Month: May 2010

Covet by J.R. Ward – Cannonball Read #12

Covet by J.R. Ward. First in her Fallen Angels series. High quality paranormal smut.

Covet is the first book the J.R.Ward’s new Fallen Angels series. Each novel follows Jim Heron, a man with a mysterious and troubled past who is approached by heavenly agents. They recruit him to be their agent in the final contest between heaven and hell. Seven souls are at stake, each one afflicted with one of the seven deadly sins.  In Covet, Vin DiPietro is afflicted with greed. He is a rapacious land developer in the process of buying up and developing pristine tracks of wilderness. Jim must intervene in Vin’s life to save him from damnation.

Jim is opposed by a demon and assisted by two Harley-riding, leather-jacket-wearing fallen angels. He gets additional help from Marie Therese, the romantic heroine. She and Vin share a meaningful look early in the book. and it’s off to the races! Their relationship helps keep the book firmly in the romance vein. We all know how the book is going to end, Vin and Marie Therese get their Happily Ever After. As she is a prostitute, this takes a bit of doing, but what is love without trials and tribulations. The suspense in the book comes on Jim’s side of things. His story and its resolution are far from certain and I will definitely be keeping up with his further adventures.

As this is the first book in the series a fair amount of of the book is concerned with setting up the series. I like the high concept for the novels. Instead of the standard girl meets vampire, vampire gets girl, vampire loses girl, girl gets vampire back and they live sexily ever after plots of her first series the Black Dagger Brotherhood Ward is branching out.  I like that she is trying to change up her game and try a different tack. At the same time, the novel is still set in fictional Caldwell, NY, the setting of the the Brotherhood novels. There is significant fan service in the book, with several Brotherhood characters making cameos. As an artist, she is seeking creativity through constraint. I am interested to see how she resolves the series as the purported resolution of the contest that Jim is acting in is the end of humanity’s tenure on the Earth.

-fh

P.S. In a lovely and realistic touch, Jim and Marie Therese only ever have safe sex. They are both cognizant of the fact that unprotected sex with someone you’ve known for two days is a bad idea, especially when one of you is a sex worker.

Cannonball Read – The New Math

Period of challenge – 11/1/09 – 10/31/10

Number of books to read and review – 52

As of 5/28/10 number of weeks remaining – 22 (~154 days)

Books read – 21

Reviews completed- 13

Number of books remaining to be read- 31 – 1.41 books per week or one book per 4.97 days

Number of reviews remaining to be written and posted – 39 – 1.77 per week or one review per 3.95 days

Any bets? Will I finish? If I do, on what day?

-fh

Beloved – Cannonball Read #21

Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Beloved is the story of Sethe, an ex-slave. She has escaped slavery and settled down in her mother in law’s house. The house is haunted and we find over the course of the novel that the poltergeist is the spirit of her daughter Beloved, whom Sethe killed when she though they would be taken back to a life of slavery. Beloved shows up at Sethe’s house one day. The novel is an emotional portrait of Sethe who is scarred by the horrific acts that the deep love for her children drove her to.

I was unimpressed with the book.  The prose was almost indecipherable for the first couple of chapters. I could barely make out the plot. I couldn’t tell if Morrison was deliberately trying to confuse the reader or if she just lacked the skill to carry off the writing style she was attempting. After the opening chapters the prose became easier to comprehend but the narrative was completely predictable. The method of Beloved’s death is hinted at for two thirds of the book but I knew immediately what had happened.

My experience of Beloved was tainted by the seminal  nature of the book. Before it was published there was no widely available, critically acclaimed novel illustrating the psychological impact of slavery. Because Beloved was so widely acclaimed it has entered the public subconscious. It had nothing new to tell me because its message has so permeated the culture I inhabit.  Beloved gets credit for paving the way for serious novels about slavery, for making a huge impact on modern American thought about the experience of slavery for black women.  It just doesn’t get credit for being an enjoyable read.

-fh

Front On

Hey, ShackNews has brand new information on Front Mission Evolved, the latest in the long-running mech strategy game that I used to really like back on the PS1! It’s supposed to be coming out any day now, so I’m really looking forward to some really polished pre-release publicity stuff! Let’s dig in:

Previously due during the vague “Spring 2010” timeframe, Double Helix’s mech-tastic action game Front Mission Evolved will now arrive at North American retailers in PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 form on September 14, 2010.

Oh. Dang. Well, I guess they’re taking the time to really do the game right!

Alongside the release date, publisher Square Enix offered up a new trailer and several new screenshots, plus word that the PC edition will be playable in stereoscopic 3D.

I… wait, what? Why? What could adding 3-d headache-o-vision add? I could see it maybe being relevant for an action title, but certainly not for a turn-based strategy title.

