C.T. Phipps's Blog, page 92

Call of Duty: Black Ops review

    I've mentioned how much I love Call of Duty before but it is a love and hate relationship. I've avoided much of the hype aversion the game gets because I avoid what the series is arguably for in multiplayer. I'm an awful "run and gunner" so I really just sit around and enjoy the single player on low difficulty since I would be made mince-meat of even in the bunny slopes. This, of course, means that I'm arguably able to review it from an angle which is somewhat underrepresen...

Altered Carbon review

    As a huge fan of Richard K. Morgan, I've been told I should have started with Altered Carbon and moved onto his other works but I actually am reading his Takeshi Kovacs series toward the end. As the old saying goes, I may have saved the best for last. I am a huge cyberpunk fan but it's a genre which has been receding since the Nineties. Part of this has to be the back and forth  optimism about technology's ability to solve humankind's problems among geeks.

  &...

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare review

    This game sucks. That's pretty much my opinion on the subject in a nutshell. It's not even that it does anything particularly wrong, though it does quite a bit wrong, it's that it is painfully generic in many places and outright boring in others. I thought Ghosts was a tremendously flawed game and an inferior successor to the Black Ops. games but this is worse.

    Have I been harsh enough yet?

    It's a shame too because I really had high hopes...

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 review

This review will contain spoilers for Modern Warfare 3.

    This is something of an annoyed review as I could have sworn I'd done a review of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 when I was reviewing the series from beginning to end, starting with my review of Call of Duty 4, continuing with Modern Warfare 2, and then my essay about its social satire. But no, honestly, it completely slipped my mind to do the final game in the series. So, those who actually are interested in my opinion...

The Cold Commands review

    A Land Fit for Heroes is one of the "Holy Quartet" of grimdark which I ascribe to be George R.R. Martin, Mark Lawrence, Joe Abercrombie. In short, if you want to know what the grimdark genre is like then you could do far worse than picking up any of their signature series. The premise of the series is there has been a big epic fantasy war like the kind you usually see in these series only for it to be over before the first page and everyone trying to pick up the pieces ther...

Wraith Knight paperback now available for pre-order!

Hey folks,

I have excellent news for you! The paperback version of Wraith Knight, my Dark Fantasy novel starring Jacob Riverson the last of the titular undead warriors, is now available from Pre-Order from Ragnarok Publications.

The King Below, Enemy of the World, is dead. Will his successor save the world...or rule it?
 
Jacob Riverson was once the greatest hero of an age. Cut down during what should have been the final battle against the King Below, he was condemned to centuries of torment...

Golgo 13: The Professional review

    Golgo 13: The Professional is the first anime I ever watched. I've always been a fan of spy fiction as anyone who has followed my blog (or read my books) will know. Thus, I was intrigued by the prospect of the anime based on Japan's answer to James Bond. I picked up my VHS copy in a video store in Huntington, VA where it was sitting on a shelf full of other classics like Akira, Bubblegum Crisis, and other works which I familiarized myself with.

    My memories...

Call of Duty: Ghosts review

    If you were going to buy this game, you probably have and if you haven't, you probably won't. Still, I'm going to talk about it anyway. Since finishing the Modern Warfare trilogy, I've been attempting to find a good replacement and have had mixed reactions. Advanced Warfare was just boring while Black Ops sullied itself by association with Oliver North.

    Call of Duty: Ghosts is a very frustrating game because it feels strongly like it's half of a very good...

Fae: The Sins of the Wyrde review

    I've talked about Graham Austin-King's Riven Wyrde trilogy before and it's a book series which deserves a good amount of attention. It's a bit schizophrenic, verging from Young Adult adventurism to grimdark brutality, but that's part of the reason I love it.

    No one ever said fantasy had to be one thing and it's ability to be many is what guarantees it will always exist. The Riven Wyrde series began in The Wild Hunt, continued in The Realm of Twilight, and...

For Special Services review

    For Special Services a very schizophrenic book which doesn't seem certain about where it wants to take Bond, which is sad since it's Gardner's second book. The man resorts to fan service by bringing back SPECTRE, Felix Leiter, and using the child of a pre-existing villain as its central antagonist. The premise is a new Blofeld has taken control of SPECTRE's remnants and reformed them into a capable dangerous force which threatens global stability.

    The open...