I bought Prince of Per­sia: The For­got­ten Sands dur­ing my stay in Lon­don over the extended week­end. Today, I had noth­ing to do so I put it in the PS3 and had a go at it. After roughly seven hours I was done. The real play­time is about one hour less and six hours of game­play aren’t all that good for a game like this. The pre­de­ces­sors took me longer. Any­way, let’s see if I can sum­ma­rize my expe­ri­ence a lit­tle better.

I won’t tell you any­thing about the plot. Let’s just say that the sto­ry­line is weak and you surely won’t be absorbed by the nar­ra­tive. The acro­bat­ics and plat­form­ing is up to the Prince of Per­sia stan­dard set by The Sands of Time. The first two hours are pretty easy going but it get’s more chal­leng­ing later on. The prince unlocks new pow­ers like freez­ing water or mak­ing por­tions of ruins seem like they did before they were destroyed. You have to com­bine these pow­ers to get through the later lev­els and this is def­i­nitely more chal­leng­ing than the begin­ning areas. Thanks to the abil­ity to rewind time you improve the odds to beat tricky plat­form­ing areas.

Com­bat is more bor­ing because it mostly con­sists of but­ton smash­ing. The first ene­mies are easy, the later ones are a bit tougher and some­times quite big. With the pow­ers the prince unlocks with his expe­ri­ence points everything’s easy, though. Using these pow­ers requires the same resources as does rewind­ing time so you may  have to be care­ful, depend­ing on your play­ing style. Dur­ing nor­mal game­play you can’t max­i­mize your pow­ers so you should play the game’s chal­lenge modes.

The visu­als of the game aren’t impres­sive at all. The game had poten­tial, though. Some­times, TFS looks really fan­tas­tic which is unfor­tu­nately negated when you arrive at dull look­ing areas. Some areas even look a bit unfin­ished. Seems like the devel­op­ers had a lot of pres­sure fin­ish­ing the game in time which results in this unre­fined game.

Funny side­note: You can unlock addi­tional stuff via Uplay and the devel­op­ers added an Ezio cos­tume (Ezio is the lead char­ac­ter in Assassin’s Creed II).

So, what’s my con­clu­sion? The game is nei­ther bad nor awe­some, but good. It has a solid base but there’s quite a bit of untapped poten­tial hid­den deep within. That makes it bet­ter than the 2008 Prince of Per­sia but that’s it. It’s got good voice act­ing and some inter­est­ing plat­form­ing but com­bat is a dull affair. If I had to rate the game, I’d give it 6 out of 10 points.

An Israeli research team has devel­oped a machine algo­rithm that can rec­og­nize sar­casm. Tested on Ama­zon, SASI (Semi-supervised Algo­rithm for Sar­casm Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion) can detect sar­cas­tic sen­tences in prod­uct reviews with 77 per­cent pre­ci­sion. The results are even bet­ter on Twit­ter where SASI iden­ti­fied sar­casm with 94 per­cent pre­ci­sion. Basi­cally, the researchers had human anno­ta­tors tag­ging sen­tences for sar­casm. The team then iden­ti­fied cer­tain sar­cas­tic pat­terns and cre­ated a clas­si­fi­ca­tion algo­rithm that puts each state­ment into a sar­cas­tic class.

The algo­rithm were then trained and turned loose on an eval­u­a­tion seet. Con­sid­er­ing the over­all pre­ci­sion SASI scored, that’s not a bad shot at inter­pret­ing the human sense of humor. It almost imme­di­ately reminded me of a project called Stu­pid­Fil­ter. If they could incor­po­rate this algo­rithm … but then, they haven’t updated their web­site for nearly two years. Too bad. Any­way, if you really want to know more about how the algo­rithm works, you should check out this PDF (~93 kB).

So what’s the use of rec­og­niz­ing sar­cas­tic state­ments? The researchers believe that SASI could be instru­men­tal in gen­er­at­ing bet­ter per­son­al­ized con­tent and make bet­ter rec­om­men­da­tions to human users. They also think that the algo­rithm could ben­e­fit opinion-mining systems.

Iron Man 2 Movie Poster

Harry from Ain’t It Cool News says that Iron Man 2 kicks it up sev­eral notches across the board. Looks like they didn’t fuck up the sequel after all! This time around there’s a lot of stuff going on. Tony Stark is addicted to being Iron Man, his power source is slowly poi­son­ing him, Whiplash pops up from nowhere, Justin Ham­mer is intro­duced, Pep­per Potts gets more respon­si­bil­ity, and there’s your beau­ti­ful femme fatale – Black Widow.

All things con­sid­ered, Iron Man 2 offers lots of plots and sub-plots and some his­tory between Tony Stark and his father. Also, the actions seems to be well dosed – the Monaco scene from the trail­ers isn’t the best sequence. At least, that’s what Harry says. Accord­ing to him this film throws a chal­lenge to Thor, Cap­tain Amer­ica, and The Avengers. Oh, there’s another infor­ma­tion I man­aged to gleam from the com­ments: Stan Lee’s cameo in this movie is his briefest yet.

Of course, you don’t com­pletely trust one source. So, there’s a review up over at ComingSoon.net that essen­tially says the same thing. They give it 8 out of 10 points, mostly because of the high expec­ta­tions some peo­ple may have from the first movie. Well, I guess we just have to see Iron Man 2 for our­selves. Con­sid­er­ing the unique release pat­tern of the movie, visit the offi­cial movie site for infor­ma­tion on when the sequel hits the­aters in your country.

Win­dows doesn’t always work “prop­erly” or in a way you would expect it to work. One of this minor annoy­ances is the mouse wheel. For instance, you’d expect that mov­ing the mouse wheel will scroll the win­dow directly beneath the mouse cur­sor and not the one with the input focus. For­tu­nately, there are a few freely avail­able tools that are able to fix this issue.

There are Kat­Mouse, Wiz­Mouse and Wheel Here. While I like Kat­Mouse the most, the other two pro­grams offer the same basic func­tion­al­ity. Kat­Mouse just goes a few steps fur­ther and adds a few more inter­est­ing options. Just try them out to decide for your­self. If you want to pay for your daily soft­ware fix, take a look at MouseEasy. Ah, I almost for­got the X-Mouse fea­tures you can acti­vate with the Pow­er­toys. I don’t really like X-Mouse because it acti­vates a win­dow but hey, that’s your choice.

A few days ago, the sec­ond trailer for the Clash of the Titans remake appeared on the net. For the first trailer – which isn’t all that dif­fer­ent from the lat­est one – get to my first post about the remake. The lat­est trailer is a full minute longer and fea­tures a bunch of new scenes. Since the movie should hit the­aters today, I’ll try to watch it this week­end. If you liked the music, look for “The Bird and the Worm” by The Used.

More­turi te salutant!

The trailer for Preda­tors, the lat­est addi­tion to the fran­chise that began with Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger, has arrived on the net. In Preda­tors, a bunch of elite war­riors are kid­napped from Earth and brought to another planet. There they real­ize that they are noth­ing more than prey! In a nut­shell, that’s the plot. Well, this is a movie about Preda­tors so we don’t need much of a story line, right? Oh, the world looks just like the jun­gles in the first film with a few additions.

I still remain cau­tious about the cast­ing but I freely admit that Adrien Brody doesn’t look as ridicu­lous in the trailer as he did in my imag­i­na­tion. Looks like Preda­tors just jumped near the top of my must-see list. What do you think? Will the addi­tional ‘s’ in the title make this one a bet­ter movie?