Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 20

Game review: Ronin for Steam

Steam is having yet another sale, and Ronin was down to 7 euros, which hubby said was okay for our budget. Ronin has been on my wishlist for a while based on game play trailers, but having completed it with the “happy ending” in a little under fifteen hours, I have to say, I really, really hate this game. I ought to be used to half baked indie games with shit controls, buggy interfaces, and bad level design, but seeing a combination of all of them plus gleeful trolling by the maker knowing nothing in their game works consistently? Oh, that’s enough to raise a super seiyan level hate boner.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but in the “hints” is the comment that the jump arc lies. The arc is a fundamental part of the interface, because when you go into combat the controls go turn-based and you CANNOT move any other way than using the jump with the right stick. Now I want to be fair and say that this control scheme has potential. The problem is that where the end of the arc indicates your landing point is not accurate for 80% of your jumps. Why should it matter? Because it’s the difference between landing on a ledge and landing on a laser or a land mine.

Worse still, the arcing path you think you’ll take is also often inaccurate, which will send your eponymous ronin (who I will name…Ronin) leaping directly into gunfire. Between turns, the enemy line of fire is represented by red lines, so optimally you want to ease your jump arc under those lines. But quite often what seems like the right height will end up a lie, and Ronin takes a face and chest full of bullets. As you die with one shot, this is…aggravating, to say the least. It’s even more annoying because the game isn’t long, nor is it particularly difficult. Had the arc line and landing points been more accurate, I probably could have finished in around 4 to 5 hours, tops. As it is, I didn’t win because I got better at the game. I won through sheer willpower and blind fucking luck.

I want to find something nice to say, so after some deep thought, I could say that the music was pretty good. I could also say that with some more work in diversifying the mission types, enemies, and levels, this could have been a rock solid game. Alas, it is another indie game that got a “good enough” stamp of approval when what it really needed was more work in the level design and controls. I’d be far more forgiving if this was a free beta. But it’s a finished product, and it’s pretty damned disappointing.

In each level there are three objectives that must be completed in order to earn a point for upgrades. The game calls these “bonus” objectives, but as you can’t buy any upgrade without accomplishing all of them, I’d hardly call them bonuses so much as mandatory goals. For the most part, I did as they asked. I killed all the enemies, spared the civilians, and avoided triggering the alarm. Around chapter 3, I gave up on this because the level of accuracy needed to avoid triggering alarms became ridiculous precisely because I had so much trouble getting Ronin to jump where I wanted her. (I avoided killing civilians in all but one level, where I got so frustrated trying to deal with their patrol routes that I snapped and hung four of them in rapid succession. I regret nothing!)

I did get enough upgrade points to teleport to enemies or to hang them from the rafters, and to throw my sword and shuriken. (throwing the sword kills one enemy, but must be retrieved until an upgrade is picked up, and shuriken will hit every enemy on screen and stun them for three turns.) When these abilities work, they can help make the game slightly less irksome.

However, the shuriken presented another major problem because they only work in very specific situations. One, Ronin must be in combat, and two, she must be in the air when the turn ends. Even when these conditions were met, I often couldn’t throw them or my sword. But that’s not even my biggest frustration with them. No, that would be saved for the times when the icon for shuriken did appear, but there was no button assigned to it. This isn’t a game that has consistent button assignments, so on an Xbox controller sometimes it might be the left trigger, or X, or Y. Taking a guess which button it’s supposed to be will 99% of the time result in throwing the sword off screen instead, and then I had to restart the checkpoint because trying to retrieve it with no way to defend myself was pretty much a death sentence anyway.

I thought perhaps the problem might be that this was intended to be played with a mouse and keyboard, but just playing for a few minutes with the mouse was enough to get my eyes twitchy. As an example, when you jump using the controller, you can push the right stick a second time to activate a grappling hook, and then hit A to reel Ronin in. To do the same trick using a mouse requires hovering the arrow close to Ronin to start the first jump, then racing it to the location to anchor the grappling hook, and then trying to click on one of two green arrow icons that appear at either end of the grappling line. I’m sure it can be done, but after just a few attempts I decided to stick with the controller. It had issues, sure, but they weren’t nearly as finicky.

Even the teleport ability had some wonky problems at times. In one particular level, it would highlight one enemy on screen, and another off screen. But the one off screen might be the gunman just a bit farther up the hall (the one I needed to teleport to in order to save myself some drama) or it might be a dude in another room entirely. (one surrounded by other gunners in a confined space and no easy means of escape once combat starts. See the problem?)

Inconsistent controls by themselves are bad enough, but it’s not even possible to sort out how long turns are. Sometimes I might only move a few inches before freezing, and this could be a problem if I had yet to land on the wall I was aiming for. It quite often meant that on the next turn I would die because moving another half centimeter was enough to stick me to the wall and give the gunmen a nice easy target. Other times, I might launch the grappling hook and NEED that quick freeze to plan my next move, only to end up swinging back and forth just long enough to let every single last enemy put a bullet in me. There is literally nothing about this game that’s consistent enough to be reliable, and that sucks quite a lot of the fun out of it.

Add to the growing list of complaints that this game has absolutely atrocious level designs. Buildings don’t look like anything remotely functional, or indeed even like buildings in some cases. It’s all just loosely connected platforms, stairwells and elevators designed in such a way that enemies you can’t see off screen can most assuredly see and shoot you without you being able to do anything about it. So they’re ugly, AND cheap. Lots of games of this type might let you duck back into the stairs or elevators if you’re in trouble, but not this game. In fact, you can’t access anything until after you come out of combat. Is it a pain in the ass? OH HELL YES.

There’s light arrangements that are ridiculously overly complex and imply that this is some kind of stealth game where the point is to avoid the light. So long as you don’t enter combat, that is somewhat true. Once one enemy spots you, however, distance and darkness both become meaningless. An enemy all the way on the other side of the level can see you, and if they have a clear shot, they will take it. This can be a major league headache as you finally pin down a ninja, only to have to back off from making the killing blow because some douche 500 yards away has a bead on you.

Don’t expect any variety in the game play, either. For two levels you will traverse the platforms and “hack terminals” (in other words, stand in front of them and press one button) and for the third you will face a “boss.” You don’t even fight a couple of them, and aside from the second to last boss, most go down with one hit. (Incidentally, the second to last boss wouldn’t be hard by himself. He’s difficult because he’s surrounded by eight gunmen that you pretty much have to kill two thirds of before you’ll stand a chance at reaching him. Good luck even lining up a killing blow on the gunmen. I’d estimate that this one level took up the bulk of my game time, with each session being ten to fifteen minutes of hopping around to dodge bullets without ever lining up a shot.)

