Paperama

android version

Got a silly little game called Paperama on my Kindle and I thought I'd mention it here.  It's good as mobile games go and, unlike so many of them, it actually requires you to think a bit.

The pros:

• It's really soothing to play — origami with a mellow soundtrack.
• I haven't run into a timed level yet.
• It's great on a touch interface, though probably better on a tablet than on a phone just do to the space available and the precision of the folding necessary.
• It's pretty rewarding to get a complex shape right after trying to figure it out for a while.
• The puzzle solving aspect is great, as you're trying to take a square of paper and figure out how to fold it into a particular shape in a limited number of folds.

The cons:

• It's "free", which means you get shown an ad every so many levels (so far just static images advertising other games). 
• There are hints available, but each hint costs so many "hint points", and of course they want to sell you those points.
• I cannot find any "point to hint" ratio so I do not know if 1 point equals 1 hint, or if as your level increases the hints cost more, and so on.  This could really change the cost of hints.

A level in the game; the undo is very useful.

Small digression: Game devs really need to realize that there are those of us who will pay for games but will never pay for micro-transactions of this kind.  Honestly if a game company wants money from me they are going to have to sell me the game.  $3.99 would be good.  $6.99 OK, and $9.99 for this totally do-able.  But I'll never pay $0.99 for three "hint points"; I'd rather be stuck forever.  I'd even pay for "packs" that increase the number of puzzles but not for extra moves, hints, or whatever the hell else your marketing people told you was a great idea to charge for.

Anyway, the bottom line is that if you can stand that they flash ads at you, and that hints beyond the initial few are only available for cash, then it's an entertaining diversion for a few hours.

The 100 (pilot)

I noticed The 100 (the television show) had made it to Netflix here in Canada and watched the pilot on Thursday.

dvd/blu-ray | on demand

The concept is intriguing: Earth was devastated by a nuclear holocaust and the only surviving humans live on The Ark, a space station made up of other, smaller space stations that have banded together (literally and figuratively) for survival. 97 years after the devastation, The Ark is sending a hundred people back to Earth to see if they survive.

Unfortunately, the concept falls apart completely within the firsts several minutes of the show.  Those hundred being sent?  They're all convicts, and they're all teenagers in the 16 to 17 year-old range.  None have had the least training in survival.  And most remarkable of all (despite, sometimes, supposed years in solitary confinement, rough treatment from the guards, and the unexpected crash landing of their pod) all of them are impeccably coiffed, plucked, and made-up — and reasonably sane.  No, seriously: one of the main characters is a girl who spent the first sixteen years of her life being hidden in the floor of her house because, under the Ark's one-child policy, her very existence was a crime.  When she was discovered, her mother was immediately executed and she was placed in solitary confinement for a solid year.  Yet she's still entirely lucid, pretty gregarious, and happily chasing boys within ten minutes of crash landing.

The main premise is that on this space station of about 2,400 people (I think?) — the very last of the human race — laws have gotten positively draconian, and the breaking of any rule, no matter how minor, results in imprisonment for minors and execution for adults.  There is no mercy.  The kids we meet are in for growing pot, taking a space walk, knowing a secret, or simply being born and most of them, it seems, have had one or both parents executed for being complicit in their various crimes.

And this is where any believability just gets stretched just a little too thin; people would not be hanging out all chill in a ruthless, authoritarian society where their fellows are executed and their children imprisoned and tortured for petty crimes.  Especially in a strictly one-child society.  Sure, in a giant faceless bureaucracy, all kinds of people fall through the cracks but — and this frequently irritates me in post-apocalyptic fiction — when there are so few people left, the idea that all they do is turn so viciously on each other, killing one another left and right and allowing the un-charismatic psychopaths among them to rule the roost, instead of, you know, cooperating, seems more a product of modern narcissism and individualistic exceptionalism than it does a product of a tiny band of humans on the brink of extinction.

