One of the games we’ve been chattering about is StarCraft 2 and a couple of the other people have been doing league 3v3 play. Had been invited to join them to make it 4v4 but I passed as my SC skills weren’t quite up to par (imho) to be a good part of their team. So I’ve been playing a bit more of the campaign (which really has nothing to do with multi-player tactics) and some multi-player matches against the AI. Still not sure my macro/micro skills are back up to par yet but getting better.

DDO has my human monk leveling slowly up, but also just started a warforged wizard/rogue. Very much a ‘flavor of the month’ build but it looks to be pretty solid for solo’ing and I can finally get all those damned secret doors my monk could spot but not search for due to shitty seach skills and not enough skill points. Game remains fun, ended up joining a guild over there to have people to chat with and the group looks to be pretty fun.

Just bought Borderlands this past week. Ended up then playing it for 6 straight hours before realizing it was 2am and I needed to sleep. Very fun, well designed content where the bits are just the right size that they don’t drag on for too long and you never realize how much time you are spending on them. Going to do some co-op this weekend with some of the IRC crowd I think. Will be interesting to see how it fares in multi-player play.

Did the first of the ‘feature episodes’ last night in STO. “Cold Call” I believe the name of it was. Did it on Advanced difficulty because I didn’t think to change it before I went into the mission. If I’d realized there was so much ground combat in it, I may have as I find the balance on ground combat is a little off (bridge officer AI not being smart enough to remove themselves from AoE effects or to seek cover without being told) though I find space combat on Advanced to be almost too easy. That said, this mission was a nice change of pace. The Breen made for an interesting new enemy to fight, though the bosses AoE attack was a little harsh as it was able to one-hit KO four of my bridge officers at once. The space portion turned out to be a surprisingly good challenge on Advanced. First time in a long time that I did a space battle on any difficulty that I actually felt challenged with. Kind of wish I could replay just the space portions of it. The next feature episode either came out today at noon time or comes out tomorrow at noon.

Other than that, working towards a Dark Sun campaign for 4E D&D. Should be interesting to see how it goes. Trying out some home rules with it to get it feeling more like the 2E setting in terms of character power vs world difficulty. Also using the old 2E books to get the game actually feeling like Dark Sun’s gritty dangerous dark world on the brink of collapse again and not 4E’s goofy mix of Conan’esque sword-and-sorcery meeting Al-Qadim arabian nights.

Will write more about that later, for now I am off back to either SC2 or some more Borderlands. Will decide while I go to get a coke.

One of the things I like about it is that the setting isn’t the typical steampunk venue of England, but rather the pacific northwest. Given that I live just a few hours south of Seattle in Portland it was very fun for me to see something in the steampunk genre set a little bit closer to home. Plus, while steampunk novels often spend a lot of time focusing on the weird technology (“Look at us! We have airships!”) the technology in this story was treated by the characters much more as something that was just there, the way we treat our cars every morning (it is just there and it works instead us going “Oh my! I have a four-wheeled remarkedly fast device for getting to work!” every morning), and the focus was instead much more on the characters and their ties to one another.

The story itself was quite enjoyable and was one of those rare stories that managed to end in a way that left me quite satisfied and actually felt complete while leaving the ready to decide on their own what the future might hold for the characters. Or, to put it another way, while I intend to look for more written by Cherie Priest now as I enjoyed the writing, I am for a change not clamouring for a sequel or more about these characters and setting because the story ended in a way that actually feels like their story is told and done.

The Affinity Bridge by George Mann is another steampunk novel and one that also pays homage to the character of Sherlock Holmes.

It was strange reading these two novels almost back to back as they both are steampunk novels and both have outbreaks of zombies in them. Where Boneshaker had them coming from exposure to gas, The Affinity Bridge has it as a disease brought to England by soldiers returning from their time spent in the Indian colonies.

The technology is a lot more at the forefront of the story in The Affinity Bridge with everything from steampowered carriages to airships to automatons to Queen Victoria being kept alive by a primitive life support device. The story however doesn’t get bogged down in look-at-how-steampunk-we-are but instead moves at a fast clip as it follows the mystery that the main character, an agent of the crown, has been assigned to unravel.

I suppose to compare the two, The Boneshaker would be the more ‘dramatic’ where The Affinity Bridge would be the more ‘pulpy’ of the two. Before anyone jumps on me, I have to say that being ‘pulpy’ is by no means a bad thing and I do fully recommend anyone picking up a copy of this book if you like your mystery novels with some action in them or your steampunk novels with some mystery in them. I myself am looking forward to reading the sequels: The Osiris Ritual which just came out in the US in August, and The Immorality Engine which comes out in the UK in September and has no US release date yet.

