The third and final game in the Deponia adventure game series. Spoilers within. In the first two Deponia games we met Rufus, a slightly twisted and mischievous fellow who wants to run away from home. There are running gags about how he has set fire to the city, destroyed property, and generally caused all kinds of havoc. Those two games were fun. Goodbye Deponia looked to be a fun game as well, but Rufus takes a much darker turn here. Rufus usually gets people to do things they shouldn’t do and like all characters in adventure games, steals everything…
Category: sci fi
Mr Nobody
There used to be this cool bit on the Carol Burnett show about a writer. The stage would be set and we would watch a scene being written. But then the writer would change his mind and instead of a gun, the man would pull out a knife. Instead of killing the woman, he would kiss her. And so on and so forth. The idea has been used recently in a series of commercials for voice recognition software where a kid writes a story about a pirate with an eggbeater for a hand. I’ve always liked to play this game…
Snowpiercer
Yet another bleak view of the future where everything we know and love is dead and gone. Snowpiercer is the story of life on a train that has been making its way around the world for the last eighteen years since some unknown something plunged the world into a complete ice age. We start off in the Back of the Train, where all the lowlives live. Our hero is a rare man with two arms and legs whose goal is to reach the Front of the Train. He meets many obstacles in his quest and loses many companions along the…
Helix on Syfy
In a secret lab where they do bad things-wait for it-something goes wrong. Our heroes are a small group of CDC doctors who are called in to help with an outbreak in a freakishly advanced research faculty surrounded by frozen tundra. In standard cosy catastrophe fashion, we have a nice enclosed population of 120 or so people which will doubtlessly decrease by regular amounts throughout the season. The disease is the standard sci fi type where the person’s veins are pulsing and black, their eyes are bloody and odd, and they seem to have lost their mind to some other…
Deponia – Fun Adventure Game
Deponia is the story of lovable loser Rufus who is trapped on a junk planet and surrounded by people who seem both fond of him and sincere when they wish him well on his plans to leave the planet far behind him. Our hero has two women in his life, one is his ex-girlfriend who he still lives with and one is a tall and lovely woman who falls from the sky and spends the bulk of the game unconscious. Rufus meets a number of odd and interesting people who tend to get in the way of his reaching his…
Upstream Color
I recently found a site called ScriptShadow and they have a list of the Ten Worst and Best Movies of 2013. I’m always interested in the movies that makes these kinds of lists as they seldom agree with my own ideas about the best and worst films of the year. Upstream Color was the Number 2 Worst Film, right behind The Host. Shane Carruth’s other movie was the time travel story Primer and like Primer, Upstream Color is not an easy movie to understand. Unlike Primer, Upstream Color looks more like a movie with a budget. Is it one of…
Terminal World
In the future something has gone terribly wrong. The earth is divided into Zones and each Zone restricts the use of different technologies. The result is towns with that can only use horse power or steam power and any higher tech looses it’s ability to function once it has been to a lower level Zone. We start out in a place called Spearpoint, which seems to have more than it’s share of Zones to go around. At the bottom of Spearpoint is Horsetown and at the top are the Celestial Levels where magic like super technology still works. The people…
Catching Fire
We open with our hero Katniss brooding in the woods surrounded by snow and emptiness. She is soon joined by her one true love, sort of, Gale. They talk about the hard times in the kingdom and how they should run off into the wilds, the sooner the better. Katniss heads home to the Victor’s Village, where she now lives with her two fellow Victors. It’s a surprisingly run down place, though it is nicer than the rest of District 12. Katniss and Peeta head off to take a victory lap around the 12 Districts, where they end up stirring…
The Caves of Steel
In the far future, where everyone eats yeast, robots are taking jobs from humans, and the earth is massively over crowded by a population of 8 billion, someone important is murdered and our hero is called upon to investigate. A police detective Asimov clearly wanted to be played by Humphrey Bogart is forced to take on a robot as his partner while they investigate the murder of a robotics engineer. One thing leads to another as they follow clues, are fooled by red herrings, and finally reveal the identity of the murderer-all in standard murder mystery fashion. The murder mystery…
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
“They look like rabbits, but if you call them smeerps, that makes it science fiction.” The Issue at Hand, James Blish. On the one hand, Anathem is an amazing book filled with deep thoughts and a tightly crafted universe. On the other hand, it reads like Neal Stephenson sat down with a Mathematics History book and made up new names for all the great theories-and how hard would that be? Anathem is a great book to listen to, leaving the problem of dozens of unfamiliar words to the Audiobook Reader. Neal does a good job of slowly introducing all of these words…