Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 24

Book review: Charm by Cat Hellisen

Charm is a hard book for me to rate or review because I have a problem with the ending. That being the case, how do I talk about the problem without spoiling the whole thing? I guess I should give the basics and then talk about what I liked, and then carefully pick my way around the ending to avoid spoilers.

Charm is about a young woman named Irene, who grew up believing her mother Hestia was crazy, and that her madness eventually led to her committing suicide. Irene wears a charm that belonged to her mother, a ward against the evil eye that behaves in a strange way around certain people. Despite this unusual pendant, Irene doesn’t believe in magic, and she’s more worried that she has inherited her mother’s madness.

Irene has one lifelong friend, Rain, who she loves deeply, but who cannot love her back in the same way because he’s gay. Rain lives with his abusive mother Lily and is locked in a co-dependent cycle with her and Irene. Lily keeps Rain close and uses him to host her own pity party, while Irene enables his heavy drinking while jealously stalking him through his various romantic encounters. Dysfunctional is the order of the day for most of the characters in this story.

The arrival of another magic user upsets the cyclical pattern for everyone, as Caleb takes Rain away from Irene and Lily by casting a spell on him. Shortly thereafter, things begin to get very weird for Irene, who learns from Caleb that her mother Hestia was not crazy at all, and neither is Irene. She is a witch of considerable power, and Caleb hopes to use her in a fight against a powerful mage.

There’s some parts in the middle of this book that kind of remind me of American Gods. Not the deities so much as the theme of a main character coming to learn about the secret world hidden away from normal people, a world she should know about, but doesn’t because she’s been living in denial her whole life.

There’s some fights with monsters leading up to the point of Irene learning how to control her power, and then there’s the ending. There’s no tension to it, and it’s over quite quickly, making it a bit of a letdown after the rising tension from the previous chapters. Part of this has to do with Caleb’s plan, which everyone but Irene knows about. And this is mostly fine if not for Rain. Rain was apparently told this plan, and how it would involve using Irene, and despite him being her best friend since childhood, he says nothing. Then, even knowing Caleb is manipulating his best friend, he abandons Irene like the ending is her fault. Ultimately, it takes all my sympathy for Rain and chucks it out a window. As for Caleb, his plan stinks, and even the big reveal twist at the end doesn’t change my opinion of him. What he does to Irene to beat the bad guy is dreadful.

There is one other thing that I felt unsatisfied with as well, and that’s Rain’s back story. There’s an event hinted at that explains why Rain is so messed up, but it’s never really revealed what happened to him. I can’t help but wonder at that, but I guess it’s something so unspeakable that it had to be left hidden. Sure, not everything has to be explained in a story, but I would have liked an answer to that question.

In the end, I guess I have to give Charm 4 stars. Okay, I really didn’t like the ending, but I did like most of the book leading up to that point. It’s a good story that I’d recommend to fans of modern dark fantasy.

Music: Vampire Weekend

Vampire Weekend is on my regular rotation of albums to write by, and if I had to pick a favorite among their three albums, I’d be hard-pressed to choose their first self-titled album or Contra. Their third album, Modern Vampires of the City, is also fantastic, but I haven’t had nearly as many listened to give it a fair chance just yet.

Their music is a fusion of styles, with a lot of their songs having great drum beats and synthesizer melodies, and quite a few have memorable guitar riffs as well. My favorite songs are Mansard Roof, Oxford Comma,Cousins, and Diplomat’s Son. If you visit their web site, you can find links to buy their albums and check out their latest videos.

A tale of two trailers…

Yesterday, my Facebook stream lit up with reactions to the new Jem and the Holograms trailer, and they were all bad. I read through an article about how awful it was and how it was angering fans of the show, and bracing myself for the worst, I took a look at it. And…I want to see the movie. Right off the bat, my first thought is how this is an origin movie for a series that started off without an origin. The series follows this group after their initial success, so they already have an established routine, and even an established rival. But you wouldn’t find any of that in their origin, if they’d had one, would you? Not really, no. So I’m ready to give the movie the benefit of the doubt. I may be wrong, and the film may suck and make me wish I hadn’t wasted my time or money on it. But based on this one short look, yeah, I’m intrigued.

