Review Day

There are no major spoilers in these reviews.

The 100, Season Four:
This show is still a great example of sci-fi lite, where you can go along for the ride without thinking too hard. Though the plot in this season isn't quite as interesting as Season Three, it's still entertaining and ends up with a nice shake-up that should make the next season fresher. The main flaw in this season is the continued flip-flop of characters that make wishy-washy decisions to forward the plot and then feel angsty about them.

Final Grade: B

Chronos:
This is a very polished 3rd-person Zelda-like game for the Oculus Rift. Like Lucky's Tale, the camera is your head, and your character runs from room to room fighting goblins and solving simple puzzles. It has a few instances of poorly telegraphed puzzles and I'm not very good at the fighting aspect, but it's very immersive and a good example of what VR can do for gaming.

Final Grade: B

Keep Talking and No One Explodes:
This is a fun VR party game where one player wears the headset and sees a suitcase bomb that they can manipulate. They have to describe what they're seeing to people in the real world who have a printed manual of logic rules (like "If there are 4 wires, cut the red wire"). The opening menu is a little cumbersome to navigate but the game itself evokes fun Telephone-like miscommunications that result in the bomb defuser getting blown up on a regular basis. We've only played the first few types of puzzles, but the later ones look intimidatingly daunting in the printed manual.

Final Grade: B+

Google Earth VR:
VR is one of those technologies whose impact can't truly be understood until you put the headset on yourself, and Google Earth is easily the killer app to make people understand. This program allows you to travel anywhere on the planet and fly through the world with your controllers. Because it is not yet integrated with Google Street View on the web, the illusion breaks down if you zoom in too close to person-scale, but it's still exhilarating to revisit places you've been before or trek up Mount Everest without danger. I've read that they've used this VR program on dementia patients to allow them to visit their childhood homes, and I, myself, have re-experienced all of the crazy vacations and hikes that Rebecca and I have taken. The map data improves regularly, and many of the neighbourhoods are getting 3D-ified with LIDAR data (surprisingly, Sterling Park is one of the completed ones, as seen in the screenshot below). In cases where the neighbourhood isn't available yet, the topography of the landscape is still rendered, but the buildings are shown as a flat texture.

Final Grade: B+