For something entirely different we have Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti. This is ‘weird fiction’ or ‘horror fiction’ in the vein of Poe or Lovecraft. It is a volume of short stories divided up into three themes, “Derangements”, “Deformations” and “The Damaged and the Diseased”.

This is the sort of fiction that you either like and enjoy, or you put the book down and pretend you never read it and hope the nightmares go away after a few days. The prose doesn’t run wildly across the page but instead proceeds slowly, building up the disturbing images and scenes of the tale one line after another. It isn’t shock-horror but the slow tide of wrongness that creeps in between the lines as the stories build and proceed. While I do recommend it I also have to say that you have to enjoy this style of writing, this genre, and while it reading it may be one way to find out if you do I don’t want to be the one you blame if you have really fucked up dreams for a while after you read.

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians is the last book I have to talk about. The short form of this review is that if you are reading this blog, you should probably go and buy a copy of this book as you will enjoy it.

It is urban fantasy and a coming of age story, the main character is brilliant and gifted and miserable as he is finishing high school and looking forward to nothing in particular in the future when he discovers that magic is real and that there is more to the world than he know and it is what he had always dreamed or wished the world could be.

Without spoiling any more of the story than that I can say that it taps into the bit in most of us that dream of a world that is better or different in some way without ever thinking about whether that would actually make us happy, or if it would just mean we’d be the same person we were living our life the same way in a slightly different world. It’s about growing up and facing who we actually are and it is quite simply very very good and possibly the best book I’ve read this year (competing for that spot it Changes, the latest Dresden Files book by Jim Butcher, but to be honest that is because I am simply a huge fan of that series).

The sequel coming in 2011 is The Magician King and while I am looking forward to it, to be honest I am not sure how he is going to be able to improve upon this first book and I am left wondering where the story will go.

Other than that, in reading news…

My Kindle should be arriving sometime in the next few days. Will have to write more about that after I’ve had a chance to play around with it some. I do however have a long list of books I am planning on buying on it right away, mostly sequels to series I like that are still in hardback and that I want to read now instead of waiting for them to come out in paperback (as much as I might like a book, and be willing to pay for it in hardback, I simply don’t have the shelf space to store hardbacks).

I am reading a few different books at the moment: The Automatic Detective by A. Lee Martinez, These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer, Wings of Wrath by C.S. Friedman, Money Shot by Christa Faust, and The Family Trade by Charles Stross. Give me another week or two and (if I am not distracted by new Kindle books first) I’ll be writing about all of them.

I don’t seem to quite at the pace I was last year for reading, but with the weather cooling off and most of my yard and garden work being done for the year, I may yet catch up and start to get closer to my reading count for last year.

But I still, even counting for my unrealistic expectations, hoped for more than what the book has in it.

I’ll start with the good points:
The rules for Thri-Kreen and Mul character races are both well designed and the are in the PHB3 style of having one fixed stat bonus and a choice between two stats for the 2nd bonus.

The ‘Character Theme’ rules are a great idea and something that I’ll likely reverse-engineer and use for non-Dark Sun campaigns as well. Themes are basically archetypes, or background careers, for your character. Or you could consider them to be like Living Greyhawk meta-orgs. Basically an idea about who your character is, but they are broad enough that they aren’t class restrictive. They include things like Dune Trader (merchant/agent), Athasian Minstrel (assassin/spy), member of the Veiled Alliance (revolutionary anti-defiler group), or Templar (servant of one of the sorceror-kings).

The new build options for Fighter (Arena Fighter), Warlock (sorceror-king pact), Shaman (elemental spirit), and Battlemind (Wild Focus) are also all pretty good and except for the Warlock one I could see using them in other settings as well.

The Feats section offers some good support for the Dark Sun options, though suffers badly from it’s somewhat cluttered organization (I wish they’d pulled all the weapon path feats out and listed them seperately).

The primer about the world is somewhat mediocre. It doesn’t give much detail on any specific locations, which I suppose allows DMs to customize the world as they see fit, it also lacks pretty much all of the style that the “Wanderer’s Journal” (world book) had in the boxed sets for 2E.

And that is where my criticism of the book starts…

It feels sterile. It is missing a lot of the life and art and style that the original 2E setting books had. The prose is lifeless and flat, the art lacks the edge that the old Baxa and Brom art had (I wish they’d just re-used that old art for the most part), and a lot of the little flavor details from the setting are missing.

