Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 34

Why I’m okay with giving negative reviews

This is a topic I’ve covered before, but it’s one that the Internet just won’t leave alone. Should authors give bad reviews on books they don’t like? The last time I talked about it, the ongoing theme of peoples’ articles was that it was somehow unprofessional to have a negative opinion to another writer’s efforts. I still don’t agree with that, since all artists are known to give their opinions on others in their field. Musicians can diss each other, and that’s not unprofessional; it’s just a part of the job. The same goes for writers, in my opinion.

Now some folks are shifting their focus and saying that with so many bookstores closing, giving bad reviews is harmful to the industry as a whole. But these issues are actually unrelated. Chain stores got in the habit of bulk buying for all their regions, and they did a bad job of stocking books according to local trends. They doomed themselves by being too big to see their clients. That had nothing to do with bad reviews, and was more about a bad relationship with customers. Adding coffee shops and free wifi couldn’t change the fact that people couldn’t find books relevant to their interests.

Compare those chains with Amazon’s recommendations system. When you read a book on Amazon, an algorithm looks for similar books and then offers them to you on the site or through your Kindle. “Hey, did you like that werewolf book? Well here’s four other books you might also like!” And this model is helping them to sell a lot of books. It’s a little thing, but it reaches people and convinces them to buy more, whereas the big chain stores didn’t seem to care about building that kind of rapport.

There’s this idea that bad reviews scare readers off and ruin a book’s reputation. I admit, I kind of worry about this with my books because I’m a little nobody, and I don’t have that many reviews in the first place. But even a really bad review can’t kill off my sales. If anything, I think I’d have a harder time selling my books if they all had glowing five star reviews. People are wary of authors gaming the system, and that leads them to look for lower scoring reviews to get a sense of what’s wrong with the book. This doesn’t mean they won’t buy it. But they do want to see some negative reviews as proof that the upper scoring reviews aren’t all sock puppets or friends of the author.

And here’s another thing to think about my negative reviews. I’m a nobody, and my influence on peoples’ reading decisions isn’t that powerful. I can’t imagine someone saying, “Yeah, The Hunger Games looks interesting, but Zoe Whitten hated it, so I’m going to ignore the thousands of glowing fan reviews and trust her instincts.” If I somehow do gain that kind of influence through a strange quirk of fate or a pact with demons, then I might start toning down my negativity. But until then, I feel relatively safe in letting people know I hated a book.

Many writers who give reviews are only willing to do so if they like the book. I think that sets a bad image for them because people begin to think they only write good reviews to support their friends. I think having bad reviews in their portfolio shows that they’re not just blowing sunshine up peoples’ asses, and it makes the good reviews more genuine. If all you do is glowing reviews, how can people trust you to be telling the truth?

The percentage of readers willing to give reviews of any length is very small, somewhere around 2-4% of the overall market. Writers have been asking politely for reviews to help them spread the word about their books, but the message isn’t rallying folks to their cause. If all writer/readers stopped reviewing too, the pool of reviews dries up even further. And while I’m on this facet, a lot of review blogs simply will not review anything self-published. Maybe it’s because they got burned by too many bad books, or because too many self-pubbed authors jumped their shit for giving a bad review. In either case, as a fellow self-pubbed writer, I know how hard it is to get a book reviewed. But even for the pros, it’s a difficult task. I want to do my part and put out reviews for most of the books I read, even if my review isn’t positive. Even a bad review can create interest in a book if people haven’t heard of it before.

So in conclusion, I don’t believe giving a bad review is unprofessional, nor is it harmful to the authors or the industry. A bad review is my explanation as a reader for why some books don’t work for me. If all I gave were bad reviews, I might be seen as a bitter hack making hit jobs on the competition. (And while I am a hack, I already pointed out how my influence is too small for said hit pieces to have any impact.) But my reviews cover the range from one to five stars, from damning rants to gushing praise. I’m giving you my honest opinions, so if my opinion on a book is negative, there’s no other motive than to express my dislike as a reader.

No one should be made to feel obligated to only say nice things; not under the guise of professionalism or with the threat of harming the craft. A bad review by itself is not a kiss of death to a creative project, and I refuse to feel guilty about hating a book. Unless that is, it’s a book written by someone I know personally. Then I have a metric shit-ton of guilt and anxiety about penning a bad review. (I blogged about that before, too.) But I’ll still give a bad review to my friends. They deserve to know how I really felt, after all. And if I can’t be honest in my feelings as a reader, I might as well forget trying to find the ugly truth in my fictional writing.

Crazy picky anger…

Last night, I decided to get Tomb Raider, finally convinced to get it at a discounted price on Steam limiting my risk and based on the large number of women gamers who insisted that the misfired initial messaging from the game makers was all just a big misunderstanding, and the game was really quite good.

This is not a review of Tomb Raider, and I may never make a full review if I can’t get much farther into the game. But in talking about the game on Twitter, I ranted my way into some insights about why I am the way I am. I have to ramble a bit to get there from here, so if you prefer just reading my reviews and don’t want all this angst and introspection, it’s okay to bail out now.

The thing is, within thirty seconds of the game’s opening scene, I noticed a mistake, something that could not actually happen, and which was written strictly to build up tension in the viewer. Before I could tell myself to let it go, there was another flaw less than twenty seconds after the first, and another just ten seconds later. I began live-tweeting a list of mistakes as I spotted them, and within an hour, I was so upset and wound up that I had to shut off the game and sit and focus on breathing.

As a visual spectacle, Tomb Raider is beautiful, a graphical work of art. Yet not one element of the levels I’ve played so far makes any logical sense. I could fill whole pages with logical inconsistencies in the short time I’ve been playing, but I don’t believe it’s the mistakes themselves that are the cause for my anger.

No, there’s a deeper issue at work here, something I’ve always had churning me up inside, and something I don’t think I can fix even if I’ve identified the problem. I know it’s not just my being a writer, and I’ve mentioned many times in previous posts how I sometimes scared my relatives as a little kid by exploding while reading a book or watching a movie or TV show because the writer got something wrong. But I’m thinking on all those explosions now, and it’s not really the mistakes that upset me.

The larger issue is, why are so many people selective in their criticism? On the surface, and only looking at it from the angle of consumption of creative entertainment, it doesn’t make much sense. So what if everyone else in the room is okay with letting the mistakes go? Why is it such a big deal? Scratching the surface of every complaint, my irrational anger stems from a perception of people as being tolerant of certain narrative viewpoints while being unreasonably critical of others.

The story of the everyman cannot resonate with me because I have always been the Other. From a very early age, I was bullied and harassed for not fitting the mold of normalcy. I rarely found any narrative that spoke to my experiences, and when I did find some examples that spoke to me, other people were hypercritical precisely because they couldn’t identify with the Other or feel any sense of empathy  for the stories or their characters.

Where it all comes from lies in my personal history. I would get beaten up, and when I went to the adults looking for help, I was instead told that I must have done something to deserve the rough treatment. When I tried to find help for the abuse I frequently suffered I was often told that children aren’t capable of what I was accusing them of. The default view of children is one of perfect innocence, an ideal held that they are taught malice by others and are otherwise incapable of cruelty or abuse. There is ample evidence that some children are capable of being physically or sexually abusive without an adult guiding them, but even trying to point this out makes one a target for criticism and abuse.

People create a narrative about how the world works, and  anyone pointing out flaws in their point of view must be wrong, even if they have evidence to rebut that perspective as flawed. Each of us, myself included, create our own internal bias, and then we judge everything we experience based on that bias.