Not including the “bosses,” there’s really only four regular enemies and the same man and woman stand in for civilian positions. This is the barest minimum effort for the design, and that’s also reflected in the “cut scenes” which all use the same badly drawn image and a few sentences about each of Ronin’s targets. This is where shit gets real lazy, because Ronin is supposedly hunting people she’s known her whole life after they killed her father. So she knows their names, right? Probably, but the game refers to them as Old Man, Wisegal, Doctor, Officer, and The Boss.

And don’t expect anything for your efforts in beating the game because they didn’t even bother adding an extra bit of text to the crap drawing. No “A Winner is You!” No “Congratulations!” Just go straight to the credits, and would you like to play again? No, not really. I’d rather move on to something less craptacular.

The game’s final level introduces a new hit point mechanic of sorts, in that if you get hit, you will die in 9 turns. Killing an enemy replenishes the turn counter, and getting shot again will remove extra turns. The idea here is that you are dying to access the sad ending. With this much effort put into this gimmick, you might think the sad ending must be something different, possibly even the “true ending.” But no, you just go to credits, and now the crappy image is torn so that Ronin is missing from it.

I also have a major nitpick with the control scheme using start to skip turns, while the back button accesses the menu. I would have liked to change these, but of course there’s no option to remap buttons. There’s no option to turn off hints, which is “helpfully mentioned” in the hints. They also mention “these hints are really useful.” I can assure you, they are not. I’m wandering, but the point is, there’s not many options in the options menu.

At the end of the credits, there’s a list of special thanks that ends with “and the haters! =D” I think that’s what bugs me most of all. This is a lazy effort all the way around, and this guy knows he’s put out something half ass. But he’s got the balls to troll in his hints that can’t be shut off, and as a final dig in the credits.

Well, you can count me as one of the haters. I’d like to dedicate a song to this game, “I Hate Everything About You.” I give Ronin 2 stars, and I wouldn’t even recommend it to people I don’t like. Stay away from this hunk of garbage. I don’t ask for refunds on anything I review, but this time I am sorely tempted to break my policy and get my money back. The only reason it’s not getting 1 star is that I reserve the lowest score for unplayable garbage. This instead is playable garbage. You can find better ways to waste your time and money on Steam.

Book review: The Radleys by Matt Haig

Wow. Okay, yeah, it’s easy to please me with a vampire story, but The Radleys has been one of the best I’ve read since Let The Right One In, and like that book, I feel a strong need to gush excessively about how very good this story is. It’s an examination of extremes, and it finds both lifestyles lacking while advocating something closer to moderation.

I realize this next comparison may offend some vampire fans, but from the start, I thought of Twilight. If the Cullens are considered vegetarians for consuming only animal blood, then the Radleys are strict vegans who have abstained from all blood drinking. Indeed, their daughter Clara has gone off of meat entirely in a misguided bid to get closer to animals, most of whom are deathly afraid of her. At the start of this story, parents Peter and Helen have yet to inform their teenage children that they’re vampires. This ends about as well as you’d expect when Clara gets a taste of blood and goes into a frenzy. The body she leaves behind is so badly mangled that Peter desperately calls in his brother Will for help with damage control.

There’s another Twilight comparison, but one more indirect in that these vampires are a departure from the typical mythos. For one thing, they aren’t immortal, only living a few centuries with a steady supply of blood. Also, in this world, the Radleys aren’t considered as radical as the Cullens in their approach to life, as they’re following a set of guidelines from a self-help book, The Abstainer’s Handbook (Second Edition) a dreadful tome advising never doing anything. Even using one’s imagination is warned against, lest it lead to actually living. Anyone practicing this lifestyle isn’t living at this point, and with each passage from the guide doled out, I felt awful for any vampire trapped in such a dreadful state. It advises a much shortened existence filled with headaches, skin rashes, and lethargy, and at one point suggests that maybe suicide is preferable to being a vampire. It’s a charming little pill, really.

If the middle-class Radley family represents a failure at one end of the vampire lifestyle extreme, Will is at the polar opposite. He’s the stereotypical vampire leaving a trail of bodies and not caring about the consequences. Normally this trope is something that drives me nuts because I have to ask, “Why doesn’t anyone know vampires exist if there’s modern forensic evidence and security cameras to expose them?” This story actually takes the time to explain why Will has been protected from his actions, and it also shows what act is the last straw, leading to his own people turning him in to the police. And oh yeah, the police and vampires are working together, and that’s why they haven’t been exposed to the public.

But so here’s Will showing up with signs of PTSD from all the people he’s killed, and yet he’s still acting as the cheerleader for fangbanging, one part drug dealer and one part wise hippie. His presence creates a schism in the family, though it feels at first like everyone but Helen is on Will’s side. When the reasons for Helen’s dislike of Will come out, it’s a string of little twists that first cast her in a bad light, only to twist again and reveal how she’d been victimized by Will many years before.

Add to this a former cop whose wife was murdered by Will, a complicated budding romance between this ex-cop’s daughter, Eve, and the other Radley offspring, Rowan, and a detective from the vampire hunting branch of Scotland yard, and you’ve got a bloody good tale, pun intended.

Peter (Who, in another comparison to Carlisle Cullen, is a general practice doctor at the local clinic) is contemplating an affair/murder due to his bloodless marriage. Rowan is wrestling with feelings of self-loathing because he’s a freak just like his bullies had claimed all along. Clara is discovering that one “little” drink has opened her senses and put her at risk of randomly attacking strangers in the street. And Helen…well, Helen is a neurotic ball of lies and half-truths that are just about to implode and destroy her “perfect” life.

If there is any fault to be found in this tale, it’s head hopping. This is not a problem for me, but I know lots of people don’t like it. Well this is head hopping to the extreme. If there are four people in a scene, each one will eventually be given the chance to air their thoughts. It’s never confusing or ambiguous about who is thinking what, but as I said, some people don’t go in for that and it might be a sticking point.

I want to keep gushing, but that would risk giving too much away. (I may have already done that, and I’m sorry. I just love this book so, so much.) So I’ll stop here and give The Radleys 5 stars. It’s a great vampire story with a unique take on the mythos and some satisfying answers to the questions brought up and ignored by more stereotypical stories. I really loved it and will look forward to reading more stories by Matt Haig when I can hunt them down.

Book review: Salvage by Duncan Ralston

When I bought Salvage, it was because the blurb made me think of Harbour, and I hoped it might carry some of the same elements of humor, charm, and dread. Unfortunately, this book never really appealed to me. It lacks any trace of charm, the dread found within has no sense of impact, and the humor is mocking derision of stereotypes. I stuck with it, but every few chapters, I’d put it down and look for something to distract me. I finally forced myself to finish it so I could move on to something else, but the ending was just as dissatisfying as the start.

