“A rebuke to everything that Derp Of Duty stood for, this shows that you can make a great comedy adventure game with a non-existent budget. In other words, this is surprisingly awesome.”
Ok, actually all I did was replay the couple seconds where the game narrator says the player’s making a disembodied voice feel awkward, and the video narrator laughs and says “This is how it’s done!” That happens at 5:54, in case you want to skip ahead too.
Jerry Bonner, the new Indie Gamer Guy over at Indie Gamer Chick, is amazing games journalist and really insightful games writer. Like here, in his latest piece:
I believe that more entirely narrative driven games where there are no weapons and no one dies like Gone Home need to exist if video games are to evolve, transcend and flourish as an artistic medium.
This is brilliant and I couldn’t agree more.
Later in the same piece, he adds:
(Fuck, if I see one more goddamn indie puzzle/platformer somebody’s gonna get cut. No joke.)
Couldn’t agree more on that part, either.
Harold and I live in a lovely, classic apartment building, with a small, rounded pool just outside our door. He goes to swim at lunch every day, and sometimes I go to the pool just to put my feet in the water. Also, our wifi reaches to the pool, so I have spent a great deal of time this summer lying next to the pool reading or writing. Covered in SPF 5,000, but still. Lying in a deck chair writing about videogames is pretty great.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this here, but everyone in our building is about a hundred years old, so the pool is never loud or crowded. The other residents are all owners, and have lived here for years, even decades, and there’s some sort of owner’s board, too. Our neighbors could not hide their delight when they discovered that the new people in The Rental Unit were a young professional couple and not students.
At night, the pool is lit from below, and it makes blue ripples across our ceiling, and it’s so tempting that sometimes we run down and go swimming at night even though I’m pretty sure the pool’s meant to be closed after dark.
Sometimes I say that Harold works all night, but the other night it was literally midnight and Harold was still putting out producer-y fires, and I couldn’t make him come outside with me. I went down alone, and sat by the steps, and dipped my feet in the blue-lit pool, and it was wonderfully warm. North Carolina and I do not always (ever) get along, but the warm summer evenings are lovely. The bottom of my skirt got splashed, so I might as well get in a little more, and then my t-shirt was wet too, so I just jumped in. I swam until I got tired, and then I lay on my back in the warm, bright pool, looking up at the stars. And it was awesome.
So that, in case the president of the board is wondering, is why there was a 30-year-old woman swimming with her clothes on in the middle of the night.
After I showed Grumpy Goats to my game design students, we had a discussion about elements of Facebook games, and I showed them World of Secrets.
One might not think a Facebook hidden object game lends itself well to a co-op game for teenagers. (Have I mentioned my amazing gamer/teacher skills.) But we created house rules in which one player was on the computer, and the three others were circling found items on the whiteboard projection of the screen, so when the computer player got stuck, his friends had given him hints already! There was a great deal of screaming and laughing over finding the missing items, and a lot of excitement over completing the scenes.
Now there’s a roundabout on my way to work. I’ve been working offsite for a couple weeks, driving to Raleigh, and while I loved the school, I’ll admit to looking out at the 40 traffic sometimes and feeling like a mythological figure unable to escape her tragic fate. And while I wasn’t driving my nice short easy commute, a brand new roundabout was built. You win this round, North Carolina.
I’m not saying that people here love driving and hate turn signals, but here’s the local paper, the News & Observers, noting 84 crashes after a year’s operation of the Hillsborough roundabout. The N&O has a followup story describing how “Traffic engineers realized some drivers would have trouble, so they published an illustrated navigation guide before the roundabout opened“. It makes Harold sad when I say mean things about the locals, so I’ll just post those without further comment.
“There’s a new roundabout on my commute,” I said grumpily, to a perfectly nice local person.
“A what?”
Right, roundabout. Sometimes I’ll say something the British way and it usually feels like a greeting from my Scottish granny. A word I must have learned from her, or heard her say, and now I say it that way too. It usually makes me very happy.
“I meant a rotary.” I tried again. But I’m not in Massachusetts, so that also got me a blank stare. “A freaking traffic circle?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what everyone driving through it is also thinking.”
