Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 30

Game review: Child of Light for PS Vita

I know what you’re thinking. “Oh God, another video game review from Zoe. I wonder how much she hated this game.” Well in the somewhat less than immortal words of Hatty Hattington, hold onto your butts, because for once I actually liked a game. YES. Shocking as it may seem, Child of Light is for me a highly entertaining and addicting game, and I say this because after starting it on Friday night, I played for something close to 36 hours straight with no sleep and only a few breaks for food. Then after sleeping to recharge, I went right back in for another 14 hour romp to the ending. And unlike most games that I binge play in one sitting (because I hate them and want to get done with them), I really loved every battle and puzzle in this pretty world.

It’s not a total love affair, so I can’t give this a perfect score. I had issues with the writing (big shock, I know) and the story, and I saw the ending coming from the opening scene and still hated it. But before I get to any of that negativity, let me talk about all the stuff I did like. That’s going to be a longer list than usual.

For starters, there’s the story putting a young girl in the protagonist’s spotlight, a welcome change of pace from all the growly-voiced middle-aged white psychopaths that usually take the top spot. (And yes, I mean psychopath. When you murder a thousand people to accomplish any goal and never consider any solution besides violence, you’re a psychopath no matter what side of the law you pretend to be on.) Aurora’s story intro is a bit of Snow White and Harry Potter, as her father marries a wicked queen to replace his deceased wife. (Though how he didn’t notice the obvious evilosity of his new wife eludes me. (Yes, evilosity is totally a real word.)) Soon after the new queen moves in, Aurora seemingly dies and ends up awake on an altar far from her familiar home. Here she learns that she’s no ordinary girl, and she has a special destiny to fulfill. Her quest to return home takes her through the villages of several fantastic peoples, and along the way she is asked to help with their plights. Each of these missions ends up bringing her another party member to help her in her fights, and each of these companions have their own unique skill sets.

The graphics are just amazing, pretty in a way that reminds me of children’s storybooks and some older styles of cell-painted animation. Aurora quickly gains the ability to fly, which opens up the world to exploration, and I can’t recall a single part of the game where I didn’t end up blurting out “Ooh, that’s pretty!” If I were giving out scores based solely on the prettiful, this game would have a perfect score.

The sound is equally good and fitting for the story, and my only nitpick is, there needed to be more. None of the music is grating, even after multiple listens, but after a while it just fades into the background because I’ve heard it over and over. So yeah, I would have liked a little more from the symphonic section who scored this game. For what is there, I will praise and say it’s certainly the best game music I’ve heard in a while.

The game play deserves a lot of praise, both in the side-scrolling world exploration parts and in the turn-based RPG sections. Aurora is aided on her quest by a sprite named Igniculus, and in addition to opening certain coffers and doors for her in the exploration sections, he can also blind enemies and allow Aurora to slip past them. This is handy because if you approach an enemy from behind, you get first strike in the turn-based battles. Igniculus can be made to glow brighter to light dark areas, and if Aurora is hurt while exploring, his glow can also heal her. This energy comes at a cost, shown as a white bar at the top of the screen, and it can either be replenished slowly with time, or more quickly by locating glowing flowers called wishes. Wishes release a series of glowing balls, and if these are collected in the right order, they can even give health and magic points back to Aurora and her companions.

In the turn-based areas, things get really interesting. First of all, you can swap either Aurora or her companions out on any turn, an instant change that doesn’t lose you your turn to cast. So while only two companions can be on the battlefield at any given time, that doesn’t mean you’re limited to who you use. I admit, once I found Rubella the jester, I mostly relied on her and Aurora for the bulk of my battles. But I dabbled with all my crew, and I can’t say there was anyone who didn’t prove useful. In particular, Oengus, a huge brute found later on in the game, is really handy for the ability to cleave all the enemies with his claws in a single attack. When this is augmented with the right elemental occuli stone and a spell from Aurora for increasing damage, Oengus has some of the most devastating critical hits of any character in your crew.

What makes the fights so addicting, though, is the slider at the bottom of the screen. This bar is divided into a longer wait section and a shorter cast section. Your party and the enemies are both shown on this bar, and when you or the monsters hit the line separating cast from waiting, they are allowed to choose an action. Every action has a cast time, from short to very long, and here’s where things get interesting. Lets say that Aurora and a monster both hit the cast line at the same time. If a monster casts a short spell and I cast a long spell, the monster will reach the end of the bar first and attack Aurora. Unless she dodges the attack, the damage done will interrupt her cast and throw her back a ways into the waiting bar. This same trick also works for me, so for instance, I can cast a very long spell while the monsters are still in the waiting phase of their turn, and just as they’re entering the casting phase, I hit them with a huge spell and knock them back into waiting. With a bit of strategy and juggling, it’s possible to go an entire match without the monsters getting to attack once. (It’s also possible to hit all three enemies in the casting phase and knock them all back into waiting, which is how you earn one of the game’s few trophies.)