I suppose my first and biggest problem is with Owen, the main character, who has no personality. He has a job, but that’s about all there is to him, making his introduction flat and dull. His connection to his sister is supposed to be really important, but this isn’t shown during the early chapters. In fact, the opposite is shown, that despite his sister’s zeal for life, Owen himself is just going through the motions, waiting for old age to take him. Even her death is no catalyst for change. Rather it’s the appearance of her ghost beckoning him to follow her to the scene of her death that incites him to action.

He’s also got no sense of empathy, and this is a trait that seems to be shared by the narrator. Everyone else in the story is cast in suspicious shades by Owen and the narrator’s shared scorn or derision, and while I admit it’s a personal issue, that sense of cynicism kept me from getting into the story.

But there’s other problems, like the narration being inconsistent. As an example, during one scene Owen is asked to close the blinds in a hospital room. But as he’s leaving, the other character “looks out the window at the darkening sky.” Right, through the closed blinds, huh? There’s quite a lot of this, as if something that happened only a few pages before was already forgotten.

There’s also a confusion in the story about what the real cause of these deaths is all about. Is it schizophrenia that creates the darker half of the villain? That really doesn’t make sense. It’s as if the author believes schizophrenia is the result of some internalized guilt over a childhood accident. That’s not how it works. But then this seems to be a major problem for the author, having only the slimmest understanding of mental conditions. Another character supposedly has down syndrome, but they have none of the physical traits of the condition, and only an Elmer Fudd-type speech impediment which is mostly played up for laughs.

Even if I set that aside, there’s no explanation for how this hallucination gives power to the villain and allows him to control water. It also doesn’t make any sense that the deaths of these cult members is what creates the haunting, as the only flashback meant to bring clarity to the central mystery suggests that their leader had died forgiving the people who had wronged them. So what’s going on? Did this figment of the villain’s imagination decide after his death to go all fire and brimstone? And if that’s the case, why did it wait a decade before beginning its “master plan”?

It’s all a muddled mess, a bland and confused haunting story that tries to find a meaning to its own rambling far too late to let me feel invested in any of these people. It doesn’t make much sense that Owen had to be the catalyst for these events, not with the deaths of several characters taking place many years before his attempt at an investigation. So this ghost just sat and waited for him to show up, murdered some random people who had nothing to do with the disaster, and then decided to go away? No, I’m not feeling it, any of it.

I’m giving Salvage 2 stars, and I can’t recommend it to anyone except the most die hard ghost story fans.

Game review: Crashlands for PC

Crashlands gives me fits trying to decide how to score it. The biggest hurdle I have in giving it a better score lies in several glitches and in the lousy controls, problems that frequently and consistently plagued my playthrough even when they weren’t always fatal.

Before I begin my review properly, I want to mention two things that are slightly related. First of all, I picked up this game because Kotaku ran such a glowing review about it, and the activities they listed certainly made it sound funny, fun, and unique. But–and this is what irks me–what they mention is all stuff that happens in the first half hour of what is a very, very long game. This would be like me doing a book review based off the first paragraph without finishing the rest of the book. (I’ll be returning to that book analogy again later for another issue.) It’s a pretty lousy review that is written even though you’ve not even made it to the first boss of the game. I know y’all are in a rush to do these things quickly, but damn, this is some seriously lazy reviewing, ya know? At least beat the first boss before you rush to the keyboard to gush.

The second thing I want to mention is that this is a cross platform game, and someone pirated the Android version and is selling it on Amazon’s app store as their own game. Whatever my feelings for the game are, this is so not cool, even before you take into account that one of the three brothers who made it has cancer. It takes a special kind of scumbucket to steal the hard work of an independent artist, but this particular scumpuppy stole it and then sold it as their own product. What the ever-lovin’ fuck, y’all.

These are not triple A developers with a few million in profits per game. They’re a group of guys who are doing something they love, and they need the money from every sale, especially right now. Moreover, these are not the folks charging 70 bucks for their game so poor little you can’t afford it. It’s 14.99, or 20 if you buy the PC version and get the mobile version from Apple or Android. If you still can’t afford this, don’t pirate it. It’s a video game, not a vital necessity like food. If you really must have it, save up the money and get it later.

(By the way, there is no Win Phone version, which is why I make no mention of the cross save or mobile features.)

Knowing this second thing in particular is what makes having to write a bad review that much harder, but I can’t lie and say I’ve come out at the ending with any positive feelings. But before I get to the problems I’ve had, I can at least cover what’s good in this game. For starters it’s certainly diverse, and big. The main character, Flux, is a “super genius” whose college bills combined with an economic depression led her to working as a space truck driver. (A basic premise that’s realistic if I take anecdotal evidence from my college graduate associates into account.) During one of her deliveries, an alien floating head shoots down her spacecraft over a primitive planet. Once stranded, Flux must find a way to radio HQ and request a pick-up. (Though this quest soon expands out with lots of sides quests, as most RPGs do.)

There’s humor in the game, and while a lot of it is trying too hard, some of it can be charming. Quite a lot of it relies on the standard indie nod to pop culture references, but there’s others that require a bit more nerdy familiarity with science and history to get. It’s a fun diversion trying to sort out if that animal name is a riff off of the Ermagerhd meme, or whether the planet’s name is a play on Roanoke, or sorting out that plonktan is actually plankton. This sort of fun is all over the game, like a character named Riikrol, (I think they missed a golden opportunity by not having him pledge never to give up on Flux. But maybe that’s just me.) and an entire race of whales who apparently communicate long distance using dub-step.

Even setting aside the humor, there’s a lot to like in many of the side stories, and a few characters’ story arcs were genuinely touching. One particular character has cameos in every region of the game, and their final exit left me feeling warm and fuzzy for having helped them. For a game built mostly around puns and name jokes, that’s pretty good writing to make me feel something for a briefly seen NPC.

The game is HUGE. No, I mean HU-UGE. There’s three regions, each quite massive, and each with its own unique ecosystem. If one were to attempt to uncover the entire map for just one region, I think it might take several months to do so. Scattered across these lands are animals to hunt and resources to collect so that Flux can craft new armor, weapons, and workstations. Additionally, Flux can take an egg from each animal and raise a pet to fight with her. Some of these pets are useless as fighters, but feeding them will always produce items vital to crafting something you need. So much like Pokemon, you gotta catch them all eventually. (Fortunately, there’s not that many per region, and all the variations come in color variations of the same six to seven beasts.)