Harold and I were reading in the coffeeshop when he came across this little feature on “Star Trek: Rivals” in Star Trek magazine. We were so thrilled to see it! We’ve been writing social content for the game for a while now, which has been great fun, and it’s good to see the game getting fan recognition. I’m so proud of the work my friends at Elephant Mouse (formerly Villain Games, the developers of Lil’ Birds) have done on this game!
I stumbled across this interview of Amy Shearn, the author of the amazing novel The Mermaid of Brooklyn, which I loved and couldn’t recommend more highly. Here, she’s asked a particularly inane question, and responds cleverly about the power of good fiction.
How can women who don’t have children appreciate this book?
One of my favourite all-time novels is Moby Dick, and I have never been on a whale ship, nor do I ever hope to be. I also love The Sun Also Rises, and I am not an expatriate and I have never seen a bullfight. I adore The Cather in The Rye, and yet, I am not a young boy running away from boarding school.
I happen to think Holden Caulfield is a whiny little prat, but what a brilliant answer to the question!
Marcus and Perillia, now middle aged, are visiting the home of their adopted daughter and son-in-law, when — of course — there’s a brutal murder in the countryside town. As this is the fifteenth time that Corvinus and a corpse have been in the same place at the same time, Perillia responds with a somewhat exasperated Again, dear? Must we? but their daughter jumps into the investigation excitedly. She might not be Corvinus’ biological daughter, but she’s definitely his successor, munching on huge meals while discussing bodies. (Don’t worry, Perillia always comes around.)
Germanicus has a much more epic scale, weaving the mystery around the mysterious deaths of the Julio-Claudians, and featuring prominent historical figures. In Solid Citizens, though, Corvinus is having a Winter Festival holiday in a quiet town when the mystery unfolds. City reputations are at state, and not the fate of the entire Roman empire (and therefore much of Western civilization), but a mild and middle-aged Corvinus still gets up to his old tricks, harassing the local bigwigs and snooping around.
Many delightful historical novels are ruined by a too-modern protagonist. It’s hard for me to get past a character who’s well-read and well-bathed and socially conscious in ways that make no sense for the time and place.
But Marcus Corvinus is a Roman. He munches Roman meals, even if dormice and garum might not be appealing to modern readers. He snarks about political machinations, accepting a certain level of corruption and bribery, but too much smacks of an unseemly greed. He accepts slaves as his due, as well. Meton, the Corvinus household’s temperamental chef, has been left behind in Rome, but Bathyllus, the proper butler, has accompanied the household to make sure standards don’t fall, even on holiday.
The mystery unfolds as Corvinus starts nosing around, turning up secrets in an upstanding prominent family, and — as usually happens whenever Corvinus pries — turning up several extra scandals as well. Another wonderful Roman adventure from David Wishart, and good motivation for me to hunt down the remaining Marcus Corvinus mysteries.
This review is based upon an ARC. Thanks! Opinions are my own, of course, and a free book has never stopped me from snarking about awful prose before.
Showing off Grumpy Goats to my game design students.
Geno is one of these warriors, motivated by both battlelust and a calmly intellectual interest in combat strategy. That seems to be all that motivates the soldiers, who basically shrug and go on with dinner when told they’re not so much in Valhalla as in a bootcamp for fighting the gods’ battles.
The crew of supersoldiers travel through time and space, awaking in historical battles to turn the tide for one side over the other. One soldier, Geno, is singled out for special assignments and cryptic messages by Hermes, the group’s leader, but it’s only when he encounters others like him, other strong, fast and massive supersoldiers, in the ranks of ancient warriors, that he begins to question who and what he is working for…
Without revealing too much of the book, Geno does start to develop emotions, as well as rediscover memories of his previous life, and even begins a relationship with Livia, another warrior, as he tries to discover who he is and what he’s doing.
‘No Other Gods’ blends myth and technology in the story of a futuristic warrior serving the gods. John Koetsier has created a scifi page-turner with enough historical detail to ground it. The science fiction world is fantastic, but still quite believable, perhaps thanks to Koetsier’s background in tech journalism. Ancient battles are depicted as a clash of disparate tribes or clans, each other slightly different motivations, which seems more genuine that the the typical, clear-cut narrative of an army battling another army. I look forward to reading more of Koetsier’s fiction.