I feel kind of alone on this, though, because the vast majority of coverage on the trailer is 100% “Ugh, really?” This reminds me once again on how often I end up being outside of the in-crowd when it comes to just about everything. This sucks because if I love something, it usually means it’s gonna die due to a lack of interest. Even when something I love has a big enough fan base to sustain it, ANY mention that I like these things instantly invites a flood of criticism and teasing. I must be stupid to like them, because the mainstream zeitgeist has classified them as pure shite.

The same thing has happened with the new Supergirl trailer. I found out about it from the collective groaning on social media, and I watched the trailer and got goosebumps. I want to see this show so, so bad. I can’t wait for a box set, I need it to come to Rai NOW. This is a thing I need in my life, and I haven’t felt that way about any superhero TV show since Smallville.

And yet, go look at io9 and Polygon marching lock-step in their hate for Supergirl, and for Jem. And the thing is, what’s the gist of all their hate? “This is not the way we wanted it to be!”

Um…and so your point is? I mean, for the last fifteen years, every time a new superhero movie has come out, there have been drastic changes to the story, the costumes, the characters, the settings. Each time a release is found lacking, but the changes made to the story happen because Hollywood is trying to write to a wider audience, and screw what the die-hard fan wants. We’re not the target market, and we’ve been told this every, single, time. These films are not made for us. They’re made to introduce everyone else to this thing we’ve loved and supported. And if the drastic changes alienate us? Well them’s the breaks.

It’s not like I don’t see where y’all are coming from with this hate. I try to give a lot of films and shows a chance, but the changes made to them often alienate me to the point where I can’t see or appreciate what it is that others love so much about the reboots. I loathed the Nolan-helmed Batman trilogy and don’t understand the love for them. I hate the new Man of Steel so much that I’d happily tie Henry Cavill to a kryptonite boulder and drop him in an ocean. I haven’t liked a single X-Men movie since the first one. I don’t like Arrow or Flash. I haven’t liked most of the second phase of the MCU. I don’t like Sherlock or Elementary. I don’t like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

But this doesn’t mean I dislike all reboots. I’m really enjoying Sleepy Hollow. I love Teen Wolf and am eagerly awaiting the release of the season 4 box set in June to keep watching. I thought the first Toby Maguire Spider-Man was fantastic, and I don’t like Spider-Man. (Or more specifically, I don’t like Peter Parker. I loved Miguel O’hara in Spider-Man 2099, which of course meant that reboot was doomed to die quickly.)

I think part of this hate has to do with people becoming fatigued by reboots and remakes. Look at the reactions to the news of a remake of The Craft. It’s all collective groans like “Why do we need another remake? Can’t Hollywood do anything original?”

Well, yes they can, and they often do release original stuff. But those original works are risky and a lot of them flop or just barely make back what they cost to be produced. This makes the studios jumpy about doing too much new stuff, and so they look back at older successes and say, “Let’s do that one again!” Why? Because the people who watched the original will come back for the new version to do a comparison, and a lot of newcomers will go see the new version out of curiosity. The reboots and remakes can still fail, but they have a much higher chance of making bank than an original idea. That’s how we get yet another round of remakes and reboots.

I understand why people are fatigued by the trend, and why they dislike the details of their favorite story changing so much. But not all change is bad, and some reboots turn out better than the original. You want an example? Buffy the Vampire Slayer. To me, that first movie was great. As I watched the first season of the TV show, I really hated the changes made to it. I swore off the series until much later, and it was only in watching Angel that I decided to give Buffy another chance. And yeah, there’s stuff I don’t like about both shows. I could rant for hours about individual problems with episodes, or with whole seasons of both shows. But the reboot was a huge success and has led to an ongoing universe of comics, the so called “Whedonverse.”

I may end up hating both Jem and Supergirl once I see them, but I am not joining the in-crowd in hating the trailers just because they don’t follow some established storyline. I’m still open to the idea of something turning out better with a complete reboot. Maybe they’ll both suck and I’ll come back later and say so in a future post. But I know that my initial reactions to both trailers is positive.

I’m not even really trying to convince anyone else to give these reboots a chance. If you hate them, okay, I understand why you feel that way. I’m just saying that for me, these premises sound interesting, and that I’m going to cut them some slack for not tailoring their story to fit with the originals. We almost never get a direct translation from one medium to the big screen, so it shouldn’t come as a shock that these two adaptations are going to be so different. We’ve been here and done this a long time now. We should be used to the pattern already. We, the fans, are not the target market. We know this. We should get it by now.