What you don’t need is food, a plot device conveniently explained away by the nano-suit Flux is wearing. Think of Samus’ power armor minus the cool gun. It will store her tools and keep her fed and hydrated indefinitely. It has no armor rating though, so you have to keep crafting new gear to wear over the suit. It also has no weapons, which seems a bit odd to me. I mean, space trucking probably carries with it a high risk of space piracy. So, why no guns? Because reasons, I guess.

The RPG elements are almost non-existent, as the only real choices you get come in deciding which gadgets and trinkets you will wear. There’s a limit of four slots, and a much larger number of toys to plug in. I don’t see this as a problem because you can always swap out items you need, provided you aren’t in combat. So, say you need a little lure to make extra fish appear in each fishing hole. Well you can swap out this other trinket that gives you an extra 10% chance of casting fire damage with your attacks. Then once you’re done fishing, you can swap them back. Easy, at least until you’ve got a lot of trinkets to sort through.

And now we start to run into the first problems. You’ll note that I mentioned Flux being a “super genius” in quotes, and that’s because this is something mentioned in the manual, but is never really seen in the game. She crash lands on a planet where half the animals have some kind of ranged attack or a charge that makes melee fighting deadly. Early on, she finds gunpowder and resin capable of fashioning a gun, but she never does. She relies primarily on pointy sticks, and it’s not until several days into the game that I met NPCs who suggested making ranged weapons. The primitive locals have an extremely limited grasp of technology, but even they can sort out “hey, wouldn’t it be great to shoot something from a distance?” (There’s few other ranged weapons given out during the later regions, but one thing I liked was that the damage done by them was always 100% of my current melee DPS. In this way, every new weapon built gave a little damage boost to my poison darts, flamethrower, and “fingerang.” (And while I’m struggling to find good things to mention, the fingerang was awesome because I could sometimes manage to hit an enemy twice with the same attack flying out and coming back.))

The ranged weapons would be great if the controls weren’t so consistently awful. I could often click on an enemy and watch Flux run up armed with her little dart gun or flamethower, and then she’d run past the range of the weapon. If I didn’t click away to move her, she would happily go stand beside the creature and get mauled. It isn’t that I missed with my targeting click. When you select an enemy in the game, a red circle appears under them to confirm that you’ve targeted them. Missing them would result in a white circle on the ground nearby indicating a travel target. (While selecting a resource to harvest results in a green circle. At least visually, the interface is helpful.) I lost track of how many times I was fighting something that could kill me in one hit, watching with growing agitation as Flux again and again failed to use a ranged attack even though I could clearly see I’d clicked on the enemy and targeted them. Even if I had out her latest pointy stick, she would still walk up to the creature and stand there without attacking, waiting like a dumbass to be slaughtered.

This one problem alone is enough to wreck my appreciation of the game, but then there’s the nonsense with the inventory. The game boasts that there is no inventory, only a contextual variety. Which is to say, you can’t check to see how much of any raw item you have without tracking a schematic requiring it, or checking the left hand side of the screen while harvesting it. The updates fade really fast, so if you miss seeing the updates and you aren’t tracking that schematic, you’re stuck without a reference on how much you need of any one item.

The other problem with this idea is that the workstations you use to craft are themselves inventory menus, and instead of unifying everything within Flux’s nano-suit, crafting often requires wasting time moving back and forth between stations just to make one item. The process can also be made more time consuming if you can’t remember which station was responsible for a certain recipe, so you have to wander back and forth trying to find it. Okay, it’s here on this station, and you don’t have this one item. Oh, that item must be harvested from a domesticated pet. Oh, you don’t have a rare item you need to feed the pet, so instead of tracking the one assembled item you need, now you can only track the food item you need to harvest for your pet.

What I’m saying is, in the act of trying to simplify inventory management, this system actually makes the process more complicated. Additionally, there is an inventory for devices, gadgets, and trinkets that can be accessed from the character menu. See the problem? It’s not true that there’s no inventory. There’s an expanding number of inventories, each with their own separate menus.

AND there’s a problem with all of these menus that clicking the back button will sometimes randomly minimize the game to your desktop, and instead your mouse click will activate another program on your taskbar.

AAAAND after playing for just a few minutes, the game sometimes stops allowing me to click on items in the workstations unless I find one pixel that still works. Exiting and restarting clears this up, but it happens frequently enough to be irritating.

AAAAAAAAAND there’s a memory leak, meaning that the longer you play, the slower the game lags until it pops a dialog box that you’ve used up all your memory.

It should also be mentioned that sometimes an animal and a plant are standing very close to each other, and the mouse will flat out refuse to recognize the one you actually clicked. Why is this relevant? Because lots of animals don’t get aggressive unless you attack them first. So, let’s say you need that ultra rare resource right next to some critter that can kill you with one hit, and which your current pointy stick won’t even tickle. Well you go click on that resource, and the game will instantly make the animal aggressive even before you’ve taken a swing at it.

God help you if you do swing at it and your pet gets involved, because many pets have a wide range attack that will draw the aggression of more and more animals. In MMORPG terms, you’ll soon be kiting around with an army of pissed off animals, all of them with their own patterns of attacks. So you either give up and pull a Monty Python and “RUN AWAY!” or you die horribly, trampled by all the animals your pet pissed off.

Let’s see, what else? Ah, right, the day/night cycle. This is a very short cycle, which shouldn’t seem like a problem except at night several more critters come out, and almost all of them are aggressive without provocation. Let’s say you need a certain rare item from a creature that’s extremely high-level. Regardless of whether you opt for melee or ranged fighting, this will invariably lead to a fight so long, you head into the night and find yourself attacked by a large number of critters you don’t have the hit points or the DPS to deal with. Your only option is to run away, head back to HQ and use the bed to skip to the next day cycle. This will reset the health of the creature you’re hunting and can mean several failed attempts just to kill one beast.

But so you finally kill it, aaaaaand yet the RNG decides not to drop that one ultra-rare item you needed. So now you have to wander aimlessly for anywhere up to several hours looking for another one of these bastards, unable to fight any of the surrounding critters because they’re all too high level for you, and often unable to even harvest resources because you need a better tool to do so. Then it’s all walking all the time, and it’s boring, boring, boring; dull, tedious, and not at all fun.

This is without mentioning how schematics drop in crates from all sorts of encounters, but often the tool or weapon you need won’t come up. Instead you’ll get a flood of junk plans. When you need a better saw or a better sword, the last thing you want to see is another potted plant or piece of furniture you can’t even use. You finally do get the tool plan you need, which leads to more busy work gathering resources and alternately running for your life from giant beasties who can end you with one hit. And yeah, eventually you reach a point where you have enough resources to craft whatever you want. But just when you reach this point is when you will move to a new region to start the whole wandering crawl all over again.

