Brooders

This is “the” novel that coined the term “Cyberpunk”.

This short story reads more like “Ferris Buelers Day off” crossed with “Wargames”. (Weird .. both of those starred Matthew Broderick).

You can feel the early 80’s influence throughout the story, which is not surprising.

You can get a hold of the original short story at the Cyberpunk Database – Cyberpunk or from Bruce Bethke’s own site. It can be considered donationware.

The general story:

Young kids, computer wizkids, are planning some stunts that the old folks (aka parents, society) just don’t understand. Like most cyberpunk literature, it focuses on how people gain power through knowledge, although in this tale, the power of the family unit is also present. I don’t want this to sound like a drama novel, but it’s just so .. 80’s I guess.

It’s definetly worth a look, this is how Cyberpunk got coined.

Rating: 8/10

I just stumbled through some notes and found Neocron – A cyberpunk-esque MMORG.

Originally, I found thi gem from The Search for the Holy MMORPG: Part Four. They rated it as a visually good game.

As a taste of the graphics, we can see their plaza:

(Screen cap from their website,
http://ng.neocron.com/index.php?id=100)

Refreshing to see we have some sort of Matrix/Cyberspace interaction, and not just a FPS with a theme. Unlike Shadowrun which seemed to just be a FPS with the name and genre’d graphics, although this is only from what I’ve read. Neocron’s site mentions that “hackers” can go up against security systems, steal information, and the usual cyberpunk cowboy kind of stuff.

It also looks like in Neocron, you can play a strategy style game (like developing skills, building and scrounging, etc ) if your not just a move-and-shoot fan. All runners (sounds like someone there played shadowrun), start with an apartment, I guess that’s a safe haven.

I think it might be worth trying out, although the game files have a 1.7 Gigabyte download !

NeoScholar.net is a side project of mine to search for books and stuff.

Currently it only search Amazon and Alibris (for price comparisons). It might be useful (and cheaper) to use this site if you want to purchase some books. So I thought I would “write software I wanted“, to help buy books, so this is the result.

So if your interested, I made some notes about:

• Buying Books online
• Alibris search integration

Anyway .. NeoScholar helps me find and buy books online.