Igniculus has his own part to play in these fights because his glow can blind enemies and significantly slow down their progress on the waiting bar. He can only blind one enemy at a time, and his energy depletes, so he has to be managed just like anyone else in your crew. On each battle screen are at least two wish plants, and the first time they’re used, they refill his energy bar and release magic and health points for your active combatants. If you should be in a battle for very long, the plants can recharge, but the subsequent uses only give energy to recharge Igniculus. To recharge health and magic for your crew after that, you’ll need potions. Fortunately, you’ll find plenty of these while exploring, and while fighting monsters, who drop them as loot.

As with most RPGs, there’s a crafting system, but this one is real simple, and you only craft occuli jewels. These jewels range in quality from rough to brilliant and can be given to your companions to fit in one of three slots and enhance their attack or defense, or to give them boosts in certain areas. For instance, equipping a diamond in a certain slot will allow a companion to collect extra XP during fights, very handy when you’re trying to level up faster.

But, it wasn’t until late in the game that I started getting more rare gems, and the pathetically short “tip” screen only shows a few crafting combinations. I went online to find a more complete occuli crafting chart, and that’s when I discovered that I was supposed to be hoarding emeralds and crafting gems towards the goal of making one “princess stone.” (The only stone in the game that only has one level of quality, by the way.) Well, this required a ton of extra grinding to find the emeralds needed for crafting, and this is the point when the game got slightly irritating for the number of battles I had to go through just to get the few gems I needed. And, right after I finally did get that one princess stone crafted, suddenly the game went from Ebenezer Scrooge to Hermann Gmeiner* is its gem-granting generosity. So on the way to the final battle, I had the game dropping gems I’d wanted for 15 levels with sudden and infuriating frequency, like:

Game: “Say, didn’t you need this?”

Me: (with teeth clench) “Fifteen levels ago, I did, yes.”

And now we come to the two biggest flaws of the game, the first of which is the writing, or more specifically of the choice to write in rhymes. Rubella’s running joke is that she’s incapable of coming up with a rhyming word, even though she’s supposedly a lyricist. But the sad truth is, the writers struggle to make rhymes for most of the game. They repeat a lot of rhymes or pick a bad rhyme when another word would have made the meaning clearer. For instance, rout is used several times, but bout would have fit the situations better. And I will say as someone who wrote a book with a rhyming narrator, this kind of thing is not easy to do, so I’ll give them kudos for experimenting and trying something different. But I’ll also say that they didn’t do a very good job with it.

And then there’s the ending, which I guessed at the beginning. I didn’t work off any clues at the opening scene, by the way. I said, “Well, this is an indie game, so instead of giving me a happy ending, everyone will die and Aurora will be forced to become the queen to a broken land.” And I wasn’t even slightly wrong. I gotta say, I’m getting real sick of indie game writers and this “you won but you lost” bullshit. I hated this with Guacamelee, I hated it with Miami Hotline, I hated it with Battleblock Theater (review forthcoming in the next few days) and I hated it with…well, with pretty much every indie game that’s gone this route. Seriously, after putting in forty-some-odd hours into a game, the last thing I need is an ending that says “Fuck you for playing, your prize is a pile of dog shit and broken bottles.”

*Takes deep breath* What makes this even more frustrating is that there’s the glimmer of a really intriguing history about this game world as told in a series of “confessions” that you collect by exploring the side-scrolling levels. There’s a lot of wasted character development for Aurora and her companions, whose conflicts with others are summarily addressed in one or two sentences each near the very end of the game. There’s a very rushed feeling to the story in all aspects. The narrator of the game has vocal parts at the start and ending, but rarely says anything during the middle chapters. Cut scenes in between chapters are “blink and you’ll miss them” short. And despite the toughness of many of the earlier boss fights, the final two fights were…really pathetic. I was all keyed up and ready for some epic fuckery, and both times, the bosses dropped in a few minutes. I was left blinking at the screen both times while asking, “Wait, that’s it?” There’s no secondary “perfect form” to either boss, and none of the dirty tricks that earlier bosses pulled to make them challenging. All the earlier fights lasted around ten mintues, and used up a lot LOT of my potions to keep my crew alive. The final bosses both went down in under two minutes. Yes, seriously. So all this epicness builds up to a whimper of an ending that was kind of underwhelming.

And here’s the thing that makes the rushed undercooked bits more frustrating: Ubisoft liked this concept so much that they footed the bill to have it completed. So here’s this indie game that has a huge ton of potential, and what it really needed is more time for a fleshed out history, more work on the rhyming writing style, more voice actors to play the parts of the various characters, more music, and more effort put into the final fights. But even with financial support from Ubisoft, what came out was slightly undercooked.

The thing is, for once, I’m going to give the story a bit of a free pass for several reasons. The first is that this game is really pretty. The second is that this is one of the few times I’ll get to play a game as a girl without her being an alternate choice to a male. The third is that I spent 36 hours playing on the addicting siren call of “just one more level, and then I’ll quit.” And I didn’t stop until sleep was an absolute requirement. So obviously, I had a lot of fun playing this, and I can see playing it again, if for no other reason than to get that princess stone crafted earlier in the game. Then maybe if I make it to the final bosses at a lower level, perhaps then they’ll be more appropriately aggravating.