My bias is why I hate cop shows. The TV shows present cops as the ultimate good guys, who solve every case, always catch the bad guy, and always have empathy for the victims. My life experience with police contradicts that view. I know the police are often wrong or fail to solve cases. I know the police are willing to be dismissive of victims, and may even aid certain people guilty of crimes because they’re biased against the victims. I know the police will frequently arrest and prosecute an innocent person, and even if later evidence bears this out, they will never apologize for letting their prejudices cloud their investigations. Because of this understanding, I am biased against the everyman cop story, and I’m subconsciously looking for mistakes in cop shows to pick apart from the beginning. I am biased not to accept their stories as realistic, much less as compelling.

When I point out mistakes to others, they may not have thought those scenes were mistakes at all. Even if I can convince them it was a mistake, well it’s no big deal because it’s just a story, and why do I get so mad anyway?

But those same people will let their bias shape their view of stories that offer the perspective of an Other. Then it upsets them if a story points out their blind spots, or that tries to educate them about the perspective of someone who isn’t an everyman. They might not get quite as angry as I do, but it does upset them to have their bias questioned or challenged. So a story showing the cops as prejudiced and callous isn’t an accurate representation. It’s a lie, and it must be flawed because it isn’t presenting likable characters.

Oppressed groups are just as capable of falling into this biased mode of thinking. Several minorities will praise stories that give them fair representation, but will criticize the same story for showing the experiences of another minority they dislike. In some cases, they may like a story for representing them, but also still criticize it for shedding light on their less positive aspects. We all know the story we want to see told about us, and any deviation from our bias is going to set us off to a certain degree.

In my case, I think my anger is so intense because it’s very rare for me to ever see a story sympathetic to someone like me. Maybe it’s because telling a story from my perspective isn’t likable. Telling a story like mine makes lots of supposedly good people out to be assholes. The view may be entirely accurate, but who’s going to admit that? No one wants to be the bad guy in the story, right? Or put another way, we all want to be the hero of our own story.

I have the same bias, but that doesn’t mean I’m incapable of enjoying stories told from perspectives I don’t share, or that I’m only willing to consume entertainment that shares my perspective. Most oppressed groups have to make compromises in what they watch or read, because the alternative is having extremely limited entertainment options.

What all these groups have in common with me is a complaint to the more privileged consumers, because they have a wide array of everyman stories to identify with, and because they do, they are highly resistant to looking at stories told from alternative viewpoints. Privileged people like stories with colonialist and heteronormative values, and because the mainstream caters to their tastes, they shun stories told from the perspective of the colonized underclass, or from the perspective of sexually queer or gender queer characters. They claim that any other perspective in fiction is “preaching” to them without admitting that their own entertainment is also preaching praise for the oppressors. The difference is, they like the sermon in those stories, and they forgive its many, many missteps.

That’s why I get so mad. On any given day, my options for stories are all about the privileged people who have always regarded my story as unworthy of their time. Should I or anyone else point out the flaws in their stories, I’m either wrong, or I’m taking this shit way too seriously.

But at the heart of the matter, my anger isn’t with the story itself. It’s with the bias of the viewers who refuse to move outside their comfort zone, and who insists that my only entertainment options should always be tailored to their bias. I want stories that speak to my bias, AND I want privileged people to consume those stories and try to learn something about me and my people in the process. I think every minority group that gets mad about a lack of representation in the mainstream is asking for the same thing. It’s not enough to have a show about our people and our plights. To really consider a story as a victory means getting the privileged mainstream viewers to watch it and not criticize it for not catering to them. To consider a story a success means to find something that speaks to us, and that helps the privileged mainstream see us as people instead of as the Other.

I got told often enough, “If you don’t like the stories you see, make up your own.” When I started writing, I made a lot of books about trans characters finding acceptance and winning their own personal battles. But I abandoned most of these stories because I could see how my bias made them unrealistic. A trans person cannot have the same easy victories that an everyman has. It’s not escapism to grant that wish. It’s nothing short of delusional hackery.

Once I felt comfortable enough to write outside my comfort zone, I created a much wider range of characters, sometimes even from the perspectives of everymen. I considered it important as an artist to try and create perspectives that I might not otherwise think about. And in that aspect, I feel like every project is partially successful because I’m rarely writing in my comfort zone or from within my comfortable bias.

But the place where I do not have success, and may never have it, is in the act of convincing the average mainstream reader to give my stories a chance to challenge their bias. This is a regular lament for me, because I want straight people to read about my gay or bi characters. I want white people to read about my characters from various groups of color. I want men to read my stories of women without boxing those stories as romance crap, even if there might be a romantic angle involved. I lament because I want to have this chance to get inside peoples’ heads and show them what the world looks like in the eyes of an Other.

Frequently when I talk about this need to reach more people, some well meaning person will ask, “Why don’t you promote to GLBT groups?” Well, setting aside that a great number of my books don’t have GLBT main characters, I don’t just want to preach to the choir. When I write about a black gay teenager, yes, I want it to be a perspective that resonates with a real person living in the same role, and that doesn’t anger them for relying on stereotypes. But I don’t want to market that book to that one specific group. They already know what life is like to be saddled with these burdens. It might be empowering for them to have a character who speaks to them, and if my story in turn inspired them to create books of their own, I’d consider that another partial victory. But for total victory, I went to convince a straight white middle-aged man to read about a black gay teenager and not let his bias get in the way of the story. Total victory is when someone from the mainstream tries out my work and tells me afterward, “I didn’t know anything about these people, and I feel like I learned something.” Total victory means gaining empathy for people who don’t get to have their stories told by the mainstream.

That’s not happening, and maybe the problem is, I don’t know how to sell my stories in an appealing way to the average reader, or even to the niche reader. It’s probably my fault that I can’t convince that mainstream white guy to look at my books and step outside his comfort zone. But then again, I can’t seem to convince the black gay reader to give it a shot either. I’m a complete failure at marketing.

So I look to the mainstream stuff, and I see how anything sells well if it’s got an everyman. I see how those stories are forgiven for every flaw, if the flaws are noticed at all. I see the praise heaped upon these stories for being “so, so good,” and I go into them curious about why people are so in love with them.

Sometimes, I see the appeal, and I do enjoy the stories. I can set aside my bias, and if that story has flaws, I can forgive them just like anyone else. I can gush and ship my favorite one true pairings and be just as fan-girly as the next fan.

But for the most part, I see tired tropes and formulas rebooted into a new frame, and then I can’t help but pick at every flaw. I can’t help but question “Why do so many of you love this story when it’s so terribly flawed?”

But under that is another unintended question. “Why can’t you people let go of these tired biases and push out of your comfort zones to try stories about the Others?” If I can join you and give your everyman entertainment a shot, why can you never make the same attempt with something I love? Why does it always have to be about you? Can’t  the story sometimes be about someone like me?

This is ironic because throughout my life, and throughout my transition, people tried to convince me that I shouldn’t be happy. They would ask me why I couldn’t think of their feelings and just be miserable for their sakes. These people never considered my side of the story, never felt empathy for me or my struggles. All that mattered was that they weren’t happy with my attempts to be comfortable in my own skin.

I have a resentment for people in general because of that attitude. I’m expected to join you and yours in celebrating these everyman stories. I’m expected to praise and love them as you do, or else I’m hurting the thing you love, and I’m hurting your feelings. Why can’t I think about your feelings, huh?

