Entertainment Books

If you are a SF fan, you will enjoy the artwork and stories in this first volume. I enjoyed Volume 1 and 2 more than volume 3, and much more than Volume 4. This begins the battles and adventures of Ryu and his goal to develop as a fighter. It also follows all of the other characters from the SF II and SF Alpha era and merges them. SF Alpha is a precursor to the SF II. It is a quick read with excellent artwork and an interesting story, and although there are some small parts of the story that are boring for a few characters, most of the story and battles are worthwhile. Do a search to find sample pages of what the artwork looks like. The book is in digest size, which is smaller than the comic book sizes. There is also an Ultimate SF book available which collects the entire four volumes and shows them in larger-than-comic-book-size pages if you can find that version. I recommend this book to all fans of SF, and to any non-fans who know of SF but have never tried to learn the backstories.

Round One: FIGHT!

Though I still have fond memories of playing Street Fighter II for the Super Nintendo back in grade school, I'll admit that I don't quite remember the game having any plot to speak of. Well, I just finished the comic book, and, my opinion hasn't changed all that much.

As you might expect, the series tells the story of a Ryu, who--SUPRISE!--gets into street fights aplenty. The honorable brawler finds his beloved sensei slain in his own dojo and sets off to find the killer, running into all manner of classic characters along the way. (Including Guile, the bombastically American super-soldier, who was my personal favorite back in the day. SONIC BOOM!)

Don't get me wrong, the Udon Crew obviously loves the original games, and has created a fitting homage to them (complete with manga-styled visuals). The only problem is that you'd have to be the age I was when I first bought a SNES to enjoy the story.

If you grew up playing Street Fighter games and wanted to know more on the stories of the characters, then THIS IS A DEFINITE MUST PICK UP AND HAVE! Great illustrations with a great storyline to stay true to the characters of the game and brings them to life. Really thought out well and structured greatly. CANT WAIT FOR THE NEXT VOLUME, VOLUME 5! :)

this books and the others are really good, I ordered this book with 4 more and all were delivered in less than a week!!

excelent work, excelent art, WOW

I LOVE STREET FIGHTER

The art in this series is absolutely BEAUTIFUL! It's well worth the price tag just to look at all the pretty pictures. But the storyline is excellent as well. If only these guys could be in charge of creating a Street Fighter movie since all the previous ones have been average to suck.

Awesome illustrations, digital and traditional. A very good book with detailed artwork done by students of Art Center Pasadena Ca. Every page is packed with creative talent applied to many different situations. I would highly recommend this book as well as many others coming out of the Design Studio Press!

"In the Future" is a great follow-up/companion piece to Design Studio Press' previous student publication "The Skillful Huntsman." Where as "Huntsman," followed the process of three students, "Future," documents the work of an entire group of students. There is a wide variety of work and exploration - from pencil/graphite, to markers, experimental media, digital, etc. Many different approaches are shown and this is one of the few places where they are all collected together. The students show a great deal of promise and who knows what they will professionally accomplish in the future.

I bought this book looking for inspiration for my own artistic efforts. What I got was a hodgepodge of scribilled sketches. This book contains VERY FEW COLOR ILLUSTRATIONS. What few there are all use very dark background colors that blend with the subject matter. So much so that it is difficult to distinguish the subject from the background. My one star rating was a generous one.

The book represents the 'journey' of work from the entertainment major at Art Center College of Design. This includes the sketches and initial ideas, through final line drawings as well as finished color renderings. The chapters are broken up into the core classes that the major has to offer with brief descriptions by the teachers.

If you enjoyed the The Skillful Huntsman: Visual Development of a Grimm Tale at Art Center College of Design that was published by Design Studio Press, then I'd consider looking into this book. Although the content has changed, the format will be familiar.

If you're looking for a glimpse at what the major and field of entertainment design have to offer, this is the book for you. Especially for aspiring students in the field (primarily for games and film). I'm still blown away by the breadth and depth of work these students have created.

- - -

I'm not sure what the other reviewer was hoping to find that s/he wasn't satisfied with, but there are plenty of color illustrations in this book...

