In-Flight Tetris - A review of a game on the back of the seat in front of me.

You probably know that I recently took a trip to the other side of the world from where I usually call home. Planes are pretty cool these days. Or at least, they can be. The first plane I was on was no wider than a can of tuna, or it felt as such. For my trip over the ocean, however, I was in one of those cool planes with a touchscreen on the seat directly ahead where one can watch any manner of movie, listen to a variety of music, and even, indeed, play a small selection of things attempting to be video games.

"Tetris In-Flight," as it was stylized on the title screen (though the menu called it In-Flight Tetris, as does the Internet, so whatever), was not that great. See, I'm a pretty big nerd and I kind of love Tetris, and I'm kinda particular when it comes to my Tetris. I mean, yeah its a pretty basic concept, you'd think it'd be hard to totally mess up, right? Well, it is possible.

TIF wasn't that bad. It had a piece hold function, which was nice. It looked pretty clean. Load times were not atrocious (apparently there is an older version that had ridiculous load times, though I think it looks better than the one I played).

The issue I had with TIF/IFT was that the controls were kinda janky. If you're unfamiliar with the little corded controller thingy that can be used to control the airplane screen, its basically just a remote control on one side, and the other has a D-Pad on one end, four controller buttons on the other, and a minuscule keyboard (like from an old blackberry phone) in-between. I think the controller itself was fine, but in game the movement of the pieces wasn't always the most responsive. Most of the time it seemed to move back and forth, flip, and drop the tetrominos just fine, but ocassionally there was a bit of lag or delay. Occasionally on that occasional occasion, there seemed to be an attempt to rectify the delay by speeding up for a split second, as if to "catch up," which as anyone could guess wasn't exactly helpful in trying to be precise. I wonder if this wasn't necessarily the fault of the game designers/programmers themselves, but was actually more a consequence of the in-flight entertainment system not being able to actively handle as much gaming and video-ing as was actually going on. That's just speculation, but I just wonder if TIF was played by itself on a more powerful or even dedicated machine, it would run better.

An interesting thing I want to point out, related to the controls, is that as the game sped up (as it should during normal play) and the pieces started falling faster, it didn't just seem to increase the speed they fell, like any normal version of Tetris, but increased the speed they moved left and right as well. Anyone who's put some good time into Tetris will know that this could be a game changer. The difficulty of having the pieces fall faster isn't just a reaction time issue, its the ability to get the piece as far over to one side or the other as you want it to. There are some other solutions to that problem that other versions of Tetris have implemented, but here it seemed an accident, and yet an interesting and potentially major one. As it turned out I think the speed ramped-up too fast for this to matter all that much, and I don't think anyone is going to be trying to be all that competitive with In-Flight Tetris any time soon.

But hey, speaking of competition, there were leaderboards! Being who I am and being that who that is is someone who has played a lot of Tetris and am at least semi-competent at it, I obviously had to get myself to the top of all the leaderboards.

The game had three modes, and they're your standard Tetris game modes. Marathon, the original the classic, just last as long as you can. Ultra, a timed mode, get as many points as you can in (in this case) two minutes. Finally, "Forty Lines," which is often called something a bit less on-the-nose (like sprint), where you have to get X number of lines, and are timed on how fast you can, and in this case, you wouldn't be surprised to know, that number is forty.

I did top the charts on all modes. I don't know that I really had stiff competition though. I think they might only be daily leaderboards, though they may even be as limited as per-flight. Whatever the case, I topped, but again, probably not a feat to be bragging about.

There is also a two-player mode, but I didn't really have a chance to play against anyone, because even though apparently some people were playing, they weren't looking in the multiplayer lobby at the exact moment I was, so there were no opponents for head-to-head and we had to resort to fighting over leaderboards, potentially over ten hours apart.

Overall, if you have another version available to you (like on 3DS or some such), you're probably better off playing that Tetris instead of Tetris In-Flight. There is something to be said for leaderboards and the possibility of playing against someone next to you, though, so I think on my return trip I will probably boot it up again. Gotta preserve my place on the top of the oh so prestigious IFT single-day leaderboards.

