Releases
It Breathes “URU” Again!
Today, Cyan Worlds announced the return of Uru Live, now called Myst Online: Uru Live Again. It’s like MO:UL was, except that it’s being run by Cyan, and it’s now donationware (meaning totally free, but donations are encouraged).
You can set up an account and download the installer from the official site. The servers are being beaten into a pulp at the moment, but you should get in eventually.
MO:ULA is currently Windows-only, but initial tests seem to point to it being completely compatible with Crossover on Mac OS, as Uru:CC was. More on that in a later post.
Update: Yes indeed, the game runs smoothly in Crossover. Besides the obvious network lag present in all versions of the game, I didn’t encounter any sort of slow-down while playing last night. The one problem is that the audio doesn’t appear to work all the time, ambient noises end up as small buzzing noises and such.
Setup couldn’t be simpler though. Open the installer file with Crossover Games, and let it do its thing. Even the PhysX install goes smoothly.
Update: I’m hosting a mirror of the installer files on my server here to help Cyan out a bit.
- Basic Downloader (not recommended)
- Full Installer (Much larger, much more likely to work)
Where The Wild Things Are
I saw Where The Wild Things Are (one of the movies on my anticipation list) yesterday, and I loved it.
Where The Wild Things Are, based on the beloved picturebook of the same title, by Maurice Sendak, tells the story of a young boy named Max who escapes from his home after getting in trouble with his mom, and takes a boat to a land full of huge monsters. He befriends said monsters, and becomes their king. Max is free to do whatever he wants as king, but soon realizes that it’s very difficult to keep everybody happy when you’re in charge. With this in mind, Max returns home.
A couple of things differ between the book and the movie, but the new adaption is startlingly loyal to the original story. The only things that were really changed were the fashion in which Max leaves his home, and the fact that all of the monsters were given unique personalities and stories. In the book, Max is sent to his room without supper after creating mischief in his house. His room transforms into a forest, and in this forest he finds the boat to take him to the land of wild things. The movie, however, takes a much more realistic (and frightening) approach, having Max run away from home after being yelled at by his mother. He makes his way into the woods near his house, where he finds the boat.
The movie’s approach is much more mature than that of the book, of course, and the same is true for many elements of the story. The original book, being a children’s book, doesn’t have enough pages to really explore the ideas of love and parenthood beyond Max simply smelling his dinner from the far off land, and being reminded of his parents’ love. The movie, on the other hand, draws many obvious parallels between the monsters and Max’s predicament with his mother. The monsters, in making Max their king, put him in the same position as his mother, and he soon understands how she must have felt when threw his tantrum.
The cinematography of the film was amazing. I think that if I had directed it, I would not change a single shot. The camera angles used inspired the audience to see from Max’s point of view, the point of view of a child, and imbued the movie with a sense of wonder. The scene in Max’s room, where the camera pans across details in his decorations, and the scene in Carol’s model room both particularly impressed me with their attention to detail.
The special effects in the movie were impressive, because the monsters themselves were (apart from their faces) actually people in costumes, not CGI. This meant that they were not entirely lifelike (for example, the way they jump is somewhat obviously wire-rigged, and their heads cannot turn independently of their bodies), but I think that for this movie, that definitely works. The monsters are, after all, figments of Max’s imagination, so it makes sense for them to be somewhat bizarre and unbelievable in appearance. At the same time, the faces were incredibly realistic. I was able to easily accept them as real creatures whenever they spoke or showed an emotion. The thin layer of fur on their noses, the eyes, the lips…I was seriously impressed. See below or the title image for examples.
My one complaint about the movie is the soundtrack. For the most part, the music was great, and fit the movie pretty well, but there were a couple of songs that were just distracting. For example, when Max runs away from home, the song in the background has a chorus of “animal! animal! animal!” which I felt detracted from the scene. This scene would otherwise be a very emotional one.
But apart from a couple of songs on the soundtrack, I really liked this movie. I was chuckling for a lot of it, and very close to tears a couple of times, too. I would recommend it to anybody who wants their childlike sense of wonder restored for a few hours.
