Nightside 2: Agents of light and darkness

Briefer post for the second installment. This one is about the unholy grail. Both sides, heaven and hell, wants it. Taylor is stuck in the middle along with most of The Nightside. Several aspects of the book appealed to me, especially the portrayal of Angels as all powerful, a concept that is sorely lacking from most modern stories. The series is starting to feel like a travel guide though. You get flipped from area to area (scene to scene in the quicker paced movie lingo), from character to character. Some die in the very same scene as they get their introduction, leaving you wondering if there’ll be a retrospective featuring them at some point.

Not sure what to make of the “frail flower with thorns that can poison you” persona of Suzy Shotgun. She was fine as a sideline in the first book but she stars as an outright sidekick in this one. In some way she invokes the Sam and Max feeling, even the same terms to some length; “Time for a bit of senseless violence?” I hope she’ll be scaled down or, even better, die in some future book. She could serve as some proper guilty conscience fodder for Taylor.

It’s also somewhat annoying that Taylor only has to flutter his eyelashes to scare the crap out of everyone from regular people to demons. Granted, it’s extremely rewarding to experience someone who isn’t trying to conceal the extent of his abilities in the rather emo fashion of most anime and modern superhero movies. Never quite understood the point of it since it only makes the story drag. That’s something you can’t accuse The Nightside series of, it never drags. It chugs along with the momentum of an avalanche.

Nightside 1: Something from the nightside

This is yet another spin on the Crowley and/or Constantine / Hellblazer formula. I was extremely pleased with Carey’s version of it in his Felix Castor series and entered The Nightside with equal glee. It didn’t quite grip me as fiercely but it’s an interesting take, The Nightside that is. It’ll remind you, in more than one way, of the classic movie Nightbreed but it focuses on the area instead of the individuals.

That’s not to say there aren’t interesting characters, quite the contrary; most personas in this book are madly exaggerated. Want some examples? Razor Eddie, Punk god of the straight razor (a phrase used quite a lot). Apparently an immortal human’ish entity that kills without impunity, but he’s a good guy since he kills… well, bad guys. Mostly. Then there’s Suzy Shotgun. She made clothing from the first person she killed. When she was twelve.

All of this could easily turn really cheese but it’s done tongue in cheek and Simon pulls it off. It never struck me as distracting and the larger than life characters helps you suspend your disbelief. Not as fond of the main character, he’s pretty much the opposite of Constantine or Castor. Apparently his mother was a demon and his birth endowed him with special powers. He can find just about anything, and not just tangible things but abstract concepts.

His abilities and past has made most of The Nightside fear him. It feels odd to follow a character that inspires fear wherever he goes when we’re used to the rather pathetic (but powerful) wretches in other supernatural series. But it’s original and the author spins the world to fit. How can we have an almost all-powerful protagonist and still weave a story around him? Make the world even more powerful and let the rulers of that world conspire against him.

I’ll end it here, there’s no way for me to easily summarize The Nightside but I would like to bring up one particular point that made me hopeful for future volumes. The protagonists first client is the archetypical annoying, bitchy woman who considers herself more than everyone around him. This is a concept exploited in several movies and usually results in her becoming an endearingly ignorant sidekick. But this book goes against the cliché in a major way which felt extremely refreshing. Go nab it.

MAG

Ever since Team Fortress 2 was new I’ve been waiting for something to change the FPS genre. To be entirely honest I’ve been waiting ever since Counter-strike. Yes, there’s been some that drew my attention. The battlefield series was nice at times. I did enjoy several random shooters that cropped up with multiplayer slapped on, but they never survived for more than a couple of months.

Several behemoths have arrived, modern warfare 1&2 to name the largest, but they never appealed to me. Sure, they were certainly improvements over playing older FPSes but they didn’t really offer anything new. Just refinements. Sometimes it seemed like the FPS genre took huge steps backwards, like the gimped number of players in MW2. I was on the verge of giving up on the shooter genre entirely and succumb to the allure of more serious timesinks, MMORPGS being the worst candidate but also the most alluring. That is, until MAG arrived.

M.A.G. (or Massive Action Game, as it used to be called) is a gamechanger. Critics have levied complaints similar to what I mentioned above with gameplay not really being truly innovate, just refinements of what already existed. And they’re right. Players have complained about it only being available for the PS3 and not the PC, and I agree with them. The PC would have been the superior platform for the game. None of that really matters though. Why? Because of 256 players.

Massive doesn’t quite describe the feeling of seeing three full squads (of eight) being obliterated by a strafing run called in by your platoon leader. Action is an entirely subpar term to use when trying to describe how you, half deafened by the roar of a grenade, try desperately to dash to the rest of your squad as the air pressure of an enemy mortar strike churn the concrete around you to dust and blur your vision. Game is a word best forgotten as you get covering fire from your team while you extract the missile launcher and aim it towards the enemy APC that is trying to punch through your barricade, running over several of your engineers in the process.