It may come as a shock to you, but I do consider your feelings. Tomb Raider is a prime example. I’d made up my mind about it without much more than a trailer reveal and a botched presentation about the game maker’s motivations for the reboot. I did not shut the game out of my mind entirely, though. No, I continued to follow reviews, noting when the reviewer was a woman, and when she said, “This story is great, and the initial presentation was just giving a bad impression.” I took those feelings into account, and I said, “Maybe I am wrong, and I will give this game a chance.”

And it turns out, I haven’t even got to the scene that I’m most strongly biased against. My dislike of the story begins right at the start because it’s not a good story to me. It’s abominably stupid and riddled with mistakes that could have been fixed in the scripting and editing stage, way before the first game assets were coded. But it isn’t the mistakes themselves making me this mad. It’s the praising reviews that ignored every mistake in favor of the spectacle. It’s the dismissive tone that “the critics are just wrong, and this is a great game.” No, it’s not. It’s a visually striking game. It’s a technical achievement for all the pretty assets on display. But it is not a good story, and I feel cheated by the praising reviews.

My anger and resentment are deeply rooted to issues that have nothing to do with the game, or the other players. My resentment is for the bias that elevates this game as a success, with 1 million copies sold in 48 hours, and 6 million copies sold worldwide. My resentment is for the success of a mediocre writing effort that reinforces the same tired tropes and does nothing to challenge people. It’s a safe bet. It’s the no-brainer, like the vapid Hollywood “popcorn movie.” But it’s also the lack of any other options that speak to me as an outsider.

And yes, it’s the bitterness of knowing that nothing I create will ever reach that many people. It’s the frustration of knowing from personal experience how people will dismiss me or shut me out for telling my story because it doesn’t match up with their understanding of the world. It’s knowing that people will block me out because my story is offensive to them, or because they think I’m trying to normalize deviant behavior. It angers me that nothing can change for the next generation of oppressed people like me because the current generation believes in the lie that they’re progressive enough not to need to see the Others.

I feel helplessly despondent because in spite of everything that happened to me, I still long for acceptance and the chance to see my people represented in the mainstream as something other than a joke or a stereotype. The helplessness brings me right back to elementary school, my hand over my busted nose and split lip, crying for help only to have the teacher, principal, or counselor tell me, “Well maybe it was your fault.” I go right back to those days of loving Robotech because of Lance Belmont, only to have friends tell me that drag queen was stupid and they couldn’t watch that queer shit. I go back to my frustrations of reading one children’s book after another, all of them full of characters who were nothing like me or like the kids I had to deal with in the real world. I go back to my first shouted complaints only to be told my concerns were no big deal.

It’s all tied into the same place, to that same feeling of never progressing even as everyone else around me keeps insisting that stuff is getting better all the time. I know I’m not alone in my frustrations, and yet I never lose that old feeling of isolation or of my sense of being an alien. In some ways, maybe as I age I’ve been able to make compromises and enjoy more everyman stories. But my frustrations remain as fresh as the pain of my my first bloody nose because I still so rarely see a story about my people make it to the mainstream and find success. Being a writer has only sharpened some of that pain when I see how little impact that I as one artist have in our world.

My growing knowledge also gives me perspective on how small our world is in relation to the cosmos. We’re not so big, but I can’t make an impact on this tiny speck of life. I can’t effect change because all our societies are comforted by the same old everyman tales, and people like me don’t have the same opportunities to join in on the conversations. Our perspectives don’t matter to millions, but a gimmicky badly written story can speak broadly to the ideal of one person making a difference in the same world. It’s truly ironic, and it’s infuriating because I know it’s a lie, even as so many others accept it as a universal truth.

So I wonder, how is it possible for me to let go of my helpless anger when it’s clear that the mainstream will always win out over the shared experiences of the broken and lost? How can I calm down and enjoy the pretty lies when the average consumer is unwilling to be challenged with a story outside their shared experience? How can I let go of my pain when my voice and many others like me will always be drowned out in the dismissive roar of the mainstream?

It’s not anger at just one story. It’s how we as a culture celebrate certain points of view, but shun so many others. It’s being unable to love the pretty lies when I know too much about the cold, ugly truth.

Michael Bay pitches a Superman reboot

MB: Gentlemen, after my work with the Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchises, I’m ready to turn my brilliant vision toward rebooting another superhero franchise, Superman. Now, I know they just rebooted him with Henry Cavill, but that didn’t review well, and I know why. You see, people are burnt out on origins stories with aliens. Trust me, I know this, because people hated the last three Transformers movies because they’re aliens, and fans reacted with outrage when I wanted to make the ninja turtles into aliens, too. So, clearly, the next Man of Steel cannot be an alien.

That’s why, in this reboot, instead of being an alien from Krypton landing on Earth as a baby, my Man of Steel will be an out of work steel factory worker played by Ryan Reynolds who falls into a vat of molten radioactive upsidasium. The experimental metal is what allows him to fly, and it’s also what makes him invulnerable. Also, instead of having laser vision, his eyes will stream liquid molten metal. It’s almost the same power, but even more gruesome. The special effects crew will have a field day with it.

Obviously, this means we need a new villain worthy of this new Man of Steel, but audiences are tired of Lex Luthor. This is why I propose a reboot  of his role to a female counterpart, an Asian martial arts master named Lei Liu-Xan, who has a vendetta againt the Man of Steel because he gave her radiation poisoning during a booty call and made all her hair fall out. Obviously, we’ll cast this role with Jennifer Lawrence.

This setup gives us everything for a great reboot. It’s got sexual tension, romantic conflict to keep the female audience sitting through to the credits, and a ton of fight scenes for the guys we’re really marketing towards. At the end of the movie, The Man of Steel and Lei Liu-Xan devastate half of Metropolis in a huge final brawl before realizing they still love each other and have a final kiss. Lei Liu-Xan explodes from overexposure to the Man of Steel’s radiation, destroying the rest of Metropolis. The Man of Steel flies away from Earth in guilt, setting us up for his *finger quotes* alien return in a sequel slated for 2017.

So, what do you think?

Head Studio Exec: … I smell a blockbuster!

Internet reaction to first announcement: OH FER FUCK’S SAKE, MICHAEL BAY, STOP DESTROYING OUR CHILDHOOD.

Same people on opening day: Well, I’ll still go see it, just to see if it’s any good.

Me: *Commits seppuku*

 

 

New release: Third Wheel Romance Blues

I got so busy working on new releases for spring that I completely forgot to post anything here about my new book that came out this week. Whoops. So, here is the cover, blurb, and links to my new romantic erotica, Third Wheel Romance Blues:

Robert Marshall is happy in love, and because of his storybook romance with Maria Rivera, no problem in his life can bring him down. Sure, Maria’s uptight mother is kind of a racist douche, his own mother is nagging him about marriage and grandkids, his ancient car is on its last wheel, and he’s still paying off his college loans. But he has a great job working as a video game programmer, a loyal crew of friends who share his love for role-play games, and a fantastically healthy sex life. Nothing could ruin his perfect life, until Maria’s little sister returned home from St. Vincent’s.

Maria  thought she was doing a good thing by introducing her nerdy sister Tina to Robert and his friends. His gaming group granted Tina an escape from their nitpicking mother, and it gave her a place to belong after losing her close circle of friends in New York. But Maria’s plan backfired and Tina and Robert fell in love with each other, and now no one is happy. Maria can’t imagine leaving Robert, but keeping Robert and Tina apart makes them both miserable. Faced with an impending disaster, Maria comes up with a desperate plan to share her boyfriend with her sister.

