Review: Spore.

Few games have seen more hype than Spore this year. It’s designed by Will Wright, the brain behind titles like SimCity and The Sims. I played the first The Sims game for a while when it was released, and I’ve spent hours and hours as a virtual mayor in different SimCity games. I never really got the hang of it, and most games ended in a devastating earthquake unleashed by your truly. Still it was great fun.

A few days before Spore was released, Wright gave an interview where he said that he was afraid all the hype was bad for the game because people’s expectations would be too high. He might have been right, but with the previous hugely successful titles, it’s no wonder his releases are anticipated.

Spore tries to be a lot of things at the same time. Wright had originally wanted to call the game SimEverything, but changed it because he wanted to release something without “Sim” in the title for once. The main theme of the game is evolution, and I find it strange that it’s not being sold with a warning sticker in some parts of the U.S. since the theory of Evolution is just the ramblings of a mad man and all that. Continue reading "Review: Spore."

“Prelude to Foundation” by Isaac Asimov.

I’ve just (on Sunday, that is) finished reading this book. It took me a mere seven months to do just that. Even though you might think so, the book is not made up of twenty five thousand densely written pages, it weighs in at about 500 pages of quite spacious text.

Some of author Isaac Asimov’s books are regarded as science fiction classics. His most commonly known work is probably “I, Robot”, not because it’s a great book (I’ve never read it myself, so I can’t tell), rather because it resulted in a movie with the same title starring Will Smith. His work has inspired a lot of people, like the Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese new religious movement that carried out the Sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subways back in 1995. Continue reading "“Prelude to Foundation” by Isaac Asimov."

“Chasm City” by Alastair Reynolds.

“Chasm City” is the second book I’ve read written by Alastair Reynolds, the first one being “Revelation Space“. I had a bit of a hard time with Revelation Space as Reynolds totally lost it during the last one hundred pages and started rambling like a madman.

So naturally I was a bit skeptical when I picked up Chasm City. The reason why I bought the book in the first place was that it was not part of the same series as Revelation Space, but the events of Chasm City still takes place in the same fictional universe as Revelation Space - and if it’s something Alastair Reynolds is very good at it’s creating thrilling, fictional universes.

Chasm City starts out well and Reynolds is keeping a good pace through most of the book, he is only side stepping once into what might resemble the ramblings of Revelation Space and for only a few pages. Unlike Revelation Space, most of Chasm City is written in first person with the occasional jumps back in time with stories told by a third-person narrator.

There is no requirement that you have to be familiar with Reynolds’ first book to enjoy Chasm City, but it’s without doubt a plus if you do as it enables you to enjoy all the more or less intricate references to Revelation Space.

Kane&Lynch: Dead Men.

When I first saw screen shots and videos from this game I was very excited. Guns, explosions, cops, robbers, vast locations, great scenery. But then the game was released and the gaming press started bashing it left and right - I guess mostly because the game did not live up the extreme hype surrounding it before the release.

The reviews of Kane & Lynch raised a lot of controversy. A reviewer at GameSpot was allegedly fired because of the review he wrote and the low score he gave the game because it didn’t look good when the publisher had paid GameSpot tons of money for heavy advertisement for the game. Reviewers who liked the game and gave it a good score have been labeled as “sell outs” by some members of the gaming community. Because, obviously, it’s not possible to like a game even though the majority of other people don’t. How stupid would that be? Continue reading "Kane&Lynch: Dead Men."

Half-Life 2: Episode Two.

Every now and then a perfect game comes along. Half-Life 2: Episode Two is such a perfect game. Excellent graphics, an even better physics engine and an intriguing story line makes Episode Two a worthy addition to the, at least so far, perfect Half-Life 2 game series.

Not surprisingly, you begin Episode Two where Episode One left off. In a classic Half-Life game start, all your gear is gone and you’re stuck. Of course you’re able to get out of the sticky situation rather quickly or it would have been a very short game. Thanks to the incredible level design and atmosphere created by Valve in Episode Two, you sometimes just want to run back to where you started, where you could see the sun and there was no monsters.

It’s hard to write about Half-Life 2: Episode Two without spoiling anything. I just recommend that you play the game.