This one is an oldie but goodie.  The kids will love making this one!  As you look at the model from different angles, the dragon’s head appears to move and follow you.  See a video of it in action after the jump.

You can get the model in 3 different colors over at Mighty Optical Illusions.

Just over a week to go!

… Electronic Arts (EA)!  Huge box that would fit probably 14 game cases.  Lovingly packed with one half-inflated packing bubble.

Appy Monday space fans!  Last week when the Ares 1-X rocket launched, my brother asked me if I had the NASA app.  It somehow slipped under my radar.  So I downloaded it to see if it had the right stuff.

Premise

The NASA app is an all-purpose news and information app for NASA activities.  There are 4 main sections: Missions, Images, Videos, and Updates.  In missions, you can see news and information dealing with all NASA-related missions to the Moon, Mars, the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle, the Solar System, and the Universe, as well as those relating to lil’ ol’ planet Earth.  Tap on a mission and you can see a myriad of information about it.  For instance, the Hubble Space Telescope area will show you its current location over the Earth, an RSS feed of Hubble stories, Hubble-related images such as recent pictures it has taken, repair missions, and forth, videos from NASA television and a clock telling how long it’s been in orbit (7141 days – holy crap that long!)

The Images section shows you NASA Images of the Day (IOTD), as well as the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) that I featured a little over a year ago.  As of today, you can view 1337 NADA IOTD’s and 5242 APOD’s.  You can get a description of each image, can save it to your camera roll, or even email it.

The Videos section has video feeds from NASA Television (by default) as well as video segments from Ares TV, Chandra X-Ray Observatory, Little SDO HMI, NASA eClips, NASA Explorer, NASA Hallmarks, , NASA Kennedy Videos, NASAconnect, NASASciFiles, and ReelNASA.  Tapping your video choice brings up a page with a description and video thumbnail.  You can tap the thumbnail to pull up and stream the full-sized video.  You can also email links to it.

Lastly the Updates section is an RRS feed area that can pull from over 20 sources, putting all updated news items into one folder area.

Presentation

The graphics are crisp and sharp.  One thing that NASA really has to do as an organization is provide beautiful images and artist renderings of its programs.  An instrument cruising through space towards a destination really isn’t all that interesting, so providing visual representations of what has happened and what’s going to happen really helps them connect to the public, and in this the app doesn’t disappoint.  Things such as the mission selection screen even have gorgeous images rather than a boring text list.

All of the video I saw were links to YouTube videos.  You could say “well I could just go to YouTube and watch them” which is true, but it’s the wrapper that makes the difference, and the app does a nice job of sectioning off videos into various missions, and providing a nice brief description of each.  As you would expect, the video aspect worked flawlessly and looked and sounded good.

Interface

By and large, the interface is very easy to understand and browse through.  I like how you can either view things in the context of missions, or you can skip that and just look at current news feeds, images and videos.  Seems like some thought was put into how to best present information that can be very dry.  Standard iPhone / iPod Touch conventions are put to good use, and the app is very accessible.  It does rely very heavily on an internet connection to pull in new stories, download pictures, watch videos, etc, so it benefits from 3G or a good wi-fi connection.

Freshness

My first thoughts when I see an app like this is that it will be one of those apps that seemed like a good idea to someone, but is not really given much attention by the creators post-release.  While it was just released October 23rd and hasn’t had time for revisions or additions, the content in it appears to be updated rather frequently.  The RSS feeds used are quite active, and I’ve been surprised at the amount of video content available too, at least one per day.  You could check the app several times a day and see new stuff in it.

When you scroll through the list of missions, you start to realize just how many things NASA is involved with.  High profile projects like Hubble or the ISS tend to make the news sporadically when news happens, but I quite enjoyed scrolling down the list and going “oh yeah, what’s going on with that mission?” or “what the heck is that one?”.

