Virtu Technologies India – Blog

Even as I sit down to pen a relatively spoiler-free review of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, I can’t help but laugh at the very concept. Any gamer who’s ever weaved his way through a Zelda title in the 25 years of series’ history surely already knows the relative slant. There is a girl and a hero, a sword and a prophecy. But most importantly there is an epic quest. Skyward Sword adheres to these established conventions, but it isn’t afraid to take certain liberties for the sake of the narrative.

Taking place in a land that is (pun intended) above and beyond the traditional climes of Hyrule, the title represents a high-flying adventure of a somehow more relatable, more human Link. The world of Skyloft (and the fabled land below, where much of your adventuring takes place) may be smaller than those of other Zelda titles, but at the same time it still manages to seem familiar.

Taking to the air on your Loftwing, the preferred mode of travel for the citizens of Skyloft, seems less akin to riding your trusty steed Epona than to navigating the waters of Wind Waker in the King of Red Lions, but there’s a comforting commonality nonetheless. The more interesting wrinkle, however, is the mechanism by which you control the creature. Flapping your Wii Remote to power the bird aloft feels ridiculous at times, but seldom unnatural. If anything the controls in Skyward Sword represent the fulfillment of the Wii’s long-neglected promise.

Properly implemented 1-to-1 Wii Motion Plus movement mean that Skyward Sword puts you in direct control of our hero. You can’t simply waggle your way through combat and expect to escape unscathed. Instead there is a straight-forward, deliberate method for approaching most enemies that involves understanding along which plane one must slash to deliver the proper blow at the appropriate time. It’s a skill you’re forced to develop early on fighting the plant life of the world below, and one that’s properly hewn even before the fights become frantic and truly satisfying. This level of highly-tuned control also extends to your abundance of secondary items, which, from projectile weapons to the instrument du jour, don’t so much push gameplay to new heights so much as they tweak the pre-existing formula in satisfying ways.

Of course these mechanics mean little in the absence of a reason to play, but Skyward Sword delivers a story that’s a cut above those of its predecessors. The most marked change is the warm, tender relationship between Link and Zelda. This makes her abrupt — but certainly not unexpected — abduction feel all the more heart-wrenching. Rescuing her and discovering the true implications of her disappearance (not to mention the threat of a new evil) feels important because of this connection. Sadly this makes the game’s shortcomings along the way even more painful.

Skyward Sword isn’t merely a Zelda game; it’s a Zelda game that makes very little effort to hide its outside influences. You’ll find, amid the title’s heavily Japanese sensibilities, hints of everything from Disney tropes — your childhood foil Groose is really just Gaston from Beauty and the Beast (with one noticeable addition) — to a relatively toothless equivalent of the Mass Effect response wheel. But the biggest influence here, the one note that carries throughout, is a Final Fantasy-style sense of the exploded narrative. So often the game chooses to tell rather than show, and, from the wit and wisdom of locals to the plot-powering ponderings of your computer-talking Na’vi analogue, Fi, this means that a significant chunk of your playtime is spent poring over on-screen text.

Though he’s too young to go at it himself, I chose to share some of my Skyward Sword playtime with my adventurous six-year-old. And just as often as he’d ooh and ahh at the game’s thrilling combat and enticing discoveries, he’d also comment on the its frequent lapses into uninspired text-bombs. “Are we just reading again, dad?” he’d say, a little disappointed, and typically I would respond in kind.

Still, this isn’t the gravest of the title’s trespasses. Just like wading through page after page of click-through text severs the player from the play experience, so does Skyward Sword’s reliance on artificial inflation. Though the game takes pains to ensure that the dungeon exploring and boss battles are familiar but not wholly predictable, the fact that it forces you to spend so much time replaying the same areas, back-tracking across well-worn ground and performing menial fetch quests somehow deflates the urgency of Zelda’s rescue. Even the method of divining, using your sword to track her whereabouts, taught early in the game, seems so banal as to make a mockery of what should be an appealing and emotionally driven quest.

Yet that’s not to say that this shift was completely bad for the series. Long viewed as a role playing game in the loosest sense, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword finally makes that jump from RPG-lite. Things like a more legitimate crafting (read: recipe-based) upgrade system and a staggering number of discoverable collectables seem to put Link’s interest and development more solidly in the player’s hands. Moreover, the fact that Link is presented as little more than a student with a strong, shared affection with Zelda from the game’s earliest moments similarly breaks him free from his old mold. He’s a blank slate onto which you can insinuate practically anything you wish.

These little tweaks, both good and bad, are littered throughout the lengthy playtime. A solid save system, a brand new world of adventures, a genuinely inspired soundtrack and some truly trying puzzle-work serve to aptly propel things forward, but all this ambition cuts both ways.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the game’s art direction. The gouache on canvas graphical overlay isn’t such a far cry from the fabric feel of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, but for a game that’s long divided its time between the realistic and the cartoony iterations it was a bit of a side-step. At times these visuals are beautiful, charming and utterly engaging, but that’s not to say they are always successful. These stylized graphics scale poorly, and at times environmental objects like trees appear as little more than thin, one-dimensional blobs. While I applaud the team for forging ahead into new visual territory, the graphics sometimes feel less like a conscious choice and more an attempt to hide the seams of the Wii’s infamously underpowered processing.

Nintendo of America’s outspoken president Reggie Fils-Aime recently said, in reference to the game’s sky-high review scores and overall critical acclaim, “I don’t know if there’s going to be a video game in history that’s going to be able to compare to Skyward Sword.” It’s a nice sentiment, but on a very nuts-and-bolts level I’m not sure if there’s even a grain of truth to it. Yes, the game has been well-received and, yes, it is most definitely worth playing, but many of its greatest strengths are soured by its most severe detriments.

