJ Ruby Rod (Tucker) and the priest Vito Cornelius (Holm) join them on their adventure. This unlikely band of misfits has to stop the Big Ball of Evil (and its entourage) from destroying the Earth. Categorized as: Reviews
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Posted on 01.20.02 by ScottC @ 12:00 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Film: Written by: David Lynch, based on the novel by Frank Herbert Features:
Released by: Universal Studios My Advice: Avoid It. Categorized as: Reviews
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Posted on 01.18.02 by Ripp @ 9:43 am
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Overall: Developer: Red Storm Entertainment The No. 1 complaint I hear about first-person shooter games is that they aren't realistic. People seem to want something that they can relate to more than the worlds portrayed in Doom or Serious Sam. If that's your complaint, then this is your game. Ghost Recon (referred to as GR) is a first-person shooter set in the world of Tom Clancy's novels. As the game opens in the year 2010, we learn that the Russian government has been taken over by a group of hard-line Ultra-nationalists. The Russian war machine is being readied for an invasion, with troop movements and buildups at Russia's western border. Only one force stands between the Russian front line and the former soviet republics: the Special Forces group known as the Ghosts. They've been tasked with running interference against the Russians until the bulk of the NATO force can mobilize. The game puts the Ghosts in your hands, leaving their fate (and the fate of nations) within your grasp. The rules of the GR universe are simple. There are no hit points. There are no bosses. There are no levels. You and your team of riflemen, demolition experts, snipers and heavy weapons "support" specialists are tasked with completing several goals during each mission. How you achieve these goals depends on your playing style as well as the makeup (and experience) of your squad. Game play is divided into two sections: the mission briefing/squad selection stage and the actual mission. In the briefing you are given your objectives for the mission and any relevant information about the enemy presence in the area. During squad selection you have the opportunity to select soldiers based on their specialties and their statistics in key areas of combat, like stealth and weapon use. After you have completed a mission you will also be able to use this screen to allocate more points to these stats, giving the player an incentive to play smart and keep a squad alive. Game play during the mission will be familiar to anyone that has played a FPS game before. Aiming is done with the mouse, while moving and all other functions critical to the mission are done via the keyboard. One particular aspect of gameplay worth noting is the command map function. With this tool you can see a crude map of the mission area and where your fireteams are at the moment. By utilizing a control system on the map itself you can direct your squads to separate waypoints and targets, all while leading one team yourself. Through efficient use of the command map it is possible to attack three targets at the same time, just as a real specops unit would. This gives the game a feel of realism well beyond what GR's competitors have to offer. Also adding to the feel of realism are the dynamics of the game itself. Uniforms get wet when you walk through water, and snow crunches underfoot. Enemies will respond appropriately (and differently) to the sounds of snapping twigs or gunfire. Your squad members will seek cover at all times, and won't fire unless they have a kill shot, or you ordered them to. As you run your weapon becomes harder to control, adding a degree of difficulty to the usual "point and shoot" interface. Where GR really wins is in its replay value. The game itself has several difficulty settings, as well as playing the "quick mission" option where mission objectives and details are changed. Add to this the fact any mission can be played in the multiplayer arena, and you have a game that guarantees hours and hours of additional play. I've logged over 100 hours and the game still doesn't bore me. Ghost Recon promised an accurate and exciting view into the life of a Special Forces unit, and it delivered. You should be able to find it at your local electronics superstore for around $40.00, and it's worth every penny! Minimum System Requirements:
Eye Candy: Categorized as: Games
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Posted on 01.18.02 by Widge @ 12:05 am
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Film: Written by: Roald Dahl & David Seltzer, based on the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Dahl Features:
Released by: Warner Brothers My Advice: Own it. Categorized as: Reviews
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Posted on 01.15.02 by ScottC @ 8:26 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own. 
