Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 21

Book review: The Farm by Tom Rob Smith

On the cover of my copy of The Farm is a blurb from Mark Billingham that reads “You will not read a better thriller this year.” I don’t know who Mark Billingham is, but I now know he’s a damned liar. This is the only so-called thriller I’ve read for the entire year, being my attempt to break out of my comfort zone, and I can tell you, there’s nothing remotely thrilling in this. It’s barely interesting and fails as a mystery as well. It’s dreadfully tedious, and the only reason I kept reading was because of morbid curiosity to see when, if ever, the book might pick up the pace and become an actual thriller. That never happened.

Fair warning: I’m going to spoil the ending for this book, so if you plan on reading it anyway, avert thine eyes and scroll or click away before it’s too late.

So, the blurb certainly made this book sound interesting, as did the first fifty pages, in which the main character Daniel is called first by his father, who says his mother is mentally ill and had to be hospitalized. His mother soon calls to say she is not insane and has been released from the hospital. She then flies from Sweden to Britain to lay out her story for her son and explain how she’s come to suspect that everyone in her town is part of a huge conspiracy. What conspiracy? She won’t say until after laying out all her evidence.

All right, so far, not so bad, but shortly thereafter, the story becomes dull and tedious as Tilde lays out a series of supposed slights committed by her neighbor Hakan. (I actually suspected him of far worse because every story I’ve read with a Hakan, that’s usually been the worst character. It’s stereoptyping, I know, like always expecting a Guido to be a mafia hitman.) The problem is, most of these slights are just that. They’re the actions of an asshole, to be sure, but not of a criminal mastermind.

When Tilde winds up her sorely lacking evidence, it’s that much harder to believe her claims, that Hakan is the ringleader to a pedophile sex ring, one that involves the mayor, the local police, and most of the community; and that Hakan murdered his adopted daughter Mia after she outlived her use to him as a child prostitute. It’s just so hard to believe that I began to suspect the ending would be more a rebuttal to all of Tilde’s claims. And this is exactly what happens. Only, it’s not just that Tilde took a few events out of context and constructed a conspiracy. She actively created evidence to frame Hakan for a series of crimes that never happened.

Daniel has his mother hospitalized again, and feeling guilty for this supposed betrayal, he journeys to Sweden to investigate himself and find out what became of Mia. In very short order, he discovers that the real source of his mother’s mental instability is that her father seduced her, got her pregnant, and then made her give up the child before blaming her pregnancy on an innocent farmhand. There’s the real conspiracy, that a local politician sexed up his daughter and then turned everyone against her when he got her pregnant.

So what about Mia? She’s totally fine, having left home with the knowledge of both her parents because of her own unplanned pregnancy with a starving artist. Hakan demanded she get an abortion so he wouldn’t lose face in his community, and when she refused he sent her away and talked the police into not investigating further. There’s no child sex ring; Hakan was a controlling asshole but otherwise not all that abusive. (I still consider some of his actions emotional abuse, but that’s not even remotely close to the crimes Tilde accused him of.) Oh, and Tidle’s father? Gets off without so much as a stern reprimand for his actions. He even smugly suggests that Tilde probably liked being abused.

If I’ve made any of this sound interesting, believe me, it’s not. I had to force myself to finish, and my first word upon completion was “Feh.” What a dull, tedious, and ultimately unsatisfying book. I give The Farm 2 stars, and it will be a long time before I ever attempt reading anything by Tom Rob Smith again.

Game review: Fallout 4 for PS4 (with some PC comments thrown in)

Bethesda…Bethesda never changes. I truly believe they are the only company who could get away with the things they do and still receive so much love from the community. The games can crash or glitch and still have people clamoring “game of the year!” with so many more qualified candidates out there. This year’s most qualified, Witcher 3, comes from a smaller team that went out of their way to make a world feel truly alive. By comparison, Fallout 4 feels like a lot of lazy half assing in so many ways. The vast majority of the sound effects in this game have been used in every single other Bethesda game in recent memory. Even the music playlist for the radio station has been heard before in previous Fallout games. The recycled engine is given some new next gen spit and polish, but aside from the prettier outdoor environments and new more colorful locations, the character models are often but ugly and badly animated.

The problem here for me is that I’ve seen other companies raise the bar higher and higher for what to expect in terms of character design and animation with each release, but Bethesda…Bethesda never changes.

However, this is actually the first Bethesda game I’ve played all the way to the end, (Unless you count Fallout Shelter, which I don’t.) liking and loathing it in equal measure. There is nothing I can praise in the game that does not instantly lead to a big BUT, and for every time I was enjoying my game, there’s at least twice as many times where I was left groaning, “This is utter bullshit.” Or yelling it, or even growling it. And I want to note that it was rarely the challenge level of the game that was the reason for my anger. Sometimes it might be a glitch or a crash, but more often, it was just lazy writing or coding.

But let me start off at the beginning. Bethesda never changes. That’s why yet again, Fallout 4 starts with the same introductory sentence. However, this time the world is fleshed out in more detail before the character creation process begins, and I think it hurts the premise even more than the previous entries. In this version, the war did not take place in an alternate fifties era. Instead, the world went on with the same culture and technology until 2077. Try to think about that. If a person from 1950 were frozen and take to our time, they would not recognize quite lot of the progress we take for granted. But not only did technology freeze, but so did all culture and art. So for this period of supposed nuclear peacetime, no one ever did anything in any field. Ever. The game actually contradicts this idea many, many times, and yet…Bethesda never changes.

But it gets worse. Your character is tricked into a vault that cryogenically freezes him or her for 200 years. When they get out, the world still looks like the war just ended. Radiation levels are just as high as the day the bombs went off. Houses that should have been swallowed by trees and other vegetation lie open and waiting for exploration. Food products that should have been dust, even with preservatives, are still somehow edible. And STILL, they’re listening to Bob Crosby, Nat King Cole, and Danny Kaye. And don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of these songs. But I’ve heard them in past games. Would it kill Bethesda to at least find other artists from the same era for a new soundtrack? Maybe it would, because Bethesda…Bethesda never changes.

Your character’s creation this time is much more streamlined compared to previous Fallout games, something I did like. There’s no waiting through a ridiculously long bunch of childhood memories or talking to a surgeon who dug a bullet out of your head. You start in front of a bathroom mirror with your spouse, (conveniently allowing you to swap genders in the context of the scene. That’s a nice touch.) play with your face, race, body, and gender, and then it’s off to the living room to play out a very short cut scene before getting your stats sorted out. The deep freeze and plot take maybe five minutes to get through, and soon you’re off and running on your adventure. Kudos, Bethesda, that wins a few point in your favor. (And while I’m thinking on it, huzzah for letting people choose to have different body types. Dragon Age: Inquisition was lacking that, and I brought it up in my review as an oversight.)

Unfortunately, they also lose points pretty quickly for tossing you in at the deep end of the messiah complex swimming pool. Within half an hour of starting, you’re given a set of power armor, the biggest gun in the game, and sent to fight the biggest monster in the world. If you survive this, the people you save move in with you and appoint you their general. Just like that. They met you not ten minutes before, and boom, you’re promoted to general. Why? Because a junkie saw you “in a vision.” No, really.

Every faction introduction is equally nonsensical. These people supposedly have trust issues, but the moment you do even one simple task for them, you’re in like Flynn. The only way you can lose their trust is if you outright try to rob or murder them. That’s pretty dumb.

Up next in this quick toss in the ocean for your swimming lesson is the crafting system, which has no tutorials, and which doesn’t even work initially because you have nothing to craft with, and no idea about how to get resources. Also, what’s useful scrap for what item? YOU DON’T KNOW. Even if you buy the boxed edition, there’s no manual to explain this. I still don’t even know how to rotate objects, so I have to walk around and eyeball alignments. It’s a huge pain in the ass.

I ended up walking away from my settlement to go kill stuff, and after having some major frustrations with the VATS system not aiming at characters even at point blank range, I took out a baton and started going all ninja on them. I carted back loads of junk to my base and set out again, each time selling a large chunk of the weapons and armor I got to vendors in exchange for bullets and stimpaks. By level 10, I’d built up enough stuff to finally sort out how to build defenses for my base and grow food and get clean water for them. But building a place for them to live was still a long way off. Up until level 20, I had all my peoples’ beds placed outside in the rain because I couldn’t figure out how to build anything. When I finally did build something, it looked like a shit sandwich. That’s not on my lousy design skills, either. All buildings look like Gilligan’s Island rejects with huge holes all over the place. Even the prefab buildings look hideous, and no matter how high your level or what perks points you invest, it will always look like shit. Which is another paradox of the game. You can make light boxes and flame throwers, build a perfect rifle, and kit out the perfect armor. But your housing constructions will always look like forts made by little kids with rusted scrap.