More Thoughts on Harry Potter 6
After reading this io9 post (an outraged rant about the new Harry Potter movie), I’ve somewhat revised the opinion presented in my previous post.
While everything I said before remains true, I would like to add that it was, in retrospect, extremely disappointing that there was no funeral for Dumbledore. This scene, in the book, brings almost every living character from the rest of the series back to Hogwarts for the funeral, and it would have been an amazing ending for the movie. Instead, we are treated to a scene in which the population of the school raises their glowing wands to the heavens, and then later, a shot of Fawkes flying off into the distance. No white tomb, no tearful congregation of every amazing character, beast and human alike, that J.K. Rowling has to offer.
Also disappointing, as the article points out, is the lack of a battle between the forces of good and evil. When the Death Eaters arrive, they simply kill Dumbledore, set Hagrid’s hut on fire, and leave with Snape and Malfoy. In the book, there is a rather epic fight scene throughout Hogwarts, where Fenrir Greyback bursts into action, flinging curses right and left into the crowd of teachers and trained students. It’s a great scene, and was ultimately not present, at all, in the movie.
Lastly, to add onto my complaint about Dumbledore’s death scene, Snape was simply not evil. To the casual observer, who knows nothing of the events in book 7, Snape already appears to be a double-crosser for the good side. In the book, Snape kills Dumbledore in cold blood, and truly seems to be evil, to the core. It is later revealed that he is, in fact, a good guy, but in the movie this seems blatantly obvious from his and Dumbledore’s countenances.
I still thought this was a very good Harry Potter movie, and if one had not read the book and known what they were missing out on with the battle and funeral, one would not even notice these problems.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
I saw the new Harry Potter yesterday, the sixth in the series. Long story short, I liked it very much. Not quite as much as the third movie, but enough to blow away #5 for second place. The film was much darker than the previous ones, just as the book was darker than the others, but it certainly worked, and made sense. Sirius Black, Harry’s only decent family, was killed at the end of the fifth book/movie, and the Death Eaters are on the rise as Voldemort gains more and more power, so it is only fitting that the movie be as dark as it is. Caution: Spoilers follow.
The movie did a very good job of compressing the sizable book into 2.5 hours. My main complaint about the fourth movie is that it seemed to flash by, never really managing to stay in one place for more than a thirty seconds. The fifth movie was much better with pacing, amazingly fitting the largest book in the seven-part series into a decent-length movie. Now, the sixth movie accomplishes the same feat as the fifth (even if there is less to cram in, there is still a lot of action for a 2.5 hour movie). Admittedly, there were a few places where it felt a teensy bit jumpy (mainly the skipping from Hagrid’s hut to the pensieve shot, and other Dumbledore meetings), and a couple of areas that I would have liked to see much more of (a longer Felix Felicis scene and more from the Half-Blood Prince’s potions book), but the movie overall was very well-paced, I thought.
I loved the special effects in the film, particularly the new pensieve. Memories now appear as black, cloudy swirls on a misty blue background, similar to the appearance of the liquid memories swirling in the bowl. It has a much more magical air to it than the pensieve of previous movies. The movie is full of these black swirly cloud effects, as the Death Eaters also appear as trails of black smoke when they are flying. This addition is a great touch, in my opinion, because it gives the dark lord’s servants a much more powerful, mysterious air than before. The actors portraying the Death Eaters did an extremely good job, particularly the one portraying Fenrir Greyback. The unbreakable vow scene, on a related note, was superb. I never quite understood this scene in the book, but in film it was crystal-clear.