But maybe if we can one day accept that being different doesn’t mean being bad, we might all have more fun exploring these new takes on old ideas. But then again, these days, hating rebooted things seems to be way more popular a hobby than loving them does. And that’s a damn shame, because sharing hate for a thing is in my opinion a lousy way to find common ground with each other.

Game review: Spooky’s House of Jump Scares for Steam

First I should give credit to Polygon and Griffin McElroy for bringing this game to my attention. Griffin’s been somewhat responsible for several of my purchases because his videos do what a lot of text articles and photos can’t; explain why these games are fun. (I also like his videos because he cusses almost as much as I do when I’m gaming. This makes me feel like we are kindred spirits.)

Spooky’s House of Jump Scares is on Steam’s Early Access, and it’s not finished yet. Some of you know my dislike of early access and may wonder why I got this anyway. I can explain in two words: it’s free.

The game is in a beta test phase and isn’t charging me money to help test it out. You know, like in the old days, before developers realized they could charge people 50 dollars to be a beta tester and never release an actual game. This, however is a classier model, giving me the game for free in exchange for me looking for bugs. And you know what? Aside from an occasional glitch where the textures to a wall might suddenly reveal the tunnel around the next corner, I didn’t see a whole lot of bugginess. For an early access game, this is pretty stable.

Spooky, the eponymous owner of this haunted house, appears at the start of the game challenging you to make it through 1,000 rooms to reach the end of her ghostly gauntlet. But as of this writing, there isn’t an end or 1,000 rooms. At room 754, the game stopped and told me that I’d reached the end of the available story, and that I could keep playing or stop there. I stopped there, but whenever this comes out with an update and a conclusion, I can see playing it again. I could even see it going into my rotation of games I pick up and play when I want to kill some time.

Graphically, Spooky’s House of Jump Scares is very simple, with most rooms wrapped in tile patterned textures. These rooms are randomly ordered, so every time you die, you’ll find a new maze to wander through. Several rooms will repeat throughout the game, such as the arcade, the computer room, and a foggy area where you must go through four arches in a certain order to reach the door. (A single piano note alerts you when you’ve found the right arch, while a two-note alert tells you when you’ve messed up and returned to the start.) As you wander the rooms and hallways, cutesy monster cutouts mounted on plywood will pop up in front of you with a sound effect that may or may not be scary. Let me be honest, these did not work on me, AT FIRST.

But within a few rooms, you uncover a note that activates a much scarier ghost, and that dude is going to pursue you from one room to the next, trying to get close enough to slash you and drain your health. You get no weapons to fight this guy, and while your health does regenerate without health packs, it does so very slowly, and this ghost does a LOT of damage.

So I’m running from this evil ghost who’s right on my heels, I’m down to a third of my health and know the next hit is going to kill me. THEN that cutesy ghost on plywood pops out of the wall, and then, it’s super effective at scaring the shit out of me because I thought the bad ghost somehow got in front of me. Of course, once I recognized it was the cutout, I would laugh and say something like “Up yours, cutesy ghost!”

And this is pretty much the whole game in a nutshell. Move through rooms until you unlock a new, much scarier ghost, and run until you lose it somewhere in the maze of repeating rooms. During the first few rounds, you find a save point every 50 rooms and an elevator that takes you deeper down into the house. But after 300, you only find saves every hundred rooms. It doesn’t take long to navigate 100 rooms, not with you doing half of them at a sprint. But as you get closer to the end of a round, you get more paranoid about dying and having to start over. So then every sound, even the harmless stuff, is jump inducing.

There’s also a point when the cuteness is blurred by different effects warping your vision or the rooms themselves, and much later on, the faces of the cute ghosts are replaced by something much scarier, and that also helps make some funny jump scares. There’s also some rooms with horror themes that are creepy even without a ghost around. Again, I won’t spoil them, but trust me, you’ll know when you find them.

Around room 555, you get an ax, and maybe this will be used more in the final rooms. But aside from breaking a few barriers and dealing with four enemies that I won’t spoil for you, you never really use it for anything else. You can’t ax the ghosts, you know. Cause they’re already dead. One ghost in particular is both scary and annoying because you have to walk backwards for something like 15 rooms. If you turn your back on him, he’ll catch you and kill you even if you have health, leading to a very long unskippable cut scene. That ghost…oh, how I hate him.