This isn’t even touching on how ridiculous some of the junk to scrap conversions are. It’s one thing to make a gun scope from a microscope or to get screws, gears, and springs while scrapping a pistol, but how in the fuck do pre-war dollar bills and packs of cigarettes convert to CLOTH? How is it that you can get enough gas to run a generator from a pair of fucking flip lighters? How does scrapping an empty can of gas provide oil for gun parts? The only answer is because Bethesda said so, and this crafting systems has some choices as nonsensical as Witcher 3’s alcohol recipes. (All involve an empty bottle and another alcohol)

Let’s move on…

Do you like loading screens? Because you will see a lot of them. This is another traditions of Bethesda’s, and for an open world game, quite a lot of it takes place after loading screens. Some interiors are even split up so that there’s ever more loading screens. And loading takes anywhere from forty-five seconds to a minute and a half. The loading screens may be a detailed 3D model to spin around and look at like in Skyrim, or it might just be a black screen with a loading symbol in the corner. But you will have to get used to seeing them everywhere. I’d say a quarter of my time was spent looking at loading screens. This becomes even worse if you fast travel to a mission location you’ve been to before fore a new mission. You just get more and more loading screens. And for those who don’t like loading screens, there’s loading screens.

The writing constantly veers from tolerable into completely fucking stupid. I lost count of how many times in a mission I would stop and complain to my hubby about why what I was doing didn’t make a single goddamn lick of sense. Stuff just happens because it has to, and there’s rarely any logic behind the choices of monsters for any given area or why they’re on the attack. Hubby constantly talks about how these games are inspired by sci-fi movies of the fifties, but even those had more attempts at motivation for things happening. What’s frequently on display here is an Ed Wood level of logic, or lack thereof.

By level 20, I’d developed a system of playing that can only be called ninja-style. I would sneak up on people as close as I could manage before opening fire. This often allowed me to drop several enemies without using VATS, and that’s good because VATS can miss an easy shot from less that a foot away. At one point, I slinked out of a doorway so that my gun was practically tickling the hairs on the back of an enemy’s neck, went into VATS and set it to unload into his brain before doing likewise to his partner in the same cycle. Only, the bullets somehow got lodged in the doorframe behind the gun and to the left of my elbow. That’s how fucking lousy VATS is. It can make bullets travel backwards. While it can be improved with more points in perception, even at my highest levels I was still seeing things like missing someone’s head multiple times with a shotgun even though I had the barrel tucked under their chin.

Then there’s the side missions for the settlements. See, once you’ve got people to watch out for, they will call you to defend them, and this is another thing that makes no sense. Fast travel advances time to an approximation of what it would have taken to walk to the same place. This makes sense, but if a farm or town is under attack at the time that you initiate fast travel and you’re on the other side of the map, why do you always show up with time to spare before the attack? Were all the raiders going, “Aaaaaarrrrrr…oh, you called for back up that will arrive in eight hours? Yeah, sure, we’ll wait for them to show up.”

This is assuming you see the tiny ass prompt asking for help. You might be otherwise engaged in a battle or mission when that one fucking second pop-up happens, and you’ll only know you had a mission at all after you get another pop-up telling you you failed it. If you fail enough times, the town or farm stops supporting you. But fret not, because eventually, they’ll be raided again, and you can go save them and re-recruit them. They won’t remember you were there before because Bethesda only recorded the bare minimum of lines for each character.

“Gee, Zoe, aren’t you being harsh?” you ask. No, I am fucking not. Let me give you a specific example. In Diamond City you can find a beggar who just wants a bottle of Nuka Cola to stave off certain death. So you give it to him, and he says, “Thank you! It’s like I can finally think straight again!” Later you can ask him, “Hey, do you want to come work for me?” and you can recruit him to move to your settlement. Thereafter, every single fucking time you initiate any dialogue with him, you will ask him to come work for you again, even though he’s already working for you, and he will again thank you for giving him that one fucking Nuka Cola. If he was an isolated event, I might let it slide. But every character reaches a point where they have the same script read on every interaction. Yes, Piper, we’re best friends. No, you’re not nuts for saying it. You do seem nuts for saying it every single day for the next two years of in game time. Yes, Jun, we know you’re very upset at the death of your son. You never say anything else, ever. We get it. Yes, Marcy, you love to complain and you hate everyone. I’ve only heard these same statements 400 times. At this point, I’d be grateful for an arrow to the knee comment. Or, failing that, an arrow to the dialogue writers’ knees.

And then there’s what I call “Skyrim all over again,” in which things I didn’t do or say are made part of the story. An early quest for the Brotherhood of Steel involves following a distress call, and when I got there and saw the place was swarmed with ghouls, I climbed up on a truck to snipe at a few of them. Meanwhile, the head honcho in his power armor wipes the walls with these poor souls. I don’t even see why he needed to call for help. He’s just that OP. But when the killing spree ended and I jumped down, he asked what I was doing there, and there was no obvious answer like “I followed your distress call. Duh?” The only useful answer is “I’m just trying to survive out here.” This gets the head honcho to comment, “Given the way you dove into those feral ghouls, I’m not sure I can believe that.” I sat blinking at the screen before sputtering, “Christ, it’s Skyrim all over again! I didn’t do that, but now it’s canon?”

(For context, I never touched the first dragon in Skyrim, but once I was prodded to absorb its soul, everyone was forever fawning, “You slayed the dragon!” And I did no such fucking thing, okay?)

Later, after I’d “helped” this guy recover some radio equipment, (he killed almost everything. I didn’t even need to be there.) he goes, “You mentioned earlier wanting to join our organization.” I never did. It never came up at all. And this sort of shit happens all the time. I’m told to tell a story to some schoolkids about my time in the wasteland, and the only story I can tell is something I never did. I frequently had characters say we talked about a topic, but that was the first time I’d heard about it so I felt lost, to say the least. The writing assumes one has taken a very specific path in the game, and that’s a terrible idea in an open world where there is no one true path to the end. But this is always the case for Bethesda games. They’re as shitty at writing as they are at coding.

Obviously, I found a lot to hate in this game, so what pulled my through all of this bullshit? What kept me playing the entire time? Mostly it was the companion side stories. I swear, there’s a great deal more care put into fleshing out the supporting cast than to the actual plot of the game. Pick a character, and their introduction is kind of dumb. But after a few missions, they open up to you and talk about their history, and that shit is FASCINATING. Nick’s a man out of time much like your own character. Piper’s a good reporter in a world that doesn’t care about the truth anymore. MacReady’s a former mercenary who got tired of fighting for the wrong side. Deacon is a habitual liar who is trying to make up for his misspent youth. Strong is a super mutant who’s on a mission to understand how “the milk of human kindness” makes them stronger than his brothers. And Curie…no, I’m not even gonna do a minor spoiler for her. Suffice it to say, I traveled with her the longest simply because I liked her so much. I liked all of my companions, but she’s special. I could honestly fall in love with a character like Curie.

Those side stories make a lot of the game’s aches and pains bearable, but not always. There’s the repetition of grinding side missions, something you have to do to take advantage of the perks system. The perks nickel and dime out bennies so that you have to keep building on them to get anything useful. For instance, at Gun Nut level 2, I could make a suppressor for pistols, but not for rifles. To get that, I had to rank up to Gun Nut level 4, which itself required being level 39. So instead of going through the story missions in a blaze, I had to take jobs for my allied factions, all of which were repeats that kept sending me to the same locations over and over. This huge open world has hundred of locations to explore, but you’ll often end up going to the same location ten or twenty times, and each time the enemy layouts are nearly identical. The first time, that ambush around a corner is a shock. The second time, it’s nothing. And you just keep doing it over, and over, and over, and over.

It also doesn’t help that the mission givers will say the same thing regardless of location. So you keep hearing the same story in maybe four different voices. Uh-HUH, raiders came and demanded food and threatened you. Yeah, you didn’t know what else to do, I got it.

