Vacant Nebula superfans may recall that I wrote a brief review of Anathem by Neal Stephenson on this blog about two years ago. I have recently recommended the book to at least two people, and started to worry that maybe it wasn’t as good as I remembered it being. I’ve had a similar situation with movies before, where I think a movie is really good the first time I watch it, then I watch it a second time and think it is pretty awful. (The most egregious example that comes to mind is Phone Booth.)

So I recently embarked upon the task of rereading Anathem. I believe this is actually the first time I have re-read a novel in over a decade. And I’m happy to stay that I stand by my original review. In fact, I liked it a little better the second time because I remembered a lot of the Orth and Fluccish vocabulary, so I didn’t have to consult the glossary all the time. And I believe the previous sentence tells you enough about the book to determine if it would be interesting to you.

I recently had two heavily Zelda-inspired games come up on my Goozex queue back-to-back, and here are my brief thoughts on the two.1

3D Dot Game Heroes

3D Dot Game Heroes is very much a new take on The Legend Of Zelda. As in, Zelda One. It has some Link To The Past elements, like a somewhat three-dimensional overworld, but it’s basically Zelda One. The game looks really pretty, which you can see in the YouTube video below. It was neat at first, but I had only played about two or three hours before I just got tired of playing it. It didn’t help that I wasn’t saving frequently and lost about an hour’s worth of progress due to a game-crashing bug. After that, I just decided I had better things to do with my time and stopped playing. My advice: if your really looking for a new take on a retro, 8-bit style game, then check out the 3D Dot Game Heroes; otherwise, just watch the video below to satisfy you’re curiosity about the art style, and pass on actually playing the game.

Darksiders

In contrast to 3D Dot Game Heroes, Darksiders is more inspired by the 3D Zelda games. There are dungeons and an inventory system and an overworld that is gradually opened up as you get items that allow you get to new areas. You even have a horse! However, the story, the combat, and the art style is much more influenced by God Of War and Devil May Cry. It was a very nice mix, and a very well done game. I enjoyed it a lot and completed it. (Well, I didn’t go back and beat it on hard, but I got all the items and maxed out all my weapons.) Suffice it to say, I recommend the game to anyone who likes the 3D Zelda games and would like to see a more violent, adult take on the formula. You can see a gameplay clip in the YouTube video below.

I recently did some evaluating of a few online cloud backup solutions, and thought I would share what I found here. I evaluated Dropbox, Carbonite, and CrashPlan. I ultimately went with CrashPlan, for reasons I’ll describe below.

Dropbox

I’ve been using the free offering from Dropbox for about a year and a half now. It’s great. At least, for what it does it’s great. The integration with the shell is perfect: the moment a file in your dropbox is modified, Dropbox starts uploading it to dropbox. It puts an icon of the file letting you know if the file has been backed up or not. And I’ve never gotten an error that I couldn’t modify a file because it was in use by Dropbox. Plus, it gives you a public folder which others can access via HTTP. You get 2GB for free, and I have no complaints about the free service.

However, I have about 80 GB of stuff I want to back up, and that number will only grow in the years to come as I record 720p videos of the kids growing. Dropbox’s prices are pretty steep if you want to buy more storage: $99/year for 50GB, or $199/year for 100GB. I guess if you pay for extra storage, you are really paying for all the people who are using Dropbox for free. Maybe they’re hoping to win you over with the awesome free service, and then maybe you won’t shop around before considering upgrading. But if you shop around you’ll find those rates are pretty unreasonable. There is also the issue that Dropbox wants part of your computer to be your Dropbox. Meaning, you would have to move all the folders you want to back up into your Dropbox folder. That’s kind of a big deal too.

Bottom line: Dropbox upgrades are a bad idea. Don’t do it unless you feel it is The Right Thing To Do, as a way to thank them for their awesome free service and to try to ensure that the free service stays around a bit longer.

Carbonite

Next up was Carbonite. I heard about Carbonite through an ad on a podcast (the Adam Carolla show I believe). They offer unlimited gigabytes for $59/year. Some web searching revealed that they seem to have a way of nudging some users away if they use too many of the “unlimited” bytes. But most of the complaints I found were from about two years ago. You can do your own research.

