Stupid thoughts
Have you ever felt like you just want to cry out loud as loud can be, so everyone in the entire world can hear you, yet nobody will know who you are?
In: Absent-minded rambling
I don’t seem to post here very often…
And I don’t know why. I just noticed I have 23 comments pending, and it looks like they’re all from spambots. Good thing I get to mark as spam and stuff. They’re even written in BBcode, so they were designed for forums. I am insulted, spammers! At least write proper bots.
To reiterate a previous point
Remember when I posted that drum and bass song along with the original song it took its samples from? Well I just found this here piano cover of it (covers the dubstep one)…
I really like it.
In: Interesting/Different music, Music
IJI
Oh my, I haven’t posted here in over a month…
This is Iji. Go get it at http://www.remar.se/daniel/iji.php
Now, there’s no need for me to provide a synopsis. Everything you need to know about this game is in the trailer and the link. Instead I’m going to talk about my experience playing it (which will be pretty much spoiler-free, but I’d still play the game at least once first).
I was told by a certain fellow out on those internets thingy that this was ‘the best game of 2008′. And I suppose it’s true. I haven’t played anything like this since Cave Story (Hmmm, no post about Cave Story yet. I know what’ll come next). I’m going to start off with saying that this is the only shoot-’em-up I’ve ever played that made me feel really damn guilty for shooting the crap out of alien invaders. Seriously, the story is pulled off so well. It gets right in there; it’s downright psychological. So I had to play the sort of alternate storyline – which is basically the same but has a few changes – where you don’t kill anyone at all. Now surprisingly, this is actually really hard to pull off. But I managed! I owe it to those little pixels.
The soundtrack is very good too. I added them to iTunes, and I noticed the song that in the game is called ’sad’ (for obvious reasons), it’s proper title is “Glass Soldier”. I thought about what that means, and how well it relates to this game’s protagonist, Iji. She is just that. She’s a soldier. But she’s a normal person first. Brutality is not in her nature, yet it is thrust upon her anyway. There really is no better title for that track.
I’m not going to go on about gameplay or graphics- which are amazing, but what really struck me is the intense story and characters, and so muuuuuch backstory behind it all. It’s an imensely polished game, and I swear, back in the 80’s people would be paying, what, £25 for a game like this- no, for games worse than this. And this thing is for free! So much awesome contained within it! I really do like this game. Nothing more I can say about it, but the best experience you’ll get is if you play it for yourself.
Lemme just give something away… You can reset your stats at any time by cracking your own nanofield (this will make sense when you play the game) by crouching and pressing ‘use’ 4 times, followed by ‘kick’ (default: c, c, c, c, z). You lose all weapons, most of your ammo, and most of your health while you’re at it- so be careful! Just remember that you can do this if you want to change how you’re set up.
And now for some hints for those of you doing a pacifist run:
- Do NOT break the truce
- You will need the most powerful gun in the game to avoid killing a certain character
- Don’t kick turrets into people >_<
That’s all I have to say for now. Enjoy Iji! Oh, and if you’re not a gamer, you should watch agentjr’s Let’s Play of it on youtube. He is the one I found out about this game from.
In: Indie Games, Interesting/Different music, Music, Video Games
Christmas Eve Eve
That’s what today is!
See, as I am of Norwegian heritage, we celebrate christmas on the evening of Christmas Eve (and then on Christmas Morning too because I’m English as well). So because of that, this is always a very busy, very special day! It’s the day we put up and decorate the tree, and crack open the pringles. Woo!
SNOW!
OHMYGODITISEVERYWHEREOHGODWHATISHAPPENINGHELPME.
Chris Wooding
As promised, a blog post on my favourite author.
If you don’t know who he is, Chris Wooding is one of Britain’s best sci-fi / fantasy authors- and I’m not the only one who thinks this.
The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray cover
I first discovered Chris’ works when I picked up a copy of The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray in Waterstones. It looked epic. It was.
It’s technically classed as ‘young adult’ but trust me, Chris’ YA stuff is very much a crossover with regular A, as it were- he says so himself.
The Haunting is a dark fantasy set in a sort of alternate past Victorian London. Don’t you love it already? You should. The setting just has so much life and soul in it. Makes you wish that London really was like that back then. Now, the reason it’s alternate is because of there not only being a different history, but we have things like magic and demon-like creatures known as ‘wych-kin’.
The story’s about a wych-hunter (think vampire slayer or demon hunter for what these people are like) who finds a strange girl who has no memories. And yes, she has a haunting as you can see from the title. This leads on to a really epic story, and trust me on that. It was literally the best book I’d ever read.
I read his other two Young Adult range standalone fantasy novels after this; Storm Thief and Poison.
The former is set in one of the most interesting settings I’ve ever read about. It’s an island city in the middle of the sea, kept in by walls and nobody ever leaves due to some sort of ancient defense system. And all anyone knows about the past is what they’ve been able to cobble together from studying artifacts from a time lost, where technology was epic and grand. All this got lost though, hence the lack of knowledge of the past. The place is racked by a problem regarding these probability storms, which sweep through the city and just change things at random. This book is full of all sorts of concepts like this, and it is great. The story I won’t talk about because of its complexity and my explanation won’t be as good as the synopsis you get from clicking on the link at the start of this paragraph anyway.
Poison is kind of a fairy tale. But damn, it’s SO MUCH better, so much more interesting. A great story with rather mind-breaking theories set in one of the most interesting fantasy worlds I’ve experienced. Read the page on Chris’ site (link above).