This book sis exactly what it aspires to be, a collection of class exercises by talented students at the Art Center in Pasadena. The artwork and layout are competent and anybody looking for a benchmark or an achievable target for their own artwork and technique could benefit form this "syllabus". But it does lack a measure of originality as one work looks pretty much like the next and the themes that give origin to the pieces are somewhat pretentious. It is a reflection of a school were undoubtedly students feed of each other's creativity and try to meet a look which is standard in the industry. The results are professional but cookie-cutter in the best of cases. Some works are a little undeveloped but may give a glimpse into the diversity of talents in a single group of students. I would use this book as a first approach or a teaching tool but not as something I want to get attached to.

This was an interesting insight into the world of retirement and elderly people. Rothman spends more than six months in a retirement community to get a feel for what retirement is like. The book made me feel empathetic towards the elderly, allowing me to glimpse life from a new perspective. I liked getting to know the cliques within the community as well as the individuals who formed the cliques. Rothman's writing style is casual, allowing for a personal account of the time spent in the retirement community. It was an unexpectedly good read.

This was a great light read. I really enjoyed the humor and anecdotes of life as a twenty-something struggling to find some inspiration and direction. The author is the son of a family friend, and really hit the nail on the head with his description of south florida's retirement villages.

Rodney retires at the age of 28 and moves to a 'community' in Florida. He learns about aging as well as the importance of youth.
I thought this book was at turns hilarious and heartbreaking. Rodney has an excellent comedic voice, honed while writing jokes for Letterman prior to his 'retirement.' I learned a lot while reading this book, but it didn't feel like learning. I would recommend this to anyone who reads for the same reason I do: To learn about lifestyles and events that are very different from me and my experiences. Or, you know, to anyone at all.

OK, I really meant to read 2008's Leisureville, but this was the only book in the library on retirement communities. I'm over 50, so I usually only read a book if it's free.

I wanted to scope out my options for the next decade. But even though Early Bird is non-fiction, it suffers from a dearth of information. It's really a bunch of essays about Rodney Rothman and how he is affected by the mostly Jewish mostly New York seniors around him, who treat him like a 28-year-old visiting son or grandson.

Even though well-written, his humor wore quickly. I know a book isn't worth reading when I'm just scanning the pages, trying to find something non-gratuitous to read. I found it 2/3 of the way in, with the chapter "Basherte", where he left campus to date women his own age. It was still gratuitous, but at least that chapter was really funny.

I didn't finish this memoir..I thought the idea behind the book was odd and it is just not worth my time and effort to read anymore of it.

Published by the same folks who brought you Game Programming Gems (and edited by one of the more prolific AI authors in that series), AI Game Programming Wisdom provides a wealth of real knowledge by actual game programming professionals, not professional authors. As a game programming professional, the number of game programming books that sit on my shelf is fairly small. Most have nothing interesting or meaningful to offer beyond rudimentary descriptions and concepts.

AI Wisdom is definitely a cut above the rest. The topic selection is intelligent and relevant, and the articles are all of a consistent quality and polish. I've already referenced articles several times when writing production code, and several co-workers have borrowed it when they had a particularly tricky problem to solve. This is simply a must-have resource for any professional AI programmer, period. Or, if you're an amateur or hobbyist looking to see the tricks and techniques professionals use, then this is a book you absolutely can't afford to miss.

"Artificial Intelligence" means different things to different people. One useful application is the control of nonplayer characters (NPC) in video games. This is the first book to address this field. Like any collection of papers, it is uneven and does not systematically cover the subject. It should be read in conjunction with a traditional AI text, such as Murphy "Introduction to AI Robotics", Russell and Norvig "Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach", Tom Mitchell "Machine Learning" or perhaps Bruce Blumberg's forthcoming "Synthetic Characters".

I teach AI at DigiPen Institute of Technology and made this one of the required books. It is good in showing which techniques are most useful in games and what you need to consider when designing your AI. Some papers are overly general and some are too specific. That's probably unavoidable, but game programmers can pick and choose the most appropriate ideas. Unfortunately, some of the better introductory articles on A*, finite state machines, flocking and fuzzy logic are not in this book but in "Game Programming Gems".