I really didn’t think there was any other way to annoy me as I neared the end of the game, but I was so, so wrong. The second to last boss is virtually immune to everything except your pointy stick. Picture it: you’ve spent two days in real world time harvesting stuff to build these newer bigger bombs, and they’re useless when you need them most. You spend just as much time training a pet to get it to an “epic” level of size, and every attack it does unleashes a stream of zeroes. Your newer, bigger weapon barely nicks the fucking paint job of the boss you’re facing, and every one of his guided missiles and guided lasers hit you for almost all of your health. Oh, and the boss has a flaming wall that swipes horizontally and vertically every four seconds, so good luck even getting in one hit before you’re dancing around doing nothing but losing health.

My solution to this scenario was to load up every last slot in my hotbar with health potions, walk up to the boss, and beat him to death while guzzling potions like a frat boy at a keg stand. It’s not elegant, but it worked.

Which got me up to the final boss fight, where the enemy has one-shot one-kill lasers in two patterns, drones armed with lasers, mines that cover most of the floor, a tractor beam that can pin you down, and health pods that can help it recover hit points until you destroy them. When the boss gets tired of shooting at Flux, he can also hop around and do a crushing attack. Yep, that’s pretty much instantly fatal, too. So there’s no standing still and using health potions. There’s no pattern to exploit because the boss is literally throwing everything at you all at once. If you manage to drop a quarter of his health, your reward is that he now drops three and four health pods. So you can watch bitterly as what little damage you did is quickly erased and you are back at square one.

This is the point when I said, “Fuck you, I’ll YouTube the ending.” Only, I can’t. Nobody as of yet has made it to the end as far as I can tell. Or at least, no one has done it in a Let’s Play video.

But ultimately, I stopped caring about seeing the ending. I got tired of fighting the controls just to score one hit on enemies. I got tired of having to fight one enemy for ten minutes, only to find out the game decided to deny me the item I desperately needed, AGAIN.

Oh, and I forgot to mention how often quests have no specific goal or marker. You’re given a task to locate an item that’s out there somewhere, and the only way to find it is to search random locations. You might need to fish a battery out of a lake. (Took me five days to do so.) You might need to pick up space trash, again by fishing in random lakes. (Two days. In real time. Who thought this was a good idea?) But the capper to this kind of nonsense was locating a creature hidden in geysers in the last region. I’ve spent five days looking in these damned holes, and I’ve never seen it. I made a freaking garden of geysers to try and increase my odds of finding it, and it’s never happened.

For every little bit of goodwill I’ve felt toward the story, the diversity, and the scope of the game, I’ve been hampered by the controls and glitches, and by the long, long stretches of doing nothing because I haven’t got the right schematic or item yet. Even after I’ve finally upgraded to the next newest weapons and armor, the improvement is often so marginally small that the only way to appreciate it is to port back a region and stomp down some formerly high-level beasts. While this is somewhat satisfying, there’s no real point to it because most resources from one region are not all that useful in the others.

Finally, there’s another gotcha to crafting and RNG, and that’s the quality and stats on your armor and weapons. You can potentially get a new item that’s really crap, and the only way to fix that is to go out and grind for all the items again. But you can potentially reroll the same item a dozen times and still not end up with a decent set of stats. It got to the point where I just gave up and took whatever I got on the first roll because I didn’t want to suffer through another ten hours of grinding just to get a similar result.

I actually feel terrible giving Crashlands 2 stars, because it’s so huge, and it’s made by this small crew who obviously put a lot of love into their work. I can identify with their problems and I almost wish I could lie and say something like, “A charming contender for game of the year!” But that’s never been my style to lie, and I can’t say I enjoyed this game very much. I certainly wanted to because the story and the world are great. But the controls and the interface–my tools for accessing the world–are so sub-par that I cannot enjoy most of my time in this game. I might have had a better time if I could have used a controller, or if I could have modified the controls to let me move with the keyboard. But even setting that aside, I kept wishing I could somehow unify all these damned menus into one actual inventory screen. Sure it might be a bit messy, but it can’t be worse than walking from one workstation to the next trying to find that one new schematic I just unlocked. (But didn’t see which station it came from because I was busy dodging lasers and ice crystals.)

I want to return to that book analogy for anyone who thinks I am being unfair or too harsh. Let’s say you buy a book from me, and on every page you find typos. Not just random strays, but the same consistent mistakes in grammar and spelling on every page. It doesn’t matter if the story is really good and it’s the most detailed and fantastic idea you’ve come across. After a few chapters, it’s not going to be the world or the characters you notice. It’s not the setting that you’re going to mention to others. No, it’s all those mistakes. You’d be right to do so because that book needed to be polished better before it went on sale. If all you can see are my mistakes, it’s my fault for not putting in the work to make it worth your time and money.

In conclusion, to the makers I have to say, I’m sorry for knocking your baby around like this. I wish you all the best on your next project, but I can’t lie to you, and I hated most of my time in Crashlands. It needed more time in early access to work out the kinks, and I’m sorry, but I can’t see the great things you’ve accomplished because I’ve reached the point where the mistakes are tainting my view.

Game review: Monument Valley for Win Phone

I’ve had Monument Valley on my phone since November, and I probably should have done a review of it right after I finished it the first time. But I got busy with other stuff for a little while, and by the time I thought of it again, I felt it would be better to play the whole game again, and then write up a review. It’s not a very long game at all, not even with the additional purchase of Forgotten Shores, a collection of eight new puzzles. It is also not very expensive, so the time to cost ratio is pretty good. Upon finishing all the levels for the first time, I likened the game to one of those fun-sized candy bars. It’s good, really good, but it leaves you wanting more. This isn’t a bad thing, either, and I think it’s one of the nicer kinds of complaints one can have about any form of entertainment, wanting more of the same.

Monument Valley follows a princess, Ida, through a strange world with beautiful puzzles that look harder to solve than they actually are once you’ve got a good grasp of the game’s mechanics. I might compare them to Escher’s Relativity, except they’re not quite that complex even if they are just as visually appealing. It helps that the game uses a colorful palette to render these monument castles and their surroundings. The designs are simple, but every bit as pretty as games with much fancier graphics. The music is very soft and relaxing, which fits with the relaxed pace of the levels.

As I said, none of the puzzles are hard to solve, although they do get progressively more elaborate with higher levels. You start out only needing to rotate a walkway to help Ida move from one checkpoint to the next, but soon the game expands so that you’re rotating the entire level to make walkways rise and fall to meet each other in ways that are both clever and charming. This is not a game you play to challenge your speed or smarts. It’s instead a nice casual stroll that’s perfect for passing a few minutes on a train or in the bathroom.