The proposal is  risky and could end in heartbreak for everyone. But with luck, a little love, and a lot of hot sex, Robert, Maria, and Tina might just make a crazy happy family of their own.

Kindle – Kobo – Gumroad

So, there it is. It’s only $2.99, so if you’ve been hoping to find a romantic erotica about gaming nerds and their many misadventures, this could be your next new book. And if not, well I’ve got new books coming out in April and May, too. April’s release is the first book in the Alice the Wolf series, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and in May, I’ll release the third Tobe White book, Adventures In Trolling. Yes, I’m putting out two wolf books in two months, but both will have very different takes on lupine shapeshifters. Should be good.

As always, thanks for reading my stuff. Now I’m getting back to work.

Book review: Lament by Maggie Stiefvater

Looking on Amazon, I couldn’t tell which of the Books of the Faerie series was the first (Amazon really needs to fix that), so I got on Twitter and asked Maggie. It’s an amazing thing, this social media we have nowadays, where I can talk to authors of bestselling books and they even answer back. I was told Lament was the first, but that it wasn’t as good as Ballad. Whether that’s true remains to be seen, but I did enjoy Lament. There is, however, one notable exception, one dreadful word that pulled down my fondness for the story, but I’ll have to come back to it in due time.

Lament is the story of Deirdre Monaghan, a musical virtuoso who plays the harp, and who has the habit of barfing before every performance. As the story opens, Deirdre is en route to a school competition, and thus also making her way to a restroom to get her nerves in order with a nice relaxing vomit. While she’s still in the throes of this unsavory activity, her hair is held back by a complete stranger, Luke Dillon, who inserts himself into her performance and into her life effortlessly. This is of course crazy, and even Deirdre recognizes that. But she also feels enchanted by Luke, and he claims to be fascinated by her, though she has no clue why at first.

Over the course of the next few days, Deirdre’s structured, controlled life falls apart, and as she learns why, she also finds out about Luke’s extremely dark past, about her family’s secrets, her best friend’s psychic powers, and about the dangers of being able to see faeries.

I like Deirdre and her friend James, and Luke’s story is incredibly tragic and mysterious in a way that I loved watching unfold slowly. Deirdre’s family is kind of creepy, and her aunt Delia is dreadful in a “love to hate her” kind of way. I love the faeries depicted in such a wicked and terrifying manner. By all rights, this should have been a five star story.

But then there’s one word that makes my teeth grind. During a scene where a faerie is tormenting Deirdre and her coworker, Sara, Deirdre thinks, Am I really going to have to rescue this skank? And that one word left me so cold that long after I’d moved on, it stuck in my mind. The author could have chose bitch, jerk, or possibly hose monster, and I wouldn’t have cared. But skank is turning into a YA codeword for “the worthless female character.” It doesn’t help that Sara is the only other young woman in the book, and that her flaws are laid out as a comparison to Deirdre’s virginal perfection. Sara is promiscuous, flirtatious, dumb, and mundane, while Deirdre is smart, selfless, talented, and powerful. I don’t feel it’s fair because Sara isn’t a bully. She’s just not as good as the heroine, and Deirdre’s use of the word manages to pull her image down as well as my immersion into her story.

Later on in the story, Sara turns out to be good enough of a friend to help Deirdre out in a jam, showing gratitude for Deirdre saving her before. Their shared secret makes Sara see Deirdre where she’d always been invisible before. She even has one of the better lines in a particularly tense scene. So while she may be shallow and mundane, she comes across as a mostly decent young woman. But that’s why the word skank stands out, especially coming from Deirdre. It doesn’t feel like a word she’d use to describe anyone, and certainly not to a woman whose worst crime against Deirdre is to call her plain in a moment of spite, and whose “cussing” never rises above the word crap. She’s hardly deserving of the label.

I feel like this is the point when I’m reminded that mainstream YA has enshrined virginity as the only true value of a young woman, and that the lack of it also implies a lack of intelligence and moral character. It makes me want to write a hundred anti-YA books with promiscuous young women who are also smart and selfless if for no other reason than to highlight that yes, it is possible to be sexually aware and still be a good person. I think Sara later bears that out, and so it isn’t as bad in usage here as the other books I’ve read where the word is applied to a stereotyped bully rival. But it does still mark the point when I thought, Well this WAS a five star story.

Setting that aside, the rest of the book builds to a confrontation with Deirdre uncovering the extent of her powers and avoiding a great tragedy with quick thinking and help from a rebellious fey faction. The ending isn’t a happily ever after, nor does it imply that Deirdre and Luke will be together forever. I really like that, since it breaks the YA mold in a lot of pleasantly surprising ways. The writing doesn’t flow quite as smoothly as in the Wolves of Mercy Falls series or in the Raven Boys series, but the dialogue is charming and funny, and the cast of characters are all just as fleshed out and realistic as in Stiefvater’s other books.

I give Lament four stars and would recommend it to fans of dark fairy tales looking for a strong heroine. If not for one little word, this could have easily become one of my favorite books in Maggie Stiefvater’s growing collection. But it’s still an entertaining and hectic tale, and I look forward to reading Ballad soon.

Reading alone isn’t enough…

I don’t normally write much about my thoughts on my writing process, mainly because in reading the advice of others, I feel like most everything I do is back-asswards. I never wrote an outline that I stuck to for longer than a quarter of the way through, I edit and revise while I’m writing the rough draft, and I don’t write every day. Logic should dictate that I rarely finish anything, and yet, I’ve wrapped up far more projects than I’ve abandoned. Still, I don’t feel like I’m qualified to talk about what others should do when they want to learn the craft. I’m full of bad habits, and my writing lacks the right ingredients to achieve success.

That said, there’s a bit of advice that I want to talk about because I feel it’s not entirely true. I see a lot of writers say that if you want to write, you should read a lot. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to read from many genres to get a feel for how other writers craft their stories, and it is a good idea to read as much as you can to find inspiration for your own stories. But to really find your voice and understand how to craft a story, I think you have to write something. It doesn’t matter if you write every day, or if you write something good or just a lark that few people will see. You do need to read a lot, but you also need to write a lot.

Before 2003, I mostly made failed attempts at writing fan-fiction. I’d get halfway through an idea and lose the point of the story. I would look over my failures with a critical eye, and I couldn’t sort out where I’d gone wrong. I was reading a lot, and my habits helped build the urge to create. But it wasn’t strong enough to sustain me through any idea, and I think part of my problem was trying to emulate the voice of other authors while at the same time struggling to create something that was uniquely mine.

In 2003, my friend Cherry suggested that I write a journal to help me work out my many emotional issues. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to talk about myself, not even in a journal that no one else would see. After several failed attempts, I decided to tell a “short” story about a schizophrenic serial bomber meeting a neglected teenager. This was the first draft of The Lesser of Two Evils, and my short story ended up being over 100 pages long. I passed this story to Cherry, and she read it in one night. When she finished, she looked up at me and smiled, and she said, “My God, you really are a writer.”

In the next two years, I wrote several novels, but I rarely showed them to anyone. There was something wrong with my work, and I knew it wasn’t good enough to submit to publishers. But I wanted to know what I was doing wrong, so I passed another story to a friend. This time it was the first draft of Little Monsters, and I gave it to my manager at the movie theater. He agreed to edit it, and along with many notes crammed in red pen in the margins, he wrote on the last page, “What a weird story, but damned fine writing.”

Still, something was wrong.