Like many things that I hold dear — Anthrax’s Worship Music, for example, and the (post-Montreal) 2011 New York Rangers — The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is full of hope, skill and promise, but ultimately more an affair for existing fans. One needs only look at the title’s vanity bundle, which includes a handsome golden Wii-mote Plus and a special 25th anniversary symphonic soundtrack CD, to see this fan service in action. This could be perceived as a veiled admission that Skyward Sword is more a game for Zelda-lovers than a vehicle to create converts, but despite its flaws it certainly has the potential to be a new generation’s Ocarina of Time. (Let us all pause to remember that damned Water Temple.)

There seems to be a notion that this title represents the ultimate in Wii gaming, and, for those who have been looking for a more interactive Zelda experience, that might certainly be true. Moreover, with the Wii U waiting in the wings it may prove to be the console’s last big first-party hurrah. Both these facts, coupled with the way in which Skyward Sword plays up the source material for the better, will certainly help to secure a coveted place in video game canon. Still, it’s not a flawless iteration, despite what the ample number of perfect ten review scores may lead you to believe.

What it is instead is another grand and touching tale of a girl and a hero and a sword and a prophecy that’s occasionally hampered by questionable design decision and padded storytelling. You will read and stagger and suffer through the first several hours of playtime. You will balk when asked to return to the same lands again and again. But along the way, gradually, you will uncover a tale for the ages. You will find yourself playing a Zelda title that is, despite its myriad of shared structural and thematic motifs, a fresh new experience. And somehow these stumbles and fumbles feel fitting. Because it is, at its heart, a game about the joys of falling down only to get back up again.

WIRED: fine use of motion controls, beautiful soundtrack, a solid narrative rooted in but not restricted by Zelda canon, evolved RPG elements, new puzzles and boss battles, collectibles galore, substantial playtime, emotional appeal

TIRED: sometimes underwhelming graphics, busywork that breaks up the action, an annoying ” tell, don’t show” mentality

Review materials provided by: Nintendo of America

Urban fantasy has been somewhat overrun lately with vampires, werewolves and the various men and women who love them. It’s hard to find a new angle on what seems to be a now-familiar subject and even harder to make that angle fresh and interesting.

Larime Taylor succeeds at both with his new serialized book, Hellwatch. From the author’s description:

A young disabled woman in a wheelchair protects an unaware world from demons and monsters. Ester Vasquez, born with arthrogryposis, hunts the monsters and demons that hide from the unsuspecting masses along with her 6′8″, 360lbs Samoan care provider, Sammy.

I found out about the book when the author, a regular on Gail Simone’s Jinxworld forums, posted about his new project, an urban fantasy in serialized chapters. Curious, I downloaded the free PDF.

And I was quickly hooked after this beginning:

Ester Vasquez was not a big fan of the Man Upstairs. As she saw things, He was a quitter, just like the father that she never knew. She eventually came to the conclusion that the deist belief in a clockmaker God that created the universe and simply walked away was pretty much on the money. He had long ago lost interest in His creation, or maybe He had never been interested at all. Praying to an invisible man in the sky seemed, as the late George Carlin once said, just as effective as praying to Joe Pesci. She wasn’t an atheist, however — she knew He existed, at least at some point in time. He just didn’t care anymore. How did she know this?

Ester hunted demons and monsters.

The book would be worth a post on its own but there’s also Taylor’s own remarkable story. Like Ester, Taylor is disabled. He’s not only a writer but also an artist who draws commissions with his mouth. I asked Taylor how this story came about.

GeekDad: What was your initial inspiration for the book?

Larime Taylor: I’ve never written about a truly disabled lead character before in any of my work, whether plays, comics or fiction. I always avoided the idea because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed or stereotyped as ‘the disabled guy that writes about disabled people.’

I think part of it also had to do with the fact that, being disabled, I could live more vicariously through my characters and kind of saw it as an escape. The main character of my graphic novel, which I’ll get to later, appears disabled on the surface but really isn’t once you find out what exactly is wrong with him. I would still occasionally use him to make observations on or give glimpses into disabled life, but this is the first time that I’ve actually written a real disabled person as the main character.

Comic book writer Gail Simone was recently given the job of bringing Barbara Gordon out of the wheelchair as Oracle and back into the Batgirl suit, which caused a lot of controversy, especially among the disabled community. I have mixed feelings on the matter, and it’s probably a whole different discussion, but the end result was that I finally decided that there weren’t enough disabled characters in popular culture and I really had no excuse not to get off my gimpy butt and do something about it myself.

Once I decided that I was going to write a disabled lead character, I wanted to go all the way with it.

That meant the character would have my disability, though her condition isn’t quite as bad as mine, and I wanted the character to be involved in the action so to speak just like any other character. One of the reasons I made her condition a little less severe was to help facilitate that, to give her a bit more independence and mobility than I have, but not very much.

In thinking about the kinds of things that this character could be involved in, I went back to my roots in pagan and ceremonial magic and my love of monsters and demons and decided that she could be a demon/monster hunter in the vein of John Constantine from Hellblazer. I knew that this meant that she would need some kind of an assistant or sidekick to do the more physical things, but I had the beginnings of a story and a character that I really liked. So basically that’s how Ester Vasquez was born.

GD: What gave you the idea to serialize it?

LT: I’ve been wanting to do serial fiction for a long time. I initially got out of playwriting because I wanted to work on something ongoing and serial in nature. I initially got into writing for television, but quickly learned that the only way I would ever get anywhere is to live in Los Angeles, and that isn’t going to happen for a number of reasons.

My screen writing teacher, Larry Brody, suggested I look into comics as he used to write for the Silver Surfer cartoon series and got to know some of the people in comics that way. Over time I’ve come to the decision that the amount of time it takes to write and draw a comic book page isn’t worth the amount of story comes out of it on a page by page basis. I love comics and graphic novels, but the amount of time that it takes me to make them isn’t as rewarding from a storyteller standpoint as I would like it to be.

