Forgotten Portals 1: Rise of the Magi (a Soterion Novel)

Forgotten Portals 1: Rise of the Magi (a Soterion Novel)

by Randy Blackwell Jr.

I was really looking forward to reading this book. Having already read 3 or so short stories in the Soterion universe on soterion.com and having had some contact with the author over the past couple of years, what with his table top RPG based on the Soterion world and proposed video game based on the RPG, you could say that I'm a Soterling.

There were some issues with the print itself. Some spelling mistakes, some grammar issues, and typographic errors, and after only 1 month of owning the book, the lamination is starting to peel off the cover. Although these are all minor issues and easily looked over, they did detract from my enjoyment of the story for brief periods. One of the biggest problem I had is trying to pronounce Miyka in my head, especially when it was spelled Mikya once. It always came out as mik-EE-a for me. I can't really come up with anything else wrong about it besides the usual first edition hiccups that you get.

The main characters in this story are the founders of the Order of Magi, Omar Metzger and Myles Callaghan. Omar is the epitome of scientists, inventor of miracles and researcher extraordinaire, who grew up a child prodigy, passing college early and gathering letters after his name like some of us gather flowers. Myles is a illusionist and conman, who grew up in the circus to learn slight of hand and many other skills like throwing knives and lion training and so much more. Both come across as intelligent in their own right, even if their educations were drastically different.

The use of Musterion as a gateway world to Soterion makes some sort of sense, and anyone familiar with C.S. Lewis could climb right on board with that. The requirement to choose a council, and choose right away before you could learn anything about the world, came as a jarring shock to me. I was already committed to finishing the book, but now it got me involved at a deeper level I hadn't thought possible. Up until that point we were learning about a world of tunnels, where the center is full of strange creatures with wondrous qualities and weird features. I didn't count how many different species were introduced in that one chapter, but I could have sworn it was 7 or 8, all with similar names, or similar descriptions. I'm not going to go through them here because, let's be honest here, I'd get them wrong. Now remember how I said I was a Soterling? Well there's about 2 extra peoples in here that I just didn't know about. I liked it, but it may confuse some people. I would suggest that if you want to get even more out of this book, take a note from Omar and write in a journal when you come across new and interesting facts about Musterion and Soterion.

Now I suppose it's time to bring this to a close and so in order to not tell you the ending of the book I wrote this review without reading the end of the book. At this point I would probably stick out my tongue, do a little dance, then run away, but that's childish so, no, I won't do it. I would like to say thank you to Randy Blackwell for inventing this beautiful and rich universe, where we Christian fantasy lovers can revel and frolic, along with the characters and species he's created. I'd say this book definitely passes the mustard.

The Gimp 2

Now if you know me, you know I'm a sucker for a good deal.  I'm talking about low price high quality.  You just can't go wrong with big project FOSS when you want a good deal.  Free to me as in "free nuts" and free to use as in "free speech", and programmed by people who not only know what they are doing, but in many cases have created the standards.  Since my first bit of free candy I've loved free things, and the FSF has treated us all VERY good in the past 2 decades.  The GIMP stands for "The GNU Image Manipulation Program" (it used to be project, but these sorts of things change), and as we all know GNU stands for "GNU's Not Unix". Anyway it's time to get this going properly before I start spouting off more about my love for FOSS or,which would be much worse, expounding on the great (if short) history of GNU, and GIMP.

GIMP is an image manipulator, or rather an image editor.  Not just any old image editor, it's a full featured image editor, whose rivals would be from big companies like Adobe and Corel.  I'm not going to compare this to other image editors, you can find lots of those types of reviews all over the place.  I'm also not going to be able to go thru all it's features like I do when I review smaller apps. What I will try to do is explain what sort of things it's good for.  Photo editing and drawing are right there at the top of the list, but I also use it for my pixel art, and digital scrapbooking.  There's filters you can use to do all sorts of things from noise and blur to rendering clouds and applying new art styles.  Layers, history, and colour management are all there too.  I've said this before to other graphic designers (Adobe lovers the lot of them): "There is not a single thing you can with Photoshop that you can't do with GIMP."  to which most of them ask "What about actions?"

Anyway The GIMP 2 passed mustard.

http://www.gimp.org/

Steam (iPhone)

So like everyone else who plays steam games on pc and owns an iPhone I signed the petition to get friend chatting on the iPhone.  Fortunately for all of us Valve decided to give way more than just chat.  You can browse groups, see friend activity, browse the Steam Catalog (a.k.a. Store), your wislist, fill up your cart, checkout and have the game ready for you at home, and use the steam store search.  Oh, yeah and there's steam news, store account info, app settings and a way to log out (either for security or cause you share your iOS device).

I'd like to go through each and every section but I'm not prepared to type 12 paragraphs.  My most used features are Friends, Catalog, Cart, and Search.  Friends works much like your friend list on the desktop Steam (Mac or PC), it lets you see who's online, playing what, and chat with them.  Catalog is essentially store.steampowered.com built for the iPhone.  Cart is your shopping cart, you need to go in here to pay for your purchase that you got from either Search or Catalog.  You can use all the same checkout methods as when you are on your computer, and when you do finally get back to it you can download the game there.