Once you understand the basics of AI, this book can save some major headaches by helping with the selection of an appropriate architecture. The CD has source code to help you get off to a good start. Reading the appropriate articles will let you anticipate problems before they happen and design around them. Professional game programmers will likely find at least one technique that pays back the cost of the book.

It's hard to find good information about game programming and design. The trouble is that people working in the industry have an incentive to keep their techniques secret -- they don't want their competitors to learn them. The people who aren't in the industry can write about games but don't have the experience to back it up.

Game AI Programming Wisdom gives us wisdom from people who have worked on real games. Each section is a short explanation of a particular problem (like pathfinding, tactical reasoning, or pattern recognition). Since they're short and independent, you can pick the section that applies to the problem you're trying to solve and read that without having to read everything in order. However, each section is written by a different person, so if you try to read the book straight through you will be distracted by the change in writing styles and level of detail.

I'm quite glad to see this book. It's actually the first game programming/design book that I purchased. (I'm quite picky when it comes to books. I'm sure Amazon doesn't like that.) Most of the game books I see go into low level programming details. This book teaches you the principles and techniques that will be useful for more than the specific problems they cover.

Being in the game development business, I am always on the lookout for new and different tricks, techniques and strategies. When most programmers go to the lectures, panels and roundtables at the Game Developers Conference, we are looking to pick up this same sort of material... we share ideas and approaches - but rarely get the chance to get down to the code details to make it easy for us to implement those ideas into our own work. This book makes that possible.

Along the lines of the other "Gems" series of books, this collection is filled with ACTUAL techniques and code chunks that are used by some of the top professionals in the industry. Just flipping through the list of the contributors to the book is like going around the room at one of the AI roundtables at the GDC... in fact, Steve Woodcock and Neil Kirby are 2 of the "3 AI guys" that RUN those roundtables! (The 3rd being Eric Dybsand who has contributed to the "Gems" series but not this title.)

Many books on game development are informative. This one is actually USEFULL. I have personally adopted Steve Rabin's source code from the section "Implementing a State Machine Language" into my own game and it has saved me many hours of development and improved the readability and understandability of my code for the rest of the team. Just that section alone has netted at least a 1000:1 return on the cost of this book. Other sections have given me a different approach on how to handle the economic strategy layer that I could have come upon myself... but was able to implement a lot quicker than if I had done it myself. It was definately worth the price.

Are any of these sections worth the purchase price for YOU? I suppose that depends on how much you value you your time. Once you equate the cost of the book to the man hours you save, it's a no brainer!

This is the best book in my library.
Write by professionals, with usefull techniques and well explained details of almost every cool aspects of AI in the game programming world.

I finished reading this book in 2 days I couldn't put it down either. I didn't know that dusty was a booker back then. But I never understood why dusty didn't have the belt longer, I hated that Ric was always champion to me that didn't make sense when I was a kid and it still don't make sense now. The champ was suppose to be the good guy. Well anyway Ric is a legend and ranks No 1. amongst diehard wrestling fans over Hogan, Rock, and Stone Cold I guarantee it. I liked the book but was disspointed at its laziness of time events. IT skipped a lot of details and seemed to just summarize over peroids of his life. For example he never said how he met any of the horsemen, He didn't let us in on him and David talking about him becoming a wrestler. I will tell you the good points and the bad points.

1. His Birth, childhood, and teenage yrs good

2. His training to become a wrestler good

3. His breaking into the wrestling business good

4. His coming up in the ranks in wrestling and guys who were there good

5. His affiliation with the Four horsmen Bad No details at all

6. His affiliation with the popular baby faces and popular heels Bad no insight or detail especially through 84-88 guys like Nakita Koloff, Lugar, Sting, Rock n roll express, Magnum T.A.

At that dissapointment everything else was ok....I do recommed it it's still good. He does talk about wrestlers who I didn't know he had an affiliation with with detail like Rowdy Piper, and others who I'm not that familiar with.