Such as the coinage. Athas (the Dark Sun world) is very metal poor. The original 2E setting reflected that by having the coinage be ceramic bits and pieces. Specially glazed ceramic coins made each year that were designed to break into 10 small bits for trade. It fit the setting, made it an interesting change of pace, and has been completed ditched in 4E by having the game use the standard default D&D currency instead.

Defiling originally happened with all magic, unless you made an effort not to. Now instead, it is an option that you can choose to do with your Daily Arcane attack spells. Something that was a huge part of the setting (do you defile or are you a preserver?) has been marginalized to completely and turned into something akin to the Warlock Dark-Pact where it damages party members (yeah… they aren’t going to be too keen on that for very long).

Some things that should have been illustrated also simply weren’t. Specifically riding animals, something that players should be able to expect their character to know about, only have a brief short text description and a mention that full stats on them are to be found in the “Dark Sun Creature Catalog” (which I still need to get as the gaming store closest to me didn’t even order any copies). I know what a Kank and a Mekillot are because I played 2E, but newcomers to the setting are going to have no clue what sort of animal they are riding.

I’d describe the difference between this 4E book and the old 2E setting as the difference between someone giving you a copy of their vacation schedule listing where they were going to be and when, and someone showing you a documentary movie they made of their vacation in vibrant full color with lots of insight into the little details and quirks of the place they went and the people they met.

My summary then of the “Dark Sun Campaign Setting” book then would be that it is mechanically well written, includes a good brief overview of the world, but lacks all the wonder and style and personality that it really needed to describe the setting to people new to Dark Sun. Fans of the old 2E setting who still have their old gaming materials will be able to use the book to run a 4E game with some slight adjustments (changing the currency around back to the 2E currency, etc) but new-comers to the game world will probably have a hard time viewing it as anything other than “D&D in the Sand”.

Warehouse 13 surprised me last year with how fun it was. Was glad to see it come back for a second season and they did a very good job before the season started to not spoil the season’s beginning. (Cliffhanger at end of season 1, despite the ad blitz for season 2 they managed not to spoil the resolution of the cliffhanger by showing any scenes that would give it away.) Looks like 4 episodes left in the season to go, so that means another month until I have to come up with something new to watch.

Psyche and Burn Notice both got me back into watching them this season. Actually missed most of the previous season of Burn Notice so it took me a bit to catch up, and Psyche previously ran hot-and-cold with me as some episodes were great and some of them just had a few too many annoying ‘sound effect and zoom in as Shaun notices something!’ moments in them. But both shows have been fun this season and I hope they both get renewed for another.

Other than that, watched a bit of True Blood (started reading the books and was surprised by how fun the first one was, need to get some of the others sometime), and the Closer (can’t bring myself to watch the show regularly, but it is usually pretty good).

During the summer I picked up season 1 of Castle and season 1 of White Collar on dvd. Watched the Castle season already and loved it, looking forward to season 2 coming out on dvd soon and season 3 starting on TV.

White Collar I caught an episode of on tv, looked interesting, picked up the first season on dvd and just haven’t gotten to watching it yet. It is on my ‘shelf of dvds to watch’ along with the entire series of Deadwood (saw most of it on HBO, been meaning to watch the dvds), the second season of Black Lagoon (watched the first season, own the manga up to vol 9, just not gotten to season 2 yet), the complete series of Claymore (manga is still ongoing when last I looked, curious to see how different the anime is and where it ends at), and the first part of Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood (loved the manga series which has since ended, the first anime series was pretty good though very untrue to the manga, the bits I’ve already seen of this anime series are more accurate to the manga though still not entirely so).

Starting off my list of what I’ve read lately is Mike Carey’s “Dead Men’s Boots”. This is the third book in his Felix Castor series, about a British exorcist named (unsurpringly) Felix Castor. The setting is present day, just the dead have started to come back. Some as ghosts, some as zombies (ghost posessing their own dead flesh), and some as loup garou (ghosts possessing animals and twisting thier bodies into human-like form). Not much to say about the story in the book without spoiling it, the series remains a good fun read. If you liked Jim Butcher’s “Dresden Files” books then you will likely also like this series. If the name of Mike Carey seems familiar it may be because you remember him from the comics he wrote like his time writing on John Constantine: Hellblazer or his time writing the Lucifer comic (set in the Sandman universe). Of the three I’ve read so far (there are five in print in the UK, but only the first three in the US right now) I do think the second one had the best story but all three are worth reading and reading in order so you don’t get spoiled. The first two were “The Devil You Know” and “Vicious Circle” in that order.