My one major complaint about the movie was that they changed the ending. In the book, as soon as Harry and Dumbledore return from their journey to get the horcrux, the death-eaters are at the school, and Dumbledore paralyzes Harry under the invisiblity cloak, forcing Harry to watch while Snape murders the headmaster. In the movie, Dumbledore simply instructs Harry to hide below, where he actually encounters Snape before the deed is done. This may not seem like that big of a change, but it means that Harry did nothing to stop Snape from killing Dumbledore, even though he easily could. In the book, Harry had very little grounds for blaming himself for Dumbledore’s death, but I feel that in the next movies (and yes, there are two movies left – The Deathly Hallows is being split in half, to draw it out a bit longer), the fact that Harry could have done something to save his beloved headmaster is going to make him even more angsty than he already is. This is disappointing, as the angst-ridden teenagers in the books and movies are the worst part of Harry Potter.
I enjoyed Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince very much, and I think that anybody who enjoyed the sixth book will not be disappointed by this movie.
Why do I still think the third movie is the best? That’s simple – I’m a sucker for time travel.
Brüno
I saw Brüno today, the sequel to 2006 comedy Borat, and found it hilarious. Compared to the first film, which I didn’t enjoy much at all, this movie was lightyears ahead. I found myself choking with laughter on more than one occasion, which honestly surprised me. I was expecting more of the same humor as we saw in Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen, as one of his characters, interacting with real people, in ridiculous situations), which is exactly what I got. This time around, however, I found it much less offensive and much more humorous.
That’s not to say that the movie won’t be offensive for many people, it most definitely will be. Brüno, an openly (and extremely) homosexual fashion designer/TV host from Austria, travels all over America (and the Middle East, Austria, and Africa) in a quest to become world-famous, encountering many a homophobe (including most of the state of Alabama and former Presidential Candidate Ron Paul) along the way. The movie is meant to expose the ridiculousness of the homophobia in many people, and satirize the homophobic, ultra-macho culture in much of America (especially near the end, when Brüno, claiming to be a changed man, now straight, hosts a cage-fighting match as “Straight Dave”).
The movie was amazing, but it is definitely not for anyone. It’s rated R for a very clear reason, and I was stunned that it managed to get only an R. There is plenty of full-frontal nudity and a number of extreme close-ups too, if you know what I mean. The one thing standing between this movie’s rating and an NC-17 is a couple of black circles covering key areas during the numerous sex scenes in the film.
Still, Brüno was a great movie. I would highly recommend it to anybody that can take the extreme nudity and antics.
iPhone 3G S Released
Today, Apple released the newest iPhone, the iPhone 3GS. The S apparently stands for “speed”, because the big feature of the new device is how fast it is. Both the network speeds and actual hardware speeds have been drastically improved over older generations, at least according to Apple. Other features include a magnetic sensor (for compass features), voice control over music and phone features, and an improved camera (3.2 megapixels, with autofocus and video recording/editing). All of this is packaged in a phone that is exactly the same in physical appearance as the previous generation, the iPhone 3G.
I went and checked out the device today, to see if it really lives up to Apple’s claims of improved speed. Long story short: it does. Doing a side-by-side test of launching Photos.app on my iPod and the 3GS, the app finished loading in about 2 seconds for the newer device while my iPod lagged behind by about 15 seconds. That kind of speed jump is really impressive. I never really noticed a problem with speed on my iPod, but seeing how fast it could be made me a bit envious. The 3.2 megapixel camera is nice, but on the iPhone screen it’s not really possible to see the difference between 2 and 3.2 megapixels, so no real change there. Video editing on the device is very cool, if a bit limited (only timeline cropping is really available, no effects or re-sequencing). I could see the practical application of that feature.
Things I forgot to test include voice control and the autofocusing camera, but I did notice the difference in screen texture. Apparently Apple is using a new coating technique on the 3GS that makes the screen “oleophobic”, so it resists fingerprints and smudges. While this extreme is certainly not reached, the screen definitely seems less easily smudged, and smoother to the touch. I could still leave a fingerprint on it, but not as easily as on my iPod’s screen.
As for the physical design of the device, Apple has taken a surprising turn by not updating the aesthetics at all. The size, shape, and colors of the phone remain identical to the previous generation, and the weight has increased by .1 ounce. This seriously disappoints me, as I never really liked the design of the iPhone 3G in the first place. The same goes for the second generation iPod Touch, I just don’t like the super-glossy rounded backs of the devices. A physical keyboard would also be nice, but that’s never going to happen, so it doesn’t matter.