Actually, now that I think about it, there was one other problem right near the end that may or may not have been a bug. When I got to room 750, Spooky granted me “unlimited stamina” which should have made sprinting easier. Only, I lost the ability to sprint at all. Whether that’s intentional or a bug, I don’t know, so I plan to ask about it in the game’s support forums. But it could be intentional, as Spooky’s other “gift” given earlier in the game was equally “useful.”

Overall, my impression of Spooky’s House of Jump Scares is a positive one. I think it proves that you don’t need next-gen graphics to make a game fun and addicting, and you don’t need photorealistic monsters to make a game scary either. Just take away any useful weapons, give the monsters the advantage, and then pop up some goofy kiddie Halloween decorations when I least expect it. Pure gaming gold, y’all.

I’m giving Spooky’s House of Jump Scares 4 stars in its unfinished state, and I may bump this up to a five for the final release. It’s fun, it’s scary, and it’s quite good.

My problems with indie platformers…

This week I bought They Bleed Pixels, and after three chapters, I gave up and walked away in frustration. I didn’t play enough to make a proper review, but the experience did help bring to mind several complaints I’ve had with indie platformers, and I want to talk about them after a few days to calm down. If I had written about this immediately after leaving the game, about 80% of every sentence would have been variations of fuck.

To begin, I love platformers. Back in my youth, Nintendo was full of these side scrolling gems, and I think back on how many of my favorite games were the 2D jump/attack variety. Among some of my favorites were Super Mario Bros. (And 2 and 3), Castlevania (and 3, screw 2), Bionic Commando, and Contra (And Super Contra). Those titles give you some idea of the variety of the formula, with each game having a very different feel and look, and they were glorious. They had a great blend of challenge and fun, and to this day, I can still go back and play some of them over just because I love them so much.

Then at a certain point, all the new consoles coming out created a shift away from the 2D side-view platform in favor of the 3D environment. I’m not knocking this because there are a lot of 3D games that I’ve loved over those consoles as well. But the dearth of the familiar platformer was always something stuck at the back of my mind. I wondered why we lost this particular style of gameplay when the increasing hardware capabilities should have made it possible to have some really pretty games on the 2D plane.

Then along came this resurgence of interest in the 2D platform style, and I’ve been pretty happy with some of the games I’ve played in recent years. Nothing from the big publishers stands out for me the way the old NES games did, though, and I think part of it has to do with the way a lot of the newer games are really just carbon copies of the old games. The old games, when they were new, had this wow factor, this idea that I was playing something never possible before. The Super Mario Bros. game that came with my NES was almost exactly like the one I could play in the arcade, and that was amazing. Now I could play the same game at home without having to sink a roll of quarters into it to make up for my slow learning ability. I could putz around at home, and then go to the arcade and maybe only spend four quarters to play the whole game.

I’m not one for nostalgia, though, and I think a lot of the indie retro style is meant to tickle a sentiment I’m rarely capable of feeling. I say rarely because something like Shovel Knight comes along, and it does tickle the nostalgia buttons in me for all the right reasons. It’s got gameplay that reminds me of some favorite old games while doing something new at the same time, and that’s what really pleases me. The nostalgia I feel for it is that return to the excitement of playing something new and different, something challenging, but not so hard it stops being fun even after I’ve died twenty or so times.

That is a tricky balance to achieve, the ratio of challenge to fun, and that is where most indie platformers lose me. They’re made to be hard, so hard that a minor percentage of people who buy them will ever beat them. Even the people who do beat them, I don’t think are having a lot of fun while playing them. I say this because I watch them play these games on YouTube, and their growls and slurs are almost as vitriolic as my own. Now, some of you may argue that you are still having fun, but I don’t think you really are. Bashing one’s head repeatedly against a hard object isn’t fun. Hurting your hands for a demanding sequence that allows no room for failure isn’t fun. It’s doesn’t tickle my sense of nostalgia either, because the old NES games that made me angry, I stopped playing and forgot about them and went back to the games I enjoyed playing.

Let me talk about They Bleed Pixels. Here’s a game that uses two buttons, but in my opinion, uses them badly, and even though I’m using a controller with eight easy to reach buttons, won’t let me map the game’s moves to other controls. It also won’t let me use the D-pad, and the analog stick’s somewhat ambiguous reading of my moves means that I spend a lot of time annoyed when the game won’t do what I need to do to survive a demanding situation.