I tried the 15-day free trial. It has useful shell integration like Dropbox, which was nice. You tell it which folders to back up (rather than having to put everything in a “Carbonite” folder or something). However, the biggest turn-off for me was the file extension blacklist. Certain types of files are not backed up automatically by Carbonite. In particular, video files are not backed up. (As I said above, one of the main reasons I want cloud backup was to protect our photos and videos.) You cannot directly edit this blacklist, or tell Carbonite “hey just go ahead and back up anything”. Instead, you have to find a file that is not being backed up, and right-click on it and go into the Carbonite options and tell it to always back up that type of file. So you have to go searching for files that Carbonite might have missed. Throughout the 15-day trial I kept finding different types of files that Carbonite was skipping—exe, ini, all hidden files, and a few other extensions.1 This was enough to turn me away from Carbonite. I need to be confident that it is backing up everything!

CrashPlan

Last in my search, I arrived at CrashPlan. Like Carbonite, CrashPlan offers an unlimited plan. Theirs is only $50/year. They don’t have the nice shell integration like the other two. The only thing you have is a tray icon, which seems to be out of sync with the actual application every now and then. Another problem I have with it is that it locks the files while it is uploading them, so while I was uploading files I occasionally got a “this file is in use by CrashPlan” error message. Which is annoying, but I can live around it. Their approach to this seems to be “watch the file system for changes, but only actually upload new/changed files every 15 minutes”. I have changed that back to just once every hour to mitigate this risk.

I think some of the strange design decisions stem from the fact that (I think) it was originally a tool used to back up files from one computer to another (most likely on the same LAN), or from one hard drive to another on the same system. (In fact, you can still use it for that purpose for free.) It is definitely the least user-friendly of the three services I looked at, but it’s not crazy or anything.

In spite of these flaws, I still went with CrashPlan because the service works great, it is a better value than Carbonite, and doesn’t have the file type blacklist. I also got a code from CrashPlan about a week before my 30-day trial ended, with a code to get a year for only $42 (saving $8). I don’t know if this is normal, or if I just happened to be evaluating the service at the right time. I’ve been using the service for about two months now (counting the trial month), and I’m pretty happy with it.

I guess I should mention that there are others out there that I didn’t really look into much, like Mozy. And Microsoft and Apple each have their own proprietary cloud backup solutions too. I’m just reporting on the things that I looked into.

I finished Donkey Kong Country Returns a few weeks ago and I thought I’d share a few thoughts. Overall, it’s really really good. The most notable thing about it is the difficulty. When a patent filed by Shigeru Miyamoto was discovered a few years ago, describing a system where the game would help players get past tough parts, it was pretty harshly mocked by the gaming community. Since then, the feature has come to be known as “Superguide” and it has been included in New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and now Donkey Kong Country Returns1. The last two in particular have shown that the feature doesn’t result in super-easy games aimed at the lowest common denominator. The effect has actually been pretty much the opposite—Nintendo has been able to make really challenging games that they can still market to a broader audience. So getting back to DKCR: the game is really challenging. But it’s not challenging in the same way that NES games were, throwing things at you just for the point of killing you. In those games, when you fail you usually feel like the game was designed in a way that was bad or just unfair. In DKCR (or SMG2 for that matter) when you fail it is usually your own fault. I’m not sure I articulated that well enough. I guess what I’m trying to say is the game didn’t feel cheap. EXCEPT...

The bosses were universally awful. Just the worst. I find it hard to believe that these are the same guys who did boss design in the Metroid Prime games.

The Rocket Barrel stages were also awful. The whole control mechanism felt like it was introduced late in the dev cycle and just didn’t get enough testing and tweaking. The worst example was level 4-5: Crowded Cavern. I died something like sixty times in that level.

Another thing that was nice about this game was that I could play it when Emma was in the room. (Most of the other games I have played lately focus on creative murder, which is inappropriate for 2-year-olds.) One of Emma’s favorite things to do was see the “monkey house” in the very first level. And this is something too cute not to share.