All-in-all, I’d say this is a good upgrade to the iPhone. The 3GS starts at $199 for 16gb (or $299 for 32 gb), while the previous generation 3G has been dropped to $99.
UPDATE: Apparently, Apple changed the official name from iPhone 3G S to just iPhone 3GS. They took out the space. Whatever.
Silence
Yeah, I haven’t posted in a while. Not for lack of things to write about either: I saw Up in 3D (loved it), I played around with a Palm Pre (enjoyed it), there’s a new iPhone, etc etc. I’ve just been incredibly busy lately. That being said, school is ending next wednesday, so I’ll have much more time to post about fun things. In the mean time, check out Little Wheel, one of the best Flash games I’ve played since Samorost.
Watchmen
I’ve been anticipating the movie adaption of Watchmen for months now, since the first time I ever saw the trailer. Watchmen (the movie) is based on Watchmen, the wildly popular graphic novel, and tells the story of a group of retired masked vigilantes, The Watchmen. The action takes place in 1985, although the earlier arrival of a superhuman figure named Dr. Manhattan has altered the course of world events: Vietnam surrendered to America, technology has advanced at an extremely accelerated rate, and human masked vigilantes have been outlawed by President Nixon, in his third term of the presidency. The narrative is told by Rorschach, a paranoid, sociopathic detective-type vigilante, the only Watchman still operational. The movie opens with the death of The Comedian, one of the disguised heroes, and the main plot is Rorschach trying to figure out who is responsible.
I won’t go too much more into the plot, but needless to say – it is very interesting to watch and read. The thing that really amazed me about the movie was how similar it was to the comic. While watching the movie, the exact same emotions and thoughts rolled through my head as when I was reading the book. The style and feel of the movie is the same as the book, the characters look and sound exactly as I imagined (with the exception of one character, Adrian Veidt), and it was overall just really well-made.
There are three problems I have with the movie, however.
The first problem is Veidt. While all of the other characters in the movie (particularly Rorschach, who was absolutely perfect in every way) were extremely well-cast, Veidt looked nothing like he did in the comic book. Veidt is the alter-ego of ex-vigilante Ozymandias, the smartest man in the world. In both versions of the story, Veidt is extremely wealthy, intelligent, and obsessed with Alexander the Great and all sorts of ancient civilizations. However, in the comic Veidt resembled a Roman emperor in appearance. He had a classically beautiful look to him, and wore purple and gold. His office was highly gilded, and he seemed warm, but regal. In the movie, however, Veidt appears almost scrawny. His armor helps him appear stronger, but it is entirely black and silver, not Ozy’s purple and gold. The same goes for his workspace, being entirely gray marble and black rock. Also, his feline companion, Bubastis, is blue instead of red for some reason.
Another issue I had with the movie was the lack of detail in certain scenes, and the addition of detail in others. The movie is already 2 hours and 40 minutes long, so obviously some scenes had to be cut down a bit, but unfortunately it’s the origin stories that lose out. Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan both had very interesting stories in the comic, explaining how they really became the heroes they are at the time of the action, but these are cut down to the bare minimum in the movie. Rorschach in the comic is forced to talk to a psychoanalyst, and over time he slowly breaks him down from a jolly fat man to a gibbering, depressed, shell of his former self. In the movie, Rorschach has one session with said therapist, and that’s it. We are still shown some of his origin, but it is condensed into a single scene. The same thing happens with Dr. Manhattan, who comprehends time differently from humans. For him, all time is simultaneous, he sees all of his past and all of his future at the same time. This makes for a very interesting origin story, as it doesn’t necessarily progress in chronological order. This was shown in the movie, but it wasn’t nearly as interesting as in the comic, and a number of crucial scenes from his past were removed.
