C.T. Phipps's Blog, page 101

Exclusive Interview with Kenny Soward! II

Hey folks,

We've got an extra-special treat for you guys with a return from GnomeSaga author Kenny Soward to talk about his new gritty urban fantasy novel Galefire.


Galefire follows the adventures of amnesiac drug-addicted gang member Lonnie as he works for a gang of supernaturals working out of Cincinnati, Ohio. Lonnie believes he's their slave but the truth is more complicated than that and he is struggling to remember who he was. Unfortunately, that requires him to live long enough to do it....

Bioshock review

Warning - this review will contain spoilers for the storyline of the original Bioshock.

    This is a review which I file under, "no one in the world needs because everyone has already made up their mind but I feel like talking about." Bioshock was a game which debuted in 2007 and took the console world by storm. It was less impressive to PC gamers because it was, deliberately, a adaptation of System Shock's gameplay and atmosphere to a new IP. If you don't own System Shock then...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...