Well, that's way more words than the silly back-of-seat-in-front-of-you-on-ridiculously-long-flights version of Tetris probably deserves, but I am nothing if not way too verbose than I often need to be.

Oh yeah, you probably already noticed that I also changed my blog theme. If you hate it and find it unusable please definitely let me know.

The Twilight Wife by A.J. Banner. A Book Review.

I must confess something. Last year I only read three books. Three.
Dozens and dozens of articles and thousands upon thousands of reddit comments, most assuredly, but only three books. I know, pretty sad.

So I decided that this year would be different. I heard about a website called Bookbub that would send you emails, alerting you to ebooks that are discounted or free on various ebook vending websites. Its pretty neat. Free is free, ya know?

One such book I saw was called The Twilight Wife by A.J. Banner. Something about the summary caught my attention, and despite not being free, only discounted, I still decided, what the heck, buy it, read it. Reviews said it was short. I was coming up fast on March and needed to get in gear with this whole "read more" thing.

The setup of the novel is this woman, Kyra Winthrope, was in a diving accident where she hit her head and is now suffering from amnesia. She's lost the last four years of her life, and has trouble forming new memories. She, along with her husband Jacob, live on Mystic Island, a fictional island in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington. As she begins to remember bits and pieces of the previous four years, along with nightmares that may or may not have been the accident itself, things don't seem to quite line up with everything she's being told.

So, this isn't exactly my normal fare, but what the heck.

Honestly, overall I would say I enjoyed it. It really was an easy read on top of being short, so I got through it pretty fast. The chapters were generally short enough that I could read one or two on break at work, or just in-between moments of life. It seemed to take a minute to get all the setup out of the way and onto the interesting stuff, but considering how I just explained how short the thing was, this is hardly a harsh criticism.

The book is written in first person present tense. I normally hate this. Present tense for a narrative format just feels so weird to me. I've tried with other books before and after a page of torture I've put them down. Despite that, I actually give this book a pass, but for a very specific reason. I think first of all maybe I just got over myself (though still not a present-tense fan), but more importantly it actually allowed A.J. Banner to do something actually pretty cool. While the main narrative of what Kyra is doing is all in present tense, when she begins to remember something, she switches to speaking in past tense. Its relatively subtle, despite feeling obvious, and allows Banner to switch between the past and the "here and now," so-to-speak, seamlessly. Present tense also just generally seems to make sense for a protagonist experiencing amnesia anyway. Maybe using the tenses this way isn't original, but its the first I've seen it and it worked.

Now, with a novel like this, from the outset we're basically told that there is a twist. It was billed as a thriller, the whole setup with the lost memories slowly coming back, other people on the island maybe knowing something that our protagonist doesn't- its all very obvious, right? Isn't the knowledge that there is a twist coming in some way usually diminishing of that twist? Like, the whole point of a twist is that you don't know what's coming, but the whole reason to read a book like this is that there is a twist, so is that self-defeating or not? Maybe I'm overthinking this.

Regardless of the meta-nature of twists in fiction, I have to say that I did find the direction the story went, as well as its conclusion, very satisfying. It may not be the most original of ideas, but I admit, I was pulled in. Just over half-way through the novel things really start to come to a head, and from that point on I honestly did not put the book down. It took me three days to get that far, but once I did I finished the book. Again, short book, so its not like I read a third of Way of Kings in a day, but at least note that the book was well-written and interesting enough to get me to do that.

Overall, enjoyable, interesting. If you're looking for a quick read and find it still on sale, I would recommend. Amazon seems to tell me that the original list price is $15, which I would never spend on this book. For the two bucks I paid, however, I got at least two bucks worth of entertainment out of it.

Minor note on content here. Considering the marital nature of the book, there is some light, I suppose one would say "sexual content," but nothing explicit. Nothing more than one would see in a PG-13 movie.