Value

The app is free, and the merging of all the NASA and space-related information into one app makes it well worth downloading for people interested in the subject matter.  The frequent updates make it an app you want to check daily, and the content is nice and bite-sized, so you can keep up-to-date without getting bogged down by too much information.  It’s a nice, polished app for any space enthusiast.

Summary

Premise:  Great
Presentation:  Superlative
Interface:  Decent
Freshness:  Impressive
Value:  Above Average
Overall:  Great app

Canon Creative Park is an excellent place to go for Halloween papercraft.  Last year I posted their awesome Jack-o’-lantern Family.  This year brings another one from Canon, Halloween Night.  The model comes in A4 and Letter paper sizes, and is a fun addition to the Halloween paper model collection.

Congrats to NASA on today’s successful flight test of the Ares 1-X rocket.  It was the first new vehicle to rise from Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in over 25 years.  It’s a test version of the rocket designed to carry a 4 to 6-person crew capsule called Orion into space.  Hopefully this successful launch will spur Congress and the White House to provide further funding.

Introduction

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is one of those games everyone said I should have played, but I never did.  I got my PlayStation 3 at roughly same time that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune came out from developer Naughty Dog, but given that the console had been out for a year or more, I felt that there were plenty of games to choose from, and that I could probably pick up some things on sale rather than a brand new $60 game.  Plus, IMO it had the misfortune of having a lousy demo.

I had heard that it was a Tomb Raider-esque game, and downloaded the demo with those expectations.  But the demo starts you off just after the plane crash (Chapter 4), and aside from one or two platforms to jump across, all you do the entire demo is shoot at people.  No puzzle elements, very little platforming elements.  Just shoot, shoot, shoot.  My initial thoughts were “well, his pants do look wet when he walks through water, but aside from that, what’s the big deal?”

As the release of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves approached this month, I began to think more about the original.  High praise was starting to come in on the sequel.  Some people I talked to kept telling me that I was crazy not to have played the first game, and that the demo was not very representative of the whole game.  So I picked it up two weeks ago at the buy two get one free sale at Toys R Us, and finished it this week.  So was it worth it after all?

Story

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is the story of Nate Drake, supposed ancestor of renowned sea captain Sir Francis Drake, following coordinates on a ring passed down through the years to Nate.  The story begins with Nate salvaging the lead coffin of Sir Francis Drake, who was supposed to have been buried at sea off of Panama.  Inside was not Drake’s body, but instead Sir Francis’ diary book, which may lead to the famed golden city of El Dorado.  After escaping pirates, Nate, with partner Victor “Sully” Sullivan, ditch a reporter named Elana Fisher who was filming the salvage expedition and head off into the Amazon in search of the city.

What they find is that the treasure might not be a city, but rather a large golden statue that appears to have been removed to an island, according to a missing page from the diary.  They also find a German u-boat, and remains of Spaniards, and a rival for the treasure named Gabriel Roman, who along with a mercenary named Atoq Navarro, shoot Sully and almost kill Nate.

Nate is rescued by Elana and together they head off to the island on the map Nate discovered to solve the mystery.  But Roman, Navarro, and the pirate leader Eddy have other ideas, and Nate’s friend Sully may still have a part to play in the action-filled adventure.  You explore through old ruins and hidden crypts, fight pirate and mercenaries and mutants(!), and puzzle your way through monaster’s as you try to uncover what really happened to Sir Francis Drake and the lost treasure of El Dorado.

Gameplay

The gameplay reminds me a little of a cross between Gears of War and Tomb Raider.  One one hand, you spend a lot of time shooting enemies from a cover system.  A lot of time.  Thankfully, the shooting side of things is very solid.  The cover system works as well as if not better than Gears of War.  There is a variety of weapons and ammo you find and/or recover off of dead bodies, and you can hold two types at a time.  I was less impressed with the weapon mechanics, in that many of them just felt the same.  There were differences, to be sure, but there often just wasn’t a compelling reason to use one type over another.

