I am a geek. In that aspect I share Sheldon’s quest for learning when the technological Singularity is going to be achieved. If I have lost you, then perhaps you need to watch this clip from The Big Bang Theory (Season 4)
Transcendence
Tag: reviews
Dune
This is by far one of my favorite sci-fi novel series. I have read Asimov, but Frank Herbert (and his son in later parts) have really put together an interesting universe with Dune. If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend that you read the entire series.
It was with great anticipation that I sat down to see the movie. Having played both the games (which did not do the series justice), I had some sparing memories of the movie during my childhood. Enough to know that Paul was played by Kyle MacLachlan, the movie had Sting as one of the characters and the fremen had cobalt blue eyes :)
The actual movie as all movies based on books go, was a big disappointment. The movie has been made in 1984 (ominous no?) so I did not expect much in terms of special effects. However the richness of the sets and the good print of the movie had me astounded. It was even a pleasant surprise to see a young Patrick Stewart play the very likeable Gurney Halleck, and a very young Sean Young (no pun intended!) play Chani.
Perhaps the plots and plots within plots were too much for the movie to capture, or perhaps the director was trying to save his ass post production, I do not know what went wrong with the movie, however the movie lacked that certain impact! Paul fails to impress and the Baron who is supposed to be the devil incarnate seems to be a flying lunatic homosexual at the worst :)
Really not worth a movie of 2.5 hours. Huge plots such as the Kwisatch Haderach, the Bene Geserit, the Voice, and Paul’s struggle against the inevitable Jihad are omitted. The original movie was apparently 4 hours, and it was excised to fit the 2 hour length by the producers. A shame, because there was no lengthy directors cut available then. A movie only to be remembered the fans of the book.
Fortune Online: Diablo2 style MMORPG
After power leveling my first level 85 Dranei Hunter on World of Warcraft, I kind of realized that I need to slow down on the WoW front. Not only was it eating a significant amount of my free time, but I had gotten a bit jaded by it.
So after staying away from it for half a week, I tried to give this a whirl. FortuneOnline is a free MMORPG which has the look and feel of Diablo 2 … took me back to my days of engineering … bunking lectures so that I could stay back and slay Diablo/Baal or his uber-minions. I think that game is the only game I played to its fullest (for a full 6-7 years).
Pros:
- Interesting power-ups and skill trees for different classes
- It’s a browser based game – no pesky bulky client downloads
- Platform dependant as long as you can install Adobe Flash
- Diablo clone MMORPG (I can’t get enough of this)
- Good controls and game controls are extremely responsive
- Game is divided into different sections very nicely
- It’s free
Cons:
- Not many players online who seem to be active on the general chat
- The consumable items do not work sometimes (I hope the developers sort this glitch out)
- Game can get a bit repetitive after some time
- The item drops in the game suggest presence of more classes that the player can have, however when I was in character creation, I did not see those classes (don’t know if there is a premium mode)
- The plot is not riveting, or perhaps I am still too jaded for really engaging into the game plot.
- The graphics are meh! … however, even Diablo was not that awesome (remember it was 1999), now our expectations have gone up
All in all, a good whirl and you can idle by a few boring hours with this game. I do hope that the Torchlight folks can turn out a better MMORPG