Posts

Showing posts with the label science fiction

Featured post

Choose Your Own Adventure Retrospective: The Curse of Batterslea Hall by Richard Brightfield

By -
Image
The Curse of Batterslea Hall  was always my favourite CYOA book – it was also, for reasons I'll get into, one of the more unusual ones. It sparked my later love of adventure games and inspired some of my sketchy early attempts at creative writing (including a thinly veiled recreation on 90s 'edutainment' program Storybook Weaver ). It also deepened my devastation when I returned home one fateful school night to discover my mum had donated my extensive CYOA collection – precious gems tremblingly unearthed from the dusty Mills and Boon-straining shelves of my local Scope – back to charity. Around twenty years later, and I took the obvious next step for a mildly lockdown-crazed 90s kid squinting down the barrel of their thirties: sourced a copy inflated by just four times the original cover price through eBay. But was it worth it, and does it still hold up? Dust off your bootcut jeans and fire up your Walkman – it's adventurin' time, 90s* style... The premise Battersl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock Game Review: Diverting Enough but Distinctly Underwhelming

By -
Image
This was just OK. I purchased this in the hopes of finding a spacey adventure game with an intense atmosphere like that of The Dig (both involve mostly solitary exploration of strange, desolate alien environments), but was left distinctly underwhelmed by the game in general. Morningstar is diverting enough, with sufficient mileage to absorb somewhat for a few hours, but the plot and characters are basic and lacklustre. There's also no true climax/resolution to the game –   while there's a confrontation, it's expected and occurs as a cut scene that is over quite quickly, so there's no real sense of being in actual danger at any point or discovery of anything truly shocking. The voice acting is rather poor, with some lines read as though the actor doesn't fully understand their context (although, while fluent, I suspect they aren't native speakers, so they deserve some slack). I discovered after playing that this was originally an in-browser game that was ...
Post a Comment
Read more

From Mai the Psychic Girl to 1984: 10 Books That Have Influenced My Life

By -
Image
When a friend recently challenged me to list ten books that have influenced my life in some way, I was presented with two problems. The first was the painful process of whittling my favourites down to just ten. I hummed and hawed over the issue for several days and had to suppress some serious feelings of guilt at 'betraying' some of my other favourites before reaching any kind of resolution. The second was the frustrating feeling that Facebook (where the challenge was circulating) wasn't an adequate platform for conveying just how much I loved these books. After all, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote, 'I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met... all the cities that I have visited.' To redress that wrong, therefore, here are my picks in the order that I discovered them, alongside some of my favourite book covers and quotes for each. 1. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien Collins edition (2002)
Post a Comment
Read more

Strata by Terry Pratchett Book Review: Sparks of Pratchett's Later Greatness

By -
Image
Strata by Terry Pratchett My rating:   ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ THE COMPANY BUILDS PLANETS. Kin Arad is a high-ranking official of the Company. After twenty-one decades of living, and with the help of memory surgery, she is at the top of her profession. Discovering two of her employees have placed a fossilized plesiosaur in the wrong stratum, not to mention the fact it is holding a placard which reads, 'End Nuclear Testing Now', doesn't dismay the woman who built a mountain range in the shape of her initials during her own high-spirited youth. But then came discovery of something which did intrigue Kin Arad. A flat earth was something new... An intriguing early work, connected as it is to the grand vision of Mr Pratchett. Strata also happens to be one of Pratchett's few forays into science fiction. Nevertheless, fans of the Discworld series will notice foreshadowings of Pratchett's later work and sparks of the humour and a preoccupation with the existentialist philosophy t...
Post a Comment
Read more