Don’t get me wrong, the game is pretty, and it’s got a great soundtrack. I love that it has a girl as the protagonist, and while I’m not a Lovecraft fan, the premise was interesting enough to get me to plunk down the money to try it out. There’s a variety of enemies, and the art style does evoke some of that old school console nostalgia.

But the controls remind me more of all the old games that put too many moves all in one button, leading to frustrating situations where the attack or move I needed to do in a quarter of a second is misread and leads to repeated deaths. It doesn’t have to be this way. The game could have let me put the claw swipe on one button, the fast kick on anther, the high kick on another, and the jump on yet another. That’s the four face buttons covered and I’ve still got two over each shoulder for slides and whatever else the game feels I need. But instead, all the attacks are in one button and the difference between tapping and holding is easy to mess up in the heat of the moment.

But there’s something else here that makes me walk away, and it’s the demand for perfection. Levels are often set up with the entire floor covered in spikes, so I have to wall cling and wall jump perfectly to make it across an area. It isn’t long before I’m also expected to fight flying enemies who can hover in open space while I must frantically plan my falls to aim for a sticky surface and avoid plunging into spikes for the hundredth time in a row. This sort of platforming is already aggravating without any time constraints added, but then the game begins tossing in advancing saw blades, forcing me through a series of enemy encounters that I must beat to keep moving. There is no move to get past the enemies because the levels are designed with extremely low ceilings. So if I don’t play the game exactly in this one right way, I’m not allowed to advance.

Where I gave up was on one of these saw rooms, where the room moved vertically up to a trap door. I frantically searched for a button, using the right stick to pan around without seeing anything, and after being knocked back by an enemy, I fell down a deep pit and found the switch. So the game makers wanted me to fall all this way, kick the switch, and then double-jump from wall to wall, dodging saw blades all the way up, and racing to get above the ever rising blades coming from the bottom of the screen.

No. No, I’m done here, and I have zero desire to continue playing. I have so little desire to know how the game ends that even with YouTube just a click away in my browser, I just don’t care. That’s because from the moment the game started, I was never having fun with it. I ended up with a raw throat from yelling and growling at every misread controller input, at every death that came down to the analog stick screwing me over.

This leaves me in a bit of a funk because I want to support these indie platform game makers. I want to encourage them to do more games in a style that I loved as a kid. But most of the games I’ve bought have been designed for a completely different audience, and the trend of the indie market seems to be catering almost exclusively to the speed runners. It isn’t that I can’t find some gems in there. In recent memory, there’s been Spelunky, Steamworld Dig, Shovel Knight and Battle Block Theater that scratched that platform itch and which I considered fun for the most part.

But for every fun game I’ve bought, there’s been four or five more that left me so mad and shaking, and Steam just keeps pushing more and more of these kinds of super hard indie platformers at me. It gets to the point where I’m so reluctant to buy anything, I’m at risk of missing out on even the fun games like Shovel Knight because I’ve been burned so often by other games. As it is, I came into Shovel Knight way after it first launched, and only after it was on sale. After playing it, I like it so much that I’m planning to get it for my Vita and PS4. It’s so much fun, I don’t mind paying for it twice. But I almost didn’t get it because the other indie games have made me wary of risking my money on games I won’t be allowed to enjoy. If I pay someone 14 euros for a game, I don’t want to be kicked out of it in the opening chapters because it demands perfection and nothing less. So I buy less games, afraid of this situation being as common as it is.

I’m not the only one to make this observation about games, but this is the only medium where some of the manufacturers gleefully work to prevent you from ever seeing the end of their story. Movies don’t stop in the middle to ask you to fight the usher before you can see the second half. Music doesn’t quiz you in the middle of an album to make sure you’ve grasped the underlying themes in the lyrics. Ebooks don’t give a pop quiz before letting you see the next chapter. But games can and often do trap you at an early point in their story, refusing to let you see the rest because you couldn’t press up, up, x, square, square, square, triangle in a tutorial level in exactly three seconds.

This is not a situation that can’t be addressed with optional skill levels. Think about a game like Street Fighter, where you have the option of setting the skill level. When you first get the game, you need more time to understand how to input attacks. So you bump down the skill level and the enemy attacks come less frequently. Once you feel comfortable using the moves, you bump up the skill level until you’re at the top, racing through fights with the confidence of a veteran.

