Newbies - April 2012

So i will be naming this monthly post "Newbies" for the new books in our bookshelves each month. (In case you are wondering, we don't buy/get so many books each week for a weekly post - it's better only once at the end of each month).

Yiota's April Newbies

Gift - The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Gift - The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
Bought - Bleach Vol. 7-9 by Tite Kubo
For Review - White Raven by Irina Lopatina
For Review - The Spirit Keeper by Melissa Luznicky Garrett

Free for University  (those books cost in sum over 200 euros o.O) :
The Internet Galaxy by Manuel Castells
Διδακτικες Προσεγγίσεις και Εργαλεία για την διδασκαλία της Πληροφορικής
E-Business and E-Commerce Management Strategy, Implementation and Practice by Dave Chaffey
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell & Norvig
Essentials of Management Information Systems by Laudon & Laudon

What did you get this week? Leave your links at the comments :D

Game Review: Binary Domain

THE MACHINE AGE HAS BEGUN in this immersive and atmospheric squad-based shooter in which you need to regain control of a futuristic Tokyo from an emerging robotic threat. Set in 2080, the story starts when Dan Marshall and his squad are sent to bring the robotic community under control as they begin to infiltrate society and slowly take over undetected, leaving humans redundant in their wake. Thrilling encounters with highly intelligent robotic enemies require you to think tactically, make challenging, real-time moral decisions and build up trust with your team mates in order to guide your squad to safety and success.

Features:

A NEW TAKE ON FUTURISTIC TOKYO - Experience dual layered Tokyo with a run down and derelict lower city and a clean and affluent upper city.

 THE CONSEQUENCE SYSTEM - Under the pressures of battle every action, every choice and every word affects everything.

PROCEDURAL DAMAGE - Fully destructible and highly resilient robots adapt to the damage they sustain encouraging you to analyse each enemy, find their weaknesses and dispose of them in the most efficient way.

WEAPON MODIFICATION AND SKILL SELECTION - Alongside a full armoury of unique weapons, put emphasis on the skills that will benefit you.

Binary Domain
Released: April 27, 2012
Rating: 3/5 stars
Console: PC / XBOX360 / PS3
Buy:Amazon.com

Review:

This game confused me... It starts right into the action with no intro at all given to get the player into the story, instead after I finished the first chapter I got to watch the intro video that explains how I got into Japan and why. And that was just the start of my confusion, I will explain in the detailed review.

Gameplay: The gameplay is pretty standarized in our days, ever since the call of duty games were such a big hit. The confusing thing here is that the default button for reloading the weapons is the middle mouse button instead of the more common 'R' button. It doesn't sound very big an issue but when all other FPS games use this button it is pretty hard to get used to another button, but if you can't you can always change it, in that case though you would have to get used to press 'R' for the secondary weapon attack because they had the bright idea to put it on the same button as the reload button...

Graphics: Yep they are good and without glitches at the same time. Thumbs up on this one.

Story: The story is really cool actually. It is about the birth of emotionally aware artificial inteligence which is banned by the UN. So the UN sends a multinational commando team called "Rust Crew" to destroy those robots and bring their creator into custody for his "crime" of advancing the technology beyond America's interests. The confusing thing here are the characters. They are all like robots, they act like their emotionaly and morality "software" is reprogrammed in each scene :O Especially in the two final chapters. In one scene they want to slay every last artificial intelince machine in Japan and in the next scene they wanna kill their boss to protect the machines. And it is not just "following orders" they are acting like fanatics on all their decisions and a human that acts that way does not change his opinion that easily, so fail for bad writen characters. The only nice character was the main hero and the hot chinese sniper girl. And the worst of them all, they failed to make me believe that the "bad guys" were really bad, in fact at the end I wanted to join them and fight against the UN because the bad guy here was actually a briliant scientist and the UN were just a racist bunch of close minded assholes that were afraid of evoltion, they were afraid of losing their sit, their money and their power and because of that they decided to stop the scientific progress.

So I would suggest you buy this game only if you like robot stories or anime series or you are just a big FPS fun. If the price drops a bit it would be worth it but now the price is too high for its worth.

Movie Review: The Avengers

Marvel's The Avengers-the Super Hero team up of a lifetime, featuring iconic Marvel Super Heroes Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Hawkeye and Black Widow. When an unexpected enemy emerges that threatens global safety and security, Nick Fury, Director of the international peacekeeping agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D., finds himself in need of a team to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. Spanning the globe, a daring recruitment effort begins. In 3D at select locations.

The Avengers
Released: 2012
Runtime: 143 mins
Rating: 5/5 stars
Buy: Not Available Yet

REVIEW:
Finally!! And i mean FINALLY! Can't remember how long i have been waiting for this movie. And i'm even more happy that was as good as i expected. An over 2 hours long movie, and it didn't even feel that long. I certainly wouldn't mind for more.

As expected you get action with fights not only against Loki, but also between the Avengers which was even more exciting for me than the final battle. Amazing choreography need to be said. There were mistakes that hurt my eyes. Some of the people should have died from the very start, and some of the moves of the heroes weren't well placed and were a little "emm fake", but never mind that. They were only like 3-4 scenes and i'm pretty sure most people didn't even notice them.