I can tell a lot more story in a lot less time by writing prose, and so I decided to move in that direction. I’ve been working on a number of ideas that I was planning to put out as serial fiction, but this one seems to be the strongest and the best of them. So, going back to my TV training I decided to treat it like a TV series and tell it in seasons, with each novella being an episode in the season.

GD: What’s your process for getting the words down? Given your circumstances, are there any special problems in taking the manuscript from a draft to a form that can be uploaded to Kindle or other electronic formats?

LT: I use speech software to write everything, which actually is a bonus because it’s a lot faster than typing – though I can type roughly 60 words a minute with a pencil in my mouth. It just wears me down really quickly.

Using speech software, I’ve been able to write as much as 10,000 words in a day, and my average is about 3,000. Kindle, Smashwords and the rest all prefer that you upload your manuscript as a Word document, so there really isn’t any problem with turning my draft into the finished product. I just had to pick up the formatting specifics and play around with how to use images and make them look right.

GD: You also offer artwork on a commission. How do you draw a piece and what are you favorite type of things to draw?

LT: I draw with my mouth and I have been since I was four or five years old.

Recently Wacom was kind enough to donate me a Cintiq tablet where I draw directly on the screen; the tablet is a display, and that has really opened up what I can do. I use the digital pen to draw directly on the screen which means that I can now photo reference – something that was impossible before since drawing with my mouth means that my head is always down on the paper so I can’t actually look at what I’m trying to draw. Now I can have it right there next to the picture I’m drawing on the screen. It’s just a simple matter of flicking my gaze back and forth.

I don’t know that I have a favorite subject, though I have to say that people are my best subject. Portraiture and caricature are my specialties.

GD: How did you develop your comics series, Hollow? Will it be out soon?

LT: I wouldn’t say it’s coming out soon. It’s been coming out soon since 2003. The biggest delay has been financial, first, and now my wife’s health as she’s the colorist. We originally had a penciler that use to work on Sandman, but we couldn’t afford him.

I took over the drawing duties, but the real style of the book comes in with my wife’s painting, and she’s been too sick the past few years to work on more than a page or two here and there. It’s on hiatus right now.

It came about as my initial idea for a TV series when I was studying under Larry Brody, and I converted it over to comics when I realized that TV wasn’t going to happen. I’ve thought about writing it as novels, but since I have a publisher and a contract for the graphic novel there are legality issues involved and, honestly, I’d still like to do it with my wife as a graphic novel. It’ll happen, one day.

GD: If there’s one misconception you could correct about the disabled to the public at large, what would it be?

LT: I’d say it’s something that I deal with in the first episode, though only in passing. People tend to assume that if you’re in a wheelchair you must also have some mental disability, and most people tend to talk to the people with you rather than you, even if it’s about you. It’s almost like you aren’t there. There’s a scene where that happens to Ester in the first episode.

The book is available free at the links posted above.

Taylor is also offering a sale on his art commissions for the holiday season.

If it wasn’t enough that Angry Birds has conquered your iPhone, iPod, iPad, Android device, e-reader, computer and practically every gadget imaginable, then been made into everything from protective cases to board games, tee-shirts and plush toys, characters from Rovio’s game franchise are now prepared to invade musically. No, they haven’t formed an irritated ornithological-themed boy band, but thanks to GEAR4, you can buy Red Bird, Black Bird and the Helmet Pig as an auxiliary speaker for your mobile device. While Red Bird includes an auxiliary cable to plug into any available headphone jack, Green Helmet Pig features an iPhone/iPod compatible dock, and Black Bird rocks an iPad dock. At under a hundred bucks a pop, you can’t expect these to perform like a Zeppelin, but they’re going to sound a lot better than your built-in speaker. And they’re Angry Birds. You can pick them up now at Best Buy at prices ranging from $79.99- $99.99.

Or, you could leave a comment below, cross your fingers and possibly win yourself a free Black Bird iPad speaker dock, courtesy of GEAR4. Contest closes at 8pm PST at which time one winner will be selected at random. US and Canadian shipping addresses only, one entry per person please. Good luck!

There is and always will be a soft spot in my heart for the Atari 2600. It was the first gaming platform I had growing up, and even with its simple graphics and pew-pew sound effects, many hours turned into days (and probably even weeks) of gameplay over the years I played that thing. It is my sincere hope that my two young sons (ages 4 and 1.5) will find a short period of time in their lives to play the same games their dad did before they discover the wonders of the Xbox or Playstation or other gaming platform that wows them with surround sound, achievements, and first-person perspective.

There are many ways to play those early 2600 games, from finding working Atari 2600s at flea markets or in grandma’s basement to running an emulator on your home computer. There’s even a collection for the iPad, and earlier this year I wrote a review of the iCade that allows iPad owners to connect up their iPad to a joystick and some buttons and enjoy a large collection of 2600 games and a nice assortment of arcade classics such as Missile Command, Centipede, and Asteroids. The iCade has been a hit with visiting friends and family (well, those who have fond memories of early ’80s arcade and 2600 games), but the iCade’s large shell, retro colors and graphics have been a sore spot with my wife who prefers the device not be left sitting on a kitchen table, a coffee table, a dining table, or really anywhere that’s visible to non-geek visitors to our home. Bummer. (To be fair, she’s given me pretty lax rules concerning my workshop, the garage, and the basement… so I’m quite all right conceding the living room, dining room, kitchen, and other public areas to non-geek decorative tastes.)

Thankfully, a solution has now presented itself that will allow me to play my 2600 games with a real joystick and buttons as well as keep my wife happy with a subtle, non-imposing footprint. It’s called the Atari Arcade, and it is full of Awesome.