Trudie Canavan’s “The Magician’s Apprentice” is up next. This is set in the same world as the “Black Magician Trilogy” and is a prequel to that series though it is never actually directly stated as such. It would actually be better to describe it as a pre-history since it is set far enough previously in time that it really has little to do storywise with the Black Magician novels except to explain some of the quirks of the setting a bit better and where some of the customs in that trilogy came from. All that aside, it was a good read though I am not quite sure how well it would stand alone without having already read the Black Magician books. I’d have to recommend reading that trilogy first (“The Magicians’ Guild”, “The Novice”, “The High Lord”) before reading this one. Since the other trilogy is a pretty good read that isn’t that bad of an idea anyways.

“The Spy Who Haunted Me” by Simon R. Green is the next in the Secret Histories series he is writing. The main character refers to himself as Shaman Bond and is a magical super-spy so you should get the idea right away that the entire series is a bit of a send-up of the James Bond spy-genre. This is the third book in the series (after “The Man With the Golden Torc” and “Daemons Are Forever”) and there is already a fourth one out already (“From Hell With Love”) and a fifth on the way (“For Heaven’s Eyes Only”). In this one, the plot is that Edwin Drood (the real name of Shaman Bond) has to compete in a contest held by a retired legendary spy in order to find out who the traitor within the Drood family is. The actual story is a bit more predictable (well, to me who has read too much at least) then the previous ones and it continues the trend of having some cross-overs with his other series (a previous book had Owen Deathstalker from the Deathstalker novels show up, this book has Walker from the Nightside books). I still liked it, but I’d really only recommend it if you liked the first two in the series and it’s quirkiness is to your taste.

“Soulless” by Gail Carriger is one of those books that I picked up more because I liked it’s cover art and the quirky tag phrase advertising it (“A Novel of Vampires, Werewolves, and Parasols”) than because I really expected it to turn out to be a good read. A habit that pleasantly surprised me this time. The novel has wit, is set in Victorian England, really had me finding myself surprised that I liked it as much as I did. I’d almost describe it as having been written almost as a parody of typical Victorian / Regency romance novels with a supernatural mystery twist but comparing it to the tripe that passes for romance novels is a bit insulting of what turned out to be a fun read. This is the first book in The Parasol Protectorate series, “Changeless” is the second (and I tried to find a copy of it while out bookshopping today but it was sold out) and the third titled “Blameless” is also already out.

Patricia Bray’s “Sword of Change” series consisting of “Devlin’s Luck”, “Devlin’s Honor” and “Devlin’s Justice” filled my quota for fantasy novels of late. I’d seen the series in stores for a while, and I finally decided to give it a try. What I can say of it is that the first two books were great, the third book should have been split into a third and fourth and made rather a bit longer. It was still a good series, but the rushed ending keeps me from calling it a great one. You get to page 340 in the third book and it looks like the book is going in one direction, and then it changes tack and the last 48 pages rushes to an end that could have almost been an entire additional book on it’s own. That said, I did especially enjoy the 2nd book in the series, “Devlin’s Honor” as the Duncaer setting and culture were so atypical of what normally shows up in fantasy that I wish it had been explored more.

I picked up “Dead Until Dark” by Charlaine Harris ages ago, back when True Blood started airing, and I didn’t manage to read it until I was on a work trip a few days ago and had just thrown a handful of books from my “Mountain of Book Doom” into my luggage. I can see now why it caught the eye of people at HBO and was turned into a series (I’ve seen bits and pieces of the show, but always meant to read the books first). It was fun little read and one of the better books I’ve read in the burgeoning genre of “Femme Fatales + Vampires”. Waiting on my Kindle to arrive and I’ll probably pick up some more of the series then. Kind of weird for me to be recommending the book now, I have to figure that anyone else interested in it has probably either already read it or is already watching True Blood and spoiled the story in the books.

“Black Magic Woman” by Justin Gustainis is another urban fantasy novel set in present day where magic is real. In this series, the main characters are Quincey Morris (great grandson of the “Dracula” character of the same name) who is a supernatural investigator (monster hunter) and Libby Chastain who is a white witch. The story involves an ages old family curse / vendetta going back to the Salem Witch Trials. The book was a pretty good read, as the first book in a series it shows potential for the character. There are some stylistic tics in it that bothered me, the way some flash back bits started mid-page in mid-chapter but if he avoids that in the second book (which is already out and is titled “Evil Ways”) then I’ll enjoy it alot more and reviews I’ve seen of the second book say it is an improvement on the first. The third book in the series, “Sympathy for the Devil”, got delayed apparently when the publisher Solaris got put up for sale a while by by Games Workshop (yes, the gaming company) but it should be out sometime next year.