AND, the location assignments don’t make any sense. You’ll be told the raiders or ghouls you need to eliminate are nearby, but pull up your Pip-Boy and you’ll see your target may be on the other side of the map. Apparently nearby can mean “five days walk through hostile terrain.”

AAAAAND, setting up defenses with the crafting system never changes the pathetic helplessness of the settlers. I got missions from my home base with the same scripts about how the settlers were just so helpless. This is the base where I had all nine of my companions living, all of them armed with high-level weapons. I had custom made high-power weapons passed out to the settlers as well, AND the entire town was surrounded by automated turrets, with stripes of said guns running down the mains street and around the garden in pairs. (One machine gun and one laser turret because I am nothing if not thorough in planning my kill boxes.) But the game doesn’t care about the defense rating for each settlement. It randomly pulls a settlement out of the hat, pulls a random enemy from another, and annoys you with more and more busy work. It’s not even worth it most of the time because the supposed army of enemies might end up being two ghouls, one of whom is trapped in a wall and can’t move. So that’s no XP, no challenge, crap gear, and a buttload of long ass loading screens.

It was actually a relief after level 25 to just take my biggest guns and go wandering off the roads to look for trouble. By then I had so much ammo and health that nothing shot of deathclaws and behemeths could threaten me, and when I did find them I was gleefully happy because it meant I had a chance of getting decent gear. I’d run across named or legendary mercenaries that had some really primo stuff, and whatever scrap crap they were wearing along with that could either be sold for caps or broken down into mods for my current gear. I reached a point where I went into the field with the same five guns because I didn’t need anything else. Minigun? Fat Man? Missile launcher? Eh, cute, these’ll fetch a few caps at the markets, but they only scrap down to steel and screws, and I only have a couple hundred of those stored already.

It was in those outside travels that I found yet another reason to keep going: the exceptionally long draw distances. I’d finish climbing a tower full of super mutants, and after sorting out what to keep and what to toss over the side, I’d look out at a perfect sunrise, with mists rolling down the mountains and rising from the various bodies of water, and I’d just stop and stare. Sometimes, the slog up to the top of something was made just so I could see that view. I’d climb the mountain at the very edge of the map and turn around, amazed that I could see all the way into the heart of the city with perfect clarity.

The same is true in several interior locations. I wandered into The Third Rail on a mission, and I was floored by the singer doing her thing with originals songs. I actually came back a few times just to listen to her sing, and when she stopped to take a break, I asked her for another song just to keep her going. I bought fucking drinks to support the bar. That’s how immersive that one location felt.

There was another mission where I went into a mansion, and it was the only place in the city that looked like someone cared enough to clean it up and make it livable. It was such an amazing exception to the junk and debris piles that even after I’d been given my next dire emergency to handle, I wandered around ogling the interior. It was certainly better than many of the houses in the wilds where there are kitchens and living rooms, but bathrooms and bedrooms might be optional. How can a game put so much detail into one location and then half ass so many others? It’s mind boggling.

I’d do story missions where nothing glitched and VATS decided not to fuck me over and miss every single close range shot, and then I was genuinely having fun. Like laughing out loud and bragging to my hubby of my wild exploits and amazing loot discoveries. But for every time I’d start to think “Hey, this isn’t so bad,” something would drag me right back out of the experience.

There’s glitchy controls that mean my character might strafe in only one direction regardless of where I had the stick pointed, and this could only be fixed by cycling from first to third person and back again. I’d just arrive to an actual story mission to have another side mission request from my useless settlers. I’d have the game crash, or glitch in such a way that I had to restart. Several times, I had texture pop-in so bad that it wrecked pivotal moments in the game. A huge explosion that was supposed to wow me instead underwhelmed because the textures didn’t load in time and I was left staring at giant brightly colored boxes the whole time.

Then there’s the shitty AI, both for my companions and for enemies. They might get stuck on a crack and freeze. Enemies might run into a crate or wall and just keep running forever. My companions might suddenly drop their ranged weapon and run across a raging battle to punch an enemy who’s armed with a minigun. No, worse, when we’re in sneak mode, instead of staying behind me, they would move into an open doorway or around a corner to let every single enemy in the area know where to shoot. And once the enemy knows where you are, they can throw a grenade exactly where you are. Are you on a roof two hundred yards away? They can still hit you. Did you just shoot them in their throwing arm with a sniper rifle? Doesn’t matter, they’ll still hit you. Was there a wall between you and them? Doesn’t fucking matter, THEY’LL STILL HIT YOU.

What else? Ah, the radio stations. There are initially two, only one of which has a DJ, and the other is classical music. The DJ for Diamond City is hard to like. This is not to say he doesn’t sometimes have his moments, but they’re few and far between, and he’s mostly grating. He’s no Three Dog, someone I’ve had to listen to for 500 hours because hubby rarely stops listening to him while playing Fallout 3. For that matter, He’s no President Eads. The music loops for each station are VERY short, so you’ll want to turn them off soon, only to turn them back on because the background music is even more repetitive. When you finally unlock the radio station for the Minutemen, it’s all fiddles and “Go save more settlers!” updates. This might seem like a good thing because hey, at last now you can know where to go exactly when you’re needed. But the updates are randomly generated, and so you can be in a mission you were JUST sent to before another is sent out. And you’re the only person who can respond. You might recruit an army of Minutemen to reside at their big castle base, but the rest of those useless motherfuckers will sit at home unless you summon them. You are the messiah, the chosen one, and everyone else is too fucking stupid to even breathe without your say so. How these people survived at all is a miracle on par with Jesus walking on water.

I should now mention that my hubby got the game for PC, and if he were a reviewer, he would tell you, “I have no complaints about the game.” That’s a bold-faced lie. I sit in the same room where he plays, and he has a fuckton of expletive-filled complaints. The biggest of these is that when entering VATS and crafting, his entire screen fills with green static. It’s just barely possible to find the enemy and interface prompts, but I’ve lost count of how often he’s yelled about losing track of the mouse cursor. Then there’s his problem of having the bodies of enemies he just killed vanish before he can loot them. Just fight a legendary and want to take his stuff? Poof! Too bad, he’s gone. I’ve never seen this happen on the console version, but I have seen it happen on his game several times now.

We’ve both seen a number of crashes that stopped the game outright, but as we’re both obsessive about saving frequently, this was only ever able to earn half hearted growls of “fuck” from either of us. And we’ve both run into missions that glitch out and can’t be completed. We can confirm online that this is common for specific missions, but there isn’t a workaround and likely won’t be a patch to address it for a very long time.

Hubby’s also had a lot of issues with the key mapping and the lack of ability to remap them. He’s got a fancy 8 button mouse and can’t assign anything to it. He doesn’t like the keyboard assignments and can’t do anything about it. He’s ended up banging his mouse and keyboard on the table in frustration when his controls go as wonky as mine do. So yeah, he’ll tell you he’s got no complaints. But he’s very much a Bethesda fanboy and will put a very thick layer of lacquer and varnish over the turd they’d dropped and call it a polished product.

Well I won’t, and that’s because I’m a critic. I love to gush when I find a game that earns it, but first and foremost, my job is to criticize when shit goes wrong, a job that separates me from the reviewers who spend 40 hours in a game and offer out a gushing review, only to come out a month later with a laundry list of complaints that should have been in their review in the first place.

I’ve put around 200 hours into this game. I’ve been through most of the optional side quests, and I’ve recruited most of the companions. I’m not in love with the game, but I don’t hate it either. In fact, now that I’ve completed the story, I plan to play a bit longer just to nab a few trophies and see what comes after the big final boom. This has even given me thoughts about playing Skyrim and Fallout 3 over again and forcing myself past the things I hated just to see if there’s something worth playing for. (Also, I’m flat broke thanks to recent book purchases and this would give me a way to play something without spending more cash during the holidays.)

In the end, I’ve decided to give Fallout 4 a 3-star rating. It’s not so bad as to deserve a 2, but it does a LOT wrong and can’t earn a 4 from me. I hate it and like it in almost equal measure, but I apparently don’t hate it so much I’d stop playing it completely. That’s probably damning with faint praise, but if you want glowing or gushing, there are other sites for that. I’m the critic. I criticize.

And in conclusion, Bethesda…Bethesda never changes. But so long as people keep buying their glitchy, buggy games at launch, they’ll never need to change. Because why make more effort to improve when your half assed efforts will still net you a billion dollars during the holiday season?