The Atari Arcade is made by Discovery Bay Games and is now available for sale at Apple Stores. As with other DBG games for the iPad (and I’ll be reviewing a few more in the coming weeks), the packaging is elegantly simple. The instruction manual is almost unnecessary as any iPad owner will easily be able to figure out how to properly connect the tablet to the Atari Arcade base. The base requires no batteries, by the way… so it really is ready to plug in and play right out of the box.

After connecting the iPad to the base, I discovered one very nice feature that I really never would have thought to add on my own. On the left and right sides of the base are two slider buttons that, when pushed forward, slide two rubber-coated pins that press against the bottom of the iPad (to the left and right of the Home button) and hold it securely in place. This helps prevent the iPad from tipping left or right when you (inevitably) jerk the joystick, for example, during an excited game of Centipede where that pesky spider is angling to take you out. Whatever the cause, I am thankful that the designer(s) thought to add in this locking feature that prevented my iPad from slipping out of the base.

Now let’s talk about the obvious — a red-ball joystick and four buttons. Given that most 2600 games only used a single button and a joystick, this isn’t a problem. Also, most early arcade games made do with one or two buttons. I’ve yet to find any 6 or 7-button arcade games (Mortal KOMBAT!!!!) for my iPad that I really want to play, so for now the Atari Arcade has enough buttons to handle my gaming needs. (But how cool would it be if something like Atari’s Gauntlet came out and used Bluetooth to allow 2 or more Atari Arcade owners to play together? I’ll push that up the wire to the DBG team and get back to you.)

As with the iCade, the joystick has a bit of play in it. I wish it offered a bit more resistance, but the fact that it returns to center quickly and has a short throw (the distance you have to push it left/right/up/down to reach its maximum movement) made it easy for me to adjust to quickly. The buttons are the click-variety — an audible click is heard every time you press one — and there’s no doubting about whether you’ve pressed one or not. Arcade cabinet aficionados should know that these four buttons are flat-topped and slightly smaller than the traditional standard-sized concave buttons you can buy when building your own arcade cabinet (such as the full-size cabinet I’ve almost completed). The buttons are not so small as to be a problem to use (I actually prefer this size given the smaller size of the base and the smaller screen of the iPad) but I do want to make others aware that these are not traditional arcade-style buttons.

Now let’s talk about your gaming options. The Atari Arcade is meant to be played with the Atari Greatest Hits app available on iTunes — if you already own the Atari Greatest Hits app (I have it on my iPad 1), you’re almost ready to play. After plugging in the iPad and opening up the app, you’ll discover that each game needs to be updated so that the Atari Arcade base is added to the (short) list of controllers. You can update each game individually as you select them to play (takes about 5 seconds for the patch to download and doesn’t require you to restart the app) or you can choose an option to download all the game updates which will allow all the 2600 games (about 80 in all) and 18 arcade games to be played with the Atari Arcade. (If you’ve not purchased and downloaded the app, the complete Atari Greatest Hits app library is about 108 megabytes in size — took less than 5 minutes for all games to download on my iPad 2 via Wi-Fi.)

For most folks, the names of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne are frequently referenced when it comes to the steampunk genre. And while I certainly appreciate their contributions to science fiction, I must admit to a complete and utter fascination with Edgar Allan Poe, the American writer who is most often thought of as a mystery/detective writer or a horror writer. But for me, he’s high on the list of examples of writers who fit easily into the steampunk style and voice.

For an advanced writing class I took in college, I remember writing an extensive paper on Poe that required me to read just about every story and poem he’d ever written. It’s dark stuff… and very good. Poe died at age 40, and much of his life reads like a tragedy with the early loss of his mother, being abandoned by his father, and his wife dying at a very young age. It should come as no surprise that much of his writing leans toward macabre story lines with death being the central subject.

I chose mid- to late-1800s fiction as a focus for much of my studies and papers for my English degree, and while I often wandered from Wells to Verne to Doyle for my subject matter, I often returned to Poe whenever I needed to compare and contrast one or more authors (such as comparing Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes to Poe’s Dupin). Even Poe’s poetry was easy to read and decipher and made for excellent subjects for short papers on the period’s interest in things dark and disturbing.

I tell you all this so you’ll understand just how happy I was to receive a review copy of Steampunk Poe. When I first heard rumblings about the book, I had very little information on what exactly the book was going to be about. Would it be stories inspired by Poe that contained steampunk themes? Or would it be some of Poe’s stories altered slightly to incorporate steampunk elements such as the overly-used goggles, dirigibles, and automatons? Thankfully, once more information was made available, I realized that the publisher had made the right choice and not attempted to modify or create new content. Instead, Steampunk Poe simply provides some of Poe’s best works, both short story and poetry, along with some beautiful custom artwork created just for the book by illustrators Zdenko Basic and Manuel Sumberac.

The book is broken into two sections — short stories first followed by poems. Scattered throughout the book are a series of full-color images that capture some element of the story or poem that surround them. The publisher is Running Press Teens, so I’m assuming the book is geared towards a younger audience — the imagery will certainly be useful for teachers or parents who want to introduce Poe’s writing to a younger crowd as the number of illustrations is just enough to set the mood of a particular story or poem without stealing the thunder.

And the publisher has made a great selection for the content as listed below:

Stories

1. The Masque of the Red Death

2. The Tell-Tale Heart

3. The Fall of the House of Usher

4. The Murders in the Rue Morgue

5. The Balloon Hoax

6. The Spectacles

7. The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether

Poems

1. The Raven

2. To Helen

3. The City in the Sea

4. A Dream Within a Dream

5. The Conqueror Worm

6. The Bells

If you’ve read little to nothing of Edgar Allan Poe, this hardback collection is a nice introduction to a good mix of his styles (comedy, horror, detective). And the text has not been edited — you’ll find Poe’s typical style of writing that often involves sentences that can run into almost complete paragraph-length descriptions such as this opening sentence for The Fall of the House of Usher:

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.