So for that combo example I just gave, the game maker could adjust the timing of the combo through a skill level slider option, giving me four or five seconds to get in all those prompts until I’ve memorized it and can handle doing it in a shorter three second window. Adjustment of skill doesn’t mean game makers have to get rid of the combo, it only means presenting a skill slider to allow for slower input timers.

The same is true of more modern games like The Last of Us. When you play it on the easiest setting, the game gives your gun a target lock. Once you’ve got a feel for the fights, you move up to normal mode, and you lose that helping crutch. Now you have to aim to hit the enemies. But you’re more comfortable with all the controls, so this is just a little bump to overcome.

Or look at Grand Theft Auto V, which will let you skip missions entirely if you fail them enough times. I only had to use this on the flying sections, but it was an amazing and unheard of idea, that the game maker wanted me to see their whole story so much, they even got rid of the pass/fail blockade that might have sent me out early on in the game.

So let’s get back to They Bleed Pixels again. A skill level option might mean the enemies don’t shove me off a platform the second they see me. It might mean those saw blade traps move a little slower at a lower skill level, and there’s maybe a few less saw blades lining that wall I needed to double jump. Having these options to acclimate me to the game doesn’t mean the hardcore speed runners can’t still play on the hardest setting and spend their days cursing and swearing with every failure. All it means is that the game maker values my perspective as a less skilled gamer who would also like to pay them for their creation. I need a lot of practice before I can move up to the next level in most games, and I appreciate those games that give me the option to scale back the difficulty until I’m more assured of my skills.

Even indie games with no difficulty slider can make the game easier or harder with just a few in-game variables. In Shovel Knight, you can smash the save points to get extra treasure, but that also means that if you die, you’re going all the way back to the beginning. There’s only two or three levels in the whole game that I can complete with no save points. But the thing is, I don’t need to do this to beat the game. It’s just an added layer of challenge for folks looking for a harder game, or those looking to score a unique achievement/trophy. I have won the trophy for making it through a level with no saves. But there’s another layer to this challenge, beating the whole game with no saves, and I don’t think I can ever do that. Which is okay, because that part of the game isn’t made for me. It’s made for the hardcore crowd.

And this is where I want to close this ramble, on the idea that an indie game can appeal to more than one niche audience and still be a success. Shovel Knight can appeal to a less skilled gamer like me by bringing back that old/new nostalgia factor, and it can appeal to the hardcore speed runners at the same time. This is why it frustrates me so much to see a game like They Bleed Pixels lock me out early on and refuse to give me any useful options to make the game less brutal. It doesn’t even need to be a difficulty slider, as I’ve shown with Shovel Knight. It could be an option in the controls to let me map out all the attacks to other buttons. It could be an option allowing me to use the D-pad to eliminate a lot of those misread directional inputs. If I’m willing to pony up the cash to play your game, why are there no options for me to customize my experience? Why are you so rigid about how I play your game?

I want to be a platform fangirl without reservations, but my support and enthusiasm are now constantly tempered by the worry that the game I want to play doesn’t want a loser like me to play it. That’s a damn shame because it often only takes a few small concessions to let me in, concessions that won’t compromise your game in any noticeable way. But if it’s so easy for games to make concessions to players like me, why do so many indies make their games so very hard to enjoy?

Book review: Growl by Ashley Fontainne

Growl started off stumbling for me, then recovered and ran fast and intense right up until the end before it once again stumbles and drops the ball entirely. The events leading up to the conclusion are so good that I was staying up later singing the “one more chapter” song, and I still consider it a good book for the most part. But the parts it mishandles are to my mind the most important for any book, and they take down the whole story by a couple notches.

Growl is about a battle between two ancient entities who have each used two small town families as their avatars for many generations. Sheryl Ilene Newcomb is the next inheritor of this ability, and her story begins by telling you how the book ends, who will die, and who will survive. This kills any sense of dread or fear for the characters. Worse, these first few chapters are chock full of infodumps that could have been handled better if they were part of the story as it happens instead of being shoehorned in at the front.

After the first three chapters, the story shakes off some of these slow infodumps, but not all of them. The story works in spite of them, and as I said, I was reading until I had dry eyes for two nights in a row. Sheryl’s family and life are interesting enough to make those constant digressions forgivable. She’s got a boyfriend already, so there’s no need to clutter the story up “finding the one,” and after a very brief flashback to a tragedy striking the family when Sheryl was nine, the story jumps ahead nine years to get to the real conflict. Sheryl’s discovery of her lineage and duties are fascinating, and I like the monsters even though they stay hidden for most of the book.