Also in the theme of ‘dark fantasy’ or ‘urban fantasy’ is “Lightbreaker” by Mark Teppo. This book was like occult-geek week. Lots of name dropping, historical references, historical characters mentioned. Also very different from most of the other ‘urban fantasy’ books in that there weren’t any monsters in the setting, just people being bad people. This was the first book in a longer series titled Codex of Souls. I believe the second book, “Heartland” is out already though I keep forgetting to check for it while bookshopping. As for recommending it, it is paced and reads very differently from most of the other urban fantasy I’ve read lately. The closest I might come to it in terms of what I’ve read of late in that it is a little bleaker because it is people, and not monsters, doing awful things to other people.

I have some more books I’ve read this month that I want to review (another five or so), and I want to talk about my coming Kindle, but this post is getting a bit long for most people to read and I am getting too sleepy at this point to do the books justice so I will have to continue this in a few days.

The bad news is that advancement is borked both via the ‘Leve systems odd reset timer (8 per 48 hours) and that you get only around 8 hours of full exp per week before your exp gain quickly throttles down to very very low levels. Along with this is the fact that the Gathering classes suffer a pretty unfun deteriorating rate of return for the time spent gathering. You get good results early on, but pretty quickly you are just mining for fishing bait instead of metal ore.

Aside from the weird design decisions with advancement (and no, this isn’t me whining about it, that is really how the lead developer described advancement as working) the UI for the game is almost brain-numbingly bad. And I don’t think it is going to get much better because the game is being designed for PS3 play as well so naturally the PC users (to not have an unfair advantage) have to jump though UI hoops that are just unnecessary and ackward to deal with. Unneeded confirm buttons, unnecessary levels of menus, lack of ability to just simply drag-and-drop items around. The UI would have felt shameful for a MMO years ago, now it simply feels unforgiveable.

That said, I still have a copy of the CE of the game on pre-order, and I do still intend to be there for the headstart and give it a solid try for at least that first month, but the chances of my subscribing and playing the game past the first month feel like they are dwindling the longer I am in the beta and testing the game.

So to make it clear, I really like Cryptic as a studio and enjoy their games.

With that in mind, STO has had issues.

Crafting was poorly implemented at launch, and has only gotten somewhat better (I pursue it half-heartedly and never feel like I am missing anything by doing so).

There is a lack of content that isn’t as bad as COs, but still leaves you feeling like you have to either play every single episode with every character you play through the game or spend hours on repetitive PvP or rather bland Exploration missions (admittedly, I’ve played tons of exploration content and tend to enjoy it if for no reason other than never knowing entirely what to expect when a mission starts).

Diplomacy gameplay that has been added in also feels lackluster. It is clear they have some idea of what they want to do with it, but there is so little there right now and what their is end up being a grind of explore missions in the hope of getting Diplo EXP ones.

Klingons just finally with Season 2 got some PvE gameplay that isn’t just exploration / random encounter grinding. It’s a step forward for them, and the bits of it that I’ve played through so far have been well done, but it should have been there at launch.

The character creator, which is one of the best aspects of the game and something Cryptic always does very well, still lacks simple things like color-blindness mouseovers so you can tell what color you have selected and there still exists problems with some of the options where you get additional drop-downs showing the name of the mesh/texture that shouldn’t be visible to the players.

And the thing is, at the heart of it all, there is a good game here. A good game, some good ideas, I absolutely love space combat (ground combat still needs work but can be fun), a lot of the Federation episodes have great stories in them, but it just needed probably another six months in development and a lot more time and attention spent on it.

The good news is, the game is getting better. Season 1 and 2 had a lot of good improvements and moved the game forward. I look forward to the UGC and being able to create stories within STO of my own. They’ve talked about working on ground combat and I look forward to the changes they will make.

If you had a sub, and unsubscribed, it might be worth coming back to STO to see if the changes make you stick around a bit more. If you haven’t bought a copy yet, keep an eye on the game and look for a free trial to give it a go. I’d have a hard time recommending the game without reservations right now (it has gotten better, but it isn’t ‘great’ yet) but Season 3 will arrive sooner or later and maybe I’ll change my mind on recommending it then.

And now, I have to work for a living. Thank god it’s Thursday and the end of my work week…