It has been MONTHS (AprilMayJuneJuly?) since I posted the books that I've been reading.  It's that lovely snowball of shame, that gets rolling when you're busy, then just has more momentum when you have to post about later and ... well, it's summer.  Snowballs have no place in New York in August.

( Books (23) )


( Games (2) )
There are a bunch more games that I've dabbled with but don't feel qualified to review as "read".  Onward, then...

February was a month of games.  I wanted to get a few games in while I knew that I could draw on Gamelab's library.  I also was looking, more than usual, for things to zone out to, especially on the subway.  I decided to close out a few games that I'd had sitting around but hadn't completed, too.

( Books (2) )
( Games (5) )

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Into the Inferno
on the Nintendo DS is much better than I expected it to be. By itself, that's not saying much. It's a licensed game, which often means that a developer has taken it on as a paycheck, given it the necessary time and no more. It generally means that the game is some common gameplay given a narrative and visual assets that refer to or even recreate the original property without regard to making the work stand by itself. I don't like many games with licensed properties, and the first couple of Avatar games, on Wii and DS, were no exception.

However, on the DS, "Into the Inferno" is a little gem of a puzzler. Each level is a series of rooms with puzzles that allow access to the next room. You control two of the characters from the show and frequently have to split them up to hit switches in time or in the right sequence, or with the right 'bending' power. The puzzles are decently clever and relatively varied. The story follows the third season of the show as closely as it can, and wouldn't make sense without having seen the story, but in the context of strong gameplay that has nothing whatsoever to do with the series anyway, I found myself only asking the narrative to get me from puzzle to puzzle.

There's decent challenge in it, and some unlockables that are interesting to try for-- in many cases, there will be multiple ways to solve a puzzle, and a particularly challenging solution will reward you with the currency for the unlockables. There are some action scenes, but they're really not the point. You can close it at any time, and most rooms are bite-sized, taking only a few minutes. It's great for the subway.

Also interesting is that they scaled down the whole game for the DS. Previous games did a poor job of translating the graphics or animation of the series to the strict technical limits of the DS. "Into the Inferno" gave up trying, and opted for a really cute "super-deformed" chibi style. The narrative then seems to have been reworked a bit to fit with the chibi style, so the whole thing fits together. It's a "cute little" take on the series, literally and stylistically.

What's remarkable about the game for me is that it looks, for the first time among the Avatar games for Nintendo, like the game designers stepped back, thought about what their platform could really do and made a good game that played well for that, and made it consistent with the series. It didn't have to be Avatar-themed, but the license did it's job here. I wouldn't have picked "Elemental Puzzle Pals" off the shelf; with the Avatar license on it, I did, and I was rewarded with a great little game.

I'm pretty sure that October was actually only about two weeks long. Certainly, the first couple of actual calendar weeks seem like they didn't happen, and I'd generally prefer to forget them. Half of my coworkers were let go, I was trying to move over to a new project, the previous one was only just finishing, and another project that was supposed to end really didn't. I didn't restrict my feelings on that to the workday very well, so the month's reading was escapist.

( Books )
( Games )

In-progress: Homo Ludens, by Johan Huizinga; Valdis Story, by Kyron Ramsey; Frozzd by Jesse Venbrux.