Book review: Never Let Me Sleep by Jennifer Brozek

Never Let Me Sleep was a bit of a mixed bag for me, with quite a few things I enjoyed, but also quite a few others that rubbed me the wrong way. The blurb certainly sounded like a good YA horror, something I don’t have much experience with and wanted to get into. The main character Melissa is interesting because she’s both bipolar and schizophrenic, meaning that even as she’s fighting skittering horrors, she’s got to question whether any of this is really happening or not. It’s a good perspective for a horror story, and a nice change of pace from the almost constant stream of thirty-something alpha dude protagonists I typically read about in horror.

The premise itself is plenty scary. A girl on house arrest wakes up one morning to find everyone in her town is dead, and the company monitoring her advises her to check the news and discover that a much larger area has fallen victim to something insidious and lethal. Anyone attempting to enter the area quickly falls victim to the same malady, and so, being the only survivor in the quarantine zone, Melissa is tasked with finding the source of this attack and stopping it. Very quickly, she discovers she is being hunted by the monsters behind this plot, and she must fight for her life every few minutes. Sounds pretty intense, right? And it is, for the most part.

But, there is something that didn’t sit right with me early on, a throwaway comment about Mel liking transitional seasons. I have some mental issues myself which are aggravated during transitional seasons, and I’ve known both schizophrenics and bipolar folks who have the same issues. The rapid up and down shift in temperatures means that one can have problems even if medication is being used and is supposedly all balanced properly so these are often the most unpopular seasons for us. I’m willing to concede that this might not be a problem for others with similar issues, but both personal and anecdotal experience made this line rub me the wrong way.

I wish that was the only problem, but there is the matter of Melissa’s age versus her experience. The story says that she’s been a shut in for most of her life because of her mental condition, and yet, she’s also familiar with the layout of the local airport, a power substation, and the radio room of the local high school, a school I’m not sure she could have attended for more than a couple months based on her backstory. And I don’t mean she just knows what they look like. She knows enough to operate the substation, and she knows enough about the airport and radio station to recognize equipment that doesn’t belong. In an older character who was more outgoing and social, I wouldn’t bat an eyelash at how she knows all this. But her expertise in a vast array of topics when she supposedly spends most of her time watching TV and is forbidden from using computers…it’s just not very believable to me.

I still enjoyed the book, and I’m sure I’ll be reading the next in the series, Never Let Me Leave. I give Never Let Me Sleep 3 stars, and recommend it to horror fans looking for something fast, tense, and only slightly gory.

Book review: After by Anna Todd

Yet again, I find a new read based off of hate for a series. If this keeps producing positive results, I might just start asking people “tell me about a book you really hated” to get more recommendations. In the case of After, I didn’t post updates on Goodreads because guessing from the reviews I thought something would set me off and send me away without finishing. Not only did that not happen, but I ended up buying book two around 80% in because I was that certain I would want to keep reading.

Before I get into the plot and characters, I feel like I need to address the criticisms on this book, which can be summed up in two sentiments, “this isn’t a healthy relationship,” and “these people are making bad choices.” I’m not in disagreement with either of these sentiments, but I feel like asking why we need all our stories to be based on good relationships where everyone is making the right choices. In real life, most of us have made a lot of bad relationship choices, and we needed years or even decades to learn who we are well enough to understand who we need as a life partner. But in fiction, it seems like people demand that everyone be smarter and more “healthy,” as if merely reading about a couple who fights might somehow damage us.

Add to this the always infuriating comment, “Reading this might teach women to want the same kind of terrible relationship.” Oh please. Boys can play violent video games like Grand Theft Auto and most people recognize that this isn’t going to lead them into lives of crime. Guys can read the goriest horror and most rational people know it won’t lead to serial killing or Satanism. But time and again, this line about women being too stupid to understand the line between fantasy and reality gets trotted out whenever a book contains even a whiff of bad behavior. “We’re just worried for the stupid little women who will chase after bad boyfriends if they read this. You know how dumb and impressionable they are.” Uh-huh, and the fact that so many people using this talking point are women is doubly offensive to me. How about we give the little ladies some credit and stop trying to demand that they only read “healthy” fiction?

So, one last thing before I get started: have you ever had a relationship that you knew was all wrong for you, and yet something about the other person felt like they were your soul mate and you couldn’t just give up on them that easy? Have you toughed it out through the bad times and tried to live in the good times until the bad outweighed the good and left? If you have, I suspect this story will carry more credibility with you than with someone who’s never been in that kind of situation. If you haven’t, this could be a hard sell. Whether you can make it past the early chapters will also depend a lot on how willing you are to put up with lengthy arguments.

I have been in that kind of relationship, and so for me After carries the uncomfortable ring of truth right from the start. Theresa, or Tessa to her friends, is a somewhat sheltered woman coming to college with no idea of what to expect but a lot of plans written down in exacting detail. It’s revealed early on that her mother is a control freak, as during a very early scene Tessa says she wants to go to another school and her mother throws a temper tantrum until Anna relents and claims she was only joking. This method of handling drama from Momma is important to keep in mind. She doesn’t handle conflict well.

Not long after arriving at school, she is introduced to a friend of her roommate, Scott, or Hardin to his friends. Hardin is a British Bastard™ par excellence, a dude with a chip on his shoulder constantly looking for someone to knock it off for him. There’s actually several reasons for his hostility and his disdain for commitment. But to get an answer, you have to wait for most of the book wondering “what the hell is this guy’s problem?”

When Hardin and Tessa first meet, he is dismissive of her being anything more than a pampered rich girl, and though she sets him straight right away, he spends many chapters antagonizing her based on his incorrect assumptions. Initially he doesn’t have much respect for her, or for anyone, so he just acts like a jerk like he does with everyone else. Hardin is the kind of guy that friends will always describe like “he takes some getting used to.”

His antagonizing behavior is what leads Tessa to see ulterior motives in everything he does and sets up a lot of their initial fights. The thing is, like I mentioned before, Tessa really doesn’t like to fight much, and she’s quick to do or say something to placate Hardin. She’s also just as quick to explode because as she says often in the early chapters, “You bring out the worst in me.” So she’s constantly walking this line between capitulation and retaliation. In goading her so often, Hardin does something positive for Tessa without realizing it; he helps her grow a backbone.

Under Hardin’s brash exterior and under his emotional armor, Tessa finds hints of someone worth knowing, and even worth loving. Initially, though, a lot of their relationship is all based off of lust at first sight. This is also another source of conflict for them because Hardin is only interested in casual “friends with benefits” relationships, and Tessa wants something more traditional. Tessa’s not too goody to be above playing the jealousy game by kissing or hugging other guys just to piss off Hardin. Eventually Hardin admits that he wants Tessa enough to make a real commitment to her, so in her way, she helps him grow up as much as he helps her develop some inner strength. They just both happened to stumble into these better qualities after lots of arguments. LOTS of arguments.

Or so it seems, something the ending throws into question. I won’t spoil it, but I will say that even if it’s something I should have expected, I actually didn’t see it coming. It reaffirms that Hardin is a jerk with his own agenda and ulterior motives for everything he’s done. I did expect that something would come up to drive them apart at the end of the first book, but I was thinking it would be Hardin’s jealousy that broke them up, and instead it’s…right spoilers.

The sex would be the only thing I have any legitimate complaints about the book, as the sex scenes are clunky and corny in many places. A scene would just be getting good when a poor word choice would leave me chuckling instead of panting. There’s an overuse of the word raspy that I think husky and variants might have been better used, and each time Hardin spoke “in a raspy voice,” I’d roll my eyes and wonder who thought a sore throat sounded sexy. If I had a nickel for every time these two had a shared orgasm, I’d be able to buy the next book for free. I have read worse sex scenes in romance and erotica, and far worse scenes in horror and fantasy, so I can let that slide.

I still can’t decide if I’m rooting for these two to succeed in their relationship, nor am I sure I can make it through the whole series. (There’s already five books, and I just read an article that said the author has two more planned.) But I am morbidly curious enough to see where this goes in the second book. Despite their many, many flaws, I like both Tessa and Hardin and want to learn more about them, even if I can also acknowledge that they’re making bad choices. To me, that’s a good book, one that can carry me down a path I’m not entirely comfortable with while still keeping me entertained enough to want more.