So, I’m giving Child of Light 4 stars, and I’d recommend it to all RPG fans looking for something a little different. This is the ONLY game in my PS Vita library that’s listed as 100% complete, but that’s because the trophies aren’t all that demanding. You can get them all on one pass through the game, something I wish I could say about other games. (Because I really hate finishing a game and seeing “36% complete” because I didn’t find all the golden sneetches, or kill enemies with all the required combos, or jump to my death for a stupid suicide trophy, or whatever.) If you like those first few battles and the gorgeous art and music, odds are good that you, like me, will be more forgiving of that wimpy, awful ending.

(* “Uh, Zoe, why did you pull out Hermann Gmeiner, of all people, as you example of philanthropy?” you ask. And I reply, “You’ll just have to play the game to uncover the extremely tenuous link between the game and this Austrian philanthropist.”)

Book review: Satan’s Sword by Debra Dunbar

I’d read A Demon Bound back in March and enjoyed getting to know Sam and her friends and frenemies, so that helped push the second book in the series up in my TBR pile. Coming into Satan’s Sword, I was happy to see that the werewolf Candy would be returning, and to find out that this story would forgo the usual “choose one” romantic triangle in favor for a much more accommodating “fuck ‘em both” approach. (Take that, heteronormativity!) Sam’s imp character is just as wicked this time around, and some of her rambling moments are hilarious just like the first book. At one point, she turns a normally placid and emotionally reserved vampire into a bellowing cauldron of rage over…Doritos. It was glorious, really.

There’s a lot going on in this story, with Sam being asked by her brother Dar to fetch a demonic artifact from vampires, with each and every meeting leading to another wild goose chase. At the same time, Sam’s slum lord act is bringing with it duties she didn’t want when the squatting tenants begin demanding that she protect them from a killer who likes taking ears as trophies. She’s still having drama with the angel Gregory, who half the time can’t seem to decide whether he wants to kill or fuck Sam. Oh, and back in Hel, some very high-level demons are requesting that she come home for exclusive breeding contracts, demons so high-level, it’s hard to believe they’d want a “lowly imp.”

With 5 other books in this series and more probably coming soon, it may be too early to be guessing like this, but I get the feeling Sam isn’t as low level as she thinks she is. Is she a reincarnated higher demon now inhabiting a younger body? Or have her many years of energy collection on Earth given her an elevated power level without her realizing how strong she is? I can’t say for certain, but I do know that Sam isn’t all that she claims to be. Demons do tend to lie, but I wonder if maybe she’s somehow even lying to herself. There have been some clues that she’s more powerful than she gives herself credit for. In this book, for instance, she demonstrates perfect control in shapeshifting to other identities she’s Owned in the past, and both demons and vampires repeat something Gregory said in the first book, that Sam doesn’t leak energy like most demons do. That seems to suggest that she’s not just a lowly imp.

There was something that bugged me in this story, and that was the fact that in several subplots, other characters repeatedly mentioned things which are obviously important, and Sam just completely ignores them. Like the serial killer. Okay, when one or two crazy people are talking about some boogie man taking ears, it’s one thing. But when even her sane tenants and her hired werewolf security guard are mentioning the same killer and she’s still blowing it off as a stupid urban legend, it starts to make Sam look kind of dense.

The other problem I had was that Sam was apparently doing stuff off camera that gets mentioned later as a very big deal, and Sam is like “Oh yeah, I did that before.” It kind of annoyed me because I kept thinking I’d skimmed a section and needed to go back and read something I’d missed.

And finally, there were quite a few more mistakes in this story than the last one. Nothing to really pull me out of the flow, but this just didn’t feel as cleanly edited as the first book. It’s not going to be a deal killer and convince me not to get book three, Elven Blood, because at this point, I’m curious to see what Sam will do with all these offers she’s being made by the vampires, elves, and demons, not to mention how she’s planning to handle her new job even though she claims she doesn’t want it.

Overall, I don’t think any of the problems I had were that big of a deal, and I give Satan’s Sword 4 stars and recommend it to fans of dark fantasy. Sam’s an interesting character, and I look forward to seeing what trouble she’ll get herself mixed up in in the next episode.

Nobody Special got a review…

Yes! Though Nobody Special only managed to make four sales in the first month, it still got one review, and the reviewer felt that it may be one of my more mainstream stories. Which I’d say is a good thing even if it makes me feel a little weird. Like “I wrote mainstream? What’s wrong with me?”

Anyway, check out the review on Frodo’s Blog of Randomness. I want to thank Eric for buying and reviewing the book, and I’m thrilled that he enjoyed it.

This is a really short post, isn’t it? Well then, in other news, the muse has convinced me to start a new paranormal romance called Anna and Iris. It will be the first time I’m writing about a “true lesbian” romance, as most of my stories featuring women in love are about bisexuals. While there’s nothing wrong with that, it means I still have a gap in my coverage of the GLBT spectrum. Time to fix that. So this story is about a werewolf falling in love with a vampire princess. There will also be a lot of soccer involved. Should be fun.