Or this bit of explanation on the skills of observation from The Murders in the Rue Morgue:

I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess.

(I’m providing these examples only because I feel a bit of warning must be issued regarding Poe’s stories — the language can be a bit difficult to parse at times. But there are simply few writers that write like this anymore, and I just love it.)

Maybe you’ve read some stories but little of his poetry. You’re really missing out. While The Raven is probably one of his most famous poems, if you’ve not read A Dream Within a Dream (very short) or The City in the Sea, give them a try. All the poems were still enjoyable to read even now, years later, and the matching illustrations that accompany them just make me love this book that much more.

My steampunk library grows constantly, and while there are many books on my shelf that I’ve enjoyed over the years, only a small number exist that I’ll reach for in years to come for a re-read. Steampunk Poe is one of those. Every few years I dive back into Verne… or Wells… or Doyle… or Poe. I’ve enjoyed my visit with Edgar and I look forward to visiting again one day soon.

This week here in the U.S. we will be celebrating Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving feast is filled with all kinds of food but the star of the meal is always the turkey. This week’s puzzle focuses on one of the supporting cast members … the corn. With a few corny riddles about Thanksgiving. How corny, you ask? Well, let’s just say if Miles Standish told these jokes then he would have been stuffed instead of the turkey. This is the GeekDad puzzle, though, and we never play fair so I encrypted the jokes. Want to have a chance to win a $50.00 ThinkGeek gift certificate? Then send me the decrypted jokes with answers to GeekDad Puzzle Central. You have to include the question and the answers, both in clear text please. Here are the riddles:

1. no oe em au yi ue gk la be dw pn wi dy iz tn ah ki dw pn wi dy mj oe df?
2. za eg ea at md ku rm wg up lz mh ds up nh?
3. za na tn xl rl dl ay ds da ds hk uo de cr am da wc cl jd nv?

Well, get cracking before the tryptophan kicks in from all that turkey you’re going to eat. Send that to me by Friday for your chance to win a $50.00 ThinkGeek gift certificate. Remember: you have to send both the riddles and the answers to us by Friday. There is some wiggle room on the answers … but not much.

About eight years ago, we built a treehouse in the backyard for our kids. The boys loved it and made great use of it over the years. As time passed though, the novelty wore off, and the treehouse saw less and less use every year. It wasn’t quite The Giving Tree made real, but clearly the interests of teenage boys lay elsewhere.

Then, earlier this year, we noticed that the trunk supporting the treehouse was visibly wobbly. A closer inspection made it clear that the roots of the tree were definitely weak, and that it was no longer safe to make use of the treehouse. Obviously the thing had to come down, but how? It didn’t seem stable enough to climb up and dismantle, and we didn’t want to just topple and destroy it. There was no rush to deal with the problem, so the puzzle became a long-running topic of conversation around the house. Most of the solutions that were proposed over the summer were amusing or ingenious, though totally impractical outside an episode of Phineas and Ferb. Finally though, as autumn settled in and leaves started falling, the solution became obvious:

We gathered up our bagged leaves, as well as the bagged leaves from our neighbours, and assembled a huge crash pad for the treehouse. Our hope was that the leaf bags would approximate an air-bag, allowing the treehouse to survive the impact of landing. Simple, cheap, and something MacGuyver would approve of, right?

Well, Sunday was the big day. We piled up the leaf bags, tied on the ropes, sharpened the axe, and set up the cameras. As an avid outdoor enthusiast, my oldest son has the most experience with chopping wood, so he volunteered to play lumberjack while the rest of us pulled on the ropes.

So, how did this all turn out? Well, check out the video below for the answer:

As you can see from the video, the roots of the tree were even more rotten than we had suspected. I’m surprised (and thankful) that the whole thing hadn’t toppled over during one of the many thunderstorms this summer. Now that we have the treehouse down on the ground, it will be much easier to set it up as a usable playhouse for the younger cousins.

And truth be told, I have been known to hang out in the treehouse in the past, once I noticed that I could get excellent wifi reception in it…

My son John Luke and I had the opportunity to visit with the main dudes who have taken over the development and care of the Halo franchise at 343 Industries. Fair warning, though — the studio head honcha is Bonnie Ross, who graciously brought me a cup of coffee before our interview sessions. We spoke with Frank O’Connor, Franchise Development Director, Dan Ayoub, Executive Producer of Publishing, and Josh Holmes, Studio Creative Director and Creative Director, Halo 4 . They shared their thoughts on taking over the Halo franchise from Bungie Studios, the pits and falls of developing a legend, the reaction of the fan community and why they are motivated to continue doing what they do.

This is Part 1 of the interviews my son and I conducted at 343 Industries.

GeekDad: Briefly introduce yourself and what your responsibilities are at 343 Industries.

Frank O’Connor: Hi, I’m Frank O’Connor, and I’m Franchise Development Director at 343 Industries. I work on all aspects of the franchise and fiction on everything from the game story to licensed goods like action figures, comic books and so on.

Dan Ayoub: My name is Dan Ayoub. I’m Executive Producer of Publishing. So I manage all external development, Halo Anniversary being the most recent game coming out of our group.

GD: What is your approach to the future development of Halo’s legendary franchise that is built mostly on a Bungie-created code base?