That’s why I’m going After 4 stars, and I’ll be starting book two, After We Collided, soonish. It’s not all happy times and healthy choices, but if I really wanted that I’d be stocking up on Christian romance and other “clean reads.” But being honest, I prefer my books to be dirty, and to acknowledge that we all have flaws and make mistakes. If you’re willing to get out of your comfort zone and read something a little different, this might just work for you, too.

Book review: Revival by Stephen King

My other Halloween horror reads fell through, (I lost interest partway through in both cases) so I bought Revival as soon as I’d found it in pocket paperback, and I was pretty excited to read this because the blurb on the front said, “This is vintage King.” Considering how long it’s been since I’ve read and enjoyed a King novel, “vintage King” sounded pretty damn good to me.

But that blurb is a bold-faced lie. It’s possibly the mother of all whoppers. I want to stress, this is not a bad story and it kept me up for several nights using the old faithful “one more chapter” mantra. But this is not vintage King. Vintage King scared me so bad that I would spend weeks after each of his books afraid of the dark. Vintage King could give me nightmares based on the description of a single body. Vintage King is what made me hide my little brother’s paper mache clown in the bottom drawer of my dresser and never take it out again. Vintage King is what made me want to write my first book.

This is NOT vintage King. It’s not even fucking close. It is old fart King reminiscing about the good old days, and this is not the least bit scary. As a horror novel it’s an abject failure. As an Anne Rice history novel, it’s a huge success. It certainly has the same qualities as my favorite Anne Rice novels, which is to say 350 pages of history lesson with almost nothing in the present day story actually happening. But I like that kind of book, which is how I made it through 12 Anne Rice books without complaints. Had King gone on to some sci-fi mad scientist ending after his history class, I might have even given this book 4 stars.

But on the last 50 pages, King jerks off on Lovecraft’s corpse, as so many horror writers today do. “Unf! Old ones! MADNESS! Lawdy, ain’t you scared now!” Eh…no. Not even close, man. I know King has a habit of blowing endings, a habit I forgive him for, but going to that particular overpumped well annoyed me so bad that I was tempted to give the book 2 stars. I’m even further tempted because this book is never remotely scary. Ever. No, EVER. It’s not even creepy. The thing that annoys me most is, there’s a scene early on where King must have thought, “Oh wait, I haven’t made this scary. Let me insert a mandatory gore scene.” Problem is, it’s so badly shoehorned in using a third person account of a CAR ACCIDENT twenty years after the event that the whole time I’m reading it, instead of imagining the gory visual, I was instead thinking, “This is such bullshit.”

This dude retired because he said he’d run out of ideas. I do not entirely agree with that notion because he can still write a story that will keep me up until the crack of dawn turning pages for “just one more chapter.” But I would agree that his days in horror are over because I’ve had scarier bouts of intestinal gas. And I’ll also say that this is almost a master class in taking a short story premise and stretching it out over 460 page using bullshit alone. It’s quality bullshit, and Stephen King is a professional bulshitter with considerable bullshitting prowess. Even so, the core premise of a mad scientist who tampers with the veil beyond death and pays the price for it is fucking twenty pages tucked at the back of the book while the rest is all padding in the hope that the reader might feel more emotionally invested in the characters. Even if I was kept up all night several times, the actual punchline left me groaning “Really? That’s what you’ve been leading this up to, a quick spunk on Lovecraft’s grave?”

I’ll give Revival 3 stars. As I said, I really want to give it 2 for the ending, but I will admit that the history lesson wasn’t all bad. It just reminded me mostly of vintage Rice, and that’s not something I thought I’d ever be saying about Stephen Motherfucking King.

Game review: Loot Heroes for PS Vita

There’s a very small part of me that wants to go easy on the makers of Loot Heroes on the grounds that I only spent 2.99 on it, and really, what did I expect? Well for starters, I expected a game that was fun and relatively glitch free. Given the videos and reviews I saw, I expected something like the NES version of Gauntlet. What I got was a lazy, shitty little turd that I wish I hadn’t wasted my money on. I can only think of one thing to compliment in this game, and that’s the music. The music is nice and catchy, but everything else is awful.

Where to begin? Well first, there’s the shitty graphics, with just the barest minimum of effort put into the design of the dungeons and the enemies. There’s the boss monsters, who have the ability to deal damage through walls because their “hit box” is ridiculously huge. There’s the recycled sound effects, meaning it’s damn near impossible to tell if that one sound was my rune spell, an approaching boss monster, or a trap just outside of my hazy area of view. There’s the cheap tactic of opening a dungeon with 20 fucking enemies and two boss monsters already in my ass so that I’m dead before I can even look for a way to escape. There’s the monsters stacked all on top of each other so that it’s impossible to tell if the monster around the corner has one friend with him or ten. There’s the fucking glitches, where I could walk down an empty hall with no enemies or traps and still take damage.

How about those awful controls? This is supposedly a twin-stick shooter, but the aiming on the right stick is shit and will send 99% of your shots into a wall. When almost all of the game is tight corridors, that’s not the least bit helpful. One would think using the face buttons to fire in a straight line might help, but NO. Why? Because no matter which face button you press, it still only fires in an “auto aim” manner, usually at the wrong enemy. Additionally, auto-aim only works for a short distance, and then the face buttons fire in whatever direction the character is facing. Absolutely fucking useless.

“Zoe, maybe you didn’t play it long enough to give it a fair chance,” you say. Nope. I played long enough to unlock the barbarian by fighting my way through to dungeon 30, and I unlocked 61% of all the trophies. I played as every class multiple times, for all the good that did, and I played long enough to collect enough class specific items so that three of my classes started at levels 2 and 3 instead of 1. In all that time playing, I went from a merely apathetic verdict of “meh” to full on hate for this piece of shit. The longer I played, the more I wanted to ask for a refund.

I give Loot Heroes 2 stars. I WANT so badly to give it 1, but I reserve that score for something so broken it’s unplayable. This is playable, but I can’t think of a single reason why I’d want to. Can’t delete this fast enough from my Vita to make room for something better.

Game review: Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter for PSP/PS Vita

Wait, what? A review for a PSP game? What year is this?! Well Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter is part of Sony’s October sale, and even if it wasn’t 3 euros, I would have picked it up. I’ve been craving a Mega Man game that I can play on my Vita, and this is an updated remake of a game I played but never managed to beat. See, way back in the SNES days, I didn’t buy a whole lot of games. I had to rent them, and this is one that I rented a few times without ever making any progress against any of the robot masters. Eventually I moved on to other stuff, and this slid off my radar. But now I stand (well, sit really) before you a proud veteran of BOTH game modes, waving the mighty banner of victory. Yes, I’m still a lousy gamer, but now I’m a lousy gamer who finally beat Mega Man X. Huzzah!

And you know what? I really love this game. There’s only a few minor things to complain about, and for the most part this is 2D platforming fun at its finest. The graphics are a bit dated, sure, but they’re still colorful and pop bright and pretty on the Vita screen. The music is great, and the controls are absolutely perfect. I’m normally a huge klutz who dies over and over because “wrong button stupid” but this is a game that just feels right soon after I started playing it. I think part of that is being able to play with the analog stick or the D-pad, but another part is that I really only need the four face buttons. No complex combos to remember, just pure button mashing platforming joy.

In this game there’s no Dr. Light or Dr. Wily because X was sealed away in a chamber by Dr. Light for future generations to discover. The scientist who does so, Dr. Cain, develops a whole range of robots around X’s design, but none of them have quite the range of emotions that he does. As Dr. Cain believes his emotions are the key to robotic evolution, his underling Sigma takes it upon himself to push X into evolving by going maverick. It’s admittedly a pretty convoluted story premise, but you don’t really need any of it to play the game.

It’s all the same basic formula from there. After playing through an intro stage, you’re allowed to choose which robots to tackle and in what order. This isn’t as free form as it seems because all robots have a weakness to another master’s weapon, and this means beating them with the standard “buster” weapon is a huge pain in the ass. This is not to say it can’t be done, but it takes a lot longer and will require luck as much as an understanding of each boss and their tells. The thing is, once you get a few weapons gathered, the game gets easier and easier because you have so many options for dealing with enemies who would have been a pain with the standard weapon.

The final levels see you fighting two of each boss again as well as a third boss. There’s time in between these fights to restock energy, so it’s not a boss rush or unbearably hard. I rather like that, that the game has a good mixture of difficulty to fun.

