Various Thoughts

This is a surprisingly fun game. Sort of a combination of Ogre Battle and Final Fantasy XII. It is not without issues, such as the extremely shallow characters and highly questionable dialog and voice acting, but the combat (which makes up the majority of the game) is engaging and there are plenty of customization options. I had feared this would be another Ogre Battle, with more time spent watching the AI play then playing yourself, though that’s not the case. While you may not have direct control over exactly what action a character will take, you do have control over what type of attack they make and who they attack. As well as being able to see what actions those attack types will trigger before committing to them.

Visually speaking; the game looks great. It does use the Unreal engine however and so suffers from severe texture pop-up… but when those textures finally do pop-up they look quite good. The movement animations are somewhat awkward, though the combat attack animations are quite good. The various weapon moves actually look like they could be conceivably preformed in real combat. The counters as well.

Technically speaking it’s just a bare-bones console port; the mouse doesn’t even have a cursor to point and click with. So while using a controller is something of a necessity, the control scheme isn’t that difficult to get the hang of despite having multiple commands attached to the same buttons (mainly thanks to the visual reminders on-screen). It curiously installs itself to a windowed mode resolution and, somewhat annoyingly, shuts itself down if you alter certain configuration options in order to implement them.

I’m not sure how well the main storyline holds up just yet, as I’m not very far along it right now, but the item collection aspects and perpetual leveling-up have kept me involved despite the storyline being just downright ludicrous. The somewhat visceral thrill of watching your characters wipe out a group of 2-5 enemies with a single attack may also have something to do with it.

Silver Borne is basically par for Patricia Briggs‘ Mercedes Thompson course. Whether this is good or bad depends upon your previous experience with this series. Nothing really notable happens except for Mercy’s trailer burning down, which forces her to live with Adam for the time being.

Changes is different in just about every way; Jim Butcher shakes the Dresden series up quite a bit with this novel. Nearly every element that was still present from the first book in the series is destroyed in this one. Honestly, it actually feels as if the series could very well have ended with this entry. Assuming it does continue, there’s a good chance it may look quite different.

While not perfect, this is definitely a move in the right direction concerning Bioware’s recent slew of DLCs.

The mission itself is acceptably sized and decently challenging combat-wise, although it is more linear than Zaeed’s. The new SMG is desperately needed to give non-soldier’s some weapon-choice options and works well. The new casual-wear (for a female Shepard) is refreshingly different from the default options, albeit with the caveat that the default walking/running animation looks terrible with it. Kasumi herself, while not looking or sounding Japanese, is quite a nice addition to the character roster and comes with two unique abilities.

The only real problems with the DLC are the aforementioned linearity, the casual wear animation issue, and Kasumi’s similarity to Zaeed in having no conversations on the ship or any upgrades. Minor issues for the most part. A potential problem may be a lack of interjections in other missions, Zaeed did not have this problem but was released at the same time as the main game, so it could go either way. I’ll update this accordingly once I’ve played a few default missions with her.

Update: She appears to have the same amount of interjections as the default characters.

First, the good:

Unlike most previous DLC, the Firewalker doesn’t magically appear in your cargo hold. You actually have to travel somewhere and do ‘something’ to acquire it… although that ‘something’ is just perform the simple bypass minigame.

Now the bad (yes, only one good thing):

It handles worse than the Mako. Sad, but true. One feature of the handling that could be viewed as an improvement is the infinite boosters; the Mako gave you only a second or two of available boost before it had to cooldown a bit, the Hammerhead can boost/hover all day long to whatever height you want. I do not view this as an improvement, as it removes any sort of challenge that might have been gleaned from having to traverse the map from checkpoint to checkpoint.

Which bring up the next problem… checkpoints. The Firewalker missions consist of driving around the map hovering over glowing symbols on the ground to vacuum up their contents (which are invisible). Making this idiotic task slightly more complicated is the fact that the vacuum function, for one inane reason or other, causes you to jerk and jitter around like a crack fiend. If you slip off the circle, you’ve got to start the vacuum up all over again. A simple mini-map pointing out the locations, like a radar system, would have been exponentially better. Rounding out the issues are the unlimited supply of guided missiles (you can have unlimited missiles, but not unlimited bullets?) and the inability to get out of the damn hovertank and walk.

If you got the Cerberus Network DLC for free with the game, this may be worth a look if you’re desperate for new content. If you did not, then Zaeed is still the only reason to buy it.

The first two books in Seanan McGuire‘s October Daye series are sort of like a combination of the Dresden Files and the Meredith Gentry novels. They lean quite a bit more toward Dresden though.

The first, Rosemary and Rue, gives a little bit of Toby’s history then launches into a storyline that forces most of that history to the forefront. A Local Habitation is the second and has the dubious honor of making one wonder why exactly Toby is so well-liked by Sylvester when she is less than successful at the most important tasks he sets for her. Curiously… Toby herself wonders the same thing.

Regardless, the books are quite good as long as you don’t mind less-than-invincible protagonists and little-to-no romantic subplots.

Lucy A. Snyder‘s Spellbent, against all of my expectations, is actually quite entertaining. Jessie’s slowly creeping hysteria as everything she has is systematically ripped away is presented incredibly well. As is the dialog in general. I’m not as fond of the all-powerful chosen-one overlay that gets lain on top of her in the story’s conclusion, but I’m inclined to give it a chance to play out a bit more before I make an issue of it.

Deadtown, on the other hand, I didn’t really have expectations for and it still managed to let them down. Nancy Holzner‘s apparent first entry to the Urban Fantasy scene feels like a movie set, a production. It doesn’t have that spark of believability that can make you forget that you’re reading a fictitious story. It is not a bad story exactly, but its just a story. I liken it to The Hollows Light.

The Devil’s Playground continues, and sort of concludes, Jenna Black’s Morgan Kingsley series. I had thought this storyline could be dragged on forever with all the various characters’ comments about how Dougal could just sit in the demon realm and wait until Lugh finally slipped up and showed himself. Interestingly, Black decided to instead have Dougal occupy an extremely tenuous position; one that ends up forcing him into a final confrontation with Lugh by the end of the novel.

Kelly Gay‘s The Better Part of Darkness introduces a new universe where heaven and hell are simply two dimensions parallel to Earth. The inhabitants of those dimensions had been mingling with mortals since the beginning of time, but only recently had they ’gone public’ with their existence. The storyline follows a mortal police detective (Charlie Madigan) and her Siren partner as they try to track down the source of a new extra-dimensional drug that leaves its users comatose, and eventually expands to focus solely on Charlie’s unexplained power surges and what happened to her before the novel proper began. It has some issues, but is decent enough.

The first book in Jennifer Estep’s Elemental Assassin series, Spider’s Bite, reminds me of a fantasy-infused Nadia Stafford. This turns out to be a good thing. The one and only problem I had with the book was the entire romance subplot with the ‘only non-crooked’ detective. It was not necessary in the slightest, and felt both cheap and forced.