I did start attempting to publish my stories, but every submission was met with dead silence. It didn’t matter if I sent it to an agent or to a small publisher, no one wrote back. I knew something was wrong, but no one would let me in on the secret. The odd thing was, when I showed my work to various people, they said I had talent. Whether they were friends or strangers, they said I had skills. While it helped my self-esteem, it didn’t help me understand what I was doing wrong.

In 2006, my dad, who’d read one of my first stories, told me about Lulu. I signed up for an account, but it was another year before I self-published my first book, a complete rewrite of The Lesser of Two Evils. I knew the first short story was flawed because neither Jobe nor Wendy were sympathetic characters. But that rewritten book was wrong in a lot of ways. I found someone willing to explain why my writing was rough. I wasn’t handling punctuation in dialogue right, and some of the dialogue felt wooden.

Simply reading more books didn’t help because as a passive reader, I rarely paid attention to the rules the writing followed. I wasn’t studying the craft the right way. Sure, I’d noticed the way other writers described their characters or locations, but I missed things like punctuation or sentence structure. I had to write for close to four years before I started picking up on these things, and even then, I needed other people to point these things out and say, “See? This is how it’s supposed to be done.”

In a lot of ways, I still feel like an amateur, and it doesn’t matter that I’ve had good reviews. It doesn’t matter that stories I emailed to other writers came back with compliments. I always feel like my writing is missing something to keep it from being worthy of the best-seller list. Reading other books don’t help me pin down what’s wrong. It’s something undefinable, some secret ingredient that I’m lacking. Which is not to say I hate my writing. Quite the opposite, when I go back to an old story to hunt for typos, I often find myself reading passively, and I have to force myself to look for mistakes. I’ve been writing the kind of stories I want to read, and even going back years later, I still enjoy my stories. But I also know they’re missing something to be successful, even though I can’t name it.

Writing all these stories has changed the way I read now. I’m always aware of sentence structure, and my internal editor is always actively studying every paragraph and sentence. I’m just as picky as I used to be, but now I can more easily define why one story works for me where another doesn’t. I can tell you that I like objective narrators who don’t tell me how to feel about characters or their actions. I loathe when a narrator tells me “This man is evil, and you should hate him.” If I should hate them, show me why through their actions. Don’t just tell me right off the bat how to feel.

I dislike when a writer tells me a topic is fascinating to a character, but gives me nothing to find it interesting. For a reader already interested in the topic, it’s okay to skip this part. But if I’m not already into the subject, I need to know why it’s fascinating. There are writers who take the time to get me into their interests, and once I’m invested, they can lead me anywhere. But the writers who just say “John had always found the topic fascinating” before moving on to the real story, I feel cheated.

I hate when a writer takes shortcuts or easy paths in a story. I also know it doesn’t bother a lot of readers top be taken through these shortcuts, but it always did bug me, even before I finished my first story. I just didn’t have the experience to define why these things bugged me. Now I do.

Reading by itself isn’t enough to develop that skill. Reading can and will inspire you. The more you read, the more ideas you’ll find to make your own stories. But it’s only one part of the puzzle, and until you sit down and start writing, you can’t begin to appreciate the crafting process. Once you do start writing, yet another piece of the puzzle is finding people willing to read your stuff and tell you bluntly about what worked and didn’t work. Which isn’t to say you have to agree with their interpretation. But if you keep hearing the same complaints from multiple readers, it might be worth your time to make an effort at fixing your “creaky” bits. You’ll also want to find someone willing to explain what rules you’ve broken, and once you know the rules better, reading other books, you’ll begin to see the rules along with the story.

It’s like looking at a jigsaw puzzle from a distance without having ever assembled one yourself. You don’t see the piece or how they fit together. You just see the picture, and you’re judging the puzzle based on whether or not the image pleases you. Once you’ve put together a few puzzles yourself, you develop your own habits. Maybe you’ll start with the corners or work on one of the borders. Maybe you’ll find the most colorful piece and work out from there. Once you’ve developed those habits, from then on, every puzzle you see, you’ll be unable not to notice the individual pieces. Your mind will process the image, but it will also study how you might have worked on this puzzle in your own way.

I think the writing process is the same way. If you read a lot but never write, the bigger picture escapes your attention. Sure, you’ll probably be able to define why one story works for you and another doesn’t. But until you write enough of your own stories, you’ll be missing out on the seams between scenes. Reading alone may inspire you, but until you write, you’re only seeing a portion of the big picture.

Book review: A Demon Bound by Debra Dunbar

I’m a sucker for a good story about a bad guy, and they don’t get much more bad than a demon. There are limits, of course, and to keep my interest, such a character needs to be complex and compelling to balance their wickedness. Fortunately, this demon has both qualities in spades. A Demon Bound is about an imp named Samantha, or Sam to her friends. Or rather, that’s the name of the person she Owned and possessed upon her arrival in our world forty years prior. Sam has a plan to stay on Earth long-term, although her reasons for wanting this are never made clear. Perhaps this will be revealed in a later book in the series, or perhaps she doesn’t fully understand her desires either.

Sam keeps herself relatively wealthy by working as a slum lord, and she enjoys spending time with her human neighbor Wyatt. In completely undemonic behavior, she pines for him, even as she struggles to keep things platonic between them. Already, it’s clear that she’s a complex character, not someone who can easily be shoehorned into definitions of good or evil.

Sam’s good life is thrown into disarray with a series of mistakes. When her demonic dog is attacked by something powerful enough to grievously wound him, Sam investigates and is in turn attacked by the same werewolf. She’s forced to kill the werewolf, but she worries that the energy expended to save her dog and kill the werewolf will summon an angel to dispatch her. Despite needing to lay low, she almost kills Wyatt in a failed attempt to Own him, and then one of the werewolves approaches her demanding that she pay a blood debt for slaying one of their packmates. The price? Sam just has to kill an angel.

And things only get more complex from there.

I really enjoyed this book from start to finish. Sam’s behavior throughout is dangerous and rarely lets you forget that she is a demon. But she’s also willing to risk her neck for Wyatt, and for others, even though it seemingly goes against her nature. Wyatt is cute in a sexy bad boy sort of way, and he and Sam make a cute couple. There’s also a romantic triangle of sorts late in the story, though I can’t explain that without massive spoilers, so I’ll leave it alone.

The writing wasn’t perfect. I found missing commas or sometimes periods, and a couple of times the narration slipped from past to present tense. But there weren’t any typos that I could recall, and none of the mistakes hurts the flow of the story. For some reason, one page of my Kindle copy replaced apostrophes and quotation marks with squares, and that was a little strange because it doesn’t happen anywhere else. Maybe it was just a glitch in the Kindle conversion.

In any case, I rather enjoyed A Demon Bound, and I give it four stars. The ending leaves me curious to know more about Sam, her friends, and her angelic enemies, so I’ll be getting the next book, Satan’s Sword, as soon as I have the funds to afford another book buying binge.

Game review Gigantic Army for PC

Gigantic Army bills itself on Steam as “a heartfelt homage to 16-bit era mech shooters such as Cybernator/Assault Suits Valken, Metal Warriors, and Front Mission: Gun Hazard.” This got my attention because the SNES era of gaming is where I felt most game makers hit a sweet spot between good graphics and fun game play. I watched the trailer and thought it looked interesting, and the price of the game being only €5.99 on Steam was hard to resist. Obviously I didn’t. The game is cheap, so why not?