And then there’s the ending, which drops the ball in every conceivable way. First of all, the bad guy is one of those “muah hahahe, I’ve got the perfect plan” types of evil villains who are in fact just complete dumb asses who couldn’t plot their way out of a paper bag armed with a box cutter and a lighter. I need to make clear, had the villain actually stuck to their plan, they might, MIGHT have had an advantage for maybe a minute or two. Even then, their plan sucked and they would have lost, but they would have at least looked somewhat intelligent. But not this guy. He’s just a moron. This actually runs contradictory to what we’re told in the story about how calculating and methodical this ancient evil is.

This leads to a wimpy final fight that lasts all of thirty seconds. All that build up and tension is wasted, and the villain isn’t ever believable as a threat. Through most of the book, and even while reading the intro about Sheryl’s many injuries, I’m thinking, “Man, this fight is going to be EPIC.” But the way her injuries are actually sustained left me feeling even more disappointed. This is a limp, whimpering finish when Sheryl deserved a defiant heroic roar.

Problem three is that in order to fill in some of this “brilliant” villain’s back story, Sheryl does so via “skin telepathy.” It’s another infodump, and most of the information doesn’t even matter at this point. It might have if the villain was half as cunning as the middle had made them out to be. But for a lightweight moron, it’s too much information given too late in the story.

The first chapters could have been pared down and moved to be an epilogue and it would have helped the book a lot by not giving away every important event before it happened. But the book really needed an epic fight to cap off all the invested tension from the middle, and this ending tiff was more like a balloon having all the air let out in a weak raspberry sound.

I’m giving Growl 3 stars. It’s worth reading for the things it does differently with the shapeshifter mythos, but it unfortunately doesn’t use all the potential it promised.

Music: Ibeyi

Ibeyi is a music group made up of French Cuban twin sisters Naomi and Lisa-Kaindle Diaz. Their songs blend English and Yoruba, and the name Ibeyi translates from Yoruba as twins. The songs are made up of percussion beats and piano melodies, and it’s a mellow style that I really love. Ibeyi are on tour right now, and I’m hoping to see them at Unaltrofestival in Milan July 7th, where they’ll be performing with Of Monsters and Men, Christopher Paul Stelling, FYFE, and Dardust.

You can find out more about Ibeyi on their website, which has links to their eponymous first album, a list of upcoming tour dates, and a collection of photos of the artists.

Mini-movie review: Tucker and Dale VS Evil

I saw the trailer for Tucker and Dale VS Evil last year, and I knew I had to get it on DVD eventually. We finally found a copy last week, and I thought it was fantastic. I love how the classic teenagers going out in the woods trope is subverted because the “evil rednecks” are actually just normal guys going on vacation, just like the teenagers are. They look different, so the college teens are all making wild assumptions about what they’re thinking and doing, and the misunderstandings resulting in copious gory violence is brilliant and hilarious.

That said, I have two problems with the film, the first minute of the movie and the last thirty seconds. The first minute gives away the ending and the “twist” and that really sucks. If that first minute of found footage wasn’t there, I would have been pretty surprised by the twist. But as it is, that intro makes the big reveal a huge let down.

The last thirty second scene is just not funny, and it makes both Dale and Allison look pretty shallow and self-centered. After spending most of the movie building on the premise that appearances can be deceiving, and that these two characters from vastly different worlds are both good folks, the finale basically goes, “Nope, they’re both assholes after all! Hyuk, hyuk hyuk!”

Setting those complaints aside, I loved the movie and spent most of the film laughing so hard I was coughing. So I’ll give Tucker and Dale VS Evil 4 stars. I hear a sequel is in the works now, and if that’s true, I’m looking forward to seeing where the next film goes.

Visual art: Eric Lacombe

I follow Eric Lacombe on Facebook, and I very much look forward to all the images and videos he shares of his artwork. He’s got a very distinct dark style to his paintings, and you can check out his galleries on his web site:



http://www.ericlacombe.com/

Let me start over…

Long time visitors are going to feel a bit disoriented, disappointed, disillusioned, or otherwise dissed today because the rest of my blog just disappeared. First let me apologize and assure you that this change was intentional and not the result of me screwing up my blog. You know, like all those other times in the past when I screwed it up.

