juv3nal

I think there's something else to being a YA novel than simply being a story about coming-of-age, else Great Expectations and David Copperfield are YA novels as well, and I'm not sure it makes sense classify them as such, though maybe it does. I dunno.

No, the are something else entirely. There are couple of really long gamefaqs threads about the "monolith" puzzle which pertain to this.

Ok, I'm in. Barring a Mr. or Mrs. McMoneypants swooping in at the last minute, it doesn't look like they are going to make it though what with 10 days left and them not even 1/3 of the way.

I used both in school (although I use neither now) and I preferred Java. Though I may just have been scarred by some makefile whitespace experience.

into ng+. all regular cubes and 13 antis so far. It's kind of mind boggling that I got the initial 32 without (for some reason) even seeing the at all. But I may be hitting the wall where I can't be bothered to decipher glyphs and will end up just gamefaq-ing the rest. We'll see. numbers and key presses I basically got down, but I don't think I can be bothered with translating actual text if that proves necessary.

I do. I think I prefer it to Cloud Atlas. Ghostwritten IMO has a more eventful plot and is less concerned with developing character, which in a capital-L-Literature sense makes it inferior, probably, but I think the difference serves to make it more entertaining. YMMV.

It's ok, but I liked Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten more. Also, for Mitchell at his most Murakami-like, see Number9dream (wikipedia, spoilers ahoy). Hell, it even takes its title from a Lennon song a la Norwegian Wood.

boobies, boobies, boobies

This works in general, but sometimes it takes moving more than a single room away. It should be noted that I think the black holes are positioned such that you can still get everywhere you need to go, but it's just trickier. Operating under that assumption, anyways, led to a bit of platforming (involving multiple rotates while mid-jump) that made me feel really rather clever (more so than some of the puzzles) for figuring it out.

Completed bare minimum ending with 27 regulars and 5 antis. There is a new game plus mode where you keep everything you've already found plus Not sure I could be bothered to solve everything myself on ng+. If I get stuck trying to track something down I'm not going to be shy about hitting up gamefaqs or whatever just because there were entire rooms I never got into the first time around. The map becomes more helpful once you put some more time into it. The areas are not really that big and the little preview if you stand in front of a door leading somewhere you've already been helps.

If you dig jazz soundtracks: the inimitable Jimmy Smith does a phenomenal job for Any Number Can Win (an Alain Delon heist caper thing) And there's also Ascenseur pour l'échafaud with doing the soundtrack.

I don't have a link, but the creators have claimed that decrypting the language is optional (i.e. the game can be completed without doing it).

I think the cube teleport thing will take you to 4 kind of "hub" areas one of which corresponds to each side of the cube. I've only gotten to 3 of them so far I think.

There are sequences of glyphs which could well be their own alphabet (or they could just be chosen because they look neat). Given how long the game was in dev, I would suspect the former, but until someone cracks the code, there's no way to tell for sure. And without decoding it, it's impossible say whether understanding the glyphs would unlock any additional gameplay or whether they just add background lore. Also it is utterly amazing. I mean that kind of literally too...if I have one gripe with it it's that I get lost pretty easily and finding my way back to a room I've already visited can be a challenge. edit: man, the rabbit hole goes deep. There's a QR code embedded in a background texture. It's partially obscured by foreground sprites though. I personally can't be bothered to reconstruct it by rotating view to unobscure & copying the thing down. I'm sure someone will be OCD enough to do it for me and post the solution to the web eventially.

I'm a play the heck out of that game when I get home.

Definitely reminds me of those two, but I really liked Shadow Complex so I'm okay if this is just something similar with a different coat of paint.

The ones I liked were:

I'm a huge HoL fanboy, but I do understand why some people hate it. I take issue, however, with the idea that it's convoluted just for the sake of being convoluted. The book is both about a labyrinth and itself meant to be a labyrinth (leaves = pages). It's not much of a maze if it isn't convoluted.

Although I like literary stuff, I tend to favor things that stretch formal or structural bounds (charitably, read: experimentalism / uncharitably, read: self-indulgent gimmickry) so our tastes maybe don't particularly align, but on the topic of genre fiction that does things genre fiction typically doesn't do, have you read Dhalgren, House of Leaves, or The Raw Shark Texts? edit: I probably have linked to this before, but the Tilda Swinton promo for The Raw Shark Texts blows me away.IGN.COM: h73f3LWZALE

Because so many characters could be dead by the time you get to ME3, they are at this point probably very good at making the absence of a character seamless while at the same time making that character seem important/well integrated if they are available. If you feel you're not missing anything playing without the DLC, that's by design and a good thing, but that doesn't mean there isn't anything there to miss.

"no text is dismissible"/"nothing doesn't have subtext" while I do agree with the general sentiment is kind of facile in that you simply don't have the time to read the sum total of all the (readily accessible, in languages one understands, etc.) printed material available. Certainly you makes choices about what to read and in making those choices, you dismiss. Whether you agree with what Stein chooses to dismiss is another matter. But to Chris specifically: I'm wondering how you reconcile agreeing with the article's views with the (correct me if I'm wrong) generally positive impression you seem to have had of Eco's Queen Loana. Eco revels in the artifacts of his fictional narrator's childhood, at times revealing how the meaning of those artifacts has been changed by the intervening years. There are resonances and meanings gleaned as an adult looking back on those Buck Rogers comics etc. that could not have been had by the child who first read them. I would certainly agree that there can be value in that, but how are we to know if, as adults, we don't have a look?

I vote for the deep end of experimental lit fic: something by Milorad Pavic or David Markson or Roberto Bolano. Ooh. All died within the last decade. Does that say something about my tastes?

Despite having studied English in university and reading a lot of relatively "adult" books, I have to come down on the side of disagreeing. Not because of any kind of reason related to the merits of one type of book or another, but just as a knee jerk "You're not the boss of me" resistance to this guy telling people what they should do. People should read what they want to read. In the unlikely case that they are somehow unaware that reading "adult" books can be worthwhile, sure, they should be made aware of that, but if they know that and still want to read Hunger Games (or whatever), more power to them.

I agree with twmac in that I preferred the shooting (well the shooting was mostly the same, but just not a fan of the addition on hand to hand) and traversal of 2 (not really the mechanics of it which felt mostly the same to me, but the level design/circumstances in which you're asked to do it), but I have to disagree with regard to the puzzles. I felt there weren't enough of them in 3, but the ones they did have were cleverer and more memorable than the ones in 2.