Alas, the time commitment at Library Journal has become just a bit too much, and I’ve had to step down from my post. Since not every review I write makes its way online in any form, I don’t know if my final review for them can be expected to turn up.
My review of The New York Times Book of Mathematics is long out, however, and can also be seen at the Barnes and Noble page here.
“They had provided him with two torturers today.” With this, probably one of the greatest opening lines in literary history, Schroeder sets the stage as quickly as possible, and then we are right in the thick of it. An action-packed jailbreak precedes a novel-length journey for home, through foreign lands, an ongoing war, and the machinations of a larger extra-terrestrial plot the Admiral’s only seen hints of.
My full review of the third Virga book is up now at AESciFi.
[I]t’s a different television landscape than we would have seen even ten years ago, and the traditional television seasons now find their borders challenged. We can thank many massively-popular reality television series with lower production costs for largely creating a genuine summer TV season.
Today in the Spectator Tribune, watch me throw television recommendations at you while I muse on the changes in the broadcasting process which have led to a an entirely different artistic landscape for the medium.
These are the opening chapters of Helene Wecker’s literary debut, and they’re doozies. Perhaps the most famous beast of Jewish folklore is paired with a creature right out of the Arabian Nights. And they’re re-imagined as developed, human-like characters. It’s an unusual combination, to say the least.
Read my review at the Free Press.
The Human Division isn’t a spoof or a straight-up comedy, but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be funny. It is set in a future wherein hundreds of technologically similar alien races are fighting each other. Humanity is, in this universe, forever on the brink of extinction.
Read the full review in the Free Press.
The working out of the physics is one of the great joys of this novel. The combination of a microgravity environment that nevertheless contains a breathable atmosphere makes for some fascinating possibilities, and Schroeder takes us through them one by one. But it’s also a rip-roaring story.
I’ll be covering Karl Schroeder’s complete Virga series at AE over the next several months. Read along with me, starting with this one.
The long-running Ninja Gaiden series dates back to the eight-bit era, but the franchise’s 3D reboot began in 2004. All three titles in the modern series have been released for both Microsoft and Sony’s platforms, while this most recent title is also available on the WiiU.
I picked up Sigma, the PS3 port of the critically-acclaimed Ninja Gaiden, a number of years ago. Along with the excellent production values, the game brought a number of new innovations to the hack-and-slash genre, and was widely praised for its depth and even its difficulty, forcing the player to really master the controls rather than sleepwalking through the game as in some button-mashers. I remember pushing stubbornly onward, ignoring the game’s helpful queries as to whether, after one more embarrassing defeat, I wouldn’t perhaps like to switch to easy mode.
This latest release was made without the input of director Tomonobu Itagaki, who was behind the previous two titles. The story does follow closely on previous events however, and has much the same feel of the previous games, including defaulting to the kind of difficulty normally reserved for a hard or super-hard mode on a comparable game.
Combat is based on a combination of light and strong attacks, with certain combinations resulting in special moves. There are at least 50 combos for each and every weapon available, some requiring strings of close to a dozen successful button presses. The player can also guard, jump, and dash out of harm’s way.
Carried over from Ninja Gaiden 2 is a dismemberment mechanic. No, it’s not like the zandatsu technique found in Metal Gear Rising. Here, you just wail on an enemy and eventually a limb randomly falls off. At this point the enemy is near death, which means two things: a) you can kill with either a few more hits or an instant kill execution technique, and b) if you fail to do so, they’ll make a crazed suicide attack on you that does heavy damage.
The story involves an end-of-the-world plot and at least one fairly iconic villain that is a highlight of the game for me. The whole game is pretty over-the-top. The story deals with a futuristic world wherein ninja and magicians co-exist uneasily with military and intelligence organizations. Here, Master Ryu finds himself on black-op missions, slicing through armoured helicopters and wizards and cloned tyrannosaurs with his magic sword.
Technology and mysticism are both accepted at face value, in a universe that reminds me of another Japanese game franchise, Strider, as much as the classic American animated television series, Gargoyles. I kinda like this world. I like that a villain can appear from nowhere slinging Slavic curses and investigating the genetics of dead gods. In this reality, it would be rather surprising if the odd nut-job didn’t manage to become a supervillain.
In fact, I have no issues with the story, whatever. It is fun even when it’s forgettable. But this is a 100-percent action game, with the levels being so linear they’re practically on rails, and nothing to do but fight through wave after wave of enemies. And the practically unvaried gameplay quickly grows tedious.
Bosses provide a welcome break in the routine, with unique battle patterns that tend to require near-perfect executions to outmatch them, but it’s easy to lose patience. Defeating the T-Rex requires the player dodge and attack, dodge and attack, for what feels like 50 repetitions without a mistake. Cheap deaths from a damage box that doesn’t quite match up properly is the icing on the cake.
I managed to make it about halfway through the game before switching to easy mode simply for the sake of getting it over with.
To be fair, I didn’t spend any time practicing the enormous list of specialized combo attacks, partly because so many can’t be executed without an average enemy dying or blocking before they’re complete, and partly because there’s no in-game pressure or assistance to do so. Maybe if I’d gone out of my way to better engage with some of the more advanced attacks, I would have found the gameplay more interesting. But with the combat already feeling clunky, repetitive, and outdated, I suspect few players will be inclined to play around with 13-step combos.