Once you beat Sigma in the final stage, this unlocks a second game mode allowing you to play as a rouge robot named Vile. Vile has a completely different play style, and while you play the same levels, enemy and item placement are all different. In effect, you get two games for the price of one. There’s even a thirty minute OVA called Day of Sigma that explains the backstory a bit farther. It’s not great, but the animation is good and the voice acting is actually better than it is in the game. So that’s two games and a mini-movie, all for one low, low price. Is there anything not to love here?

YES. To properly upgrade both X and Vile, you have to hunt down heart containers and subtanks. The heart tanks give you more hit points, which is desperately important during the regular fights against robot masters. The subtanks are even more vital when fighting Sigma, who first sics his dog on you, then fights you with a light saber, and then transfers his head to a giant robot. Even if you play well, you NEED a refill by the time you reach that last fight.

Well the problem is that several of these upgrades are damned hard to reach. With X, the problem is only on one particular heart tank in Sting Chameleon’s base. This requires boost jumping from a very small platform, so I ended up dying about a hundred times before I finally picked it up.

But with Vile, it’s a whole other world of frustrations because so many of his upgrades require using a mech unit. Unlike in the X mode, Vile’s mech has a timer that counts down from 30 seconds, and any enemy hits will drain that timer fast. Some of these upgrades will require boosting across heavily fortified terrain, trying to dodge or kill enemies and still end up with enough time to do whatever platforming trick is required to get the upgrade. But this is nothing compared to the frustration of needing to jump in the mech, eject at the apex of the jump through a tiny sliver of a gap, and then jump again off the wall to reach an upgrade. And if this seemed like the ultimate torture, that’s still nothing compared to needing to arrive over a series of platform at just the right time so the mech explodes and clears a set of crates. This…is bullshit. I never spent any time cussing while playing the platforming sections or fighting the bosses. But I was cussing so loud while fetching the upgrades during Vile’s mode that my husband was asking me to tone it down.

This, however, is a relatively small part of the game, and even if I spent a large amount of my time on these frustrating activities, overall I enjoyed my time with this game. So I’ll give Mega Man X: Maverick Hunter 4 stars, and would recommend it to any Vita owners looking for something fun to help pass the time until Mighty No. 9 comes out.

Game Review: Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt for PS4

My time in Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt can be summed up as vast chunks of time spent skipping through the woods picking flowers and admiring the countryside and clouds, intermittently interrupted by occasional bouts of what-the-fuckery. Sometimes, these bouts were events one should expect in a fantasy game, such as accidentally kicking over a ghoul’s nest or tripping on a griffin, but I often came across glitches or outright crashes that gave me pause. Other times, I had troubles with the controls, or with the sometimes dumb rules of the crafting system. None of these are really deal breakers that make this a bad game, but they will be brought up in my review. So if you’re looking for a totally glowing review, this won’t be it. No, I’m here to get nitpicky and anal, even as I admit this here is a pretty game. Oh so very, very pretty.

Before I get started, I will admit this is sort of my first foray into the Witcher world. I say sort of because hubby has played the previous two games, and I sometimes watched over his shoulder. I can’t say much about those games because what little I saw didn’t pull me in and make me want to play them. But I do distinctly recall the moment that I saw one of the early game play trailers for Witcher 3 and watched a pack of wolves moving together to cut off Geralt’s escape, and I thought, “Well if that’s in the actual game, it’ll be brilliant.”

And it is, to a certain degree. (Even if that trailer completely lied and wolves never do what they did in the trailer.) Enemies of all types feel like they have actual intelligence, working together and planning attacks to flank and back stab in a way that makes every fight feel tense and challenging. So I rather like that, and I feel I should bring it up right away. It’s a shame this does not carry over to allies, but I’ll get to that later. This praise also doesn’t apply to enemies that suddenly glitch and become derpy, which happens frequently enough that it should be mentioned. The combat controls too will deserve their own separate rant. This is a long review, is what I’m saying.

The story in this third installment is that Geralt of Rivia is hired to find his adopted daughter Ciri, who is being pursued by the Wild Hunt, a group of supernatural elf baddies who dress in skeletal armor and command frosty elemental magic. Along the way, everyone who has information on Ciri will first ask Geralt to do something for them in exchange for their information, and almost all of these side quests branch out into their own little stories, some of which are really interesting. But mostly, they’re repetitive and dull, and the pattern of delaying tactics never alters throughout the game. Every scene is like:

Geralt: “Will you just answer one simple fucking question so I can be on my way?”

NPC: “Aye, but first you must kill this beastie for me. To do that, you’ve got to question the locals, find some herbs, track the trail of corpses…blah blah blah…”

Geralt: “Motherfucker.”

(Actually, that last line may have been me speaking for Geralt as he never says motherfucker, even if he does say fuck a lot. I consider it one of his better qualities.)

It’s this repetitive and completely uninspired pattern that had me burning out every few days. I would drop the game and go days or even weeks without playing it because I was sick and tired of doing the same shit over and over again. This is a damn crying shame, because the game is so very pretty. I know I normally say this about all games I review, and good graphics are becoming easy as a passing grade for everyone whether they do a 3D game, or 2D, or 2.5D. But even so, this game is so very pretty. I didn’t even take my horse during most missions in the first 75 hours because I just wanted to run from field to field, admiring the sky, the fields, the buildings. I’d stop in interiors and gush to my husband about the design and layout, and how nothing feels out of place. I’d marvel at the details in the villagers, in their animations, in the detail in their faces. Even the ugly NPCs are beautiful to me for their diversity of shapes and sizes. (But not colors.) And the water. MY GOD THE WATER.

The music is glorious and nicely varied. I never heard any one track long enough to get tired of it, and I deeply appreciate the company shipping the soundtrack on a separate CD for me to listen to without playing the game. It’s really so good that during combat, I hated having to kill the monsters and cut off the song early. I hung out in pubs just to listen to the bards playing. I stopped to listen to street performers. Vital mission? Fuck that, I’m stopping to listen to these dudes jam out. This is music so good, I want to igni my thumb and wave it back and forth.

Combat is where the flaws begin to show precisely because it’s such an inconsistent experience. In certain fights, there’s a fluid quality to combat where I’m rolling Geralt smoothly from one foe to the next, making up lovely combos of heavy and light attacks before dodging or parrying and finally slicing some dude neatly in half. (Which rarely failed to elicit an “Oooh” or an “Eeeew” from me depending on how close the camera got to a slaughtered enemy.) When everything is working right, it’s fun. It does, however become tedious quickly, and there’s nothing the game does to prevent this. Most games have some progression system where you’re getting new abilities or combos to keep things from getting stale. But Witcher 3’s design team doubles down on their dull system, like, “Not only will you do the same fights over and over, but we’ve padded the story to send you out for at least 100 hours of the same old shit.”

This doesn’t cover when the controls simply don’t work and Geralt suddenly handles like a tank with a busted tread. If I’d had a gold coin for every time I shouted, “Will you fucking dodge already?” I’d have enough gold for Geralt to retire and hire someone else to find Ciri for him. At times, all the buttons just stop working, and this is true after multiple patches, and after an alternate control scheme was added. Combat is buggy and the controls are awful far more often than they’re smooth and responsive. Going into every fight was a little tense. Will the controls work? Or will they try to fuck me over again?

And sometimes, combat has rules that make no fucking sense whatsoever. Your ability to make signs, basic fucking hand gestures, is tied into your stamina. “Oh no, I’m too winded from running to make metal horns.” WTF. And then there’s the even stupider rule that you can’t use your sword or hand signs underwater, but you can use a fucking crossbow. (Pop quiz: what is the single biggest weakness for ancient crossbows? That’s right kids, FUCKING WATER.) I’d understand if I couldn’t fire off igni and yrden, but aard and axii were okay, but choosing to deny me basic hand gestures while giving me a weapon that shouldn’t work at all underwater? Only in a video game does this kind of stuff pass muster.

When Geralt is paired with someone else, his allies have zero intelligence and efficacy. It’s a good thing that most are nigh-indestructible, because they often get surrounded by enemies and flail in one spot with attacks that apparently do -1 damage. It could be worse, and they could stick on doors or be fragile and die every few minutes. But that doesn’t mean they’re good or useful.

And that navigation system! I want to appreciate it for the fact that at least it points me toward my goals without making me have to guess where to go, but I might be more grateful if the fucking dots didn’t randomly change their path to the exact opposite direction and send me back the way I came before swapping back again. At times like this, I’d go to the map in the hopes of at least finding a waypoint marker, and even that wasn’t guaranteed. There should be one somewhere on the map, but sometimes it just goes on a coffee break. Check back later and it will be there. But not now, not when I fucking need it.

