The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy Podcast, Episode 22!

George R. R. Martin, author of A Game of Thrones (now a new series from HBO!), joins us to discuss editing anthologies, playing games, and competing with Clifford the Big Red Dog. Dave and John discuss the life and works of GRRM.

So while googling for new info on the Monkey Island 2 special edition I came across a glowing recommendation for Machinarium, a traditional point-and-click adventure from Czech developer Amanita. You can play the first few screens for free online, and it’s a $20 download, which I bought. Here are my thoughts.

First of all, the visuals are breathtaking. This game is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. It looks like a really gorgeous picture book, and the quality of the animation is impressive as well.

The game is so incredibly wondrous to behold that it just makes me wonder once again what LucasArts could possibly have been thinking when they made Monkey Island 4 in 3D. 3D adds nothing to an adventure game, and in the case of Monkey Island 4 it also just looks like total dogshit.

Anyway, back to Machinarium. The graphics are fantastic, and the puzzle design is generally pretty good. I didn’t want to spend too much time playing it, so I was looking up the solution if I got stuck for more than about fifteen minutes, and the majority of the time I felt like I should have been able to figure out the solution on my own.

There are some big problems with this game though. The first is the interface, which is horrendous. You have to be standing right next to an object in order to interact with it, which makes it inordinately difficult to locate hot spots on the screen, and makes it a chore trying to use inventory objects with the environment. You can also make your robot taller or shorter, but if you then try to walk somewhere he walks really, REALLY slowly, which is just ridiculous.

There’s also no text in the game. All the conversations are conveyed through little cartoons, which is definitely an interesting choice, but half the fun of an adventure game for me is the amusing dialogue. A bigger issue with the lack of text is the confusion that sometimes results. Once or twice I ended up with an item in my inventory and I had no idea what it was supposed to be, especially if I hadn’t played the game for a while and couldn’t remember where the item had come from. In a typical adventure game you could hover your cursor over the item and some text would identify it for you. Also in a typical game your character would give you text/verbal feedback on whether you were on the right track or not. For example, the character might say, “I can’t reach it.” In Machinarium your character just shrugs all the time, so you’re never exactly sure what he’s unable to do and why not.

The biggest issue for me is that the game is full of stupid “brain teaser” puzzles, and they get more intrusive and time-consuming the further into the game you get. If there’s anything I HATE in adventure games, it’s action sequences and brain teasers, and this game has both. (By brain teasers, I mean stupid “rearrange the colored blocks” type puzzles that have nothing to do with the characters or story.) If I had known how much of the game was going to be brain teasers, I would never have played it in the first place, and I finally got so fed up with them that I gave up on the game and just watched the remainder of it on YouTube … though it turned out that I was almost at the end anyway.

Apparently this game was made by a few guys on a shoestring budget, so I’m inclined to cut them some slack. The good parts of the game are absolutely superb. The brain teasers killed it for me, but if you actually like that sort of stuff the game is definitely worth checking out. It was a lot of fun to play a new adventure game, something I haven’t done in years.

ETA: Speaking of adventure games, listen to my December 2010 interview with Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

Just watched this. It’s great!

Here’s a great shot of Maisie Williams, who’ll be playing Arya Stark in the upcoming HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones, posing with one of the “Needle” replica swords produced by Valyrian Steel.

io9 has dubbed Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy episode 19 the “best discussion of human identity and the Tuvix Voyager episode ever.”

Editor Annalee Newitz writes: The highlight of the episode is Adams and co-host David Barr Kirtley interviewing Robin Wasserman, author of Skinned, about how you transfer human consciousness into a high-tech body. This later kicks off a whole discussion between Adams and Kirtley about whether transporters are really killing you and then creating a perfect copy at the other end of the transporter beam. And that in turn leads to actual intelligent commentary on the Tuvix episode – you know, where Tuvok and Neelix are merged into one Super Awful Being as a result of a transporter accident? Yeah. You’ve got to listen.

Just saw the sad news that Frank Frazetta has died. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend the documentary Frazetta: Painting with Fire (it’s on Netflix). Frazetta’s story is absolutely fascinating, even if you have no particular interest in his art. The film has been criticized I guess for bordering on hagiography, but personally I really enjoyed its boundless enthusiasm for its subject.