Additionally, I would have liked to see Team Ninja acknowledge some of the innovations made in the genre over the last 10 years. Consider the Metal Gear Solid and Devil May Cry series, the latter for its fluid battle-mechanics and combo system, and the former for its stealth action (Tenchu: Stealth Assassins might make an even better point of comparison). Ninja Gaiden 3 actually does introduce stealth kills, in the very first level, then abandons it, almost never letting the player do it again.
The rapid-fire button combinations used for customized actions during boss fights, utilized heavily in God of War and borrowed by everybody else since (including Metal Gear Rising), are fitted in here. However, they’re done in such a pointless and half-assed way I again wonder at the point. It rarely goes beyond rapidly tapping the square button for two seconds.
Ryu can wall-climb and ninja jump up narrow crevices. This is a cursory exercise of pressing the jump button a few times. Platforming is out; free-roaming environments are out. I think of the fact that we have an actual ninja running through cities and leaping from building to building and how it’s no different than pressing X to open a door and it seems like a huge missed opportunity.
Have the developers never heard of Mirror’s Edge? Or Prince of Persia? They give Ryu a wall run ability, but it’s pointless since the level design isn’t there to make it needed. The odd impossible-to-screw-up jump seems like lip-service to the platforming other games have done so well, and it basically amounts to a tease. Add it to the list of half-implemented ideas done better elsewhere.
Team Ninja’s error is not Icarus’ — they have not reached too high only to plummet. Quite the opposite, this game suggests a profound lack of ambition. The result is a decent weekend distraction and nothing more.
Article first published as PlayStation 3 Review: Ninja Gaiden 3: The Razor’s Edge on Blogcritics.
Recently, Sawyer’s quest for variety has brought him to other genres. Last year’s Triggers was a techno-thriller that mixed bits of Dan Brown and Robert Ludlum with his own trademark style. Now, with his Martian murder mystery Red Planet Blues, the science fiction veteran has gone hard-boiled.
With just a dash of spaghetti Western thrown in for flavour. Read my full review of Sawyer’s latest at AE.
In some ways, I can thank my high school English classes for sparking my long love of speculative fiction. Between reading and discussing such notable literary classics as 1984, Brave New World, and Watership Down, I quickly came to prefer a good “what if?” story to any other kind. Amongst all the excellent choices on my high school reading list, however, Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon stood out to me as the most poignant and affecting.
I never imagined there would be a worthy modern successor to this powerful and bittersweet tale. Indeed, I would not have expected anyone to try. Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark therefore took me completely by surprise. I’m sorry that I missed this 2003 Nebula winner when it first came out. But I’m pleased to have stumbled across it now. Jay Snyder’s expert narration only added to the experience.
Moon’s novel tells the story of Lou Arrendale, an autistic who’s spent his whole life adjusting to a society built for people who think differently. Through early intervention and a lot of hard work, he’s learned to interpret some of the facial cues and tonal nuances in the unwritten social language most of us attain fluency in as toddlers. But he’ll never be a native speaker. Living independently and using his talent for pattern analysis, he works in a tech firm in a section with other autistics. In accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and, perhaps more importantly, in recognition of the section’s astounding productivity, supports are provided to create a good working environment for the autistic employees.
The simple addition of assigned parking provides structure and predictability they crave. When Lou becomes upset, he listens to Bach, turns on the fan and watches the pattern of colour as his spin spirals glitter and turn. On Tuesdays he does his grocery shopping. On Saturdays he meticulously cleans out his car. Though he doesn’t tell anyone at work, he spends Wednesday nights at fencing practice, with “normals”, reveling in the new patterns of a fresh opponent.
He is happy, he thinks. Content, at least. He long ago gave up on a childhood dream of travelling into space. He talks himself out of thinking that Marjorie, the woman at fencing practice, might have the same kind of funny feelings inside when she thinks about him, as he does for her. I had to learn ways to get a loan when I got stuck on a trip in Sweden – it is called låna pengar over there. He is safe, leaving things as they are. Those purses had all our items in it – including our credit cards. It was pretty embarassing to need to call mom and dad and make them cosign for a local bästa the morning after such good times and with such a horrible hangover.
But things will not stay as they are. A new boss at work resents the “special privileges” provided for the autistic employees. A series of unexpected episodes, a mean-spirited officer at airport security, an act of vandalism on his car, leave Lou flustered and feeling the full extent of his handicap. Then he hears about a new experimental treatment, expected to reverse adult autism. To make him normal. Seasonally, the airport that offers private aircraft charter flight options in-country to help with tourism and seasonal journey. And he is faced with a life-altering choice.
This is an important work, because, like Mark Haddon’s 2003 Whitbread winner, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, it provides a voice for people like Lou who many of us may never get a chance to know ourselves. The Speed of Dark dispels the myth that autistic people don’t have feelings; that they are static and do not experience growth and change; that they are somehow inhuman. But it’s not only important, it’s also incredibly readable. I can therefore recommend this book for everyone.
(More info on the book and on autism can be found at Elizabeth Moon’s excellent blog.)
Reprinted with permission from The Green Man Review
Copyright (2008) The Green Man Review
Today in the Free Press book review.