Well actually, cheap applies to more than just the price. Before I get to an elaboration on that point, I want to talk about the controls and the graphics, because this really does feel like a game from the SNES era. The comparison to Cybernator is a good fit, mainly because the mech you pilot uses almost the same abilities. There’s the dash, the rocket jump, the shield, and a selection of weapons to customize your mech with. The mech’s method of aiming even feels kind of similar. So on that aspect, they’ve done a good job.

Thing is, the mech in Gigantic Army feels much, much slower than the mechs from the games it’s inspired by, and it’s like walking in molasses. The dash is somewhat helpful in moving you along faster, but it only goes a short distance, and the double tap on the analog stick required to activate it is finicky. I had trouble getting it to activate when I needed it, and randomly, I managed to dash while I was trying to aim at an airborne enemy.

Oddly enough, in the upper right hand corner is a frame rate counter telling me the game is running a steady 60 FPS. It’s true, there’s no lag or screen flicker, but it’s hard to appreciate the steady frame rate when I’m piloting a mechanized lard ass. Also, I want to turn off the FPS counter, because who really cares about that in 2D scroller, right? But there’s no option for that. It’s just a useless thing taking up space on the screen.

I didn’t care for the default controller layout, since it puts the jump button in an awkward place, but the game does at least allow me to change the buttons. Once I fixed the layout, jumping and shooting at overhead target was less of a chore. There is still some frustration involved in trying to aim the gun at certain angles. I’d have to wiggle the stick around, watching many shots strike higher or lower than where I needed them, and while it is possible to finally find the right angle, more often than not, I found it was easier to shoot at a diagonal while walking forward until I got myself lined up with my target.

Since aiming is so fiddly, sometime your weapon is aimed up while an enemy is rushing you, and the mech has a piston-like lance that launches in the direction you’re facing. This is a good thing, as it lowers the number of times you’ll be struck while your gun is pointed the wrong way.

While the graphics somewhat live up to the SNES era, the music is unmemorable. I mean, I had to go back and play the levels during this review to confirm they weren’t all playing the same song. They aren’t, but it’s just barely there as background noise, and after a few seconds, I find I’m ignoring it. What I’m saying is, I’m never going to think, “Man, I sure hope they release a CD soundtrack for this!” But being charitable, I can say at least it isn’t annoying. So there is that.

While you have options for your main and special weapons, the only reason you might use certain combination is to get the achievements for killing 100 enemies with that weapon. For the main weapon, you can use a machine gun, a spread gun, or a grenade launcher. This is like asking, “Do you want one of these pea shooters or a real gun?” Seriously, by selecting the grenade launcher, you don’t even really need the special weapons at all. Once you’ve gotten used to the rate of fire on the grenades, you can take out everything up to the big bosses without once going for the other weapon. There are power upgrade items for the guns, but even at full power, they’re still crap compared to grenades.

My real problem isn’t with the weapon options, it’s with the timer. I really, really hate games that have a timer to begin with, and when I have to fight three bosses using a pea shooter, I often find I make it to the last boss with no time left, resulting in my health being chipped away instead. And the problem with that is, you only recover a portion of health in between stages. This is a severely cheap tactic that irritates me by itself, but when combined with the timer, it makes me want to chuck my controller. Hence, the grenade launcher became my default weapon because I could kill all the bosses, still have some time to spare, and not lose a crap ton of health in the process.

But that timer also means there’s no reason to stop and admire the view, or to explore. Not that there’s many reasons to explore aside from some power ups tucked away in a few nooks. But still, that timer…goddamn, that fucking timer. And you know what? I went and looked up game play videos of every single one of the games these folks claimed as their inspirations, and not one had a timer. Of all the things that bug me about this game, the timer is hands down the biggest irritation for me.

Now let’s talk about the special weapons. Again, there’s three choices, but this time two of the three are decent, while the other is kind of pathetic. There’s a multi-missile option that’s pretty badass, and that’s visually purdy when you launch all these missiles in a flurry of smoky contrails. They’re homing missiles too, damned handy in boss fights because they go right to the weak spots. Then there0s the beam cannon, and that’s real purdy too, and real powerful. If you target a boss’ weak spot with it, the beam cannon can melt off a crap ton of hit points from the health bar in just a few seconds. Very nice, yes. But last is the cluster bomb, and it’s not so useful. The problem is, most of the time, the cluster bombs it drops just scatter onto the ground. Even if you jump and use the rocket pack before laung the cluster bomb roughly 50-75% of the payload is wasted ammo, so it’s ineffectual against most of the bosses. There is an achievement for killing three enemies with the cluster bomb, but once you’ve done that, it usually makes more sense to go with the better special weapons.

Weapon customization has a trade-off. Choosing the pea shooters gives you more ammo for the special weapons, and each of the special weapons has a set amount of shots with no items in the game available for reloading. You can get more special weapon ammo going with a machine or spread gun, but even then you’ll want to save those big toys for the last boss and just muscle through the other mini-bosses with the main weapon.

I feel conflicted about this game because the initial levels are kind of fun, although sometimes cheap with the timer and health bar problems I mentioned above. But the later levels keep getting more cheap. Enemies endlessly respawn from a tunnel, and when you get to the end of said tunnel, it’s a dead end. You go back the way you came to go to a lower level, and more enemies keep pouring out of that dead end to shoot you in the back. I don’t suppose I’d really mind endlessly shooting them if I didn’t have the timer to worry about, but because of that, I have to rush through, usually taking damage that can’t be recovered with the health packs or between levels.

Keep in mind, when you take damage, the weapons upgrades you’ve collected also diminish with your health, so you take a few hits and you’re right back to the lowest levels of pea shooter. Cheap, cheap, cheap, and all for the sake of making the game longer by forcing you to keep playing the same levels over and over. This in some respects is similar to the SNES days, but the games Gigantic Army emulates are actually more forgiving, and as a result, less aggravating and more fun.

And then there’s the mines. In earlier levels, they’re on the ground, and the enemy mechs walk all over them, no sweat. You can jump up onto platforms to avoid them, but you can’t shoot mines to get rid of them. This is cheap, and aggravating, and it only gets worse when the later levels begin placing mines on the ceiling and the floor, guaranteeing that you hit both with almost every jump.

The final levels feature some bosses who fire missiles that you can’t shoot while they’re in motion. Said bombs are armed with guns, and they will hover all around you and blast you to pieces in the crossfire before attempting to blow up near your mech. And while they’re doing this, the boss is firing two types of canons, and wielding some kind of laser halberd. And the end boss is even more cheap. There’s no end to the hate I feel for the two final bosses, and the game just stops being fun for me.

I haven’t even gotten to the story, where humans are facing the “Ramulons.” (I picture the game makers in a meeting: “Gee, Romulans are kind of cool, but the name is copyrighted.” “WAIT! We’ll call our aliens Ramulons!”) The story is all told on what looks like an e-ink ereader, only some of the letters clip off the side of the screen, and the device is set next to a pack of cigarettes for no reason whatsoever. The story goes like this: humans are inept and bad at fighting this advanced army until level three, when they suddenly win the war. Then the narrator thinks humans are mean and stinky to the poor widdle Ramulons, so they switch sides to fight with the remaining Ramulons, who are now inept and equally incapable of fighting the same mechs they were trashing just one level before. So, three levels later, they win and…that’s it, Game End. Not Game Over, Game End. There’s no final narration, not even on the crap ereader screen. There’s not even a “You Are WINNER!” screen. I mean, I know the game is only €5.99, but shit, man, you don’t even bother with a credits scroll?