I guess that’s about it for now. I should have some new reviews up in the next few days. I know I haven’t done a sales report recently, but I’m waiting until the end of opening months for Nobody Special to report on all four new releases at the same time. As always, thanks for reading my stuff.

Erasing abuse…

This is a post I debated most of the day about writing after reading this blog entry from Jim C. Hines about Marion Zimmer Bradley and her abuse of her daughter and defense of Walter Breen, her husband who was a pedophile. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to drag this topic back out because I feel like I’ve beaten it to death in past posts. But there’s part of that post that speaks about people willing to defend abusers if they’re famous writers, and that raises in me a need to address the point and expand upon it. Because as we’ve seen with the Steubenville rape case and with the case of Penn State and Jerry Sandusky, it’s not just writers who can be given this kind of treatment. All someone needs is a little power or authority and suddenly people who claim to hate child abuse will begin to question the victims, or when that is not possible, to defend the abuser.

I’m reluctant to bring this back up not because I’m polishing my image lately, but because there are people who have written to me and told me never to talk about this. It’s apparently embarrassing to them that I should talk about things that fill me with regret and guilt. But the thing is, I cannot ever let this go and act like I’m Saint Zoe. For a long time, I had a problem taking the compliment, “You’re a good person,” because deep down I knew I would never be worthy of that praise. It doesn’t matter to me how many good deeds I do, or how much money I give to charities. It doesn’t matter that I suffered sexual and physical abuse starting from a very early age. All that matters is, I ended up being an abusive person. I’ve cleaned myself up now, and I never let myself forget how easy it is to slip into old mental traps that might excuse my past. I don’t go into them.

The thing I’ve noticed is how much people want to make abuse go away so they don’t have to talk about it or think about it. Abuse victims are encouraged to not talk about this stuff because it’s so upsetting to other people. Abusers who reform and feel regret are told not to talk about it either because that’s supposedly normalizing deviant behavior. Both the reformed abusers and the victims could teach the general public how to recognize the warning signs that someone else was being preyed upon, but the general public has never wanted that education or that responsibility. “Am I my brother’s keeper” are just empty words even to the most devout people. We keep our heads down to avoid reality as much as possible, and when someone asks us to look up and see the danger signs that a predator is among us, we tell the person warning us not to make trouble.

There was a time when I thought that I could find a venue to speak out about what happened to me; how I was first abused by other kids, how I was eventually blackmailed into even uglier crimes, and how my grooming led to me becoming abusive. People I talked to praised me for coming out, but always there was the underlying message, “And now that you’ve come clean, you don’t ever have to talk about this again.”

But I do. Because I didn’t clean up and become a better person in my childhood. I just buried all this poison inside me, letting it build and build until I became toxic and dangerous. I didn’t really clean myself up until I was 28. It’s been eleven years since then, but there’s rarely a day that goes by that I don’t remember that I was an abusive person. Somewhere out there are a group of people who I can never forget because they were my victims. I don’t know if they will ever come forward to talk about me, but if it happens, I have to prepare myself for that inevitability. And if that happens, I don’t want anyone jumping on whoever comes forward like my reputation is some precious commodity to be defended. It’s why I keep talking about these things, because I want people to know these things happened, and that I think it’s okay for the people I abused to speak out against me. I don’t want them to feel ashamed of what happened to them. I don’t want them to keep the burden of this secret hidden and eating away at them.

As a child, I was both a victim and a predator, and I lived with all these secrets. I hated it, and I wanted to be out of the closet in every way possible. I wanted to take all my skeletons and show them to the world so they could see how messed up some of us had life. I wasn’t alone in being so messed up. When I was nine, I had three girl friends who took me in and gave me protection from the bullies. It sounds so wholesome when I leave it at that, but one of those friends had explained to me one time why she preferred an adult lover over letting a boy her age mess around with her, and her friends were in complete agreement about it. Over time, I came to realize she’d probably been groomed by her abuser to think that way, and I often wish I could see her again to find out if she ever recovered.

I think about these things a lot. I think about the people I abused, and I wonder if they ever came out and talked about what happened. I wonder if they recovered and went on to lead normal lives. But I can’t seek them out because I fear them. I’m afraid of opening old wounds that they may have already gotten over. But I can’t get over this. I always end up picking at those old scars, bringing fresh regret and sadness. I can get over my own abuse. I can forgive the people who used and hurt me, but I can never forget that I let that abuse turn me into someone ugly and monstrous. I can never get over what I did, because I worry it might lead to a relapse and a return to old habits.

Maybe, as people say to me, this is a sign that I have become a better person. But one of the reasons I can never stop talking about it is because I keep seeing signs that we as a society have not evolved to the point where abuse is not a taboo topic. We still silence the victims and push them into closets. We still shame them into silence when we should be listening to them and learning how to prevent future abuses. And yes, it is everyone’s responsibility to police one another. It doesn’t matter if the victim is a little girl or boy, if they’re teens, or if they’re adults. It doesn’t matter if the abuse is sexual or violent. What matters is, we need to be able to listen and learn so that one day, we can help save others.

