I lament all the effort that goes into creating lush, beautiful environments and the rendering engines that can handle them while gameplay and story languish on the sidelines. However, in this case, the reasonably standard Zelda-style action-adventure action was fun, and the tolerable dialogue and storyline didn’t manage to stand in the way of my enjoying the experience. Taking pictures of things was neat too, though I did a lot more of that in Wind Waker.

My comments must be taken with a grain of salt since I saw the film in Japanese and my grasp of that language is on the low end of passable. However, I got the feeling that this worked to my benefit as the spectacular visuals and anime-style action scenes seemed to be the film’s main strengths. Even without understanding a word, it was obvious that the director ended the film with a painfully heavy handed bout of trite moralization. If it makes it to DVD in the States, try turning off the subtitles and maybe smoking something.

He’s a funny guy, but his bubblegum philosophies started to get in the way of any sort of positive message that I was getting from the book.

The book covers a great deal of ground as game programming is a broad topic, but it fails to reach the depth at which the interesting problems begin to occur. The “techniques” described are all so basic as to be rediscoverable by any reasonably intelligent programmer on their first attempt at tackling similar problems. Perhaps a subject as broad as game development resists any useful survey, but I have a feeling that if someone of Knuth’s caliber took a crack at it, the interesting problems and solutions would make themselves known.

Far from Vinge’s best work, but still reasonably interesting science-fictiony goodness.

My new apartment came with its very own set of sakura and they are simply lovely.

I’ll refrain from gushing about how much better my new place is than my old one. Quality of life has vastly improved.