Over the years, I have reduced pretty significantly the number of reviews that I post on this blog. Mainly, this is because I don’t think I’m particularly good at reviewing things, and there are certainly plenty of people who are far better at it than me. But a few people have asked me specifically about Metroid: Other M, so here goes.

Metroid: Other M is my least favorite Metroid game.

I take that back, Metroid Prime: Hunters still holds that distinction. But I don’t really consider Hunters a Metroid proper, if you will. I think of it more as a side project that is only slightly more Metroid-y than Metroid Prime Pinball.

But back to Other M. The writing in the game is as bad as the writing in the title. (I’m still not even sure who or what the “other M” actually is.) They made Samus into a weak, emotionally fragile two-year-old in an adult’s body. I mean, we’re talking about intergalactic bounty hunter Samus frickin’ Aran here! After everything she’s been through, you’re going to tell me she takes orders from people? That she ever hesitates when she has a shot at a bad guy?

Also, cutscenes with the cybersuit on? She can make some or all of her suit dissolve at will, so why not at least take the helmet off during cut scenes when there is no danger? It looks ridiculous, like if you saw Tom Brady walking around Wal-Mart in full football uniform—cleats, pads, and helmet. It also makes it so you usually can’t tell if Samus’s lips are moving, so you don’t know if what she’s saying is dialog or internal monologue (she narrates her thoughts throughout, sometimes even in the middle of a conversation with other people).

I’ve heard the combat praised, but it seemed to mainly consist of running around waiting for your charge beam to charge, while constantly tapping the d-pad (tapping the d-pad when an enemy attacks will dodge the attack). I get the feeling that Team Ninja originally wanted it to be more difficult, but Nintendo told them to scale it back a notch. (These are the people who made the notoriously difficult Ninja Gaiden, after all.)

The game also eliminates most of the sense of exploration by telling you exactly where you must go, and locking the doors that don’t lead that way. To make it worse, it feels like there is a boss or miniboss about every fourth room. It’s not until the very end of the game that the doors are actually unlocked and you are free to explore. Sorry, Team Ninja, but that’s just not Metroid.

The departure from the series that annoyed me the most, however, was something seemingly minor that I didn’t see discussed in any reviews: enemies do not drop energy pellets. It is especially annoying early on, when you don’t have much health and some enemies can take over half your energy in one hit. You have a checkpoint at every boss or miniboss, and if you die you start over right there, so it’s not that big of a deal. But I’d prefer shooting little enemies or projectiles during the boss battle to pick up extra energy, rather than dying and starting over.

All that being said, it’s not a bad game. It’s just not that good either.

Disclaimer: I am someone with the Metroid item collect music as my ringtone. I may be teh bias.

I have devised a very simple scale for evaluating Mexican restaurants. There are only two points of evaluation:

1. Are the fajitas sizzling when they are brought to your table? If so, the restaurant gets 25 points.

2. Are the tortillas there as soon as the fajitas are brought to the table? If so, the restaurant gets 75 points. (Score no points if you have to sit there and watch your fajitas sizzle out (assuming they were sizzling in the first place) waiting on the waiter to bring out the tortillas.)

For those of you who aren’t mathematically inclined, the only scores possible are 0, 25, 75, and 100.  0 and 25 are equivalent to an F-.  75 is a C. 100 is an A+.

I wanted to add two more points to last month’s Netflix vs. Blockbuster post.  First, Blockbuster allows you to continue to access your account and modify your queue even after you have cancelled your membership.  This is nice for me, because it means I can add movies as they come out in theaters, rather than sitting down next May and trying to remember every movie from the last year that I wanted to see.  With Netflix, you get nothing but a message telling you how to come back.

Second, Blockbuster announced in February that they would integrate games into their service, on a trial basis, and hopefully roll out the service by the second half of the year.  Apparently the trials didn’t go so well, because we’re almost halfway through the second half of this year and they haven’t mentioned games at all.  It would have been a very convient Netflix+GameFly type of service (speaking of which, if those two companies merged, wouldn’t that be cool?).  But I’ve since found Goozex (which I might blog about some day) to provide me with a fresh and cheap supply of video games.  And it’s not like Netflix offers video games either, so neither service has an advantage here.