The Tomb Raider nature of the game comes from the climbing, swinging and jumping mechanics of your character, as well as from the exploration and puzzle components.  No one has moved around the environment as well since Lara Croft.  The movement all seems very natural.  I occasionally misjumped, but the camera was usually where it should have been, so I chalk it up to bad reflexes.  There is a fair number of puzzles to solve, to open secret passages or whatnot, but not as many as I’d have liked and not very complicated at all.  In fact, most of the time the game makes them a bit too simple.

In terms of visuals and audio, the game looks and sounds gorgeous.  Much ado was made over the water, and how if Nate walked through water up to his knees, his pants would look wet up to the knees, and slowly dry off.  It all looked very slick.  My only complaint was that at times the visuals looks a little too shiny.  But really there is nothing to complain about, because the game looks great.  It sounds great too, with a very good score that complimented the action well.

Extras

There are not a whole lot of extras, but there are some.  There are 4 levels of difficulty (3 to start off with, 1 to unlock).  As you progress through the game there, are 60 hidden treasures to find, which unlock videos, concept art, and the like. (I didn’t search too vigorously for them and found only 24.)  Also, there is an in-game medal/achievement system with 47 medals that you can receive for finding items, popping headshots, killing enemies with different types of weapons, and so on.  These medals translate into points which you can use to unlock in-game treats like unlimited ammo, costumes, and so on.  The medal system also got converted to the PlayStation trophy system via patch after the game was released.

Nitpicks

I don’t normally have a section like this in a Game Impressions post, having spread my thoughts out among the other sections.  But there are a whole lot of things that bugged me in this game.  Keep in mind that I finished it, which I generally don’t do with games I don’t like.  But maybe my expectations were too high, given the number of people I know that rave about the game.  I’ll wrap things up with a conclusion section, but here’s a list of specific things that bugged me in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (SPOILER WARNING!!):

• I complained that the demo had no puzzles in it.  Well in the story as a whole, after you give Drake’s book to Sully, you pretty much do no puzzles until you get the book back.  Which includes the whole section shown in the demo.  But later on, you use the map to help solve a puzzle.  Why couldn’t this be implemented earlier?

• Speaking of puzzles, in the beginning, I guess they implemented a sort of training mode when you are exploring with Sully, but it was a little too much hand holding for me.  I think maybe they should have implemented that for easy mode and turned it off for other difficulties.  For instance, you walk into a cave area that is blocked by wood debris.  You look around and there are some hanging braziers in the room.  Before you have a chance to do anything more, Sully suggests that you light the braziers.  You do that, and as you’re still exploring the room and looking around, he then suggests you shoot the braziers so they’ll fall down and light the wood on fire.  Gee, thanks.  Maybe Sully should just do it himself, since he’s so helpful.

• Some enemies in later levels use Desert Eagle Pistols with laser sights.  But if you kill a guy using one, and pick it up, yours doesn’t have a laser sight.  Why?

• Every time you see a room with half walls or columns, you pretty much know you’ll be jumping across them.  Same with climbing elements.  To me, treasure hunting in some remote part of the world means climbing to get to areas unreachable any other way.  This can lead to a sense of isolation, as if no one had been to where you are in hundreds of years.  You never get that feeling in Uncharted, which has you climbing so you can get a keyring, so you can climb back down and open a door.

• You work your way across the upper area of the monastery so you can get behind the stained glass window, to get to a hidden room, only so you can see the roof of another building.  There’s a hidden room just to look out a window at a roof that can be seen from any number of buildings?

• You solve the puzzle element in the Library at the Sanctuary, and open up access to some underground crypts.  You leave your companions behind in a secret room, because no one will know they are there.  And then 2 minutes later enemies are shooting at you in the hidden crypt!  Huh, what?  If the enemy is all over the underground crypt area, how is it that they didn’t discover the secret room?