We haven’t even gotten to the story or to the many troubling aspects of the game. The story is “Our princess is in another castle,” and every time, just to enter the castle and meet the toad who tells you this requires 30-40 hours of real world time spent doing mind numbing busy work. When you finally do get to meet that toad, it will trigger a flashback so you can play as Ciri. I hated this because Ciri has no powers, no potions, and is pitted against floods of enemies that I was never sure if I was supposed to fight them all or just dash past. Sometimes the game wants me to do one thing, or sometimes it wants the other. But it’s never very clear what I’m supposed to do with her. Frankly, I’d have rather just sat through a longer cut scene than put up with these sections.

Also, this game is an escapist fantasy only for straight white males. If you’re a person of color, the closest you get to representation is a mention of a Middle Eastern-like desert country, Zerrikania, and never any actual sign of said Zerrikanians. Oh, you can find their equipment scattered around. But trying to find a dark-skinned person in the game is impossible. It’s also kind of telling that Geralt is himself the whitest special snowflake in the game, and that his whiteness is so special that even covered in scars, other white people call him pretty.

(And don’t hand me shit about “Well it’s set in X region, where there aren’t any people of color.” This is a fantasy game written by modern people whose premise is that a confluence of dimensions dropped elves, dragons, and fucking vampires into the region. It shouldn’t be that much more of a stretch to put in some human-like race that’s dark-skinned. And while it’s fair to say it’s not outright racism, it is completely ignorant of its own whiteness overload in a time when gamers have been discussing this for well over a decade. Tone deaf? Oh hell yeah.)

But this is one game where you may be glad not to see your people represented, because if they were in the game, the white men would treat them like shit. Worse, the game is making you rescue the murdering, raping, racist, sexist white men from the end of the world. Halfway through the game, I was debating just stopping and pretending the whole world died because they all fucking deserve it.

“Oh Zoe, I’m sure you’re exaggerating how bad it is,” you say. No, I’m really not. As an example, let me tell you about Whoreson Junior, a character I’m meant to track who is working for King Radovid. The king tells me this guy is in a castle up the way with a bevy of whores.

“I’m told he doesn’t treat the women well,” the king says.

UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE FUCKING CENTURY.

I get to said castle and sneak inside to find Whoreson’s room, and outside in the hall is a dead prostitute tacked to the wall with daggers through her wrists. This is enough to certify that this Whoreson Junior is a Very Bad Man, yes?

NO.

I walk inside the room, and there’s a bathtub with no less than four dead prostitutes with their throats slit, another lying dead on the table in front of the bad guy in question, another on the bed, and yet another swinging from the fucking rafters. This isn’t overkill. It’s straight up fucking ludicrous how much rape and murder had to be put on display for ONE FUCKING GUY. Hitler would walk in on this display and go, “Oh wow…I am impressed, ya?” But I think most women gamers will walk in on it and say, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

That’s just one scene, yo. Listen in on the menfolk of the game talking, and you hear boasts of rape all the time. There’s a scene early on where a trio of soldiers threaten you in a bar. You can intimidate them easily enough, but just stand there and listen, and you’ll hear one brag about raping a child. Was it a boy or a girl? Hell, they didn’t know, and they didn’t care. It was just a hole to fill. HAHAHAHAAA…aaaah, good times.

This problem with women in the game is so blatant that when I saw a slim chance of putting a woman on the throne in one of the kingdoms late in the game, I dropped everything else to make sure she was crowned. I just wanted somehow to make this world a little less dickish before I left it. (And incidentally, it turns out she’s the best ruler for the land, and the only surviving male who might have led is a fucking idiot with bigger fists than his brain.)

Most of the women in this world are just rape fodder, and even the most powerful sorceresses are at the “mercy” of the men. Ciri may seem the most empowered because you get to play her, but she’s running from men, and has to be rescued by a man. Like I said, this isn’t an escapist fantasy for anyone except straight white dudes. (“But what about–?” Gays are abominations in this world, as explained by a gay character early on. “Gotcha, Zoe.”)

But it’s not all misogyny all the time. There’s room for superstition and hatred against pagans, witches, and magi, too. Once I’ve rescued all the witches and magi and gotten them away from the witch hunters, the cultists in charge go, “Hmmmm, well we HAVE to burn something…DWARVES AND ELVES. YES, LET’S GO MURDER THE NON-HUMANS NEXT.” These are the people I’m saving from doom, y’all. I’d much rather help the bad guys kill them all.

This is a complaint I had with Dragon Age: Inquisition, and it’s just as valid here. The more I learn of this world, the less I want to be the savior of these people. I want to lose and have them all destroyed. They all fucking deserve it. It’s not just the royal shits at the top. It’s the soldiers tormenting the villagers and the peasants spitting on anyone not like them. It’s all the snide fucking comments all the fucking time. How is this escapist fantasy? “The whole fucking world is awful and stupid, now go rescue it from evil.” How about the whole evil world unfucking itself for a change of pace and I just go fishing? (Oh, but I can’t, because the fishing rod isn’t an item I can equip. It’s just there to be broken into scrap and crafted.)

Before I move on, there is one complaint I’ve seen in other reviews that I feel requires contradicting. I’ve seen people say, “Geralt is a womanizer himself.” Well actually, it is possible to play the game so that Geralt is completely faithful to only one woman. If you as the player had him running around fucking all the sorceresses and hookers, that’s not really on Geralt, is it? YOU choose to play him that way, and then you chose to complain how awful it was that you had the option to be a shithead. No, man, that complaint doesn’t fly, especially not in a game world where you had the choice to be better and you chose to be just as pathetic as the other people in the game.

Having said that, I chose to be faithful to Yennefer, and oh my God, I wish I’d chosen to dump her ass as soon as possible. Even after I’ve bent over backwards to help her, she remained a moody, overbearing, abrasive shrew who spends more time berating Geralt and everyone else to do her bidding than she ever does acting even remotely romantic. By the end of the game, I was lamenting, “I should have chose Triss.” Triss is a much less demanding character, and the missions she asks Geralt to take on, she ASKS for his help, not demands it. Even the questionable missions she takes for money are for a good reason, in that she needs the money to organize an underground railroad operation to keep complete strangers safe. Triss is fucking awesome, and Yennefer is a self-centered self-absorbed harpy. She makes me wish I had cheated on her at every turn. Like, I had a sweet chance to see lots of bewbs, and I gave it up for THIS? I was robbed, man.

Oh, and there’s a random recurring comment in several reviews about Keira’s dress and how “it practically invites you to undress her with your eyes.” Um…dudes, do you not remember that less than a minute after meeting her, she gets naked and lets you look at her boobs before joining you on your quest? Or were you just not mentioning it because it’s spoilers?

Well let me go ahead and spoils several moments in the game, then. “Beeeeeeewbs. Look, more bewbs. Old lady bewbs. Pert young lady bewbs. Satyr bewbs! Elf bewbs! Beeeeeeeeeewbs!” And not a single dick in sight to balance all this bewbage out. I feel cheated. I wanted to see dong at least once, man.

So, the crafting system…I’ll just give one example and move on. I find out early on that recovering potions requires alcohol, any strong spirit. Which is stupid, but okay, at least I don’t have to keep looking for the same herbs over and over, right? Right, so I look for alcohol recipes. And without fail, every recipe is “one empty bottle and one bottle of alcohol plus some herbs.” This is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen in a crafting system, EVER. Given how often vodka is mentioned in the game, would it have killed them to have me crafting potatoes, yeast, and sugar into an actual spirit? Why does making alcohol require alcohol? Shouldn’t it require yeast and sugar? I’m not expecting total realism with a two year wait for fermentation and distillation, but fuck me, alcohol recipes require an empty bottle and a bottle of alcohol? That’s…I literally can’t even, y’all.

This crafting system is just…it’s another headache in a game already jam-packed full of them. I can’t just buy a suit of armor. First I have to buy or find the plans. Then I have to find someone of a sufficient skill level to build it. Then I have to gather all the fucking supplies to make it, and then I can pay to have it made…oh, I don’t have enough gold because repairs of my shitty equipment is taking all my money? Well let me go steal some shit and try to avoid combat until I can sell enough stuff to buy one stupid fucking piece of equipment. After I’ve got a cuirass secured, I have to do this for my pants, for my gloves, for my boots, and both my fucking swords? Good God, what a tedious, boring mini-game!