US Release Date: November 14, 2001 On paper, The Sims doesn't sound interesting: you guide the lives of Sims (the people in the game) to furnish their houses, obtain jobs, form relationships, and go to the bathroom. But for a lot of people, it becomes addictive. You can become attached to your Sims, concerned about their well being; financial, physical, and emotional. It also helps that many of the features of The Sims are done in a tongue-in-cheek style, from the funny descriptions of the various objects around the house to the swelling music when two Sims fall in love. The newest addition to this is the Hot Date Expansion Pack. Hot Date focuses on the social aspect of the game. Your Sims have more flexibility in relating to other Sims, from how friendly a greeting can be (a wave, a handshake, a friendly hug, or a "very friendly" hug) to the subjects they can talk about (the 60's, crime, technology, or travel). How you gauge the contacts your Sims have has also changed. Replacing the status bar on the health of a relationship are two status bars, one on how things are going at the moment and another on how the relationship is going as a whole. The biggest improvement that comes with this new expansion is the Sim Downtown. Categorized as: Games andReviews
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Posted on 01.14.02 by Doc @ 2:26 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Overall: Developer: United Game Artists Since the earliest generation consoles, pretty much every game produced has fallen neatly into a genre, making it easy to market, easy for fans to find, and easy to review, as there are "standards" of a sort for each genre of game, be it FPS, RTS, sports, RPG, whatever. And now there's Rez. And I have to start from scratch, because, despite the fact that it's advertised and marketed as a "shooter," it's infinitely more complex than that. Rez puts you in control of a little wireframe person, zipping through what looks to be some sort of VR cyberspace computer network, full of wireframe landscapes and polygonal bad guys representing the network's defense systems. So you zip through the network "on rails" (for the uninitiated, this means that you have no control over your movement, just your aim), and you blow up security programs, with the obligatory "boss monster" at the end of each of five levels. Categorized as: Games
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Posted on 01.09.02 by ScottC @ 6:18 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Written by: Connie Willis I've looked over the books I have reviewed so far, and found they are rather serious and somber. I'm going to lighten the mood with To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis, a novel that tells the story of a temporal paradox that could destroy the space-time continuum. But this is not another Star Trek time travel rehash, trust me. In the mid-21st century, time travel has been developed, but Time doesn't like to be messed with. It is impossible to take anything from the past into the present. Because of this, time travel has become consigned to cash-strapped universities, such as Oxford. However when a researcher, Verity Kindle, returns from 1888 with a cat, this impossibility should have caused a huge uproar. Unfortunately, the wealthy and demanding Lady Schrapnell has commandeered Oxford to help her rebuild Coventry Cathedral, destroyed during a Nazi air raid. Since the cathedral is to be an exact copy (Lady Schrapnell's favorite saying is "God is in the details!"), everyone is working to exhaustion including Ned Henry. Ned has been traveling to 1940 and back so much looking for the "bishop's bird stump" (an ugly Victorian decoration), his brain has become addled with "time lag". To get him away from Lady Schrapnell's badgering, he is sent back to return the cat to 1888 and avoid the possible destruction of the universe. Ned's brain is so addled by the time lag he doesn't think to ask "How did the cat get to the present?" or "Where do I return the cat to?" or "How do I get out of this mess?" of which there are many in the book. Categorized as: Books andReviews
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Posted on 01.09.02 by ScottC @ 6:00 pm
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own.  Written by: Simon Winchester Professor James Murray was given a daunting task, to edit and compile The Oxford English Dictionary, the most complete and accurate dictionary ever. It took 70 years to complete the first edition (published in 1928); it contained 414,800 words and 1,861,200 quotations (the second edition published in 1989 contains 615,100 words and 2,436,600 quotations). While there were other dictionaries available (most notably Samuel Johnson's famous work), the OED was unique since it not only defined words, but also traced the history of words through quotations obtained from literature and non-fiction. Murray was helped by a Dr. William Minor, who like 2000 other volunteers, submitted appropriate quotations that showed the word's first appearance or illustrated the word's meaning. Dr. Minor's quotations were plentiful and well researched. So Professor Murray figured the doctor had plenty of free time. Since Minor was committed to Broadmoor Asylum for shooting a man he believed to be an assassin, he did. This is the odd relationship that frames The Professor and the Madman, a relationship between two very different men. Murray was a son of a tailor, a self-educated Scotsman who spoke 25 languages and was a pious Congregationalist; Minor was an aristocratic American, educated at Yale, a surgeon during the Civil War, an agnostic and libertine. But both were brought together by a love of language. Such was Murray's regard for Minor that it took years to see that the return address on his correspondence was from an asylum, not a county house in the area. Winchester delves into the lives and motivations of these two men, especially Minor's paranoid dementia; he also delves into the dictionary, the third member of this triangle. Categorized as: Books andReviews
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Posted on 01.06.02 by Widge @ 4:23 am
Comments on this: none yet. Add your own. 
Written by: Caroline Alexander & Joseph Dorman, based on the book by Alexander My Advice: Wait and rent it. Sir Ernest Shackleton wanted to not just succeed but exceed--and nothing exceeds like excess. So thwarted in his attempts to be the first man to reach the South Pole, he strives ahead anyway for another go. On their way to the Antarctic continent, the expedition's ship, Endurance, gets snagged in an ice field--that solidifies, trapping them with no way out. What follows is a two year test of limits: the limits that human beings can tolerate before they just fall over and die. The most amazing thing is that Shackleton decided he wouldn't lose a single man--and he succeeded. That's right, it ain't spoilers if it's in the history books already, people. Categorized as: Reviews
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