There’s a good story told in it as well, one that gives out clues as to what’s going on with only a few short bits of dialogue. It’s a minimalist approach to storytelling, and I think it’s a perfect pairing of a fairy tale with a pretty puzzle game.

It’s not entirely perfect, though. I can’t be sure if the problems I had were due to the small size of my phone screen, but at times, trying to move Ida to the right point on the thin walkways required breaking out a stylus. Other times, trying to rotate or slide certain objects proved finicky and I had trouble whether I used the stylus or my finger. I got past these points with a combination of the two inputs, and as nothing is life threatening in the game, it wasn’t a major problem, just a minor frustration.

The game also had a strange tendency to crash and close down after completing certain levels. The crashes dropped me back to the home screen, but once I restarted the game, I could progress to the next level without needing to play the one that crashed over again. It’s also not a deal breaker, but I thought it should be mentioned.

The bugs and finicky controls aren’t so bad that I can’t give Monument Valley a nice 4 star rating. If you like puzzle games, this is the sort of thing you can pick up and play in small doses, or binge it through in one sitting. It’s also fun enough that you can come back to it later and still enjoy the level designs even if you already know the tricks to reaching each exit. Definitely worth the price of admission, and if a sequel ever comes out for it, I’ll look forward to playing it as well.

Game review: LA Cops for PS4

“Zoe,” you say, “I thought you were broke, so how did you get a new game?” Well, faithful reader who always asks the right questions, I discovered I had 4.99 still stashed in my Sony wallet, and being desperate for a new game, I went looking for something on sale cheap. LA Cops was only 3.49, so I got it, and here we are, another review for you loverly peoples.

My first impression of LA Cops is that it’s very similar in design to Hotline Miami, with some minor improvements in a few areas. It unfortunately also replicates a lot of the problems and design flaws I saw in Hotline Miami, but I’ll hold off on listing those just yet.

First, let’s talk about what it does have going for it. One, it’s got a diverse cast of cops to choose from, with no need to mess around with unlocking. It’s got a neat visual style to its cut scenes, something I can’t say I’ve seen in any game in recent or even distant memory. The voice acting in the cut scenes is pretty good, and the story is…it’s okay, for what little there is to it. The music is very good, something my husband noticed after only a few minutes into the game and commented on. A couple of the songs don’t sound like the era they’re aiming for, and they’re more like an extended Pearl Jam solo. But eh, I like Pearl Jam, so this worked for me.

I like the premise and the ideal of what the game is trying to accomplish. But I can’t really say that I liked much else because of a lot of glitches and design flaws. Like Hotline Miami, LA Cops suffers from door glitches, but this game has some doozies that are all unique. For starters, all doors are double hinged and spring loaded. It’s possible to hit a door to make it swing in and watch it bounce back and forth twice before closing again. Doors are also so fragile that an enemy or your cop can simply walk into them and shatter them. Doors are a suggestion, meaning that if an enemy decides a closed door isn’t really there, he can see through it and shoot through it with perfect accuracy. What else? Oh yes, my personal “favorite”: if an enemy gets stuck on the door, their gun will become an automatic, regardless of what they’re carrying and its supposed rate of fire.

If this was all the game did wrong, I might still be ready to give it a good review. After all, graphically, it’s much better than Hotline Miami, and I can at least tell what’s in a room at a glance in terms of the furniture and decorations.

But like Hotline Miami, LA Cops suffers from an undercooked level design. Rooms are cobbled together without much logic to them, and some design elements simulate ducting and wiring, which blocks the view and usually hides a stationary enemy no matter how I rotate the camera. Setting that aside, the level goals are often just cobbled together without much sense. You might be tasked to kill all the bad guys (so far, so good), and then blow out all the power boxes before taking the elevator to the next floor. (LOL WUT) First of all, no building has power boxes arranged like this, and second, how would one ride an elevator after blowing the power?

The problem is, the game is trying so hard to do something besides just kill the bad guys, and that’s a mistake. If they dropped the added tasks, it wouldn’t hurt the game play. If people really want an added challenge, it’s built in with the ability to arrest criminals using a melee attack. It’s even one of the achievements, arresting all the baddies on a level.

As the game progresses, it keeps finding more agonizing and frustrating ways to up the ante. Single floor level designs give way to two, three, and four floor stacks. Then when adding more floors and objects to break isn’t good enough, they add a timer. (Y’all should know by now, adding a timer to any game makes me hate it that much more.) AND, this timer does not reset if you have to restart the level. So if you get almost to the end with a few seconds to spare before you die, you just go back to the start of the level to watch those last few seconds tick off. To properly reset the timer requires exiting to the menu and restarting the whole level over again. Also? There’s a hostage situation on a timer where you have to kill everything and reach the hostage in two minutes. No, you cannot just go to the hostage to shut off the timer and then play mop up. It took me forever to get past this floor because I kept getting right to the last room and either getting shot or running out of time.

But if I thought that was frustrating, that’s nothing compared to the final level, where they bring in waves of enemies on a timer, with this level’s objective being to survive until the time runs out. Survive that and…you go to another level where the boss is hiding in a booth made of bulletproof glass. To get him out, you have to destroy 76 slot machines (which the game calls fruit machines for some strange reason) while also fighting against endless hordes of enemies. I fought for most of one day on this one level alone, and when I finally managed to get the bastard to come out, he also summoned another wave of goons. Through several additional plays, I defeated them, hunted him down, and…one shot had him pull up a force field and scurry back to his booth before summoning another horde. Sweet baby Jesus, what an awful pain in the ass. It’s like playing cops and robbers with a little kid. “NUH-UH, you din’t shoot me! I got an invisible wall!”

It doesn’t help that at this point in the game, the rules keep changing about what you can and can’t shoot or be shot through. The bad guys seem to be able to shoot through walls and doors whenever they like, but this does not work for your cops, even armed with the same guns. But in the final stage, the game can’t seem to decide if you can shoot through slot machines or not. The goons can, and if your poor schmuck cop can’t, the baddies will be able to mow you down while you slowly amble around a corner desperately trying to line up another shot.

No. Not fun at all.

I must bring up the leveling system and XP, both of which are useless in my opinion. You earn XP based on the grade you earn from each level. Problem is, you earn the same XP regardless of the difficulty level you choose to use for each map. So if you earn an A, you get 4 XP. There’s no point to playing on the harder modes, no greater reward. Playing on nightmare just means you lose the ability to auto-lock onto enemies who can now one-shot kill you with less time to react, a skill that’s not all that useful in lots of situations anyways because it refuses to aim for the bad guy currently shooting your cop in the face and will instead lock and stick with a dude in another room who poses absolutely no risk to you.