Remember how I said I went to YouTube to look at the games that inspired this one? Yeah, well all of those games have some pretty nifty story elements to them, in some cases even including cut scenes between the levels. But Gigantic Army doesn’t bother. It’s the barest minimal effort needed to finish the game. And, having looked at those other games, they all feel faster and more urgent. The size of the mechs in those games fill the screen and make them feel fast, massive, and powerful, while the mech in Gigantic Army is a little thing in the middle of lots of empty space. I think this is one of the things that make the mech feel so slow, because it takes a while to cross the screen even when using the dash.

The game is cheap in every sense of the word. It’s got a cheap price, but it’s also got a cheap story with no cut scenes or character art, cheap tactics, and cheap production values. While it does get the control and graphics right for an SNES title, the games it’s emulating were better, and they had better production values.

I did like the first levels, and so I’m willing to cut the game some slack. I can even admit that I’ll probably go an play the game again every once in a while to see if practice might eventual make those final bosses less annoying. But even if the makers say this is a heartfelt tribute, it feels to me like a half hearted effort.

I give Gigantic Army three stars. I can’t say I’d recommend it, but it is cheap and should be worth a few hours of distraction. Just don’t go in expecting too much.

What’s going on with the main blog…

Yes, the main blog is down and out for the foreseeable future. My domain registration was coming up for renewal, and I kept getting reminders from Infinity Cloud, who you may recall went out of business. I did try to renew through the links in their emails, but none of the links worked, and none of their email addresses were still active. I incorrectly assumed that my new host, DreamHost, would send a similar email, but Infinity Cloud didn’t transfer registrar rights over to them. They didn’t even know my domain was about to expire, so this isn’t something they could have prevented.

So the site went down last Friday, and DreamHost told me that it looked like my registrar was Public Domain Registry, and I had to renew through them. Only trouble was, my domain didn’t show up in their database. I emailed them to ask what to do, and they gave me a different address to contact one of the people formerly in charge of Infinity Cloud. That address worked, and the person I contacted made an attempt to renew my domain, only to discover that they couldn’t do it either. So they’re contacting another person to try and get this sorted out.

Long story short, my domain is lost in a technical limbo for now. I have no idea how long it’s going to take to get this fixed, so I can’t give any time frame for when the main blog will be back up and running. At least I have this mirror blog to let y’all know what’s going on. As this could take a while, I’ll get back to posting reviews and stuff soon, and whenever the main blog is back up, I’ll just copy pasta the latest articles over with an edited time stamp.

In other news, I’m just about ready to start putting out some new releases, and should have a new book out this month, a romantic erotica title called Third Wheel Romance Blues. Next month, I will try to release the first Alice the Wolf book, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I know I said I’d put out all five books at once, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea now. I’ll send out the first and get to work on the others for release a few months at a time to give folks a chance to read them and stay caught up. Lastly, in May, I’ll be releasing the third Tobe White book, Adventures in Trolling. I expect that after May, I’ll have a few quiet months without new releases, but I’ll use the time to promote these new titles and see if that helps with sales. (Sales were very bad last month, with only one sale on Amazon, and two on Kobo. This is probably due to the length of time I’ve gone without releasing any new work, so I hope to make summer and spring less sucky for sales.)

And that’s it for now. I should have new book and game reviews up soonish, and I thank you for your patience during my technical difficulties.

Game review: Strider for Xbox 360

Way back in the days when I was a scrawny wee nerd, I couldn’t afford to have more than one console. I had my NES, and the only way I could play Genesis games was to go to the video store and rent one of their consoles. Strider was my favorite Genesis game, while the NES version was…well, it was shit. You’d think this would have been a red flag for me when so many reviews said the new Strider reboot was a lot like the old NES game, but no, I had on some nostalgia glasses, and I was all “Oooh, a platforming game like the good old days.”

Except this is not like the good old days. This is gaming at the absolute cheapest and shittiest level of padding tactics. Back when cartridges had limited memory, programmers had to pad the length of a game to make it seem like a good value for your gaming dollars because longer = better no matter how you accomplish that feat. So some assholes decided to make the player keep running through the same maps facing the same respawning enemies and bosses, all so they could say their game had X hours of play time. That at least 75% of that time was spent NOT HAVING FUN was irrelevant. So having a choice to remake the awesome Genesis title or the shit Nintendo title, why for the love of baby Jesus did they fucking opt to imitate the shit game?

Part of me wants to be nice and talk about a direct comparison to the NES title in terms of the graphics. I mean, really, if my 10-year-old self had been handed a game to play on any console that looked this pretty, I’d have shit a double-thick chocolate milkshake and creamed my jeans at the same time. But that same 10-year-old me would soon be screaming in outrage trying to play this shit sandwich, and not even nostalgia can take away the reminder that I hated a lot of games for everything the programmers made me suffer through.

Let’s start with the controls. The D-Pad –what you’re supposed to use for movement in a platformer– is of course used for weapon swapping. As is standard for so many modern games, movement and attack direction is “controlled” by the left stick. I put that in quotes because one fucking time out of twenty, I might get the controller to attack or move in the way I actually wanted. The rest of the time, it was a fucking disaster of bad jumps, attacks that went to one side or the other around the target I was aiming for, and falling off of platforms because the game interpreted a press to the left as “drop off the side and into the bottomless pit” instead of “cling to the side of the platform.”

When the game starts you off, you’ve only got the sword and no ranged attacks, and you will play a lot of the early game with the enemies punking you out with no way to hit them unless you run up and take 20-30 lasers in the face. The upgrades to the sword never make it much more useful than the default, and if you want proof, just backtrack to the first levels after collecting all possible sword upgrades. It’s still a pathetic weapon no matter what color of “plasma” you add to it.

The same is true of all your ninja powers. I thought the “cypher reflect” was neat in a jedi kind of way, and in theory, being able to send lasers back at the enemies sounded like an equalizer for all those ranged weapon enemies. But NO, I can spend a minute getting shot by five different enemies, never once getting a laser to reflect, and when I finally do, it angles up at the ceiling. It’s easier just to get shot in the face to wade through the laser fire and hack the enemies apart with my pathetic sword.

The kunai may also be upgraded to explode, but they’re useless against enemies with a shield. One of your abilities is a dash that gets upgrades of its own to do “damage” to the enemies. But again, it doesn’t work on enemies with shields, and even the enemies it does work on, you have to dash through them several times. It’s still easier to just take lasers in the face and hack everything with your sword. This is the extent of strategy and progression in the game. You just keep hacking shit until you reach the end.

The same is true of the three “options” you pick up. These are methods of travel that also double as weapons, but not a one of them is worth a damn. Option B says it’s best for airborne enemies, a statement that makes zero sense because invoking the flaming eagle sends it in a downward sweeping arc under Hiryu, and never comes close to touching any airborne enemies. Option C is a shield that doesn’t block half the missile attacks thrown by enemies, and doesn’t last more than three seconds even when it is working. Option A is a “Tetrapodal Panther droid” who runs back and forth across the screen, generally being ignored by most enemies. I have to wonder why I made all the effort to collect these items, when they’re all useless. Oh wait, right, they’re also all used as “keys” to access different fast travel systems, or to operate certain machines to open new pathways. Aside from that, they rarely serve a purpose as weapons.