So that’s why I have to keep tearing open old wounds. I don’t like it, and I don’t like how some people react to me, like I’m burdening them with a problem they want nothing to do with. I often feel like this is a lost cause, and that people in my time won’t learn to be more empathic to the suffering of others. But I keep talking about this because I hope that one day we can get this taboo out in the open and eradicate it rather then letting it fester in the dark as we’ve done for countless generations.

Book review: The Fault In Our Stars by John Green

First, let me say, even before I started The Fault In Our Stars, I knew how it was going to end, and I thought perhaps in some way that would help brace me for it. No. I’m a sniffling, snotty mess just now. But I think it’s best to get my thoughts out now, while these feelings are fresh and raw rather than wait until morning when they will probably start to feel a bit dream-like.

From the start, I liked Hazel and her realistic cynicism. I liked Augustus and his charming sarcasm. I think there was only one early scene that I couldn’t connect with, where Hazel and Augustus are sitting with a wailing, sobbing friend, and they’re talking to each other about a book while acting oblivious to his suffering. I think I had trouble feeling that scene because I could not do that to my friends when I was a teen. I’m not saying “I don’t believe it,” or “teenagers don’t act like that.” I’m sure some could. I just didn’t feel it.

But that’s a tiny, minor thing, not even really a complaint. The rest of the book is just so…words fail me, and the only thing I can come up with is perfect.

Hazel and Augustus go to Amsterdam to meet with the author of the book they’ve both become emotionally attached to. They could have gone anywhere, but they went to Amsterdam, the city I’ve been to three times, and the one place I wish I could live in, even though Milan is totally cool as a consolation prize. And the thing is, the story really captures that atmosphere that makes Amsterdam so beautiful and peaceful and perfect.

And then the author turns out to be less than they were expecting, and even in this seemingly perfect place, along comes a douche to remind them that life isn’t fair. And for me, this was also perfect. It is to me the only way this story could have gone without wandering too far into a fantasy.

Hazel and Augustus go to the Anne Frank house, and the story quotes a video of Otto Frank that plays at the end of the tour. The line that Hazel quotes Otto on is about parents not knowing their children, and it tore me up when I saw it in person, and it tore me up again when I read it this time. I know I’m going to sound like a broken record, but it’s a perfect moment of connection for me, of knowing the location because I was there, of knowing exactly the sound of Otto Frank’s voice, even his expression. I could see this scene in my mind so clearly because I’ve been to the location. I’ve struggled with the same stairs that Hazel had, seen the same pencil marks under glass. It’s what made this story so real for me, actually being in the same rooms and having seen them for myself.

And then, after climbing to this beautiful perfect peak, the story sends Hazel and Augustus crashing back down into painful reality, and oh, my, God, I knew it was coming, and I still couldn’t keep myself from crying and sniffling, and crying some more. I mean, there were still some cute things to laugh at, too. But mostly it’s just sad and unfair, just like real life is sometimes.

Still, it’s good to cry sometimes, and I loved this book in a way that I haven’t loved many others in a while. It made me laugh and cry with equal amounts of intensity, and it touches on a sentiment that I wished books would acknowledge more often, that the world is unfair, and it’s not a wish-granting factory. Which seems terrible, but recognizing that means appreciating those few good times when everything does go right and it feels like our wishes can be granted after all.

So yes, I totally loved The Fault In Our Stars, and I give it 5 stars and recommend it to everyone who is not afraid to shed a few tears in the course of a story.

Book review: Kindred by Octavia Butler

Going into this story, I knew it would be hard to read, and that it would have a heavy impact on me. I knew it would bring back some memories that I prefer leaving buried. I was never a slave in the conventional sense, but I’ve dealt with blackmail as a child, and had been forced to do things that continue to haunt me. I’ve dealt with violence and been told that I deserved it so often that eventually, I even came to believe it myself. I was never a slave, but I know what it means to be forced to act a certain way to keep others happy. Because of that oppressive experience, I knew this would be one of the hardest books I’d try to read.

I was right. Kindred is the story of Dana, a writer living a fairly normal life in California in 1976 before she is pulled under mysterious circumstances to Maryland in the 1800s and rescues a boy drowning in a river. This begins a series of hops back and forth through time, and while time in the “present” barely passes from one hop to the next, Dana spends progressively longer amounts of time living with the boy she saved, Rufus Weylin, and his slave owning father Tom. What makes each of these time traveling episodes dangerous to Dana is, she’s black, an educated black talking like white people in a time when such behavior is deadly.

Early on in the book, Dana had confidently told her husband that she had seen violence on TV and knew how to handle herself. I didn’t know how to take that, because experience long ago taught me that seeing violence and experiencing it are two very different things. So I wasn’t sure if this was false bravado or a mistake in the writing. It’s bravado, and as Dana is forced to endure the miserable life of a slave, she fares no better against the Weylins than any black person born in that time had. This is the grim reality of the science fantasy the story is offering. Of course every modern person would say, “If they tried that on me, I’d…” But the truth is, once someone is stuck in the grip of systemic oppression with no hope of escape, what they’d really do is acclimate and struggle to survive. Which is what Dana does, even though she feels repulsed by her acceptance of this reduced way of life.