Broken Sky Part 1 cover
So now we have the Broken Sky series, available as either a trilogy or what I call a triple-trilogy (9 books in total). This was apparently the first time Chris ever wrote something that wasn’t set in the real world; he instead created his own world. And hoo boy, what a world (or worlds rather)! As you can probably tell from the cover, there’s a lot of inspiration from manga and anime, and this is heavily reflected in the setting, which reminds one of Japan in the past. Only with everyone having superpowers. The story is of a brother and sister, who grew up in a lovely, picturesque place in the country. They were especially powerful too, and they don’t have to seriously use their powers until something truly awful happens to them. The way the two (and also everyone else in the trilogy) develop as characters is amazing. Chris certainly has a talent for realistic and likable characters. Not to mention the story is so brilliantly intriguing and compelling and bloody interesting that it keeps you hooked for the whole way through. It’s a hell of an experience it is, treating you to laughs, cries, angers, and scareds (I don’t care that those are not real words).
The last YA book of his I’m going to talk about is Malice. This is the first in a series as far as I know (the only one that is out at time of writing this post). Now in this book is a technique I have actually never seen before. The book is about this sort of rumoured evil comic book, where you can perform a ritual and then you end up inside its pages. And the world in the comic is a truly fearful place indeed. And because of this, several sections of the book are actually in graphic novel format- we see characters inside the comic, rather than just read about it, and this is awesome. If you want a novel with a rather novel way of storytelling (awful pun intended), have a look at this. You’ll be able to expect the quality that’s in all of Chris’s works while you’re there too.
Now I’ll move onto the adult books. I’ve read half of The Fade and haven’t read the Braided Path trilogy at all (I plan to!), so I’ll talk to you about what is only my number one favourite book of all time, Retribution Falls!
Retribution Falls cover
Now why is this my favourite book of all time? Let me tell you. It’s because Chris is just so damn good at his job. As I’ve said about all the other books, Chris is amazing at creating Worlds, Characters, and epic, epic Stories (Yes I am capitalising those words, they deserve it). In this novel, I think there are my favourite of all. I’ll talk about these three words in order I suppose.
World:
All I can say is, AIRSHIPS. Come on, you know how god damned awesome airships are don’t you? In RF, airships are the main method of transportation, and the technology behind them is vastly different to any zeppelin of our world. This is science fiction that isn’t in space, or the future. Alternate worlds for the win!
Characters:
Oh man, I love these guys. I love them so much, I do! We’ll start with the captain, Frey. This man is wickedly funny, and is quite the realist too. He is a sensible fellow, and he is not really a good leader at all. So he, ironically, is the best person to lead them after all. I can’t go through them all in detail, but let’s just say we have a doctor who loves his drink, has round, green-tinted specs and a large moustache. We have a simple-minded young fighter pilot who thinks with his balls, and a nervous, very socially awkward fighter pilot of great skill. We have a silent, physically imposing… uh, mechanic I guess he is. We have a very, very mysterious navigator who has more to her than she seems. We have a daemonist, with (what I imagine to be) snazzy dress sense and a trendy beard, and his metal behemoth friend who he loves a lot (more to him than meets the eye too!) Oh yes, and a ship’s cat (of course), and he has attitude. Sounds like a great mix, eh!?
Story:
We have everything here: Mystery, laughs, cries, betrayal, epic fights by air and land, love (of sorts), I could go on… You can read the synopsis from the link above. Let me just tell you that it’s pretty damn near the perfect read. Even if you don’t generally go for fantasy or sci-fi, you’ll more likely than not love this thing anyway.
People don’t always realise that just because something is not well-known, that doesn’t mean it’s not very, very good. Let me just say that I’d definitely rate Chris above other well-known authors, such as J.K Rowling, or Eoin Colfer, or (*hiss*) Stephanie Meyer (she’s not a good writer she just got lucky- oh the injustice). I’ll leave it at this, feel free to check out Chris’ stuff in a library or book shop when you get the chance. I promise you won’t regret it!
Little things
I saw a balloon today as I walked through Waterloo station, stuck up on the ceiling, and I thought to myself “It’ll come down eventually”. And for some reason, this made me feel sad. I don’t know, maybe I saw it as a metaphor for the inevitability of death or the fact that nothing lasts forever… One can’t help but feel the sadness contained in those helium balloons; a child getting upset over their loss of fun thing. And now the poor little balloon is abandoned, isolated and alone, stuck up there until its eventual demise.
In: Absent-minded rambling
Too much work AND play.
It’s been a while since my last post. You know what they say, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. Well I’ve been spending my time either working or playing, not leaving much time for writing anything here (that, and my life’s been dull enough to not have anything to post about).
One interesting thing happened. I met my favourite author. He deserves a blog post! I shall write one up later.
In: Absent-minded rambling, Books, Misc.
“Weird things have been happening lately.”
The title of this post is a quote from April Ryan, main character of what is no doubt my favourite video game of all time, The Longest Journey. If you like puzzles, point-and-click adventure or amazing stories, then you should look it up.
I’m not just posting to advertise my favourite game. I have been noticing funny things. Like just now on my way in to uni I saw A car drive past, with a bloody tree tied to the bloody roof. That’s weird, isn’t it? The driver seemed to not think so.
And a couple of days ago on my way home I saw a mother and son, the former being on the phone, and the latter sitting in a buggy wearing bright red plastic devil horns and wielding a bright red plastic trident. He looked up at me, grinned and said “RAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!”. I stared the kid right back in the face, and I said “eek.” Then I continued on my way home, feeling somewhat smug, for some unknown reason.
And another thing- I keep noticing a place named “The Rapid Results College” in Wimbledon when I drive past on the train. Now I don’t know why, but the title really doesn’t inspire confidence in me regarding the quality of the courses they offer.
In: Absent-minded rambling