Media Recap: December 2013

Summary: 5 games, 1 movie, 8 videos

I want to check out Risk of Rain, since it sounds interesting and got a splendid review from Polygon. However, I’m a little skeptical about playing it since I get angry very easily when playing video games against the computer. Interestingly I don’t have a problem losing against other people.

Another interesting thought that recently entered my mind is the purchase of a Playstation 3 which should be heavily discounted by now. I’m considering Journey, Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 ReMIX and Kingdom Hearts HD 2.5 ReMIX as well as the Ratchet and Clank franchise. For non-exclusives I’d prefer to stick to the Xbox 360 version. Fortunately, as is the way of wikipedia, there is a list of PS3 exclusive titles. This is a long-term plan however.

I got some gifts: Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, LEGO Battles Ninjago, Deponia and an NDS version of The Guild - have a short review of that or a more positive one, in German. Due to some games being just that interesting and work for university I haven’t been able to play/test these in 2013.

Games

• Pokémon Y
• Skulls of the Shogun - was free for one day before Christmas. Since I’ve heard only good things about it when it was released for XBLA I thought I’d try it out and was pleasantly surprised with its amusing atmosphere, its great humor and its gameplay. My favorite point about the game is the music, which is just so well done. It doesn’t lull you in but provides an easy background for your tactical thinking.
• Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - had the chance to try it during the holidays. I will stick with my decision to rather not move while playing video games. Meaning: I don’t like the Wii.
• Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift - I played the hell out of my Final Fantasy Tactics Advance copy back then and intend to do the same with this one. Tactics series games are amongst my favorites for mobile entertainment.
• Tiny Thief - was distributed as one of Apple’s 12 Days of Christmas gifts. Has adorable animations and a enjoyably whimsical feel.

Movies

• Puss in Boots (German, “Der gestiefelte Kater”) - Turns out that sometimes there *is* good stuff on television. I am fond of the Fruit Ninja re-skin accompanying the movie and just had to see it.

Videos

• Bananasaurus Rex’s solo eggplant run in Spelunky - Polygon wrote a fascinating article why this is an indication for what to expect in gaming and streaming for the near future.
• Julia: An LLVM-based approach to scientific computing - Very interesting typing system, however I am pretty sure I missed a lot of mathematical basics as well as more CS theory. I wish the presenter would’ve talked a lot slower.
• Developer Toolchain for the PlayStation®4 - It was interesting to hear how the development of the PS4 and its toolchain influenced Sony to upstream changes. Due to the secrecy involved this presentations contains some horror stories like “the merge with upstream changes took about 3 months and was done by a single person”. Sony’s developers will spend a lot more time upstreaming patches if this talk is any indication.
• Bringing clang and LLVM to Visual C++ users - The efforts to bring clang and LLVM integration to Visual Studio are fascinating. I highly recommend this talk.
• Emscripten: Compiling LLVM bitcode to JavaScript
• Building a Modern Database with LLVM - Improving performance of modern distributed databases. Builds on top of HDFS, not Hadoop.
• An Interesting Approach to Reverse Engineering Apps
• Managing Macs at Google Scale