And I’m wandering. The thing is, let’s say you choose to play the first level over and over until you can level up two cops to their highest levels. Man, those must be two badass motherfuckers now, right? Nope, not at all. Fully increased weapon damage is only slightly different from an unmodified damage level. Similarly, perking up to full health won’t make traversing halls full of baddies any less instantly fatal. “Speed” is a joke, because the baddies will often run three times as fast as your character in wave modes even after you’ve filled the speed bar. In other words, nothing about the perks gives any sense of progress, and I really could have done without their inclusion given how utterly useless they were.

Let’s see, what else? Despite having a diverse cast, someone made the decision for every character to record the same flavor text. Every character says “Double kill! and “That’s what I’m talkin’ about” and “Oh no you din’t!” in much the same way, making them indistinguishable from each other in the game. They also all start out with the same weapons, so there’s no reason to play them all. You just pick the two you want and stick with them throughout the 13 levels. I appreciated not having to unlock the other cops, but I just wish there had been some reason to play them, and there’s no incentive given in their weapon load out or their dialogue.

Oh, and I can’t forget the partners system. In theory, this is a neat idea, being able to position one cop in a doorway to cover the other. In practice, the partner AI often fails to recognize threats, either to itself or to my character. I might step around a corner to survey a room and see a bad guy walk up to my partner and erase their face with a shotgun because my partner never reacted. Or, I might find myself surrounded and out of ammo, backing into a room to get some help only to have the bad guy walk around my partner and continue shooting me. The whole time I’m being made into Swiss cheese, my partner will just stand there like a pothead contemplating their palm after smoking half an ounce too much.

As I reached the final levels of the game I was struck again and again by the idea that this feels like a beta release meant to test the waters, not an actual finished game. It’s short, it’s glitchy, and it still needs a lot of work. In the end, I think that it being a finished product is what makes it so irritating, even for the low price I paid for it. Under the flaws and glitches, there’s a great game idea that needed more time and thought put into it before it was released. Instead, this got the “good enough” stamp and was shuttled out with all these issues burdening it.

That’s why I have to give LA Cops 2 stars. Somewhere under all this crap is a great idea. But no one cared to polish it before they sent it out. And that’s a damn shame because the game could be so much better with a lot of TLC from the developer.

My first review of 2016!

As I mentioned a few posts back, it’s been quite a while since I’ve had any reviews on my books to bring to your attention. As luck would have it, Eric Townsend of Frodo’s Blog of Randomness reviewed my super villain comedy Waiting for a Miracle, and it’s a great review, earning 4 out of 5 smiling Frodos.

You can check out the review here: http://frodosblog.com/2016/01/18/no-control-365-challenge-day-18-book-491/

Waiting for a Miracle was one of the first books I’d ever written, and only the second I’d published. Like so much of my work, it was based on a simple question that somehow blossomed into something bigger. In this case, the question was, “What would a villain do if his hero went missing?” I’ve gone back and reread it a few times over the years, and I’m still proud of how it turned out even through it was written on a lark.

I want to thank Eric for reading my stuff, and for taking the time to give such a detailed review. I really appreciate it. =^)

Book review: Paper Towns by John Green

Paper Towns got pushed up higher in my TBR pile for the simple reason that I got the movie on Blu-Ray and wanted to read the book first. (So that way I can complain bitterly about any changes I don’t like. It’s a tradition for me, like relatives drinking and fighting during the holidays.) This makes my third book by John Green, and something I like is how each story is unique. There’s familiar elements, certainly, like the trademark sarcasm and humor displayed by all the characters, but each book is something new and unexpected.

Paper Towns has the feel of a mystery, one Quentin Jacobsen has to unravel surrounding his next door neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman. Although these two initially started life as infantile and childhood friends, Margo went on to achieve a legendary high school reputation while Quentin became a nobody who can only watch his idol from afar and admire her for the crazy things she’s done over the years. But one night, Margo comes to him with a crazy plan, and Quentin goes along with it, never suspecting that Margo will very soon disappear again.

Which brings in the mystery, as Quentin and his friends try to piece together clues Margo left behind and find out if she has merely checked out of town or out of life entirely. The mystery itself is pretty good, and even when it gets slow or repetitive, it’s still a fun read. I like how Quentin begins to understand that his perception of his idol is nothing at all like the real person, and how this evolving view is what actually leads him to solving the mystery.

But the ending…I don’t want to spoil it, but it was something of a let down. It’s so inconsistent with everything else that happens in the story, and even if I think the final pages make up for it, I got to a certain point near the end and was just kind of shaking my head about how little sense certain parts made.

Still, it’s a good book, one that made me laugh often and read sections to my husband. Quentin’s character is likeable, even if at times the way he talks reminded me of someone raised in the 90’s. (Possibly someone in their thirties who still doesn’t know that YouTube or Wikipedia are a Thing Now. (And while I’m at it, would it kill this guy to actually look up a modern video game instead of making them up on the fly? Because speaking as a lifelong gamer, I think his ideas for what video games are like are as lame as chaperoned parties.)) I’m looking forward to the next John Green book in my TBR pile, Looking for Alaska, whenever it rises up among my many other choices. (Or when the movie comes out, whichever happens first.)

I’ll give Paper Towns three stars and recommend it to anyone looking for a fun mystery with lots of humor and charm.

Game review: Assault Android Cactus for PC

I have EXTREMELY mixed feelings about Assault Android Cactus in that I want to like it based on most levels and its graphical and aural charms. My problem is mainly due to the control scheme, although I do have several other complaints as well. Assault Android Cactus is categorized as a twin stick shooter, and it’s about androids (surprise!) on a freight ship whose AI has gone nuts and started killing everyone. I’d worry about spoiling the plot, except the plot is unbearably stupid and goes like this: an evil emo android showed up and told the AI that the universe is a lie and everything sucks, and the AI agreed and set about killing everyone to “save everything.” Stupid? Oh absolutely. But for video game writing, one can almost pretend this is some deeply philosophical shit.

The game’s title is also the “main character,” but right from the start, the player can choose from several other androids, each with their own unique payload of weapons. Further, by beating bosses at the end of sections, the player can unlock even more androids, including making the evil emo Licorice playable. All of these choices give players a lot of options depending on what kind of rate of fire on their primary weapons they want, and on what kind of secondary weapon they can deploy. Those include options like a flamethrower, land mines, missiles, a force field, and a singularity. (Because an indoor black hole is always a good idea, amiright?)

