C.T. Phipps's Blog, page 101
January 27, 2016
Lucifer (television series) pilot review
I'm a big fan of Neil Gaiman's Lucifer from Sandman and less of the spin-off series which took the basic concept and ran with it in a direction I didn't care for. The premise for those Philistines (just kidding) unfamiliar with Sandman is Lucifer decides to quit being ruler of Hell. He's been at the job for millennium and, bluntly, it sucks. Heading up to planet Earth, he becomes a piano player and leaves all of the damned to their own devices.
The comic s...
January 26, 2016
Prince of Fools review
Mark Lawrence is one of my favorite new writers. I say new because I only started reading him in 2015. He's rapidly approaching Jim Butcher and Peter David levels of providing me with some of my most-consistently entertaining novels. Rare is the author who I look at and say, "Well, I'm going to enjoy what he writes no matter what it is." This is a fairly hefty bit of praise after three novels.
Now four.
The Broken Empire Trilogy was an ex...
January 25, 2016
Ascension mini-series review
Warning - this review will contains spoilers for the Ascension mini-series.
I'm presently enjoying The Expanse and Killjoys series on the Syfy channel, which is the first sign of the old (note the spelling) Sci-Fi channel quality coming back for me. I'm not done with either season, though, so I thought I would take time to discuss one of the failed efforts of the network. Specifically, the Ascension mini-series.
The premise is interesting but has the proble...
January 23, 2016
Why is Dragon Age moving away from Dark Fantasy?
Dragon Age: Origins is one of my favorite video games of all time. It's not the greatest video game in terms of originality or gameplay but it does something which I give it a lot of credit for: it mastered immersion and mood. By the time you finished DA:O, you knew everything you needed to know about elves, dwarves, Fereldan, Darkspawn, mages, Templars, and a few dozen other groups.
But what I liked most about DA:O is that the setting sucked. One of the t...
January 22, 2016
Dragon's Lair review
Dragon's Lair is an interesting game to review as you wouldn't think it would still be playable despite the fact it came out in 1983. However, Dragon's Lair has been ported to console after console largely unchanged despite the fact it's more than three decades later. This is because of the Don Bluth animation which means the original laser-disc "graphics" are every bit as good as they were when I was three. I decided to play the game on my Xbox 360 because it hasn't yet be...
January 20, 2016
Grimdark Magazine 6# is out with articles by me
I'm pleased to say Grimdark Magazine, a great fanzine I have a lot of respect for, has seen fit to include two articles by me in their latest publication. These are, "WHO IS THE GRIMDARK VILLAIN?" which is a sequel to a similar article by in Grimdark Magazine 5#. I also do a review of the Dishonored Definitive Edition. There's a really great interview with Aliette de Bodard plus a round table discussion of grimdark with Tim Marquitz, Geoff Brown, Katie Cord, and Shawn Speakman. This is in add...
Star Trek: Bridge Commander review
This is a retro-review. I'm pretty sure no one is going to go out of their way to purchase a 2002 game, even if they could get it to work in 2016. However, it's fun to talk about your memories of games sometimes as well as what you think was enjoyable about them. Besides, who know what is available on the internet if you look far enough.
Star Trek: Bridge Commander actually holds up remarkably well because it makes the surprisingly good decision of keeping...
January 19, 2016
Star Trek: Voyager: Acts of Contrition
Star Trek: Voyager is a series with an interesting relationship to my teenage years. It's probably my second-to-least favorite Star Trek but I know all of the cast intimately and was invested in their quest to get home. If I had to explain it in simple terms, I probably liked the cast of Voyager more than anyone else save the Original Series' crew but they had really bad plots. Some really good ones too, mind you, but not so much to balance things out.
As...
January 17, 2016
Star Trek: New Frontier: Dark Allies review
Dark Allies is another great book in the Star Trek: New Frontier series. I've mentioned this is my favorite series in the Star Trek novelverse and it's up there with my favorite series of books all round. The books are funny, adventurous, entertaining, moving, serious, and ridiculous all in one. The premise of the books is the U.S.S Excalibur, led by eccentric military genius Mackenzie Calhoun, and populated by a band of misfits has been sent into the former Thallonian Empi...
Undead L.A. review
Devan Sagliani is the grandmaster of independent zombie fiction. In a genre which has produced thousands of (largely sub-par) works in the past decade, Devan has managed to produce some of the most consistently entertaining works in an over-saturated market. His Zombies Attack! Young Adult novels are my favorite of his works but, certainly not his only ones. Indeed, I was greatly looking forward to his Undead L.A. series and am sorry I didn't get to read them earlier.
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