There are a lot of problems along this line in the show.  If resources are so tight that there is a one-child rule and you can get stuck in prison for going on a spacewalk on a lark, then why are so many useless prisoners tolerated, you know, up to the point they pick out a hundred of them (how many are there, anyway?) and decide to shoot them at the Earth?  In the pilot alone, we see a gifted doctor condemned to death for giving an injured patient more than the "allowed amount" of blood during a surgery.  And this makes no sense: a community like this needs its surgeons.  They are expensive to train, have specialist knowledge, and are not disposable.  And really, this would be such a no-brainer to solve: a rule like this would be enforced by a petty (and far more disposable) bean-counter who was the only one able to dole out the valued resource and the only one held responsible if the allowed amount was exceeded.  A sane society (that is, one that had managed to survive 97 years in space after a nuclear holocaust) would take the decision to even violate the law out of the hands of the high-value and expensively-trained member of society and put it in the hands of someone whose only value was in controlling the flow of that resource.  (To anyone who grew up experiencing HMOs in the U.S., this sort of bureaucrat-induced health care rationing seems like it would be second nature.)

Irrationality is at every turn: At one point the pro tempore chancellor of the space station, a man made out to be both short-sighted and evil, takes his underling aside to explain that friendships are useless, mean nothing, and can have no sway on decisions.  So how does someone so unlikable and stupid get to such a position of power (let alone remain un-murdered) if not for the many friends who benefit from his position?

Oh, and this one might be a bit too nit-picky (feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph) but here it goes: these chosen Hundred are supposed to have been shot down to Earth somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains near Mount Weather, Virginia.  Why then are these kids running amok through (what looks to me) a Pacific Northwest rain forest?  Maybe that kind of observation is only possible to someone who grew up in one region or the other, but it's pretty glaring if you did.  (I suspect this show was filmed in Washington state or British Columbia, and that's why, but it looks silly, especially when they have shots of ragged snow-capped peaks instead of the gently rolling Blue Ridge Mountains.)  Sorry, I had to get that out there.  These instances were just one more thing piled onto the many other problems that made me turn to the person watching this with me and go, "Muh?"

And you know, all that might still be forgivable — from "not a one of our writers seems to know a thing about group dynamics" to "we have no idea what the Appalachian Mountains look like" — if the dialogue weren't mind-numbingly hackneyed.  All the scripting says to me is "Teen survival drama is hot right now, right?  We cranked this out as fast as we could.  Tweens won't know the difference!"  The actors do as best they can with the dialogue — I mean, they look as serious as possible when uttering lines that make them seem like the remains of humankind were educated solely by watching TV melodramas and action flicks — but it soon grates on the ear.

There are twelve more episodes in season one, and the thing got sixteen episodes for season two, but the whole of the pilot just couldn't give me a good enough reason to stick it out and see where it goes.

Borderlands: The Pre-sequel

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I've been playing Borderlands: The Pre-sequel since its release in October with a co-op partner.  This past weekend, we finally finished the main game, and now have gone back again in True Vault Hunter Mode to see what that has in store for us.

We've been having a lot of fun with the game.  The game does not have a lot of big UI or engine differences from Borderlands 2, except for four, and those range from pretty fun to really fun.

The Additions
First, they've introduced cryo as an element type: after you freeze then melee-shatter your first enemy, you'll be hooked too.

Second, a large areas of the game are low gravity, which means your character can jump a long, long way.  In combination with the Oz kits (oxygen kits for breathing in those areas without air), the low gravity also allows for double-jumps (for extra floaty spacetime fun) and for gravity slams (which everyone really calls "butt slams"), where you power your character downward from a low-gravity jump by releasing oxygen from their kit and then slam into the ground, knocking back any nearby enemies.  (Oz Kits also come with elemental modifications so you can do, for example, electrical or corrosive butt slams.)

Looking out at Serenity's Waste
with my new favorite laser.

Third, they've included a new weapon type: lasers.  Lasers vary anywhere from single-shot and burst-shot varieties into a full, continuous beam mode I like to call "firehose mode", which can be a great deal of fun, too — just point and spray damage at your enemies.

Fourth, but not least, there is a new vehicle — the Stingray.  There is the standard two-person, four-wheeled vehicle which, in B:TPS, is called the Moon Buggy (or the Moon Zoomy). but the Stingray is a single-person hovercraft that can jump and slam; think of it like a space bike.

To quote Stig, "Don't tell me we get to use the space bikes!"

The Characters and Classes
There are four classes to play in the base game; as they introduce them, we have Athena as the Gladiator, Wilhelm as the Enforcer, Nisha as the Lawbringer, and Claptrap as a Mistake.

Athena's customization screen

Athena you may remember as an NPC from The Secret Armory of General Knoxx DLC.  Athena's skills focus on shotgun and SMG, with her special ability being the Aspis, a shield that absorbs damage coming from in front of her and can be thrown to deal damage — in fact, this shield is why her preferred weapons are the point-and-shoot variety rather than the precise-aiming variety since, with the Aspis out, she cannot zoom in for a scoped shot.