DA: I can speak certainly to [Halo] Anniversary. One thing we wanted to do with Anniversary is a celebration of ten years of playing Halo. I mean, I think we are very conscious that people have very, very fond memories of when they first played Halo, and that’s not something that we wanted to mess with. In fact, that’s something we wanted to celebrate. So it was important for us to make sure that the game played exactly the same way as it did in its original version. And the way we actually did that is that we went so far as to use the original code in the game. And that actually ensures that the game plays exactly the same as it did ten years ago. So for us it was all about celebrating that ten year legacy with the fans and being very, very conscious of the fact that people did not want to see the game-play change. So, I joked that we shipped the game “warts and all,” like we didn’t actually change bugs in the original game, because for many people that was so core to the original game-play. So we resisted the temptation to make those changes in core game-play and we focused on other things, and you know it felt part and parcel with not just wanting to do another remake, right. So, obviously the celebration but we wanted to do more than just an HD remake, so we took that philosophy and added a ton of extra features to it, and turned into an all out celebration of that ten-year anniversary. Do you want to add to that, Frank?

FO’C: Just to compound what Dan said, the magic of Halo and the “secret sauce” is the game-play, and if you moved it to a different engine, if you moved it to a different technology you’d lose that essence. One of the funniest things about it is the dichotomy. It meant that it was one of the simplest problem spaces for us because we weren’t going to change it. But it was also a difficult technical challenge to get the new graphics layer working on top of the existing game-play engine and graphics layer. So it was a mixed blessing: the one thing, once we had that resolved, we didn’t have to worry about whether it would play well. And you have a lot of other franchises in game development cycles where they literally don’t know until the last couple of weeks of development before that thing goes to gold master if it actually plays well. I mean, you can’t quite be sure until everything’s optimized, until everything’s tested. After a certain point, we didn’t have to worry about that. Often now I have to go play through the game several times just to unlock levels so I’m ready for a demo, or just work-related reasons. But in doing that I realize: one, that I’m having fun doing that and it should be a chore, right, and two, that it hasn’t dated in the slightest, that it holds up after ten years and it feels like it came out yesterday.
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DA: Yeah, some of the best compliments we got when we started demoing this to press and fans was they picked it up, and the two great comments I loved to hear was “wow, this game could have released last month” and ironically, “wow, this feels exactly like it did ten years ago,” which I think is a testament to just great that original game felt, that people are able to remember it ten years after playing it for the first time.

GD: When did you decide to change the original Halo with the Reach multiplayer engine?

FO’C: When did we actually start having conversations about the content of this game?

DA: Yeah, I would say about eighteen months ago. I would say it’s hard to pin it down to a date. I mean, we were close after the Reach launch.

FO’C: AS Dan says, about eighteen months ago, we started discussing what the content was going to be, and we had a sort of idealized visions of what it would be. It would be everything to everyone, blah, blah, blah. We also had discussion of a very pared down, literally just an HD remake, where everything is just upscaled to 1080 and so on. Eventually we realized that, given that we were now shooting for a very, very artificial date, and not a natural one at all, which was the November the 15th date. We wanted to make this the ten-year anniversary — that there were some things we were able to do, some things we wouldn’t be able to do. We ended up doing a lot more than what we ever thought we could. But the hardest part of that decision making process was: do we remake the multiplayer component with the original multiplayer engine, add a networking layer and keep it exactly as what it was verbatim?

One of the production realities is that, that might not have been possible. In fact, it probably wouldn’t have been possible. The original game-play engine doesn’t support real latency field networking in any real way. It uses system link, which in itself was an evolution of kind of Apple Talk. It’s just a very simple system, and it would have taken a tremendous amount of engineering. And then, we don’t know how Halo would really have played online. We don’t know how those weapons, how that balance, how those levels would have played so we’d have gotten to a test situation before we really knew.

So early on, we looked at another factor, which was Halo Reach had just come out, and these things rely on a population to make them fun. So, if we arrived in it with another game in the middle of Reach’s lifespan, we’d have a negative impact on that population by taking people away from Reach and into this new game, as it were, in terms of the remake. And so we made a decision at that point to stick with the Reach engine and we have to do something meaningful with the types of map and the collection of maps we add to it. And at that point we had a discussion about the title update, which is some code that we added to the Reach engine to give us the ability to manage more classic feeling playlists, and pay homage to the original Halo game-play features like the three-shot kill pistol. So we made that decision — we know that the end results would be good. We know that now — we’re doing testing and we’re very, very happy with it. We know that the Reach fans will be happy with it because it gives them a huge amount of content. But we did know that people who are fans of the original game-play were not going to be super happy with that. And we knew that was going to be a huge ​compromise right off the bat. But, I think if they just stick with us, I think they’ll find that it’s the right decision.

DA: Yeah, I think Frank nailed it all on the head. The one thing that I would add to that that’s interesting, that I can get from that decision, is all of the armor abilities that come from Reach. So because we’re using that engine, those armor abilities you’re now able to bring into your new multiplayer experience. And the example I give all the time is Beaver Creek, right? It’s amazing how a level like that changes when you factor in things like jet packs for example, and all of a sudden, like, people are rocketing all over the place. So it added a great, new dynamic element. ‘Cause it’s kind of like taking these maps you know and putting a new spin on them, which has been really rewarding. And, you know, the flip side to that, going back to the philosophy of wanting to maintain that game-play. If you want, of course, you have the opportunity to play those maps without those armor abilities. But that’s just another bonus we got from using the Reach engine — is just giving another kind of face to these maps that you know and just see how they change with some of the new Halo elements that we get from Reach.

FO’C: There’s some fairly significant features that Reach adds to it. I mean you have things like saved films, the ability to take screenshots, and forgeable environments that you can customize and change yourself. We probably could have added some of that functionality, but not all of it had we started with the original Halo gameplay engine. So, ultimately, it was certainly the best thing to do, knowing what we know now.

DA: So, there are actually two engines. The campaign engine is a hybrid of the original Halo code, and some new graphical and audio engine stuff that we’ve done and we’ve married those two together. The multiplayer portion is Reach. So the campaign version and the multiplayer engine are running on different vehicles.