• You go through the lower level of the monastery, solving a puzzle with 2 bells in order to move on.  Then later you make your way across the aforementioned upper area of the monastery.  Finally, near the end, you go back to the monastery, where you suddenly make the proclamation that there is a hidden passage under the altar.  How did you come to know that when you didn’t know it before?

• As I mentioned earlier, at the beginning of the game you light some hanging braziers on fire and shoot them down to clear some wooden debris.  But later in the game, there are some swinging braziers that you can’t shoot down.  Not only that, but they are already lit.  Did the enemy light them just in case you came along?

• The treasure you’ve been seeking the whole game is found in an underground room, with a big hole in the ceiling perfect for lifting out the treasure with a helicopter.  Seems like it would have been much simpler to just go straight to the hole, instead of secret passageways, hidden rooms, and so on.  How could no one have seen this?  Perhaps the enemy did, which is why they always seemed to be in the next place you just discovered through much more complicated means.  Maybe you should have been following them instead of Drake’s book.

• You are almost conditioned in the game to take out the laser sighted enemies first, since they can kill you with one shot pretty easily.  Then when you get to the final level, there is a laser sighted enemy with some normal enemies.  If you blow away his cover, or kill the other enemies around him, he will run away.  What I didn’t understand until the very end was that he was the final boss!  So I was trying to kill him first, as I did every time I came across a laser sighted enemy, and not having any success.  Because he’s the final boss.  You can’t kill him until the end!  I can’t tell you how many times I died on the final level trying to kill that guy, in any number of ways.  You shouldn’t be able to even shoot at a character that is not killable!

• In order to defeat the final boss, you have to initiate an interactive cutscene with him by pressing the square button.  The game doesn’t tell you to do this.  You just have to know.  Once it’s initiated, then the interactive cutscene tells you what to press next, which is a combo you already should have used many times in the game.  But the whole thing is just awkward, because it’s the only time in the whole game where you initiate a cutscene by pressing a button, and where you do this combo as an interactive cutscene, and not in “real time.”   Naughty Dog should have made you do that elsewhere, so it didn’t seem so unnatural at the end.

Conclusion

So, having gone through all of that, did I like the game?  Yes.  I think my expectations on this game were very high, maybe too high.  The metacritic score for this game is an 88, which is probably a fair representation. My general impression is that it made quite a splash when it was released partly because it was a good game with awesome graphics that was exclusive to the PlayStation 3, which hadn’t seen many good or exclusive titles at the time.  It set the bar pretty high at the time, but the bar has since been raised, and I think that if it was released new now, it would not score quite as favorably.

If I were making the game, I’d have streamlined it a little bit, leaving out some of the things like the awkward sixaxis control for walking over logs, or the jetski where you have to stop to shoot, or the waves and waves of enemies, and ramped up the puzzle difficulty a little more without the hand-holding.  And straightened out the nonsensical issues in the plot.  But the game is very polished, and looks gorgeous.  The voice acting is great, the jumping and climbing works really well, and the shooting mechanic is very smooth.  It’s not a long game, at 6-8 hours, but it’s $30 now as a Greatest Hits title, and at that price it’s well worth it.  If you haven’t delved into Uncharted territory before, and want to see where it all began (or aren’t ready to spend $60 on Uncharted 2), pick up Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

Just replaced my old nasty mousepad with this one.  Makes me want to Load “*”,8,1.

Appy Rockin’ Monday!  I’m a fan of Rock Band on the Xbox 360.  I own Rock Band, Rock Band 2 and The Beatles: Rock Band on that platform.  So an official Rock Band app for the iPhone / iPod Touch immediately peaked my curiosity.

Premise

Rock Band is a rhythm game with similar game mechanics to previous iterations on various consoles.  You can play guitar, bass, drums or vocals.  It has the familiar runway with notes moving down it, that you strike at the right time.  The longer you go without a mistake, the higher your multiplier.  You can build up and activate overdrive to double your multiplier.