Wilhelm you may recall as an NPC from Borderlands 2 where he was the first major boss faced by the Vault Hunters in that game.  Wilhelm's skills focus on heavy weapons, especially lasers (but he's pretty good with all guns).  His special ability is Wolf and Saint: Wolf is an aggressive attack drone and Saint is a passive support drone, and they can get quite powerful.

Nisha may be remembered as the Sheriff of Lynchwood in Borderlands 2.  Her general focus is on pistols, and her special ability, Showdown, puts her in an auto-aim mode that drastically increases her gun damage, fire rate, accuracy, reload speed, and bullet speed.  Her skill tree allows her to dual wield pistols, as well, though she does loose the right-mouse aim mode when doing this.

Finally, there's CL4P-TP, who needs really no introduction as Claptrap.  Except he's actually FR4G-TP — the same Claptrap as the Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Claptrap from the Claptrap's New Robot Revolution DLC.  Was he meant as a serious character and class?  It's hard to say but do note that in choosing Claptrap as your character, you have to confirm  more than once that this is what you really want to do.  Claptrap's special ability is VaultHunter.EXE, a somewhat random collection of things that occur when the ability is triggered — some may be quite effective, others humorous, and some potentially disastrous.  His skill tree is equally ludicrous, with specializations of "Boomtrap" (explosive damage and guns), "I Love You Guys!" (support), and "Fragmented Fragtrap" (rewarding versatility and adaptability as his strengths and weaknesses periodically change).

The Milieu
B:TPS takes place on Pandora's moon, Elpis, and on the Hyperion space station that you can see in the sky in the other Borderlands games (you know, that giant H-shaped satellite by the moon).  Time-wise, the story takes place between Borderlands and Borderlands 2 — in playing B:TPS you get to find out what happened to Brick, Mordecai, Lilith, and Roland from the original game in the immediate aftermath of the Vault's opening, and what made Handsome Jack (and Wilhelm and Nisha) into the characters you meet in Borderlands 2.  Some old favorites make appearances as well — Moxxi in particular shows up as the proprietor of Moxxi's Up Over (a pub on the moon).  It can be a little confusing at first, though, because the story you're experiencing is actually being told to Lilith by Athena after the events of Borderlands 2.

While the bulk of Pandora's denizens in the first two games are voiced with American accents, Elpis is, apparently, Pandora's Oceania.  A good many of the accents are Australian, and a lot of the jokes and references are Australian, too.  This is fairly pervasive, from the O² kits being called "Oz Kits", place names such as Burraburra, and "Springy Shiela" grenade mods, to talk of billabongs, jumbucks, and tuckerbags, and a roving enemy known as the Swagman.  While some people seem to really hate this aspect of the voice acting and find the thick Aussie accents distracting or annoying, I find it pretty charming and a nice change from the North American hicks and rednecks of Borderlands and Borderlands 2.

One of the many (many many) references to Australia.

The Game
The game itself seemed a little short to me, but not so short that it's "just another DLC" as some complain.  It can actually take a lot of time to do all the side quests and to work on challenges and achievements, if you're a die-hard completionist like me.  The extra game features and four new classes add enough that it's definitely a whole new game in the franchise.  I think the "too short" impression mostly comes about because the writing in the latter third or fourth of the game seems rushed and a little disjointed, and those story missions are prone to push, push, push you through too quickly if you let their intense urgency get to you.

There are some annoying aspects.  There are bugs that really should've been worked out by now, and by this I primarily mean mobs clipping into walls where they can shoot your character but not, apparently, be shot by your toon.  And it's bad that it's so damned easy to fall through the scenery and die that I've done it at least a dozen times just in the course of normal hunt-for-Vault-symbols style exploration.  Yesterday my co-op partner and I took down one of the "secret" boss mobs only to find that it was bugged, and didn't spawn the exit it was supposed to, and so our characters had to die to get out of its lair which shouldn't happen.  My co-op partner and I also found a too-large number of Challenges that could only be triggered by one character in the zone (we had to reload the zone for the other of us to be able to get it) and at least one that I have not been able to complete even though he got the completion on it when my character picked up the fifth of the five necessary items.

Still, if you like the Borderlands series, this is more of the same and you will enjoy it, and it's a very fun ride to boot.