DoomBook

Game: Puzzle Agent 2
Publisher: Telltale Games

Puzzle Agent 2 from Telltale Games brings us back to Scoggins, Minnesota to delve into the unresolved secrets of the first installment. The FBI’s sole agent in charge of the US Department of Puzzle Research, Nelson Tethers, has decided there’s a puzzle left unsolved.

Graham Annable returns with his sketch-art animation and folk-lore hidden people. The animation and story board are a good bit of the selling point for the Puzzle Agent series, with Graham’s ability to pack emotion into a fairly low-detail form of art. The art’s fun, unpretentious, and surprisingly engaging.

Audio in the game sets the mood nicely, complementing the gameplay and settings without being overbearing. Voice acting is on par with anything I’ve watched. The best complement I can pay any game not about music is that I don’t remember the soundtrack, only recalling that it was good.

And that’s the case here.

Too many titles wedge in music that undercuts the gameplay rather than underscoring it because someone “did music” or they’re trying to get an extra sales angle in.

Puzzles in Puzzle Agent 2 are slightly easier than in the first game. Some of the aspects that could make solving puzzles irritating have been altered. I really didn’t find them hard, more along the lines of a brain-teaser or Saturday newspaper puzzle than MENSA material.

There are also abundant hints available if riddles are a bit too challenging. Or if you don’t have knowledge of a particular subject.

Coming in at about 4 hours of playtime, Puzzle Agent 2 is a bit longer than an episode but shorter than a traditional long-format game. Which is about right for a ~10$ pricetag.

I liked the game. It was fun all the way through. With the sketch animation style, puzzles, and clean content Puzzle Agent 2 delivers.

Footnote: you should play Puzzle Agent first, since Puzzle Agent 2 is somewhat of another episode. It’s not going to hurt to start on the second chapter, but why would you want to?

Alright, so I was reading up on the news this evening and looked over an article claiming that Yahoo and Google have roughly equal market share. Which seemed ludicrous on the face of it.

I mean, Google makes oodles more money than Yahoo, a fact that the article in question freely admits. yet they claimed that the sites shared equal visitor metrics.

And that’s weird. It really is. Then I thought about it. And figured I had the solution. So, I needed an independent third party that does some kind of arbitrary web metrics that involve both Yahoo and Google.

Sure enough, there’s a quick little toolbar monitor that doesn’t do too good a job outside what Windows users are visiting, but for generic non-OS centric numbers works just fine (although take them with a grain of salt). Alexa.com.

So I looked up the comparison over at Alexa. And you’ll notice some weird things that won’t seem weird unless you’re putting your critical thinking hat on.

For instance, the numbers look pretty parallel. Yahoo scores down 10% on most of the metrics (which is a lot, Alexa-wise) aside from time on page which is absurdly high for both engines, relatively speaking, when you consider what it is they do… but it’s about the same for that, which doesn’t jive at all with the article. However, it does make perfect sense with the way my thoughts were going.

Okay, so you’ve got similar statistics for both pages, Yahoo trailing by a good bit. They did sell their search out to Microsoft, after all, which means they don’t think they can cut it as an entity. Remember Netscape? Starting to get a little hazy as to what they did?

AOL sacrificed them in much the same way as Yahoo did their search engine.. and I’m sure they’re patting themselves on the back over what a great idea that was.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Here’s the relevant page over at Alexa. Click on Search % there on the nav bar. Yahoo and Google are the one type of page that doesn’t really want a high number on that score.

Why, you might ask? It means they’re getting a high percentage of their traffic from search results. Given that most of those results come from Google, that means most of their traffic is coming from.. er.. googling.

So yes, they might have acceptable numbers over at Yahoo as far as inbound is concerned. But that’s only, by my estimation (from a little bit of digging), because Google is getting that traffic first. And getting the chance to sell you an ad with the search, if what you’re really looking for is a purchase.

Which means that Yahoo gets the dregs. Kinda explains why their ad revenue sucks, seeing as how they’re only getting a shot if it didn’t work out for the admittedly more accurate Google ad machine. Puts it into perspective why they see a 7th the revenue of the big G.

Seems that if the author of the article I was reading did a little critical thinking or cross-referenced those numbers with something they might’ve realized it rings a bit hollow. Yahoo doesn’t do that much worse a job with ad-revenue than Google, certainly not 1/7th as well anyway, so something had to be wrong.

We had to actually look up what “revenant” meant. Normally I would’ve had that one.. but unfortunately D&D references always skew my memory. It means, literally, ghost. Or more exactly disquited spirit (thank you Wikipedia) from Eastern European folklore.