You may recall that nearly three years ago I won a SumoLounge Omni bean bag chair.  At the time, I said “I’ll be sure to let you, o faithful reader of my blog, know what I think of it.”  Well I never did, mainly because I forgot about it.  But a few months ago someone asked me what I thought of the chair, and I wrote a quick review in an e-mail.  And I decided, since I had already written it, I would repost it here and fulfill that three-year-old promise.  I know you’ve all been awaiting this anxiously.

The most surprising thing to me was that it was very light.  Bean bag chairs that I’ve used before were always really heavy, but this thing uses something about as dense as styrofoam.  It’s also pretty much indestructible—I’ve let my dog play on it and her claws never came close to penetrating the material, which feels sort of like the material heavy-duty waterproof backpacks or wintersports/skiing jackets are made from.

On the downside, it’s not very good as a seat for an extended period.  The SumoSacs look a lot bigger, so maybe that wouldn’t be a problem there.  But the Omni doesn’t hold its shape quite well enough when one person is sitting on it.  After a few minutes, you’re basically sitting on the floor.  I’ve never really tried the upright/straddling positions the blonde girl on the website is doing though.  I’ve tried putting it up against a wall so that it is shaped kind of like a couch, but I didn’t find that very comfortable.  I’ve also tried folding it in half and sitting on it, but it felt like it wanted to unfold again.  The thing I’ve found it best for, actually, is if I want to lay on the floor and watch TV.  You can make one side of it into a pretty good pillow so your neck isn’t strained, and the rest stays comfy for a quite while (since your weight isn’t all focused on one spot when you’re laying down).

So, to make a conclusion: in my opinion, I don’t think the Omni is worth the price as a seat for an adult, but I can’t speak to any of the other bigger things they sell.

For the last four summers, Stephanie and I have subscribed to Netflix.  It’s something I mentioned on this blog way back in 2005.  We find that we can get our money’s worth in just three or four months, and watch everything worth watching from the last year.  But this summer when I went to sign up for Netflix I found that they are charging extra for Blu-Ray, which they didn’t do last summer.  So I decided to use Blockbuster, since they do not charge extra for Blu-Ray.  Here are a few things that are different, for anyone wondering how the services compare:

• Blockbuster doesn’t charge extra for Blu-Ray (see above).

• Blockbuster lets you return a movie to a physical store, which means that you get your next movie a day faster than you do with Netflix.
  

  • Now, you might think you’d be able to exchange a movie in-store with another movie.  You can, but you have to pay extra for that.  I didn’t bother (although I got five free in-store exchanges my first month, of which I used two).

  • For some stupid reason, if you do exchange in-store, you can only exchange a mailed movie for a store movie.  In other words, say you got Air Bud1 in the mail.  You watch it, and exchange it in the store for Air Bud: Golden Receiver.  Now, since you didn’t get Golden Receiver in the mail, you can’t exchange it in store for Air Bud: World Pup2.

  • Of course, for this to be helpful, there needs to be a Blockbuster nearby.  The store a quarter-mile from my house went out of business a month after I signed up, and the next closest one is five miles away and not on the way to anywhere. :(

• Blockbuster’s selection seemed to be a little spottier on random things.  (For example, Steph wanted to rent My Little Pony: The Movie and it was listed as “Very Long Wait” all summer.)  Other than that, we were able to get everything we wanted.

• I’m not sure if Blockbuster has a movie-streaming option.  I’m pretty sure they don’t.  I never used it on Netflix, and I wouldn’t use it on Blockbuster, so that’s not a detraction for me.

• Blockbuster lets you rate movies in half-star intervals.  Which is nice.  Sometimes you want to give a movie 3.5 stars, not 3 or 4.

• Netflix’s movie suggestion algorithm seemed a little bit less terrible than Blockbuster’s.

• Netflix’s website was faster and more responsive.

• When you cancel your membership with Blockbuster, you get a month to return the movies you have out.  With Netflix you only get seven days.

At this point, I’ll still subscribe to Blockbuster next summer, as long as they don’t add a charge (or charge more than Netflix) for Blu-Ray rentals.

Update: See my follow-up post for more.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson is the best book I have ever read.