Like I said the book has a sense of urgency like Ric was saying let's hurry up and finish this thing let's keep it kinda short, because if Ric told it all it would probably be around 500-600 pages.

One great roller-coster of an autobiography with the man himself "SLICK RIC". This book is great and really goes into details about Ric's life. BOTH personally and professionally.

I must have read this book over 5 times cause thats good it is. Much better than Hogans book which reads like a childrens book compared to this.

BUY IT ! YOU WONT REGRET IT !

CAUSE TO KNOW THE MAN ......YOU GOTTA READ THE MAN .........WOOOOooooooooooooooooo !

I think reviews on this book will greatly vary depending on if the reader is going to compare it to other wrestling autobiographies or as a book about arguably the greatest performer in pro-wrestling. I reread this book with Ric Flair's imminent retirement coming up in mind. What we have here is Ric Flair (Richard Fleihr) relating his life in brief antecdotes and releasing some frustrations. This covers his life from birth to the formation of Evolution in 2004 (thus pre-road rage and Beth-divorce).

His controversial birth was very surprising and claims to have not even known his birth name (Fred Philips) until he started writing this book. His high school life and brief college experience began him on his life of debauchery and partying. He breaks into wrestling by training under Verne Gange and spends most of his early career with Mid South Wrestling, later going to Georgia Championship Wrestling, NWA, WCW, and WWF/E. He hides little in how he overspent and did everything to live the 'Ric Flair lifestyle' that he's known for - expensive clothes, all-night partying, and womanizer. There are countless anecdotes about his fellow wrestlers and the things they did.

Flair covers both fond and bitter memories. His respect for Ricky Steamboat and Sting abound. His rebuttal of Mick Foley is bitter and his personal friendship with Hulk Hogan dramatically changed once he helped get Hogan into WCW. He hides little in what he thinks of some of the other wrestlers (Bret Hart, Sid Viscious, pro & con of Dusty Rhodes, etc). His dispisal of Bischoff is great and takes up much of the latter part of the book. This treatment with Bischoff and the downfall of WCW affects Flair personally, causing him such great self doubt that he nearly quit the business and it took many years to regain his confidence to return to in-ring performing.

If you're a Flair fan, you will love this book. Comparing it to other similar books, you'll think it's good enough. It's a bit sporadic in the flow because it seems as though he throws in anecdotes as he remembers them. It could have been better organized and there's still topics I wanted more on. I would love to see a Top 10 style list of his favorite matches, opponents, and worst big matches. There's areas I'd like to have seen more on but there's plenty left for Flair to do a follow up book on after he retires. Unfortunately, this is a WWE published book so the praise he lays on McMahon, Triple H, HBK, and a few others seems tainted but there is a lot of respect shown to guys like Steamboat, Piper, Arn Anderson, Sting, Dusty Rhodes, and Undertaker.

Definitely worth reading and it's certainly among the better wrestling autobiographies out there. Lots of memories in this long career by feasibly the best in-ring worker & interviewer in the business.

When I first checked out this book at a local library, I was courious about all of the earlier days of Ric Flair's career (not old enough to remember all of the early years). So once I started reading, I was hooked! I loved it, looking back to the "old school" wrestling years on up to now, I just really got into it! I admit that I didn't want to give up this book when it came time to turn it back in to the library. *chuckle* I also loved the pictures too.;) If you are a fan of wrestling, or a fan of Ric Flair, this is a must read! *cheers!*

This book did a great job at keeping me glued to the pages. The stories were interesting, especially those about his time on the road, breaking into the business. However, it felt like a meal where there is too many potatoes and not enough meat. The stories were nice, but they felt furnishings or sides to something that didn't have a compelling arch. The arch, Ric's realization of how he impacted the latest generation of wrestlers, came across with bitterness and an uber-sense of self-importance.

In the book, Flair is in a constant state of competition with his contemporaries and manages even those he compliments. In one of the most puzzling portions of the book, he says Bruno Sammartino drew lots of money for the WWWF but was never a top wrestler compared to a few pages earlier where he defined a top guy as someone who draws a lot of money. Flair's opinion on Hulk Hogan also varies depending on the chapter, but not with the natural flow of his life. There are many instances of these weird happenings within the pages of the novel.