During another time hop, Dana’s white husband Kevin is pulled into the past, but even his presence cannot prevent the abuses that Dana is made to suffer. Worse, he ends up trapped in the past for a great deal of time. When he finally returns to his own time, he is almost as scarred and disillusioned as Dana. His time in the past is only touched on briefly, but he makes the right choice by trying to help free as many slaves as he can before eventually being exposed as a sympathizer.

Even after Kevin is safely returned to his time, Dana is repeatedly called back to Maryland to save Rufus from himself. I think that, like Dana, I had some naive hope that her modern sensibilities could be transferred to Rufus and prevent him from becoming as awful a man as his father Tom. But with each hop in time, Dana meets an older and crueler Rufus, and she suffers more abuse and indignity at his hands. And still, in spite of these crimes, she struggles to forgive him and push him toward reform. When it becomes clear that he cannot and will not get better, and that he is willing to sink even lower in his abuse, Dana is forced to make a decision that finally sends her back to her proper time period for good, though she is both physically and emotionally scarred by the experience.

As I said before, I knew Kindred would be hard to read, but I’m glad I made the effort to get outside my comfort zone, and I would recommend the book to anyone willing to do the same. I give Kindred 5 stars, and I know it’s going to stick with me for a very long time.

Game review: Borderlands 2 for PS Vita

I’ve already done a review for Borderlands 2 on the PC, and the short summary of that review is “Two stars, what a crock of shit.” I have since then amassed a whopping 182 hours on the PC version, which might require some explanation. Borderlands 2 has become much like Diablo II for me in that I’m not playing for the story. I’m playing for the looting and character leveling options. I can play both games for hours on end to get some new combination of powers and weapons, the whole time loathing the story and wishing game makers gave half a shit about plot the way they do about graphics and sound.

Of course, Borderlands 2 is still a buggy mess with many sections that just aren’t fun to play. So you might think I’d pass on the PS Vita version. And you’d be wrong, because I’ve been desperate to have a semi-decent shooter on the Vita for those days when I can’t sit up to play on my PC. My options for shooters on Vita are extremely limited, so much so that the idea of getting this game ported made me excited. Yeah, that’s the very definition of desperation, y’all.

Obviously, my feelings for the story hasn’t changed, so what really matters is, how does the game play on the Vita? Well, I’ve got a major problem with the game, but it’s not the controls, so I’ll get to that in a moment. First, I should say, the controls are pretty good. There is an option to use the accelerometer to aim, but I shut that off because the game has a built-in mechanic for simulating accuracy with gun swaying, and trying to wrestle the Vita around with some guns was a huge pain in the ass. However, once I shut that off, the rest of the controls were good. The back and front touch panel functions can be customized, and once I got used to using the sticks to shoot instead of a mouse and keyboard, the setup was comfortable even with long playing sessions.

BUT, this games is a buggy, crash happy motherfucker. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’d just completed a quest and would be on my way back to a checkpoint when a crash would force me to restart the game and do the quest over again. The most frustrating of these was after I did the Minecraft side mission and found a great rifle after facing the Badass Creeper. I was just equipping the gun when the game crashed, and when I had to do the mission over, the same boss didn’t drop the gun. (Or ANY gun, for that matter.) But more than this, there’s a kind of freeze that requires shutting off the Vita after the OS locks. There’s another glitch that turns the text and button prompts into unreadable glitchy rainbow block barf, again requiring a reset to fix.

And of course there’s all the glitches in the game that can be found in the PC version, like guns randomly disappearing from the inventory, even if you were currently using them in one of your four active slots. You can still get stuck on the smallest bumps or on the corner of doorways. Missions might glitch, requiring you to start the game to redo certain sections over.

But then there’s bugs specific to this port. I can’t get certain trophies to work, even though I’ve done what’s required to be rewarded them. Like for instance, I’ve let a Goliath level up four times before killing them. No dice. The sound cuts out a lot. There’s lag in some areas bad enough to make you stutter step for a few minutes. There’s texture pop in, and sometimes textures take a long time to render, making everything a muddy blurred mess for upwards of a minute. There’s really nasty screen tearing at times. What I’m saying is, this is not the most optimal version of the game available.

But, having said that, I’ve already run through the game once, and that includes most of the side missions. I can see putting more hours into this version to level up all the characters, and I’ve still got the DLC packs to play with. So for the price, I don’t think it was a bad game. (Okay, yes, it still is.) You however may choose to hold off on playing until a few more patches come out to fix some of the stability issues.