Now I do have to say that it isn't seamless with the desktop app.  Chats do not propagate across, and sometimes when you exit the app, chats will pop up as notifications, and sometimes they just don't.  I'd like to say it's stable, but my copy has crashed just before checkout, and then I had to start over searching for my game again.  Not a big problem, but occasionally annoying.

Passed mustard.

Skyrim Alchemy (free version) for iOS

You can find the app on iTunes store, or by following the link on the app's blog: http://skyrimalchemy.blogspot.ca/

This app lets you try new and different alchemy recipes without wasting your in game ingredients. Now this app has a very simple User Interface and trust me when it's this type of app the simpler the better!  You can select a single effect, then choose two ingredients from the filtered lists accessed by the silver buttons saying "Select Ingredient", and then one more ingredient whose effects match either or both of the first two ingredients.  It will also tell you what effects that potion will have if you were to make it in game.  I find it VERY handy when I'm trying to track down that one perfect potion, or just to avoid negative effects on positive potions by changing ingredients (I don't spend any perks in my alchemy constellation in game, even though I try to max out my alchemy skill).

Also there is a secondary function where you select two effects and it gives you a list of possible ingredient combinations to give you those two effects in a single potion.  Be warned though, cause the second effect list isn't filtered like the ingredient lists are in the primary screen.  I have found a few effects that would be nice to have together, but just won't go together.

I have one issue with it (and it's a minor issue): I want the buttons to be bigger!  It's not that I don't have any dexterity in my fingers, it's just that I like a little wiggle room and padding when the only UI shown is a few buttons.  I'm not saying the screen needs to be filled with them, but 5 to 10 extra pixels bigger each would be nice.

So does it pass mustard? yes
Should you buy the pay version? well if you have some money left over on your app store card it'd be nice to support the author, but there's no added incentive past "Disable ads" to go pay.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Official World Interactive Map (iPhone)

It's crap.  The visuals are cartoony, the free version only shows holds, the extra content (and there's a lot) costs $0.99 for every single unlock!  Are you kidding me?  15 unlocks, all $0.99 or you can buy the whole lot for $9.99, but I already downloaded the app for free, why do I have to pay!?? and the worst part is trying to add a pin to the map.  touch pins, touch add pin, touch map where you want the pin, see a big white box with only a done button on it, click done, oh where's the pin? zoom in all the way, oh, I think it's that little tiny red ball there... STUPID!!!   I'm guessing that the big white box is so you can type something in it, and pins do keep after you turn off the app, but it's just so unwieldy.  there's a button on the start screen that lets you download all the maps at once, taking up 970MB of space on your iPhone and easily that much bandwidth.  I've tried this app without an internet connection, and it works, but only up to a certain level of zoom, because for high zoom levels it has to download a new map from the internet.  Because of this.... let's call it a zoom threshold.... and many other things (like a lack of help or usage instructions) I'm going to say that Prima Guide's Skyrim Official World Interactive Map for iPhone does NOT pass mustard.

Breakdown:

• is it a map? yes
• So is it interactive? yes
• does it work on my iPhone 3GS? yes
• Does it show where you've been in skyrim? You can tell the app what places you've discovered, but only if you've payed for everything, the free one only gives you the different hold cities.
• Does it show dungeon placements etc.? yes if you pay for them
• does it make noise? yes, but you can turn that off
• is there a search funciton? yes but to find anything that's actually hard to find (i.e. not hold cities) you'll need to pay for content.

My final verdict is that if you want an interactive map that already has everything on it, there's a free one at UESP.net based on google's tech:  http://www.uesp.net/maps/srmap/srmap.shtml and it'll work on your iPhone's browser, so it's easily better than this app, even though you need an internet connection to use it.

The Simpsons Tapped Out

Electronic Arts. Okay now that you are done booing at the world's largest video game producer, check out this iPhone game: The Simpsons Tapped Out.  It's a village building game with a Simpsons twist.  It does have some connection issues when you use EA's Origin service to connect to your friends.  When I say some connection issues I mean if you like to play weekends and super late night you won't be able to, cause it won't connect after midnight or during a Saturday.  Works gorgeously every other time though.  I just love it.  All the most memorable landmarks from Springfield USA are in it.  Like the Kwik E Mart and Krusty Burger.  You get a whole bunch of characters too like Homer, Lisa, Ned, Apu, Krusty, and Milhouse (that's as far as I've gotten so far).  I'm currently working on getting enough moneys (in game currency) to buy the School.  There's also magic donuts that can speed any action up quickly.  They cost real money, so don't go spending all the free ones you get right away.

Passed Mustard.

Real Steel

Boxing movie, but with robots.  Check out IMDB or Amazon for plot synopsis.  I loved it, and so did my girlfriend.  So it Passed Mustard without a doubt.