You get to see a lot of all the characters, though the center was Iron Man, Hulk and surprisingly Hawkeye. I felt like they had more scenes than the rest (well..Iron Man definitely had!). Not that it bothered me :P I liked every single one of them. I liked the start, when they try to work all together but didn't really work out. The jokes written by the writers were as funny as i was expecting with Stark having some really good lines. There were times the movie fell more like a comedy than a super hero flick. Again, that doesn't mean you get any less of the story or the action.

The special effects don't really need to be discussed. They were obviously amazing. A friend also told me, that the 3D version of the film was also really good.

Now i'm waiting excited for Iron Man 3, Thor 2, Captain America 2 and The Avengers 2. Those movies really fill you. I really don't know if the do justice to the comics but they are definitely enjoyable for me.

P.S: Stan Lee has a cameo scene again as in all Marvel movies.

Game Review: Blades of Time

Gunswords, booty (of the gold and jewels kind) and a cute outfit? All in a day's work. Play as the gorgeous gunsword-wielding treasure hunter Ayumi as she carves a path of destruction through a mysterious and dangerous island. While rich with bounty, the island is also caught in the throes of Chaos magic. Ayumi soon discovers that it is also the home of thousands of long-held secrets, including special powers and abilities that she can gain for herself. Using everything she can, she must find a way to defeat armies of menacing villains and a multitude of treacherous traps in order to break free of the possessed island's grasp. With a host of colorful characters, eye-popping visual appeal, tons of treasure and a huge variety of combat skills to master, Blades of Time will satisfy gamers hunger for an entertaining yet deep action game that even gamers new to the hack-and-slash genre will enjoy.

 Features:

Richly entertaining characters. From the young yet tough Ayumi, her wise and battle worn mentor Zero, and more. This character-driven story has a unique charm, banter and mystery all of it's own.

 Lushly designed environments. Experience huge and beautifully realized game locations, including snowy lands, jungles, ancient cities, temples and sky islands. Deep combat system. Unlock 40 set of skills, including melee, tactics, combos, as well as the powerful Order and Chaos forms of magic to defeat your foes.

Special moves change up gameplay - Time Rewind allows Ayumi to turn back time and produce a clone of herself to help solve puzzles, tackle hordes of enemies, and more. - All-new Dash ability means Ayumi can close the distance between herself and her enemy prey almost instantly, as well as travel quickly using environmental features.

 Robust multiplayer options. Fire up a co-op Campaign or battle in PvP

Blades of Time
Release Date: April 18, 2012
Rating: 5/5 stars
Console: PC
Buy: Amazon (UK)

Review:

It has been too long since a good action game came out on PC, I guess they were building up to the moment of this game's release. Blades of time has magic, katanas, guns, rocket launchers, aliens, demons, zombies, and a hot main heroine. Granted that she talks way too much, at an annoying level sometimes, but I find that her semi-british accent adds to her hotness. So let's get on with the details.

Gameplay: It went back to the basics FINALLY ! All those additions with level ups, skills, combos, equipments, aligment options, and a LOT other trash options for character development have a huge place in RPGs but ABSOLUTELY no place in a hack and slash action game. This kind of games are about only one thing: KILL THINGS ! Please big companies stop making a "me smash things" game feel like a chess match and let us enjoy the fighting and the hot animated girls in not-at-the-least-effective armors. This game has 2 or 3 combo moves that are impressive to watch, easy to remember and easy to execute, and this is awesome. It also adds some magic, or special moves, whatever, and some very basic leveling options that are veeeeeery easy to choose between them without much thinking about strategies. And the most amazing thing is the main character's, named Ayumi, special ability: she can rewind time and create "time clones" by going into her past. This creates the feeling that you are controling a whole squad of Ayumi clones all at once. AWESOME.

Story: The story is pretty straight forward, Ayumi is a treasure hunter and a member in the dominant treasure hunters' guild. The guild has a secret that makes it so reach, a parallel world full of treasures that the most experienced members of the guild can enter through a "magical" orb controled by the mysterious guild master. The orb is actually an alien technology space-time portal but whatever, just call it magical :P It has a few twists in the script to make it more interesting but, come on, say the truth, if you play this game you don't care about the script, you only care about smashing aliens and demons around with your katanas.

Graphics: The game has nice graphics, a little outdated maybe but still very playable, I would call them average to good for this kind of game. The important thing to say is that I didn't notice even a single rendering glitch, which I value waaaaaaaaay more than having the perfect realistic graphics engine. After all, the place is called Dragonland, fuck realism !

To sum it up, this game rules, it has the right ratio of violence to strategy and character development, it has only 1 kind of hidden collectable items, and badass characters. The only negative thing is that, at least on the PC version I played, it had a few bugs, not anything game breaking but they could get annoying in a tough battle, small chance to happen to be in a tough battle and have a bug at the same time but it did happen once to me. So go buy it guys ;)