There’s flaws to this game. Large flaws. The three different teams have identical talent tree points that work sort of like what you’d expect from an RPG. You level up by getting experience via a plethora of ways. You could focus on killing enemy soldiers, healing / reviving your teammates. Be an engineer and repair blown up bunkers or torn down gates. But what’s the point of having different factions if they’re ultimately identical? I’ve heard some nonsense about base stats being different but that hardly makes up for it. Balance isn’t an issue, if something as bloated as WoW can have some semblance of balance then an FPS surely can.

To make matters worse the developers have committed the ultimate sin; they punish players that enjoy the game so much that they want to experiment. You see, just like in WoW it will cost you to reset your talent tree. You need to pay re-spec points in order to do so. You get these points at a 1:1 ratio with experience gains. Initially it isn’t a problem since it starts at a meager 3k. As you first start playing you hardly even notice the experience tick by since everything is so new.

But, exactly as in WoW, the cost increases with each re-spec you commit. 3k becomes 5k, which becomes 10k, 17k, 26k. I’m at the point where I’ve invested into a line, just to experiment with it, but won’t be able to re-spec out of it for weeks (of real time). Nice one. I enjoy your game, I want to experience everything you have to offer and now you punish me for doing so. Good on you Zipper.

Naturally there’s good points. Great points in fact. The maps are fantastic, the weapons feel solid, the graphics aren’t the best due to the PS3s limited amount of RAM but they really cram a lot of punch into each byte when you consider the scope of the game. The game relies utterly on teamwork since trying to play like in Modern Warfare and dash in Rambo style will get you slaughtered in seconds. It might work when the next room only contained 4 enemies, as in other FPSes, but when it contains 32 or even 64 you can easily calculate your odds of survival.

In order to promote teamwork the squad leader sets objectives. These might be along the lines of; burn down that bunker, capture that vehicle, repair that barricade or defend that point. Following these orders effectively doubles the amount of experience you get. Naturally only a fool would want to run around alone. Other benefits include getting a portion of the experience if you wound an enemy but don’t get the final killing shot. Your experience also doesn’t detract from the amount that the person who really got the killing blow would receive.

What I like the most is the build system. You get 5 slots, each slot contains a particular configuration of weapons, armor, tools, explosives and such. Since you get 60 levels before reaching the cap you’re certainly not locked into a particular role. Maybe you feel like being a sniper, a mechanic, a medic and a submachine gunner? No problem at all. Despite the re-spec system trying desperately to crush your joy you get several chances to experiment and pick the roles you prefer. Then you can create either hybrid builds or specific builds to fill those 5 slots, easily switching between them whenever you die.

This game is close to perfect. You owe it to yourself to grab it with all haste. If you’ve been holding off buying a PS3 then this and MGS4 should be enough to convince anyone. Buy it and join the brotherhood of Sever (S.V.E.R.), join us today brother!

Crescent

Been going to podiobooks on and off for quite a while. There’s some gems there if you know where to look. I stumbled across Crescent by accident and the summary does sound quite appealing;

“Darkness has inspired fear since mankind first watched the sun go down. Bad things hide in the dark feral beasts with mouths full of razors waiting for a taste of flesh. But now, the darkness is stirring with a life of its own. Crescent Station is the last bastion of civilization, floating in the cold, outer systems where colonized space gives way to the sparser settlements of the Frontier. Like the boom towns of distant Earth s Old American West, Crescent Station is a gateway to power, wealth, and opportunity for anyone who isn t afraid to get his or her hands dirty. But deep within the station s bowels, in Crescent s darkest and most secret places, an ancient evil is awakening and hungry, and it threatens the very fabric of space and time. Will the residents of Crescent Station find a way to stop it before the terror drives them insane? Or is it already too late?”

Really, doesn’t that sound just fantastic? And it is, mostly. I’d probably call this a mix of Event Horizon and Dallas. The sci-fi bits are great, the horror bits are superb and the atmosphere is oppressing. You’ll lick the plate clean if you’re into that sort of thing.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of intrigue going around on the station. Infidelity, a megalomaniacal station mayor and nymphomaniacal research assistants. Actually, that does sound pretty good but Phil Rossi goes a bit too far. The majority of the book isn’t about the supernatural events, nor are they even buildups to it. Instead they’re used to introduce us to the characters.

Logical, since without emotional attachments we don’t care what happens to them. But everyone that actually dies aren’t really expanded upon (with a single, notable, exception). They get single paragraph lives in some chapters, some creeping up to three or four.