FO’C: That experience will be seamless to the player. You can see behind you on the menu screen it just launches from one menu. You won’t be aware of all that stuff going on under the hood. It’ll be seamless.

GD: Would you like to mention any other significant game-play elements that have been changed?

DA: We were very mindful that we didn’t want to change that game-play. So the features we approached were things that would be additive. Classic mode is a great example. That’s the feature that at any point during the campaign game-play, you hit the Back button, and the graphics revert to how they were ten years ago. And then you hit it and it comes back. You can go back and forth as much as you can. That’s fun, that’s awesome — it lets you relive some of the nostalgia, but it doesn’t change your game-play. That core game-play remains the same. You know, the 3D implementation, again, if you have a 3D TV and that’s technology you want to take advantage of it looks fantastic, it looks awesome. In fact, we did a custom 3D solution — we didn’t use something off the shelf. That looks awesome, but it doesn’t change your game-play.

So, we kind of focused on those kinds of experiences that would be additive and help ​you learn a little bit more about the history. Terminals. We did a new terminal approach where they’re more graphical, so you find them and you unlock these really fancy, slick motion comics that give you more history about the ring and the universe. Awesome, but it doesn’t change your game-play experience. So all of these features were built around maintaining that game-play while giving these cool, new features to the fans.

Look for Part 2 of our interviews with 343 Industries tomorrow.

Here’s part 3 of our holiday gift guide. Don’t forget to check out previous years’ gift guides. Note that the individual entries are by Natania Barron (NB), Matt Blum (MB), Jonathan Liu (JL), Curtis Silver (CS), Jenny Williams (JW), Z, and myself (JB).

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Batman: Arkham City

Gotham’s mental health needs are now met by Arkham City, a metropolitan district that has been turned into an prison for the usual rogue’s gallery of villains for Batman to beat up. Batman: Arkham City is a beautiful game that is a worthy successor to last year’s Arkham Asylum. Rappel over rooftops and drop down on unsuspecting punks, solve riddles, and undertake side missions. Catwoman fans, take heart: you can play her as a character with her own storyline that is compatible with Batman’s. (JB)

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Nixon RPM Headphones

Designed for the hipster crowd, and those DJs that cater to such, the Nixon RPM Headphones are bit bulky, but they carry clean sound to your ears. Speaking about your ears, the comfortable gel-filled ear cushions create a nice seal for your listening pleasure. Of course, the 40mm driver is tuned specifically for DJ monitoring, but they aren’t just for DJs. They are moderately priced for quality headphones, and additionally feature an interlocking coiled cable, and an iPhone-compatible cable with remote and mic. You can check them out at Nixonnow.com, as well as a full selection of brand new headphones. Also available at Amazon.com. (CS)

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Lego Imperial Shuttle

Harkening back to Return of the Jedi, this Lambda-class shuttle model is built at minifig scale, meaning that the ship is sized proportionally as if the minifigs were human-sized. That means big: 28 inches tall (on its stand) and 22 inches wide with its wings locked down. It comes with five minifigs and over 2,500 Lego elements. Buy it from Buy it from Amazon or from Lego.com. (JB)

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PowerSkin Battery Case

My friend Dave has returned to college, and that means he’s away from his charger pretty much all day. His HTC Sensation used to crap out by the afternoon but now he’s still mostly charged up by the end of the day. The tradeoff is a much thicker phone, but at least he can still call and text! Available for many Android phones as well as the iPhone 4. Buy it from Amazon or from Power-Skin.com. (JB)

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Nanoblocks

Love building with Lego but can’t afford the intricate kits? Or have you run out of room on your bookshelf for all of your finished models? Nanoblocks offers a similar building experience, but on a much smaller scale. A bit like training a bonsai compared to trimming a regular tree, building Nanoblocks kits lets you create architectural or animal models with an itty bitty footprint.
Image: Nanoblocks (JW)

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Just Dance 3

Aptly named dancing game is more fun and easier to play than DDR, with only a Wii remote needed to play (and able to accommodate up to four simultaneous players!). Basically you dance along with songs, performing the moves you see on the screen, and getting scored for your efforts. What makes this game a success is that the producers licensed a lot of great songs including those from Black Eyed Peas, Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, and a lot more. The highlight? Danny Elfman’s “This Is Halloween”! A great way to get the kids off the couch this winter. Buy it from Amazon. (JB)

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Olympus LS-20M HD Video/Audio Recorder

As smartphones take over the video market, those dedicated video recorders that remain have to grab a niche, and the LS-20M does that with its excellent capsule mics (24 bit, 96KHZ). Of course, it shoots 1080P as well, and the linear orientation of the camera — on the top, not the back — suggests that unit would be happiest on a tripod. You can also leverage its superior audio capabilities by simply using it as a reporter’s mic, and you can get tons of high quality recordings on a SD card. Buy it from Amazon. (JB)

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Professor Layton and the Last Specter

Professor Layton has been one of the most consistently pleasing new IPs to hit the Nintendo DS since that system’s introduction. Gorgeous to look at thanks to the hyper-stylized design of the characters and the distinct ambience of the games’ mysterious locales, and delightful to play due to its innovative and often challenging puzzles, the series has become a hallmark of the niche (but nonetheless accessible) puzzle adventure genre. This fourth entry brings the property forward by taking it back, acting as a prequel to the previous chapters. Centered in the town of Misthallery, an old-world hamlet besieged by a destructive apparition, it’s up to Layton and his original assistant Emmy Altava to unravel the mystery. By solving logic puzzles, of course.