Evolved marks a departure from traditional Front Mission entries, focusing on real-time third-person action instead of the turn-based strategy the series is known for. In addition to its single-player campaign, Evolved will also pack four multiplayer modes and the ability for players to customize their “wanzers” with a variety of parts and weapons.

…

So instead of the nichey little strategy title with the ridiculous length and deep squad customization that I was looking forward to, you’re doing the second most played-out genre possible – right after FPS – and tossing in a schlocky flavor-of-the-month technology gimmick as well?

*Sigh* If I was uninterested in Front Mission Evolved before, I’m downright incurious now. I’d be willing to give it a chance on its own terms as a new action title, but all the franchise goodwill I had saved up is out the window now.

-ssr

Podcandy: Irrational Behavior

Irrational Games, nee 2K Boston, nee Looking Glass Studios, has a half-hour monthly podcast called Irrational Behavior. It consists of five to seven very short interview segments with various employees of the studio, not least among them Irrational impresario Ken Levine. As these are people who’ve had long careers at some of the more creative game studios around, their stories are uniformly interesting and frequently delivered with more than a little flair. The whole thing is nicely produced, with plenty of musical bumpers and narration by GFW/EGM alumnus Shawn Elliott to tie it all together.

Podcasts can be stuffed with filler or too topical to retain value in the future. At their worst, podcasts are little more than torrents of consciousness; unfiltered, meandering, and ultimately frustrating. Irrational Behavior avoids all of these traps, although probably at the cost of a more rapid publication schedule. The cast is slick, to the point, and satisfying. It is, of course, marketing, but it is also entertaining, and as long as you bear in mind what it is you are listening to, the fun can be safely sluiced out of the propaganda via various mechanisms within your brain.

You can find Irrational Behavior on the iTunes store, or get all of the episodes from the Irrational Games website here.

-ssr

And The Award for Honest Reflection Upon Your Business Model That You Probably Oughtn’t to Have Told a Reporter Goes To:

Crystal Dynamics’ global brand director Karl Stewart, for telling CVG in all earnestness:

“I think the model as we see it right now is a frail one. Having the used market is not beneficial to any of us.”

Which is a completely true and honest statement, for values of the word “us” that do not include the subset “customers”. Try to keep that in mind the next time you decide to sling flame online in the name of your favorite major game corporation.

This Project $10 thing from EA is starting to get a bit out of hand. I didn’t particularly care when it was just extra stuff like costumes and weapons that aren’t part of the core experience of a game; in fact, I thought it was a clever way to incentivize buying a new title. The new deal, where sports games will cost an extra $10 to play online if bought used, flips that all upside down. It’s taken what originally sounded like a reasonable proposal – here’s a nice present if you do things the way that’s good for us – and turns it into a muscle play. I can’t imagine nearly as many people are going to stick up for the “buy it new or it’s broken and you’ll pay to fix it” model as were willing to speak out in favor of new-game bonuses. We’re not far now from simply having console games that require a 1-time activation code – free with a new copy, $60 otherwise – to work at all. we’ve already taken the leap that gets us about halfway there.

Continue reading And The Award for Honest Reflection Upon Your Business Model That You Probably Oughtn’t to Have Told a Reporter Goes To:

Assassin’s Creed II – Downloadable Mal-Content

Yesterday, after getting all of the trophies for Assassin’s Creed II I had a hankering to stab some more people in the throat and run over rooftops. I downloaded the DLC currently available: The Battle of Forli and The Bonfire of the Vanities: Black Edition with 3 Templar Lairs. All of this cost me $10.98.

The DLC  was not all that.

Continue reading Assassin’s Creed II – Downloadable Mal-Content

Make Me Play Videogames: What’s Going Wrong Here

There’s no two ways about it: this experiment with Shadow of the Colossus is not going well. I sit down to decide what to do with my evening, and as my glance strays towards the PS2, SotC disc slumbering away in its tray, I remember that I have Space Marines to paint. Episodes of Glee to watch. Dishes to wash. The catbox could use cleaning.

Apparently I don’t want to play this game anymore.

There’s a lot to like about Colossus, and I touched on some of it in the last podcast. It’s beautifully atmospheric. The designs of the colossi are interesting, and the puzzles are interesting to figure out and solve. I’m just looking for a bit more, I suppose.

Continue reading Make Me Play Videogames: What’s Going Wrong Here

Chat Box

Sonic Rob: oh fuck, we watched New Moon last night
Sonic Rob: we thought it would be stupid, mindless laugh-at-the-movie fun
Sonic Rob: it was fucking pain rendered in photons
FyreHaar: dude
FyreHaar: were you drunk?
FyreHaar: I think you need to be drunk