Part of what motivated me to take this drastic step is that as I���ve moved this site from one host to the next, there���s always some sort of technical gotcha that���s made the transfer fail. Sure, I read the documentation and tried to follow the instructions, but it never really worked out like I hoped. The only time that didn���t happen is when the techs working for Infinity Cloud did the transfer for me, and those poor souls went out of business. (A damn shame, really, because they were great people to work with. (Not that my current host is bad, mind you. But they did make me do my own blog transfer, and look how that turned out. *Sighs*))

The rest of the times, the only reason I could still recover the site is that I never gave up on updating my mirror at the WP-hosted address. This recovery method has problems because when I import the files over to this site, I���m not actually importing the graphics to the new server. There���s now this forced connection between the two sites, and to fix that kind of thing would take a long time. I���m far behind on several other projects that should have been done already, so I���m not too keen to get all up in the guts of my blog to untwist the kinky bits of code.

The other reason is more a matter of my changing perspective. In the last few years, I���ve tended to look at some of my older rants and think, ���Wow, I really was too pissed to think straight, wasn���t I?��� Being angry is one thing, but being incoherent to the point where I can���t find the connection from one idea to the next is…well, it���s cringe inducing.

���But Zoe, some of your best hits were the incoherent rants!��� you say. (And no joke, I have actually been told this on Twitter several times before, so for once, I���m not inventing a straw man to make my point.) That may be true, with slight emphasis on may, but in between my best hits were a lot of posts that, after years of distance, I now look at and sigh. They don���t truly reflect how I think about these topics now, or even if they still do, they���re not written with the kind of clarity I���d hoped to offer, being that I am a writer. Sure I could edit them, but again, I���m behind on work that needs doing, and curating all my past rants isn���t all that appealing. I���d much rather edit my early books for typos because that at least has some positive benefits for all parties concerned. Editing old rants just feels depressing.

So, I deleted the whole thing. I did have thoughts about keeping the last few months of reviews, just to have so back content to offer. But I decided that if people really needed to see my older book reviews, they���re all on Goodreads. The game reviews couldn���t be salvaged, but heck, it���s not like my reviews were all that important, you know? Most come months or years after a game release, so my post won���t be the deciding factor for most gamers��� purchases. It���s just my opinion of the stuff I play, and it���s not so important that I need to save any of it.

I also decided that I could make this a fresh new start, a reboot and redirection of my energies towards the things I���ve enjoyed most about blogging in the last couple of years. Which is to say, reviews and promotions of other peoples��� stuff. Sure, there���s going to be the occasional request to buy my latest book because self-promotion is a necessity for the self-published. But I like being able to use this space as a platform to highlight the art I���m consuming from other creators, even for the stuff I didn���t quite enjoy. In the past, that���s been mainly books and games, but moving ahead, I���d also like to highlight new bands and musicians, the rare movie I get out to see, and visual artists whose work has grabbed my attention. I���ll also be linking to videos on YouTube, though I think these will be links and not embedded videos so the creators get exposure for their other stuff.

A lot of this stuff won���t have full reviews. It will just be links to the thing I want you to see along with a little blurb like ���go check this out.��� I do still expect to do proper reviews for the games and books, but I feel less qualified to critique visual art and music in the same way. I know that I like stuff, but trying to put into words why always results in some stumbling and fumbling. So rather than try to explain why I like a thing, I���ll just point you to it. If you like it, great. If you don���t, well we all come to these things with our own perspectives, and that���s okay.

I do hope to invite some other folks over for guest posts or do interviews now and again. Variety is the spice of life, and I do like giving creators a place to reach new people. This will not be a regular thing, and depends entirely on whether I can find folks willing to indulge my questions about their stuff. I will try to avoid the usual questions like ���Why do you do this thing?��� or ���What inspires you?��� But I don���t expect to be more than a softball lobbing fan-girl, so it���s probably best not to expect anything too hard hitting or controversial. The only person I���m ever that hard on is myself.

Will there still be rants? Yes, most likely. There will also be links to stories that I feel are important and worthy of your attention, but I hope to make my thoughts on these topics more succinctly and perhaps with more coherence than in the past. Only time will tell if I���m able to accomplish this.

If you���re a long-time reader, I hope you���ll stick with me through this reboot, and if you���re a new reader, welcome to my blog. Thank you one and all for visiting my little nook in the web, and if you like my site, maybe consider checking out the store and buying one of my books. Or don���t if they���re not your thing. That���s totally cool, too. Either way, thanks for stopping by.