Been unplugged - well, not unplugged unplugged, just not doing the whole obsessive-web-browsing thing - for a little while, and? AWESOME. Example: That thing? With the dude, and the gun, that I’m not actually describing because I don’t want those search hits? Totally didn’t know about that until Thag mentioned it. Yay for avoidance of media inundation.

Couldn’t escape fro-dude getting voted off, though.

Anyway!

Late to the Game:

Burnout: Revenge (360)
Tomb Raider: Legend (360)

I’m a big fan of retrogaming, because (a) cheap, and because of that, (b) by the time I play most things they run badass-ly on my system. Which actually doesn’t apply to consoles, so never mind.

I’ve mostly been into the open-ended sandbox stuff lately, so it’s nice to play some stuff that’s very very linear. Tomb Raider evokes a really nice sense of environmental majesty, and is surprisingly tense in places - although the main place that happens is actually the middle of the game, so that’s a little disappointing. And Burnout, well, my hands haven’t sweated this much since Smash.

Comics:

Batgirl: Destruction’s Daughter
Gotham Central: Unresolved Targets

Birds of Prey: Sensei and Student
Nextwave: Agents of Hate - This is What They Want

For straight superhero action, it’s hard to beat Gail Simone on Birds of Prey. Tight plotting, sensible and human characterization - and by that I mean her characters almost always behave in a manner consistent with their previously established motivations, personality and intelligence, which is pretty fucking rare in superhero comics - and it manages the nifty combo of usually-feminist writing and Ed Benes sex-art, so yay both worlds!

Nextwave, meanwhile…

Txt:

The Cobweb

The Prestige

I got The Prestige on the basis of “by Christopher Priest”. It wasn’t until I got home and looked it up that I found out it wasn’t actually this Christopher Priest, but rather some English dude, so thank god it turned out to be really damn good anyway. And I’m still not sure about the misdirection, goddammit.

Cobweb: The dual-author thing put me off at first, but the more I read it, the more it looked like Stephenson had just outsourced the research, because the whole thing has Stephenson’s style condensing on the surface of the page. The thing I like about Stephenson is that, yeah, everything he writes is totally SF-style, but somehow he always manages to avoid this. By SF-style, I’m talking about the worldbuilding and sense of place and time, and it’s kind of the same thing that Douglas Adams was sooooo good at, taking a world and weaving detail after detail of these worlds that look so strange to an alien, English perspective, and then turning that tourist-view onto familiar territory, giving the reader the realization that every culture consists of a dyslexic gestalt of thousands of years of territorial disputes, sky-beard worship and dietary restrictions, and honestly the idea that wearing bits of shaped, liquified sand in front of your eyes, sitting in a tin can blasting ten miles above the earth on trails of burning dinosaur bones at a speed that renders the very air howling and deranged whilst reading pictographs of four-color ink that attempts to sell you a novel method for shining your shoes in the bathtub is some unbelievably weird shit. The Baroque Cycle is the apex - or, possibly, nadir - of this, with expositional bits like a character declaiming a brief history of the Continent’s political and military history to his fucking horse.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Comics, Gaming, Narcissism, Textuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.