The gameplay itself holds few surprises for returning gamers, but quirky characters and a slowly unfolding plot are more than enough to warrant a return to the land of Layton. Still, fans hungering for something truly new are sure to be delighted by the bundled Brownie Brown-developed life-sim RPG Professor Layton’s London Life. Easily described as Earthbound meets Animal Crossing, this 16-bit charmer sees your in-game avatar setting up a new life in Little London. Here he will assist citizens (many of which are scaled-down versions of characters from the proper Layton series), buy new clothes and furniture for his flat and otherwise amuse himself across 100+ hours of additional gameplay. With so much to offer at a single price of admission, Professor Layton and the Last Specter is a must-have for fans of the series, and the introductory nature of the prequel makes it an ideal game for DS owners of all stripes. (Z)

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Trash Pack

Garbage-themed figures who immediately remind one of the 1980s’ Garbage Pail Kids, but actually are nothing alike. Where GPK featured sideshow-esque freakiness and grossout humor, Trash Pack characters are much more positive and fun. For instance, Rotten Apple “sees the good in everyone and always wants to help anyone who can use a hand or is in trouble,” according to the character description. They’re all examples of animated garbage like Mouldy Milk and Stench Fries. My favorite character is a Scummy Screen, a busted computer who specializes in helping his friends hack together new technology out of junkyard detritus. The characters are collectible, with commons, rares, and limited editions making the acquisition of a complete set a challenge. Finally, Trash Pack has some fun accessories like trash cans and a garbage truck. (JB)

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Clone Commander 12-Inch Figure

Magnificent and incredible detailed figure with over 30 points of articulation, six sets pairs of hands in different configurations, two kinds of boots, and two different weapons. Perfect for displaying your Star Wars obsession for all to see. This figure was a Comic-Con exclusive but you can still buy it on SideShow.com. (JB)

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Serenity Little Damn Heroes Maquette

If you’ve seen Quantum Mechanix’s big (damn) replica of Serenity, your jaw has probably dropped as much as every other fan’s, but if you’re like most the price tag kept it a dream. Now our hopes for a more affordable model for our shrine to the Firefly/Serenity arm of the Whedon-verse are being answered! QMx is coming out with a small, but still awesome, model of the ship, and for only $99.95. It doesn’t ship until December, but you can get on the waiting list now! (MB)

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Settlers of America by Mayfair Games

If you like Settlers of Catan but you want something a little deeper, go west: Settlers of America is a recreation of the westward expansion, challenging you to build cities, lay train tracks, and deliver goods across the good ol’ United States. It’s not just a rehash of the original game, either — Settlers of America takes the basic mechanics of Catan and adds a whole new set of actions, which adds considerable depth to the game. Here’s the full review or buy it from Amazon. (JL)

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The Sumo Lounge: Sway Couple

The first time I encountered Sumo was at PAX East two years ago. The hallways at the place were strewn with these beanbag-like pieces of furniture, and every single one of them was occupied by a most satisfied looking geek. Fast forward to the future, and one of these chairs now sits in my living room. People comment on it whenever they see it, and more often than not they sit down. That’s usually followed by a profession along the lines of, “I really need one of these!”

See, that’s the thing about Sumos. They might be classified as beanbags, but they really aren’t. First, they’re too attractive. In my experience, beanbags are, quite frankly, terribly made and uncomfortable, too. On the contrary, the Sumo Sway Couple that now resides in my house is extremely well made, filled with a foamy material and certainly not those horrid beans, and is the center of a continual family debate over who will get to sit on it (the humans, that is; our clever cat just waits until we’re asleep and sits on it all night).

My favorite part about the Sumo Sway Couple is that my son and I can fit on it together. Extra bonus? It has back support. Yeah, that’s right, this “beanbag” has complete back support. It’s comfortable for long periods of time, and is especially nice for me (considering I’m in my second trimester and things are getting uncomfortable). I absolutely adore the corduroy cover in red, which is soft and durable. And the pocket on the side? Brilliant. Great, indeed, for both lounging and gaming, it’s totally versatile. Not to mention miles and miles more attractive than most similar ones on the market. (NB)

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Star Wars Ultimate Darth Vader FX Lightsaber

Finally, Hasbro has come out with a lightsaber that looks awesome but isn’t so expensive and beautiful you’ll be afraid to let your kids play with it. It makes all the sounds you could want — on and off, blade clash, and a nice swift hum as you make your best moves. They make one for Anakin, too, but the Darth Vader one is an awesome red, and besides, Darth Vader is cooler than Anakin Skywalker in pretty much every way. (MB)

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The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch

This fascinating book follows the adventures of Thomas Thwaites as he attempts to build a toaster… from scratch. He molds his own plastic, extrudes his own nickel-chromium wire, and refines iron ore to build the frame. It’s an entertaining and well-written book and I love how Thwaites embraces failure as a part of the story, which is a reality for many “maker” style projects. Buy it from Amazon. (JB)

You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why: Doctor Who Is Coming to Town.

Doctor Who fans, REJOICE! The good Doctor will be returning to our screens in the annual Christmas Special this December. In the past, he’s faced alien invasion, the sinking of the Starship Titanic, steampunk Cybermen, and flying sharks. This year, the fun continues with an episode entitled “The Doctor, The Widow, and The Wardrobe.” Just guess what this one is riffing on, I dare you. 

We can tell a few things the from the exclusive YouTube preview — but if you don’t want any spoilers, stop reading now and don’t watch this:

The episode will be set in WWII England in a country home with two children sent to the country to escape the bombing of London, where a mysterious caretaker — The Doctor — greats them. The mystery will grow when they enter a mysterious blue package under the Christmas Tree and into a snowy forest, much like The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. And then the heavily armored space marines come out of a portal, which I think C.S. Lewis cut from the final version of the book.

The episode will premier on BBC America ”this Christmas” according to the web sites, which probably means December 25th, assuming the US gets it the same time as the UK. For myself, I’m traveling over the holidays this year, and just hope somebody has BBC America where I’m going, or that iTunes gets it online quickly.