“But Zoe,” you say, “if you’ve played the game all this time, AND you bought the Vita version, aren’t you at least willing to go back and revise that two star score?” Well, that’s a fair point, so I’m raising the score to three stars. I still have a long, LONG list of complaints about the games. The story stinks. The vast majority of the cast are unlikable and make me wish I could shoot NPCs in the face. I’m really only in this game for the gun porn and the moving targets. But on the mention of gun porn, let me bring up something that’s really bugging the shit out of me. One of the missions Dr. Zed gives is to locate a special “E-tech” gun that shouts laser bolts. Dr. Zed say that there are all kinds of E-tch guns from all the manufacturers, and I should look for them. Well fuck Dr. Zed, and fuck Gearbox, because in all this time, I’ve never seen a single other E-tech gun in the game, not even while playing co-op with my hubby. Yeah, okay, guns are procedurally generated, but were talking about well over 200 hours across two platforms and four player classes, and I’ve still never seen another e-tech gun outside of that one mission. EVER. Oh, my God, that pisses me off so, so bad.

So, yeah, I’m still playing the game, but I also still have a pretty low opinion about it. Which may say something about how sad I am that I’ve put this much time into a game I don’t really like all that much. Anyway, that’s my review of the Vita version. Your mileage may vary.

New release: Nobody Special

Nobody Special is my fourth release in as many months, and it’s quite different from my typical fantasy and sci-fi stories. I wasn’t sure at first if I should call it YA or not, but reading Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian convinced me to make a few changes so it would fit in the YA market without being too…too much, I guess. Anyway, here’s the cover and blurb:

Scott Wagner is used to coasting through life as a nobody. His adoptive parents don’t expect anything from him, but they spend more time inebriated than they do being a family. He is invisible at school, and no one talks to him besides his pothead wingman Aaron Marshall. His only other friend Emily Barnes makes up the better half of his gaming club, and he’s not proud of the fact that a girl in junior high can beat him up digitally.

It’s a safe but dull life, a holding pattern of smoking joints and playing video games until a series of chance encounters strips Scott of his invisibility. Forming a band with Emily and some new friends, Scott gains much needed approval from his parents while at the same time coming under scrutiny from Emily’s father, a hard-nosed cop who thinks Scott is a bad influence on his daughter.

Scott’s stumbling path to adulthood is a journey of self-discovery, offering him new friendships, a closer connection to his family, and a taste of young love. But it also brings painful lessons about dealing with prejudices, making sacrifices, and dealing with tragic losses. Between the emotional highs and lows, Scott learns how even a nobody can be special to somebody.

___

Kindle – Kobo – Nook – Gumroad

Nobody Special is $4.99, and it’s my first new release available on Nook. (Nook users, I’ll be working to get the rest of my library up on the Barnes & Nobles site throughout this months, so check back to see what else is online if this book isn’t your thing.) It’s also listed on Goodreads if you want to add it to your shelves.

I know that like Third Wheel Romance Blues, this is going to be a hard sell with my usual crowd of fantasy readers. But I think Scott’s story is worth you time, and if you’re tired of monsters and saving the world and looking for a change of pace to cleanse your literary palate, you might like this tale of one young man’s journey out of obscurity and into adulthood. If you give it a read, or even just check out the free preview, I want to thank you for trying it out. (And yes, I freely admit that one of the characters may be considered a case of blatant self-insertion and wish fulfillment. She just turned up in the story, and I couldn’t make her go away. Really.)

With this fourth release done, I’m taking a break from publishing new stuff for a few months. I want to catch up on my reading and get more reviews done, and I need time to write without having my mind forking between a new story and whatever I’m supposed to be editing. I still have lots of stuff in my editing queue, so there will be new stuff coming in the fall and winter. In the meantime, please think about buying one of the four books I released. Third Wheel Romance Blues, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Adventures In Trolling are all great summer reads, in my humble opinion.

And with this announcement out of the way, I’m off to read some other peoples’ stuff. See you soon with more reviews.

Book review: The Hides by Kealan Patrick Burke

I’m feeling more than a little torn about the Timmy Quinn series at this point. The writing style is strong, with plenty of detail given for characters and locations. I like Timmy and I feel sympathy for his unique powers. But, I don’t care much for the setup or the conclusion of The Hides.

Let me back up. In The Turtle Boy, we’re introduced to Timmy, who has the ability to not only see the dead, but to grant them power in influencing the living. This is a passive ability, not something he can control. At the end of the first story, there was one question lingering that I really wanted an answer for and didn’t get. In this second installment, that question remains unaddressed. Instead of picking up right away with his latest dealings with the dead, The Hides fast-forwards a few years to the point when Timmy’s parents are getting a divorce and his father Paul pushes Timmy to go to Ireland with him.

This is the problem I have with the premise, because the “chapter zero” establishes that Timmy has a history of seeing and empowering the dead in their quests for revenge against the living. His parents are well aware of his problems, but they decide that he should go to a town in Ireland, Dungarvan, a place likely haunted by at least a few thousand spirits seeking revenge. And why are they making him go? “To get a clean break and start over.”