The real problem I come back to again and again is, even with all the upgrades, the game remains hard because I spend so much time wrestling with the controls. If an enemy is directly overhead and all I have to do is fire some kunai straight up, I can be assured that I will use up most of my attack energy firing kunai to the right and left 30 times before finally getting one shot to go up as I intended. This is where I’d love to use a normal D-pad to just aim up. Failing that, I’d like to use the right stick to bring up an aiming recticle so I have half a fucking clue of where my ranged weapons will go when they’re fired. But no, the right stick “controls the camera.” Which is to say it nudges the screen in one direction by roughly half an inch. Why is it even used at all? It’s fucking useless and NEVER serves a purpose.

Worse, the Xbox 360 D-pad can’t handle a simple direction input either. See, you use the D-pad to choose which “plasma” the sword channels, (plasma being used in the video game sense, and having no relation to plasma of any kind in the real world) and certain enemies have shields that can only be broken with the corresponding plasma type. But without fail, whenever I needed to switch to say, fire plasma, I’d get ice or the default blade every single time. I had to fight to choose the right blade type, and the whole time I was screaming “NO, PICK THE FUCKING FIRE SWORD,” I was being shot by the enemies hiding behind the dick with the shield. Why? Because in old school video games, there is no such thing as friendly fire.

So I had to fight to get the right sword selected every time. I had to fight to get the ranged weapons to hit their target every time. When I got the dash move, I had to fight to get it to point the right way. EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. TIME. And all of this is made even more aggravating when I need something done in a split second or I’ll die, and of course I die, and die again. And again…and again. I’m not dying because this one double jump is so tricky. I’m dying because I can’t get the fucking analog stick to work right.

This is before we even get to the bosses, not a one of whom isn’t full of cheap tactics. Almost everyone can teleport around to dodge my wimpy sword, and they all have ranged attacks. One boss, Solo, spends the entire fight hovering high enough so that you have to double jump just to reach him for a single sword swipe. His gun fires energy blasts that cover the entire platform and can only be dodged by dropping and hanging on the side of the platform. (Yeah, and good fucking luck getting Hiryu to actually hang on instead of dropping to his death or climbing back up to take the laser in the face.) He repeats the same obnoxious phrases throughout the fight, and I shut off the voices for the rest of the game because of him. And what do I get to challenge this asshole? At least a pea shooter? NO. I won’t actually get the pea shooter until three bosses later. LOVERLY. And, like all the bosses in this shit show, you have to face this asshole twice.

Here’s the thing I don’t get. This is 2014. You know all these cheap tactics were used in old games to make them harder and NOT FUN just so game makers could pack a few more levels into a game and justify raising the price. This is called padding, and most gamers hate that shit. So why for the love of God are these same lousy practices now considered a good thing by some gamers? How is doing a shitty job considered “old school?”

Do you like screaming at your controller or throwing it across the room? Do you like repeating the same monotonous bullshit over and over with little sense of progression? You do? Well fuck you, I don’t. Of all the great things that could have been brought back from old games, level padding, repeated boss fights, and shit controls were nowhere on my fucking wishlist. It’s like saying, “Gee, I wish someone could beat me up and steal my lunch money like the good old days.” Some shit just needs to stay buried in the past where it belongs.

Anywho, after gathering all the health and energy upgrades and getting all the sword and kunai upgrades, I headed off to the final battle in a tower where I have to fight my way through four sections just to activate an elevator. Sure, in the real world, we just call an elevator by pressing a button next to the lift. But in video game land, every employee must spend half an hour platforming just to take the elevator up to their assigned post. But anyway, once the elevator starts, the game throws out a gauntlet of every mini-boss you’ve faced before, plus drones punking you to ensure that you WILL lose health no matter how well you fight the bosses. There’s no use killing the drones first because they’ll respawn infinitely until you deal with the mini-bosses. The latter enemies use so many cheap tactics that I had to shut off the game and walk away or risk throwing my controller through the fucking TV.

I came back the next day, thinking I’d be put back on the elevator. NOPE. I have to enter the tower again and go through the whole bullshit process to get to the gauntlet. Then I can spend more time hating the people who thought this shit was fun. But at last, I get to the final boss, and he’s of course full of cheap tactics that make me do something like a cross between growling and yodeling for an hour.

After you beat him, you have to face him a second time in his “true form,” OF COURSE. And after you beat him again, you might expect some sort of cut-scene detailing Hiryu’s victorious walk into the sunset. BUT NO, FUCK YOU, you only get the end credits. So the game makers really went all out to emulate the WORST parts of the NES games. Shitty controls, repetitive enemy designs, repeatedly facing the same bosses and going through the same monotonous levels, and not even so much as a “Conglaturations you are winnar” for beating this piece of shit.

AND I WAS PLAYING ON EASY MODE. That’s right, all this bullshit could have been made cheaper and harder, just in case I wasn’t quite infuriated enough.

And here’s the thing about hard games that are made harder with cheap tactics and bad controls: they’re rarely fun. Some masochistic gamers out there operate under the delusion that there’s a sense of accomplishment that comes from finally beating a tough boss or section of a cheap game. Oh sure, if they record themselves playing, they spend just as much time as me screaming “Fuck you!” But they insist that all that growling and cussing is “really fun.” They like paying someone to torture their hands, and apparently rage is “fun” for them.

But I don’t agree, and I never feel elated upon completing these challenges. I have sore hands from thrashing around on the controller, and a strong urge to hunt down every last one of the programmers and strangle them with their own disemboweled intestines. I hate them so bad, I want them to choke out on their own shit.

*Takes deep breath* Like I said near the top of this rant, I want to give this game the benefit of the doubt because it’s real pretty. But even after collecting all the weapons to overcome the lower-level enemies’ cheap tactics, I never stopped hating the act of fighting the controls for even the most basic maneuvers. I never stopped hating having to be trapped in a room with a boss for the second or even third time. This game was a reminder of what I despised about a lot of old NES games, where the challenge wasn’t in finding the precise timing to jump around a level (like in the Mario Bros. games) or the exact movement pattern needed to slip through a boss’s defenses. (like Bionic Commando) No, the challenge was in getting lucky and having the character move anywhere near the direction I was pushing on my controller.

And I haven’t mentioned the story, but these bad guys are extremely nonchalant about Hiryu fucking their base up. Everyone is all “Oh, he killed half the base already? Big whoop, it’s not like we need to worry about him.” No one so much as bats an eyelash at my path of destruction, even after I destroyed their giant floating base. Even the final boss is like “You killed all my people. Good job for weeding out the incompetents for me.” I understand having confidence, but thinking you’re a god who’s gonna take over the world when your entire army can’t even kill one guy is more like delusion rather than bravado.

Let me give a random example: there’s three martial artist sisters you fight, (the tragically named Pooh triplets) and on the third fight, the first sister is like “Okay, you beat me twice, but this time, for sure, I’m going to kick your ass.” How? By using the exact same moves I’ve already beaten? And if I’m hacking everyone with this here plasma sword, why doesn’t it seem to kill anyone EVER? Shouldn’t a flaming sword be at least marginally effective at giving enemies an incurable case of dead?

I like games, y’all. I game on my PC, my Xbox, my Vita, and even my phone. I like hard games that are fair about their challenges. I love playing Super Stardust Delta, Spelunky, and Project Diva f even though I lose a lot. The main difference is, I never feel like I’m fighting the controls in those games. Strider, however, rarely lets me get to any platform without making multiple failed attempts at it. It’s not hard because of a legitimate challenge. It’s hard because the game is cheap and the controls suck a dick.

So I’m giving Strider two stars, and I would only recommend it to masochists who think paying to be abused and get angry is “fun.” If this is your idea of fun, have at it. As for me, I’m deleting this crap from my Xbox, and I hope I can erase the game as a traumatic memory soon.