I’d surely recommend this story, especially since it’s free. It’s somewhat open ended and I’d jump on the opportunity to buy a sequel. I just hope it’ll be more Event Horizon and less Dallas next time.

Get your piece of space here. For free.

I am legend

I’m one of those people that watched the movie before the book and I really enjoyed Will Smith’s performance, despite several of my friends telling me that it didn’t hold a candle to the actual book. Naturally I couldn’t let this sleight towards the bald actor remain untouched so I dug out a copy of the book and got to it.

Going to keep this short and sweet. Yes, I preferred the book. It had a much more dystopian and apocalyptic feel to it. For some reason I preferred the more virus’ish feel of the creatures in the movie though. Labeling them as outright vampires felt odd, even though he did do a great job of explaining various plagues as outbreaks of the vampire “genome”.

Having watched Lost I immediately found myself chuckling as I referred to the new order of humans as “the others”. Overall a great read and, as previously stated, a much gloomier ending. And you can’t go wrong with doom and gloom.

I did find the differing use of the title itself interesting. In the movie the term “I am legend” is used in conjuncture with the surviving members of humanity. While in the book it has an entirely different, and much darker meaning as the protagonist is viewed as a… well, antagonist. A slayer of loved ones. The boogeyman who lurks in the light, as opposed to the dark.

Mörkrädd

Although the book is Swedish I will keep this post in english for the sake of continuity with the rest of this blog.

Mörkrädd (Afraid of the dark) is a psychological thriller with any elements of the supernatural left to the imagination and deductive reasoning of the reader. It isn’t a monster story but a rather heartfelt, desperate segment from a scarred man. It isn’t filled with cheap scares but damaged women whose fake bravado is as large as the protagonist’s fear of the unknown.

To quickly summarize the plot; a man is deathly afraid of the dark due to an event that occurred in his youth. It seems that he was trapped in the woods by a group of boys and scared witless. Yet he came out of the confrontation with this newfound fear, while another of the boys was permanently paralyzed from the encounter. At a later confrontation it seemed like the boys were afraid of him, not the other way around.

In order to combat this fear, which is consuming his life bit by bit, he seeks advice from a councilor. This individual tells him that trial by fire is the only surefire way of getting to terms with it. Said and done he books a lonesome cabin in the northern wood. Isolated. Dark. It doesn’t go exactly as planned.

While the underlying story is what truly gripped me I couldn’t help but feel enthralled by the meta stories as well. You have the sister who is so fed up with his constant issues that she withdraws entirely, despite constantly claiming to “be on his side” and “you can do it, brother”.

He encounters another woman who is equally damaged and doesn’t just withdraw from him but from any type of commitment. I can relate to this withdrawal mentality. Have you ever seen someone get mugged, or someone fall down and hurt themselves on the street but you just kept walking? My story is similar but not identical.

I had an ex-junkie living in the same building as me and my fiance did. He had been given the apartment by the community since he was recovering. Obviously things didn’t go exactly as he wanted them to (or did they? I don’t know), but when his need came a knocking his previously annoying tendency to constantly ask for favors got turned up several notches. We didn’t help, we withdrew. Heck, we even moved eventually. Not because of him but we certainly didn’t give him any forwarding address. Self-preservation or cowardice on our part? Not sure but the mentality has become prevalent in today’s society. There’s just too many people that want help.

The final meta plot is the old question of “what is real”? What exactly is reality? Is it external influences that we process internally, or is it internal expressions we process externally? If you see something unspeakable watching you from a dark corner, is it real or isn’t it? Is it real for the person enduring that nightmare and not real to the rest of us, or is it real to everyone yet most of us just aren’t sharing the experience? Very meta, rather circular logic but you got to love pondering the question.

If you’re swedish then you should run out and get this novel by Andreas Roman. I’m not sure if there is an english translation but a google of his name might reveal it.

Dark nebula episode 1

I just noticed a rather peculiar thing; haven’t posted a single iphone game blog entry, despite the fact that I spend at least an hour a day glued to one game or another. Is this because most of the games are rather simplistic and not worthy of an entire post? Might be true for the vast majority of games in the appstore but certainly not all of them. There’s some utter gems in there. Like Dark nebula.

Made by swedish studio and held up to the “magnifying glass of utmost scrutiny”. Everything about this game oozes perfection, from the fantastic (and appropriate) graphics to the audio and back to the mechanics. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I outright loathe accelerometer / tilt controls. When I play a game I want to be looking at the game, not the side of my iPhone. Most tilt games fails utterly in this regard but not Dark Nebula.

They’ve done… something, not entirely sure what, to make sure that you never tilt it too much yet they don’t remove any fine-tuning that I noticed. Think of the control nexus as the core of your device, tilting it beyond the “walls” of that core would not result in improved speed or make the ball turn quicker.