No, it really isn’t believable. Maybe it might have been if Timmy had only dealt with that one spirit and the parents thought it was a fluke. But they’re established as knowing how his powers work and why. So what they’re doing is dooming their child to another traumatic experience because it’s convenient for them. Even if I could suspend disbelief and accept their plan, it still makes them look like the worst parents ever. It doesn’t help that when Timmy calls home to talk to his mother and tell her he’s sensing the dead in much the same way that he’d experienced in the first book, she completely ignores his history and intuitions and tells him “don’t worry so much.” For someone who was supposedly so concerned for the welfare of her son, this scene rings hollow.

When it finally comes out that Timmy’s grandmother Agatha had a specific reason for asking Paul to bring Timmy along, she makes Timmy’s mom look semi-decent by comparison. But even knowing this, I keep coming back to the parents. I imagine them sitting at a table talking about a city with a history of violence going back to the world wars, a city where the IRA murdered people many times, and they somehow think taking a child sensitive to the dead to this place will be a positive thing. How does that conversation go down? What kind of fucked up logic made them think this was a good idea? We don’t know because the book skips over that part and moves to the point where Timmy and Paul are going to Ireland.

Once there, Paul takes possibly the worst job in the country, and of course the place he’s working is haunted by at least a dozen murder victims. And once Timmy’s around, the dead get empowered in a predictable fashion. Anyone who read the first book can see this coming, so I have to ask why Timmy’s parents didn’t.

Anyway, Timmy learns the truth about Agatha, that she isn’t such a sweet old lady, and that her recently deceased husband was responsible for the hauntings at the local factory. Timmy races across town to save his dad, and then things just fall apart. A confrontation that should have been tense and nail biting instead runs through a number of required horror cliches without creating any sense of dread or horror. As soon as that one fight is over, half the town shows up in time to see another dead attack. But no one is willing to admit what they saw, so a story is concocted to explain away the fire at the factory and the spectacle that happens immediately thereafter.

Time fast-forwards again for an unspecified amount, and Timmy and Paul are talking about the dead when there’s yet another attack. It almost seems like Paul is going to answer that lingering question from book one when the story just ends. Sometimes cliffhangers happen in such a way that I have to get the next book right away. But this is not the way to do it. No, this ending annoys me greatly.

So, here’s my dilemma. I like the writing style, and I like Timmy’s character. But I find most of the characters in the book hard to believe and hard to like. I also have a hard time buying into the reasons for Timmy being in Ireland. Despite a great build up of tension, the big fight fell flat for me, and that abrupt ending left me feeling cheated and unsatisfied.

In the end I have to give The Hides 2 stars. It’s a good idea in theory that gets marred by the setup, and while many books have a strong start and end with a flabby middle, this is a book with a compelling midsection and a weak start and finish. I can’t say it’s put me off of reading the third book, Vessels, but I don’t have any sense of urgency to pick it up, or even to read the preview at the end of the book. Like a Natty Light, it’s hard to swallow at first, gets slightly better while I’m consuming it, but doesn’t have a smooth finish.

Book excerpt: Nobody Special

Well, this Friday has gone all pear-shaped as far as my attempts to get any work done, and I figured I needed to do something that vaguely resembles work to justify the many hours I’ve spent planted on the couch with my Vita. (But it’s not laziness, so you know. Weather shifts are twisting my spine and neck into some lovely pretzel shapes.) So I decided to do a bit of pre-promotion for Nobody Special, which will be coming out sometime next week. This excerpt is from Chapter 21, and it details how the main character Scott chooses to deal with bullies in his own passive-aggressive way:

Getting my ass kicked wasn’t so hard. I was walking across the parking lot toward Aaron’s car for our morning toke when somebody tagged me in the back of the head. I spun to fight back and got a fist in my mouth without seeing a damn thing. I went down and got slammed with a flurry of kicks from all directions. It happened so fast I didn’t have time to open my eyes and see who was involved. None of it hurt as bad as I’d feared, and when it was over, I was left with sharp aches in my back and arms.

Aaron was there right after it ended, and he hauled me to my feet. “What was that about?”

“Lost my invisibility.” I poked the tip of my tongue into a hole in my lower lip where my tooth had broken through and spat a wad of blood on the pavement. “Are you free this afternoon?”

“Is this anger I detect?” Aaron’s mouth thinned in a cruel smirk. “Are you going to take that shit lying down?”

“Hell no.” I spun to search for the truck. The open tail bed was surrounded by four guys who I had no doubt were involved in my jump in.

That was okay. I would have my revenge.

I bided my time until the end of the second period, and then I walked out to the truck and kicked a dent into the driver’s side door. Satisfied that this would get the right response by lunch, I went to my next class late and took detention without complaints. That punishment was the least of my concerns for the day.

The bullies caught up with me while I waited in the lunch line with Aaron, and their leader stood behind me and growled, “You think I’m going to let you get away with that?”

I looked at Aaron, and he threw the first punch. This sent the leader spinning back into his friends, so I had time to turn and read the situation before the three bullies leapt at us.

I took two glancing blows to the side of my head that I barely felt and got in two good jabs on one guy’s mouth and chin before a hand closed over my wrist. I looked back at one of the gym coaches and went limp. The coach was yelling at us a second later, but in my opinion, getting revenge was totally worth the trouble I was in.