Not having finished the novel I can’t comment on if it ends well, but at the halfway point it’s proved to be up to Donaldson’s usual standard. Characters filled with emotion and human foibles thread through the story along with the empowered embodiments of ideas and extremes. While there aren’t a huge cast of central characters each one is thoroughly, almost exhaustively, plumbed for depth in typical Covenant novel fashion.

Even taking the detail of Fatal Revenant into account (normally something that turns me off to a novel) I like the book. For some reason it clicks quite a bit better than other novels that expound at length on detail. Thinking on it, that’s probably due to the exposition being used on the characters, rather than merely their surroundings. Thomas Covenant novels evoke a visceral reaction that most books can’t, and this latest book is no exception.

I had to pick it up. There really wasn’t a way around it, what with the game being available out the gate for Linux.

And it’s good! I’ve been playing Penny Arcade’s “On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness Ep1 for the past few hours (since I finished working) and it’s fun. Initially there was a bit of a hiccup loading the game but once I gave it a few tries it started up.

Another quible is that it eats massive amounts of CPU time on the x86_64 Debian release that I run on the laptop. Even so, the performance is okay once the game is going. Just don’t expect the system to be doing much else. Might be a x86_64 specific or Debian edgy specific problem, dunno.

Gameplay is similar to an updated Monkie Island or Zak McKracken. The engine is fairly novel, and delivers the story in a fun and simple manner. Don’t expect to be facing an incredibly tough stat building RPG.. the combat progression so far is fun, but it doesn’t get in the way of plot progression or the storyline.

And what a storyline! It’s got well spliced comic scenes liberally sprinkled throughout with pointed over-the-top humor that’s made Penny Arcade famous.

Rendering the PA crowd in 3D really seems to have payed off as well. The style captures quite a bit of Gabe’s feel for the pen with rounded lines and a realistic/cartoony presentation.

Check out the demo from the Greenhouse and grab a copy if you like it. For 20$ on any platform, it’s quite a bargain.

Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect when I picked up Dennō Coil. The angle, youth wearing VR overlay glasses, sounded something like .hack. Fortunately that wasn’t the case.

What Dennō Coil does have is a compelling story line centering around a group of young protagonists and a not altogether far-fetched technological premise. Through the plot the authors have weaved urban legend and the vibrant imaginations of children starting to explore the wider world.

Our storytellers viewpoint for the story is well balanced with much of what happens being caused or influenced by a well-done and well thought out perspective I rarely see in film. It had me going right up to the end, not quite sure what the larger picture was.

So this is definitely one to watch. It’s got competent animation, a very approachable bit of science fiction, and a compelling story line.

I’ve actually had the gumption to write up the first review of the new season. All it needs are some pretty graphs and analysis of the same and it’s good to go.

Graphics-wise there is one oddity that’s throwing up a bit of a sticking point. Running the OpenGL test “glxgears” in a dedicated Xorg sessions prior to starting up an initial X session kicks in at 1500 fps … while starting the same session up after an KDE desktop is running (or after it’s been closed) results in a frame rate of 900 fps.

A roughly 30% drop.

Needless to say this will require a bit more investigation before I go to press with the review.

Happy holidays all. And probably New Years. I’ll be busy before then, with machines to review (finally. maybe. and conversations to have.

Kio Shimoku’s slice of life manga on the happenings of a group of high-school Otaku is at an end. Genshiken: The Society for the Study of Modern Visual Culture volume 9 wraps up the series and ends on a somewhat longer note than the original from Kodansha’s Afternoon (from which the series was reprinted).

The same dense art that originally had me pick up the series continues through the last book. Panel’s are filled out with expressive character action and the dialog tends toward wordplay and conversation rather than a trade of statements some manga writers over-use.

Almost all the characters that appear through the series are present for the finale. The only notable absence was the creepy former club president, who hasn’t shown up since the early issues of the series.

So all-in-all it’s a somewhat more satisfying ending than the original print release. It’s already gracing my bookshelf, go check it out.

Mathangi Arulpragasam’s (aka M.I.A.) debut album turned out to be interesting. It blends in some fairly basic synth kit beats with stop n’ go rap lyrics.

Lyricaly it made me think Black Eyed Peas without the over-production.

A funky, multilingual old-school dance beat album with lilting rapping over it.

All in all, not bad. Check out some of the links to on the Wikipedia entry to get an idea of the sound.

We’re now on WordPress 2.2 and all the features (comments and whatnot) should be back to a working state. If you notice anything odd send me an e-mail over at PCBurn.com if you’d like .. that’s chris@ the aformentioned website.

In case you’re curious, the problem I was having started when I changed wordpress directories on the server. It just freaked out.

All the incoming links started flaking, it didn’t ping out to services anymore, and comments were screwy. This after I changed all the appropriate places to reflect the new directory (plugins and such).

Now with a fresh install, DB updated for 2.2, and a cleaned up set of plugins we should be good to go.