At the same time, some details were left in that were unnecessary, and some were even added in. The biggest problem, I thought, was the sex scene. It lasted quite a bit longer than it had to, and while I do think the scene itself was important to have in the film, it shouldn’t have been long enough to require the removal of actual content. I do, however, applaud the parties responsible for the movie for leaving many of the R-rated aspects of the movie unchanged.
The final problem I had was the soundtrack. While the music chosen was awesone (Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Hendrix, etc.), it seemed to not really fit the action. Particularly the scene of Dr. Manhattan in Vietnam, with Ride of the Valkyries in the background. The song is awesome, and fits, but it is such a cliché that it didn’t work. I would have liked more original music, with one or two oldies every now and then.
Apart from these three, however, I loved the movie, and would recommend it to anybody who likes (super)hero movies with less action than normal (which isn’t to say less blood), and more mystery and plot.
Picasa For Mac
Picasa, Google’s photo manager program, has finally been released for Mac OS X. This is absolutely great news for people like me, who despise iPhoto. iPhoto is ridiculously slow and inefficient in my experience, and (like a lot of other things on OS X) doesn’t really offer a lot of options on how behind-the-scenes organization will take place, so photos get hidden in big file trees, ending with the ‘Roll’, which is completely nondescript and unhelpful when looking for files. More recent versions of iPhoto are even worse, packing all of the photos into a single pseudofile: like a .app, it is actually a folder that has been given a file extention. This means that its still relatively easy to access your photos, but it makes actions like backing up photos or accessing them from other programs very difficult. In short, I don’t like iPhoto.
However, up until now, there haven’t really been any other options. Microsoft doesn’t really offer a built-in method of photo organization (or at least, they didn’t before Windows 7, which uses special ‘Library’ folders that can be used for photo organization, I think), so there are lots of programs out there for Windows photo organization (like Picasa). Since iPhoto is pre-installed on every Mac, nobody has really bothered to write up an alternative photo manager.
Picasa was my photo manager of choice on Windows, has traditionally been only for Windows and (infuriatingly) Linux. This has never made sense to me. Obviously, this is a very cross-platform application if it can be run on Windows and Linux, so how hard could it be to get it running on a Mac? Apparently very hard, as Picasa 3 for Mac is only in Beta at this point, and it has taken Google this long to get that far.
Anyway, the application itself is very nice. I like it a lot more than iPhoto for many reasons, but I miss some things from iPhoto. For one thing, Picasa is not really a photo manager as much as a picture manager. When you launch it, it scans your whole home folder looking for images, and displays them all, categorized by folder. It tries to sort the folders by date, but it seems to have a very tough time doing this (most of the years assigned to my folders are a year or two off, while some are dated 1990 and as far back as 1969…). I want a way to exclude folders entirely from its scan, but I have not found a way to do this yet. To make up for this lacking feature, Picasa categorizes its sources and allows you to minimize the ones you don’t want to see (for example, I have Albums, iPhoto Library, and one other specific folder opened, but the main folder hierarchies are minimized, because they add a lot of noise).
Picasa doesn’t really organize at all behind the scenes, it seems to just want to display the pictures as it finds them on your machine, and leave the organization to the user. I like this more than iPhoto, because it gives me complete control over organization and makes things a lot easier to find (inside the Pictures/Picasa folder that I made, I make a specific folder for each photo shoot, and then inside that, one folder for each camera or lens used). Picasa neatly recognizes my organizational system and displays the shoot folder as a category in the sidebar, with the folders under it.
One thing I don’t like so far is that Picasa doesn’t seem that much more efficient than iPhoto. It certainly loads faster, opening almost as soon as I launch it, while iPhoto can take up to 30 seconds to get to a usable state, and even longer to quit. However, both applications use a lot of resources on my machine, if either is running in the background my fans start going nuts before long. Picasa is, however, still only a beta, so it’s very likely that it will become better soon.
Overall, I really like Picasa, a lot more than iPhoto, and I’d recommend it to anybody who’s as fed up with iPhoto as I am.