My final complaint is one that draws on voice. The book is very obviously ghost-written, which is very unfortunate, especially because this book comes from one of the best, most entertaining interviewees ever. The toughest parts to swallow are the instances in the book where Keith Elliot Greenberg, his ghost writer, overdoes the pro-wrestler aspect of the biography. It reads too much like an old WWF Magazine written in Kayfabe in parts where you really would like to know inside information about what happened in certain wrestling situations.

Out of five, I would give this book Two Stars. I'd put it slightly above the Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper books but right behind Dynamite Kid's book, which, in turn is behind Foley's first two and the new Chris Jericho book. It wasn't disappointing at all, though. This is definitely a book recommended to smarter wrestling fans who know how things work but don't know all of the history that goes with it. Those who know quite a bit may find the book tedious and repetitive.

This is a book by Freddie's personal assisant who lived right along side him. Almost as good as being there yourself. As far as a Freddie a biography this is at the top of the list along with Mercury and Me by Jim Hutton. It's good great pictures too. I highly recommend this book and I like to think of myself as a Freddie connoisseur. Can you ever really get enough Freddie stuff. I think not.

I do not care how you feel about Freddie or people who lived his lifestyle. THE BOOK IS TERRIBLE AND THE PICTURES ARE A JOKE. I could not even give this book away to the public library!

You can read better and more accurate material for free online. There are many fansites that have reproductions of interviews conducted with Freddie and the other Queen members. A year or so ago, a trade publication dedicated the entire magazine to Queen and I learn new information.

Take my advice and search the web for information and photographs, you will be glad you did.

Peter Freestone was Freddie Mercury's personal assistant from 1979 until Freddie's death in 1991. In that time, Peter found himself in the midst of many interesting scenarios, many of which are chronicled in his book. Peter's detailed account of the layout of Garden Lodge (Freddie's palatial home in the Kensington section of London) is especially noteworthy. Peter went around the world with Freddie, experienced many tours, witnessed many recording sessions and video shoots, met many people who came and went in Freddie's life, and was even with Freddie during his declining years. One can tell his loyalty to Freddie was steadfast. Even though I favor Jim Hutton's book over all other books written about Freddie Mercury, this one still gets my stamp of approval, and I would still recommend it.

I enjoyed reading the life of Freddie Mercury on the stage and in his personal life. He was very generous to those who were close to him.

Most complete biography of Freddie Mercury that I've seen. It really takes you inside Freddie's world. After reading it, I almost felt like I knew him. A must have for any Queen fan.

The GoW guides are some of the best out there because the include every tiny bit on what you have to do in the game. I also liked that the Bestilery has improved and is a lot more clear. The only problem I have with this is that it doesnt show you the bonus costumes that you unlock as Kratos. So overall this is a very good guide and it comes in handy a lot.

This guide is well laid out. The bestiary, photos, and campaign walkthrough are top notch. I really liked the sections that explained the Greek myths, which provided extra background info about the characters in the game. It was definitely an abbreviated history lesson. The guide also contains lots of concept art in the back. You also get a nice rundown of all the hitpoints for all the enemies. All the combos are explained. If you are a fan of the series, you can't go wrong with this little guide.

Came within a week after ordering in perfect condition.

My kids and I had to rely once or twice on cheats. The puzzles are not so hard - but there are some problems with not doing things in the "right" order in Exile. Online free sites provided the answers. The walkthroughs, like the one in this book, are empty and utterly spoil the game. Don't buy this book.

Don't even waste your time getting this hint guide. The online/unofficial guides much more accurate and are always being updated

This book SAVED ME!!!! i am a BIG myst etc. fan. I think the puzzles in exile are harder than in riven or myst, so i was STUCK IN J'NANIN!!!! luckily, my dad bought this book! so I was saved. it's actually a very interesting book to read, weather you're on exile or not.

Won't you pleeease help me-....this book will get
you going again!
I was stuck in the game and so frustrated.
Bought this... on Amazon and am enjoying the
journey again.