If you are at all familiar with Rock Band on other consoles, you’ll be right at home with this app.   You know you’re playing a Rock Band game the instant you fire it up.  From the graphics and sound effects to the gameplay and achievements, it’s it quintessentially Rock Band.

Presentation

The visuals of Rock Band are exactly what you’d expect, if you’ve played other versions.  Everything is very sharp and easy to see.  Runway graphics are excellent, and where you press is below the runway area, so your thumbs don’t get in the way of the action.  Everything is in portrait mode.  It would have been nice to have a landscape mode, as the thumb area was a bit cramped.

Music is not high quality.  More than likely this is a space-saving function,  but it would be nice to have a little higher quality.  It really didn’t affect gameplay though.  Sound effects are spot-on, and exactly like other iterations of the game.

I did have one or two instances of the game stuttering during gameplay, when a particularly intense series of notes came down the screen.  It’s messed up my score on that particular song, but really hasn’t happened regularly enough to affect overall gameplay.  It does make me wonder how well it will work on older iPhone / iPod Touch devices.  (It does require OS 3.0.)

Interface

On the iPhone / iPod Touch, you use the touch screen to strike various green/red/yellow/blue notes as they cross a note bar.  Missing a note and you get a “clunk” sound and your multiplier resets.  For guitar and bass, you hit the appropriate guitar picks.  For drums, you hit little drum pads, and there is no foot pedal.  You tilt the device to active overdrive.  The mechanic is simple and it works well, although by squeezing 4 pads in across the bottom, it can be harder for people with large hands, and it can sometimes be easy to drift off the pad and either hit the wrong pad or nothing at all.

Vocals are odd in that you are not actually singing.  The lyrics are not even present.  The notes scroll right to left, and you hit them with your thumb as they cross the line.  Since you can hook up headphones with a built-in microphone, it’s odd that they just don’t let you sing.  Plus, as you never hold more than one note at a time, it doesn’t feel as challenging.

Freshness

While tapping the screen doesn’t seem as interactive as using the plastic instruments, at the upper levels the game can get quite challenging.  I’m not a Rock Band protege.  My level of play on the Xbox 360 rarely exceeds medium.  Hard mode on the iPhone / iPod Touch introduces hammer-ons and pull-offs with a slide-your-finger technique,  and I found the jump from medium to hard more difficult than the jump from easy to medium, even on the simpler songs.

There is no online multiplayer on Rock Band, which might be one of the biggest adjustments for Tap Tap Revenge aficionados.  It does have local multiplayer over bluetooth, which I’m told by others works well, but I haven’t tried it.  You can play “online” with others by playing a song and syncing your score.  Other people playing that song with other instruments will be combined with you to form a “band” and you’ll get push notification later on with your score and fans acquired.  I tried that several times, and the mechanic worked ok, but it’s nothing I’d do regularly.

Value

The price is $9.99, which is very high for an iPhone / iPod Touch app, though like every other app I’m sure it’ll drop after awhile.  Additional tracks come in 2-packs and can be downloaded for 99 cents, and one pack was available for free right away.  I popped for the app right away the day it was released, and I wasn’t disappointed.  I played all the way through the World Tour and (eventually) 5-starred every song on medium.  I’d have liked to see the World Tour be longer, but I’ve since been going back to try to get various achievements, so I definitely feel I’ve gotten my money’s worth.

Fans of Tap Tap Revenge 3 might have a hard time adjusting to Rock Band for the iPhone / iPod Touch.  I haven’t played Tap Tap Revenge much, but there are quite a few differences (3 pad interface, chat rooms).  From my limited experience, Tap Tap Revenge seems to have music that is less well known, and seems to be geared more towards getting the app out there cheap, and pushing DLC.  Rock Band is the opposite, where they charge you more up front, but you get tracks from some more established artists that you can play outside the DLC.  Fans of Rock Band should pick it up right away.

Summary

Premise:  Great
Presentation:  Superlative
Interface:  Impressive
Freshness:  Good
Value:  Above Average
Overall:  Excellent app