Here’s a list of some recent episodes of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, just in case you missed any:

Episode 019: Immortality! Automata! Consciousness Transfer! (Robin Wasserman)
Episode 018: Organ Repossession! Con Men! Dystopian Satire! (Eric Garcia)
Episode 017: Dragons! Fan Fiction! Copyright Law! (Naomi Novik)
Episode 016: Geek Rock! Mad Scientists vs. Zombies! Dave’s Alien Ancestry! (Jonathan Coulton)
Episode 015: The Black Death! Archimedes! Counterfactuals! (Dan Carlin)
Episode 014: Fairies! Unicorns! Action Figures! (Holly Black)

The church-state separation advocacy group the Freedom From Religion Foundation recently won a court case declaring the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional. Here’s the group’s co-president Dan Barker (a former evangelical preacher) on FOX “News.” Dan does a superb job of giving the breathtakingly ignorant host a quick five minute education on basic American history.

I just noticed that artist Huan Tran has posted another iteration of his artwork for my short story “Blood of Virgins.”

If you’re curious, here’s the original version that appeared in Realms of Fantasy magazine, and here’s another alternate version.

Pop quiz. Can you match the dragon color to the deadly substance exhaled?

A. Black		1. Acid
B. Blue		2. Fire
C. Green		3. Ice
D. Red		4. Lightning
E. White		5. Poison Gas

If not, you’d better listen to dragon-themed Episode 17 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, with special guest Naomi Novik. Because knowing is half the battle.

There’s a really interesting lecture by Michael Drout on the 4/16/10 iTunes feed for The Tolkien Professor podcast. Here’s a sample:

Strider, who became Aragorn, was originally a hobbit named “Trotter,” who wore wooden shoes or had wooden feet even. (He’d been tortured by the Dark Lord and so had to wear shoes, or maybe even have prosthetic wooden feet.) And “Trotter” persisted forever. Meriadoc’s name was “Marmaduke.” And my favorite one is that Frodo was “Bingo” — for a long time, I mean, like, multiple drafts. So what I tell my students is: revise, revise, revise … Or actually, the other one is that in The Hobbit, Gandalf’s original name was “Bladderthin.” And again that persisted through whole drafts.

Nice. I just noticed that The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition is now available for the Mac, as a $10 instant download. Seriously, best ten bucks you’ll ever spend.

ETA: Listen to my December 2010 interview with Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy will be interviewing Robin Wasserman, author of the YA science fiction novel Skinned, and Eli Kintisch, author of Hack the Planet, a nonfiction book about ambitious and risky geoengineering schemes to address climate change. If anyone has any questions they’d like us to ask them, feel free to suggest them.

Apparently my copy of Shadow & Claw is a big believer in safe sex:

No seriously, why is a layer of plastic peeling off from this book? None of my other books look like this.

Wow, remind me never to travel to Saudi Arabia:

“Sorcerer” Faces Imminent Death in Saudi Arabia

Ali Sabat was the host of a popular Lebanese TV show in which he predicted the future and gave advice. He was arrested by religious police on sorcery charges while on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in 2008. His lawyer, May el-Khansa, says she has been told Mr Sabat is due to be executed this week … Many Saudi executions are beheadings by the sword in public places.

Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is scheduled to interview Naomi Novik, author of His Majesty’s Dragon, and Eric Garcia, author of Matchstick Men and Repo Men, so if anyone has any questions they’d like us to ask them, feel free to suggest them.

Here’s a cool visual demonstration of contradictions in the Bible. Each arc stretches between two contradictory verses.

I have not personally checked each of the 439 listed contradictions for accuracy, but if you care to do so you can read them all on the massive PDF version.

Here’s the table of contents for Zombies, the Spanish-language edition of The Living Dead, which includes my story “El muchacho con cara de calavera.”

Here’s the preliminary cover for the anthology The Way of the Wizard, edited by John Joseph Adams (which includes my story “Family Tree”).

Check out this terrific app: The Scale of the Universe. It allows you to zoom in to a Planck length or out to the size of the Universe, and see a hundred different objects in proper scale all along the way.