Windows 7
So as some people may have heard, the first beta of Windows 7 (aka build 7000) has been leaked onto the internet. For those of you who haven’t heard, and have no idea what I’m talking about, Windows 7 is Microsoft’s next operating system (the replacement for Vista, just as Vista was the replacement for XP before it). Despite my dislike for Windows Vista, which is a bloated and unusable operating system on most machines, I decided that I ought to try out Windows 7 for myself, since Microsoft claims that it is much faster than Vista.
Well, after a bit of trouble burning it to a disk (fourth time’s the charm!), I finally got the OS up and running on my machine. Let me start of by saying that for the most part, Microsoft is completely right: 7 is amazingly fast. For the most part. Compared to Vista. The impressive thing is that the machine I’m running 7 on is somewhat old, a 2.93ghz Celeron cpu with 512mb of ram, and yet it manages to pull off full Aero effects at full speed (by which I mean it runs at the same speed as Windows XP on the same machine, give or take a bit). Admittedly, I do have a pretty good graphics card to go with the crappy processor and memory, but Vista didn’t even give me the option of enabling Aero, so this is definitely a step up. Overall my machine gets a 2.9 in the experience index (which, by the way, now goes up to 7.9 instead of 5.9) – limited by my memory.
Windows 7 is currently installed at the back of my computer, on the second partition of my secondary hard drive, which it seems to be dealing with just fine. It is completely comfortable being installed alongside Windows XP, and by default gives me the option to boot an older version of Windows or 7, which is really nice. Annoyingly, it doesn’t automatically mount the other hard drive (which is C:\\ for Windows XP), but I got it to mount as a C:\\Windows XP folder with no problems.
Even though this is only a beta, it is surprisingly stable. I don’t really think much of the stability of Windows in the first place, so the amount of instability present in 7 is practically acceptable. The most annoying thing is the Windows Explorer crash every time I log in, which is easily fixed by relaunching it. Apart from that, there have been a few minor crashes every now and then, and a few places where it’s obvious that a little polish is still needed (notably the help files).
Compatability-wise, 7 is surprisingly friendly with almost all of my hardware by default. During the system installation it managed to connect to my WiFi, and has been connected flawlessly ever since then. Seriously, two thumbs way up for Microsoft on getting the WiFi thing down. It never asks me which network to connect to, and never bugs me when it can’t connect (because it always manages to connect). Also, I love the fact that Windows 7 doesn’t bug me about empty ethernet ports like every other version of Windows does. All I have in my taskbar is the WiFi connection level and some system warnings (get a virus scanner, turn on updates, blah blah blah), both of which I could hide if I so chose. The one piece of hardware 7 seems to be having trouble with is my sound processor, which isn’t surprising as no version of Windows seems to be able to install this chip by default (the VIA Vinyl AC’97 or something).
On the software side, things in general seem to work (including Uru, which is actually faster, if anything), with the exception of the programs that rely on audio (all of which just complain about the lack of an audio device before quitting themselves – Myst, Riven, etc). I cannot get the installer for my audio chip drivers to work, which is very annoying. However, overall this seems like a very good OS in terms of compatibility.
I like the superbar a lot. It really has to be seen to fully appreciate it, but basically the superbar is the new taskbar. Applications appear now as tiles on the bar, and the quicklaunch is gone – replaced with ‘pinned’ applications, which are always present on the bar. Icons have menus that pop up when right-clicked, and if more than one window is open for an application, a small extra bar is added to the right side of the tile, one bar for each extra window. It’s a subtle way to show how many windows you have open, and much nicer than the grouping that old taskbars did.
Overall, I’m really enjoying Windows 7. Apart from the small assortment of glitches listed above, the environment is very stable and speedy, and a lot nicer looking than XP and Vista. Thanks to a patch I found online, I have Windows 7 until July, at which point there should be a newer build out anyway. I very much want to upgrade my XP installation rather than dual-boot, but the problems listed above force me not to (plus I don’t think the leaked beta even allows upgrading yet). As of this moment, I do plan on buying a copy (or at least trying to get a copy from a friend at Microsoft) of Windows 7 when it comes out. If I could, I would even install it on Eve, it’s just that good.
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