For the most part, the non-boss levels are fun if a bit frantic due to these androids having extremely poor battery life. This is for me another problem, as I’ve got no love for games that put me on a timer and demand perfect speed. It’s particularly frustrating to pop the icon for a battery, only to die while trying to reach it. (Or worse, while circling around it because the damn thing has decided to go in an orbit around your character without connecting.) And there’s one level called Repeater that I honestly was ready to murder someone over because it rearranges the floor underneath my character whenever I moved. I could turn a perfect circle and rather than return to my starting point I’d end up in a confusingly dense range of hallways, which conveniently only melted for enemies to take pot shots at me before rematerializing again to block my shots. Confusing doesn’t even begin to cover it.

The boss levels try to crank up the bullet-hell difficulty, which becomes a visual vomit that makes it damned hard to see anything, much less to keep track of the meters floating around my character (indicating the heat level of secondary weapons) and around the power-up icons. (indicating the time left before the power-up changes types.) It also doesn’t help that these massive bosses only give out batteries if you can pummel them enough to reach the next cycle in their multi-phased lives. The final boss is worst of all because you’re expected to fight the ship AI in multiple phases as well as fighting every previous boss set to batshit mode. (And when you pop the AI to start a new batshit boss cycle, the battery you desperately need is usually directly under the bullet hell, bullet sponge boss.) Even after you manage to whittle away the last of this bitch’s health, the AI pulls your character into an “ether realm” to fight one more time.

And I can’t say I’m really all that fond of the boss dialogue, either. Going into a fight, it’s all “I must kill you, blah blah blah. I have seen the truth and you are inferior blah blah blah” When you defeat them, they’re all going, “It wasn’t me, the others were too strong for me.” And plot twist: it wasn’t any of them. It was evil emo android. Damn those motherfucking battery stealing evil emo androids.

Finally we get to my biggest complaint of the game, and that’s the controls. To fire the main weapon requires holding down the right trigger, while switching weapons requires a tap of the left trigger. This wouldn’t seem like a terrible thing to some of you, but just a few minutes into any one play session resulted in massively painful hand cramps. The thing is, its a twin stick shooter. You should just be able to fire by moving the stick in the direction you want to shoot. The game has an “accessibility” feature that swaps which hand will cramp up faster rather than allow the player to just use the stick to fire.

Upon completing a few levels, the game also unlocks Infinity Drive and Daily Drive, which is just Infinity Drive with an added dick waving contest. This might seem like Endless mode on Super Stardust Delta and earn some praise from me, except it’s the same rush over and over, with no random variety to keep it from getting stale. It does serve as good practice so that you can get a feel for each android’s arsenal, but even that begins to get dull pretty quickly because of the lack of variety.

I have to give Assault Android Cactus 3 stars, and I feel like I should explain why the score is so high if I had such a hard time with it. It’s not broken or even bad, but the game’s design takes several missteps that for me make it both aggravating and physically painful. This is yet another indie game where I want to ask why a skill level option isn’t available. It doesn’t even need to be less intense in the bullet-hell delivery. All they had to do to ease up the strain was slow the rate of the battery draining. That one tiny concession and changing the controls to allow me to fire using only the right stick would go a long way in making the game less painful. Alas, this is never going to happen, so I’m afraid this game has quickly hit a dead end for me.

The year 2015 in review

This post was supposed to go up before January 1st, but didn’t on account of me not writing it yet. With mere days left to the end of the year, I caught a cold and ended up going to the living room to hide away from the chill in my room under a pile of blankets with a warm heater nearby and a steady supply of citrus drinks to try and burn out this snotty bug. Today, it seems like I can breathe without drugs, so I’m declaring a tentative victory and venturing into my cold, cold room to finally do this post. This is my dedication to you. Witness my love for alla y’all.

How to begin? Well if 2014 was one of my better years, 2015 was certainly one of the worst. Right at the start, my husband contracted a staph infection and had to be hospitalized. Before the doctors could identify the strain, it had already gummed up the stents in his heart, and he had to undergo open chest surgery. He was moved from one hospital to the next, and no one had any answers about how effective the treatments were or when he might finally come home. Even after we had an answer, the doctors kept changing their minds and pushing it back. Poor hubby looked like a pincushion, and he endured so many treatments that eventually the doctors ran out of viable locations to put in new catheters.

Some of you may recall this, but I have multiple sclerosis. I’m mostly fine unless I move around too much. Well for the first two and a half months of the year, I did more moving around than I had in all of 2014 and 2013 combined. It wasn’t just travel to and from the hospitals, either. I had to wash hubby’s things and cart them back and forth. I had to clean the house and care for the animals, all stuff I’d normally done with his help. And when hubby got home, he needed a lot of help with everything. So even if I was exhausted and in pain, I just kept pressing on.

And then I got sick, and that was the final straw for my body. I still have not recovered from the strain, neither mentally nor physically. I can only do a little housework before I need a long sit to recover. I have brain fog even under light mental stress, so I haven’t been able to write or edit much. I haven’t even been able to read, so while in 2014 I hit a new record of 50 books completed, in 2015 I barely managed 20.

Sales were crap, to say the least. Part of that has to do with me not having the energy to get out there and promote my titles, but the other problem lies in my shrinking social reach. It’s been massively difficult to get any message out on any network, and even harder to get my titles reviewed. Amazon’s changed the rules for what books get shown to customers, and now I apparently need more reviews to be seen. In short, all the ways that I’d been using to improve my visibility in previous years have dried up in 2015, and so my one release of the year slipped out like a squeaky fart at a death metal concert.

I’m trying to look at this all in perspective and stay positive. This is not my worst year ever. Being totally objective, it’s possibly still in the top five, but it could have been worse. Having said that, I’m glad to be done with 2015, and I’m ready to start 2016 with hopeful prayers like “dear lord, not like last year, please?”

I can’t promise anything at this early stage, but I really hope to get back to a more regular posting schedule soon. True, it will be mostly book reviews, mainly because I’ve got a huge TBR pile to work through and an empty bank account ensuring there can be no new game purchases for a while. But who knows? Maybe my next few books will sell enough for me to have some free cash again. Even if they don’t I’ll still try to keep the reviews coming somehow.

I want to close this out by thanking the people who have stuck with me this year. I know I didn’t have much to offer you, often going silent for weeks at a time. But you’re still here, still checking in, and I really do appreciate it. To you I wish you a great new year, and I hope to keep you entertained, or at the very least morbidly amused throughout the coming months.

Happy belated new year, y’all. Let’s make it a year worth remembering.