Gameplay wise it’s extremely rudimentary, in the good way. You control a ball, you have to steer that ball through various levels filled with dangers (be it spikes, sheer drops or what have you). It gets somewhat more complex with the concept of powering up your ball with energy of a particular kind (red, green, blue). If your ball isn’t tuned to a particular energy then you cannot cross some barriers. Simple but perfect.

Don’t really have a single complaint. Sure, I would have liked a virtual thumbpad so I didn’t have to tilt my device at all and the game is somewhat short. Another batch of levels and I’d be a happy camper, yet for the price I won’t outright complain about it, just await the sequel. Go grab it with all haste.

Aliens: Steel egg

Having read the rather good “No Exit” I was expecting equally good things from “Steel egg”, unfortunately I was somewhat disappointed. Not really because of the story itself or the author’s intentions, but the hazy, non-canonical way the Alien universe has unfolded.

When we were first introduced to aliens in the original film a la Ripley it felt like an epic first contact. This book takes place before that in a sort of prequel with a derelict spaceship having been detected due to its beacon (ring a bell?). Unfortunately the AvP movie (which I saw before I read this book, but it was made after) defined the first contact scenario as before even that, in fact it was before Weland Yutani even existed on earth itself. The problem is that if first contact keeps getting moved around you can never determine the true, underlying plot. Something most of us want the ability to do.

Let’s move on to the plot. There’s a race to this abandoned vessel, as usual there’s multiple factions trying to reach it first. You have the usual cast of characters including the hero, the scientist, engineers and the casually arrogant, gloryhound of a scientist that wants nothing more than to make sure he gets out on top. As they blunder into the belly of the beast, so to say, chaos ensues.

Overall I enjoyed it. There were some good descriptions of alien technology that tickled my imagination. Of course, there were also long, focused segments on technology that felt rather uninspired. Still, I feel satisfied leaving the second “license” book from this series and can’t help but feel curious about what the next one will entail. The editors must be outright fantastic to be able to pick authors of this calibre, or at least fine-tuning their work to a point where it feels cohesive to the alien universe. Just really wish all these different media forms would stop pulling in different directions and give us a proper, canonical storyline.

Discworld: Unseen academicals

Won’t be a long post since I fully expect any decently sane person to be following the Discworld series as avidly as I am. I mostly just wanted to breathe a sigh of relief. With mr Pratchett’s recent medical problems a natural fear probably crept up on most of his fans; will his last books suffer from this debilitating disease as much as he is?

Fortunately I can now say no. At least not yet. Unseen academicals, despite covering a topic as bleary as football, hits the usual high marks in not only comedic content but also for phrasing and clever-arsed’ness (that last one is a technical qualification). Despite not being entirely as entertained as I was by Making Money or several other ones I’m quite ready to blame that fact on the topic. The book is still vastly superior to several of his earlier works, including most of the witches-books.

My hopes and prayers are with mr Pratchett and I’m sure all of his fans hope that he will make it through his troubles, even if the chance of a full recovery is slim to none.

Dawn of war: Winter assault

I was really, really looking forward to this since I thoroughly enjoyed the first installment of the series. While I’m usually enthralled by the vicious lives of the nobel and uncompromising space marine chapters; it’s always been the imperial guard that truly draw me into the Warhammer 40k universe.

These are the poor blokes that get sent into battles not wearing inches thick battle armor but a leather vest and sub-par weaponry. These are the men that die by the hundreds in every barrage made against their trenches, not the ones that single handedly kill half a dozen orcs. Relic didn’t let me down.

The mechanics you learned from the first game remain the same but you have to adapt (or simply discard) every tactic you used. You can load up with 10 squads of fully upgraded infantery units, send them in and expect a victory. These little buggers will die in droves if not micro-managed and supported by heavy weaponry. A truly enjoyable campaign for a strategy game.

Not so much when it came to the ork and chaos campaign. While I never found the orks too interesting I’ve been a sucker for chaos since the original board game was released. The entire ordeal felt somewhat lackluster unfortunately, especially after the well balanced and interesting imperial guard campaign. It might be because you have to play, basically, the same maps all over again or that the developers spent themselves on the first. Despite excellent voice acting (with chaos characters being appropriately over the top) the latter part of the game is skippable.

I did encounter some annoying problems with this game. If you’re going to play it then you must update to version 1.5. I didn’t know this since I couldn’t find a proper patch page anywhere on the official sites. I didn’t even find references to a 1.5 patch until I googled and visited random download sites.

You see, our old friend securom has struck again. This game will not work with newer versions of windows. Patch 1.5 removes the disc requirement. If you’re getting the message “wrong disc inserted” then this is what is causing it.

Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.