This is why I’m so very conflicted about how to score this game. I’ve played something like 150 hours, and most of the time, I was bored to tears. I kept forcing myself back into it so I could make it to the end and see what the punch line is, and summing it up, it’s, “See? The elves are all dicks too!” Well, thanks for telling me that after 150 hours.

For the glitches, the controls, the story, and the constant tedium, I want to rate this game very low, maybe even a 1. But it was so pretty, and I spent a lot of time just staring and taking in the world. After coming back from a long break, for just a few hours, the combat felt fresh and interesting, and there were many times when the witty dialogue made me laugh out loud. I liked that I could talk my way out of lots of fights. In particular, I talked my way past most trolls and only had to fight two in the entire game because they couldn’t be reasoned with.

For all the nice touches, I want to give the game a 4. Then there’s the fact that the company charged me a base price and gave me the limited edition treatment with a soundtrack CD, a gorgeous map, stickers, a game guide, a manual, AND a letter thanking me for buying their game. Lots of triple A studios these days charge me 70 euros and won’t even give me a card outlining the controls. It’s just a disc in an otherwise empty box, and sometimes I feel like they want to stop making even that effort if they can and charge me even more for just the game download. It’s nice to see someone making an all out effort to earn the money I’m paying for their game.

But for as nice as the package was, I have to give Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt 2 stars. I was bored most of the time I was playing it, and when I wasn’t bored, my time was often spent being pissed at the controls. Yeah, there’s a good time in there too, but it’s buried under so much tedium and fuckery that I don’t ever want to play again. I don’t care if there’s other endings or story paths I could take. It’s just way too long of a slog. And this is coming from someone who put 200 hours into one playthrough of Dragon Age: Inquisition. It’s not the length of time turning me off. It’s the quality of the activities within that time, and I found that quality to be sorely lacking.

Game review: Puzzle Quest 2 and Plague, Inc. for Windows Phone

What? TWO game reviews in ONE post? Yeah, this may not always be the case for phone game reviews, but in these two cases, the games are just so simple that there’s not much reason to devote a full post to each of them. One I liked, and the other did nothing for me. I didn’t dislike it, but I also don’t find myself wanting to play it any more.

First, let’s cover Puzzle Quest 2, which is definitely my kind of game. The Puzzle Quest brand is turning into a big licensed property franchise, and a Kotaku review of the latest version sporting Marvel characters felt it was weak, and stated that the best in the series was the second game. I grabbed my phone, hoping that maybe, just maybe, there would be a Win Phone version. (Game makers, please don’t say a game is coming out on all mobile platforms when you mean just Android and iPhone. It gets my hopes up and then crushes them cruelly.) There was, and so I bought it and spent a long, LONG time playing it. I might still be playing through the story quest now, but after level 50, the game just erased my character and dumped me back to the beginning. I think eventually, I’ll start it over because I love puzzle games, but that loss of progress was more than a little hard to take.

What Puzzle Quest 2 is, is a match 3 tile puzzle with some context added to the turns-based struggles with AI opponents. They could have just made the game without the fantasy story and it would have worked just fine for me. But the idea is that each opponent is a different monster with different spells and defenses. As you progress down through this dungeon, you come across bigger and badder enemies, and each time you have to revise your playing style to counter theirs. You fire off your own spells by collecting gems of various colors, but you can also collect little fists to gather action points for using a weapon, or you can match skulls to do damage directly. And that’s pretty much it.

The game tries to add some variety with puzzles for collecting loot, for breaking doors down, for springing booby traps, and for picking locks. It also tosses some boss battles in with restrictions on your spells or specifying a certain item you have to activate. You can find NPCs willing to train you in new spells by solving tricky puzzles that must end with an empty screen. But no matter what flavor the puzzle is, it’s still a match 3 game. If you match 4 or 5 tiles, you get added bonuses and an extra turn, and if you can fire off a “heroic” chain reaction, you get extra XP at the end of the fight. XP builds so that you can unlock new spells, which is a fun way to keep things from being too repetitive.

If I have any complaints about the game, it’s that even on Easy mode, early fights feel grossly unfair. Enemies have double or even triple the hit points of my character, and I have nothing to fight their many spells. Later on, however, the game starts unlocking some bad ass spells that even the odds, so much so that even a boss with four times my health and regeneration can be slammed to death with just a few well placed spells attacks. In that respect, it’s delicious revenge that makes up for those hellish early levels. But still, if this is my experience on Easy mode, I have to wonder was sort of douchebaggery occurs at harder difficulties.

I’ll give Puzzle Quest 2 4 stars and recommend it to fans of puzzle games.

Moving on, Plague, Inc. was recommended to me by a friend on Facebook and seconded by another, both of them loving the premise of killing off everyone with plagues. So I grabbed my phone and saw it was available, and I bought and took it for a short spin.

Frankly, I don’t see the appeal. You’re presented with a map and are told to choose the country where your disease will start, and as it infects people, you get more DNA points to evolve various traits for your disease. You can give it better qualities to resist climate extremes and medicines, and you can add symptoms that make it more deadly or more virulent. You can add methods of transmission so it spreads more easily. As the game progresses, you pop little icons on the map to get more DNA points or to slow research on the cure. If a cure is developed, you lose. If it doesn’t, everyone dies, you win, and you unlock some genes to apply to your next disease. Your infection is given a score, and I guess the appeal is supposed to be to build a disease that kills super fast and earns a prefect star rating.

But after just a few plays, I don’t care to try again. It’s a bit too simplistic for my preference, and while the news-feed scrolling at the top had some funny lines, the game just isn’t much fun for me.

I give Plague, Inc. 2 stars and might suggest it for strategy fans looking for something to play on their phone.

Book Review: Bite Club by Rachel Caine

I knew it had to happen eventually in a series this long, finding a book I didn’t like. But I don’t just dislike Bite Club. I hated it. I actively loathe it, and I had to struggle to finish it. I’m now no longer at risk of reading the rest of the series one book after another. If anything, it will now be a struggle to read the books I’ve already bought. That’s how badly this book screwed the pooch. It’s so bad, my give a fuck meter plunged off the chart. The whole town could burst into flames and kill everyone, and I wouldn’t care. That’s a major league fuck up, y’all.

There’s a lot to hate, but the number one cause of this falling out is Shane’s first person perspective intrusion into the book. This series has ALWAYS been third person singular, and it’s always been Claire’s story. That’s why I liked it, getting the story from this outsider who’s slowly becoming a bad ass and building her legend in this town. So here’s Shane, most of his early intrusions going, “Hey, I’m a walking dick, you know? Let me tell you why it’s okay for me to be a dick. Because…well, because I’m a dick. Man, dicks are so awesome.”

NO. NO! NO! FUCK YOU, SHANE. WHY DID YOU HAVE TO OPEN YOUR DICK MOUTH AND RUIN THIS SERIES FOR ME?

And yes, there is a reason for his behavior revealed later, and yes, I guessed it early on. But having to read his stupid thoughts flat out ruined the book for me.

If that was the only flaw, I might, MIGHT be able to forgive this intrusion and move on. But no, everyone in this book caught a case of stupid, INCLUDING THE WRITER. The writer forgot that the Glass House wouldn’t have let a vampire in uninvited. But fuck that rule because it would make a scene impossible. The story has a gaping logic hole around Frank and cell phones, and in a town running a security grid that monitors every single message and email, I find it really fucking hard to believe that a video streaming site with hundreds of thousands of viewers can’t be traced on its traffic spike alone. “Oh, but it’s really good encryption!” No, man, I don’t fucking believe it.

But this is the story where we see Amalie has straight up gone stupid. When Claire outlines everything that’s been going on, Amalie says, “I knew all of that!” Oh you KNEW? So you’re just letting your greatest enemy build a fucking army for shits and giggles? You just let another character escape, all the while talking about how merciless and cruel you can be? Cause I stopped buying your shit this time, chick.

I really can’t think of a single character that didn’t get stupid. Myrnin, supposed super genius, falls for a damned “rabbit season, duck season” conversation so obvious, I have to wonder why he doesn’t start talking with a Fudd voice.

*Takes deep breath*

I give Bite Club 2 stars. I hated it, and I will now need at least six months to a year before I can try reading the next book.