The Last Candle

My lone computer is going to be offline for about a week, and I’d like to make the following observations, statements, regrets, pinings, opinions, praises, and proclamations:

• Elder Scrolls: Oblivion comes out today, and the PC gaming and Xbox360 world has about a hundred hours of RPG adventurin’ more today than it had yesterday. (The aforementioned world does not include LARPers, who reportedly can enjoy up to 24 hours of role-playing per da, every day of their doublet-wearing lives. Incredible!)

  Unfortunately, I’ll not be adventuring back to the world of Tamriel for quite some time for two reasons, one major and then other minor. First, the whole “RAM today, gone tomorrow!” deal. I expect to be reading a lot in the coming seven days. Oh, and catching up on my Animal Crossing, too.

  Second, I already have too many games to play! Easy enough, right? Just completed and vanquished were Kameo and Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars (more on those below), but Condamned and the Broken Sword sequel immediately rushed to fill the sudden gap in my gaming repetoire. This is aside from the multi-hour gaming sessions of Shadow Warrior and Battletoads a Swedish friend and I engage most every night.

  Plenty to see, plenty to do, plenty to kill — but not in Oblivion. Sad, really.

• Really brief reviews, brought to you by: Father Time! Man, that geezer can move…for an old guy! Or is he young? Or…what?

  Kameo: Not bad — had all the looks and sounds of something you’d hope to see from a next-gen game, with enough bloom to last us until the next two generations. The gameplay, on the other hand, was far from next-gen, reminding me mostly of playing Altered Beast back on the Genesis, except Kameo has a fairy and Altered Beast has a couple of kickboxing meatheads that can turn into pumas and tigers at the drop of a aht.

  Okay, maybe it’s not so much like Kameo, but it was roughly the same concept with a new gloss of paint, a few more options, and about $20 million more dollars behind it. Worth playing for the next-gen love, but I don’t feel any need at all to pick it up again and visit the bloomin’ world again.

  Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars: Pitted against the 2005 release Kameo, this 1996 game also rears the decent, mostly ordinary head of “Not Bad.” Some aspects were very good: The characters, by and large, were vibrant, interesting, and involving; the voice acting and script, especially the protagonist’s, was clever and amusing without being verbose or too silly; and the artwork was generally very well detailed, especially the backgrounds.

  To recap: characters were good, voice acting was good, art was good. What’s left? Ahh, yes — the story and the puzzles.

  Broken Sword started with a bang — or a boom, I should say — and the plot moved along at a smart, involving pace, but it didn’t land the ending. There’s a decent amount of history about the actual Templars during the gameplay (rivaled only by Gabriel Knight 3), and the way the game was heading all signs pointed towards the history actually making an impact on the climax. Didn’t happen. For the finale, while the device was mentioned about a thousand times during the game, it was just some…thing that didn’t relate to the game or the Templar’s context in a meaningful or functional fashion. The rest of the story was quite good — traveling around to different geographic locales and hunting down those Temple Knights was a lot of fun — but man, a bad ending is like waking up after not brushing your teeth before bed the evening before. Blegh.

  And the puzzles? Okay, I guess. Fairly obtuse in places, a little too obvious in other places. A few items where you know exactly where they go when you pick ‘em up, and others that still don’t make any sense when you finally discover how to use ‘em. In short: pretty much your typical point-and-click adventure game. Longest Journey’s puzzles seemed more satisfying, anyways, and nothing can beat the world-wide puzzle known as Riven.

• Alright, another review, since I can churn these babies out faster than the ocean can make a man thirsty.

  Prayers for the Assassin by Robert Ferrigno. Here’s the gist of this book: Fifty years into the future, there’s no longer the United States; instead we have the Islamic Republic, which covers pretty much everything aside from the original Confederate states, and the Bible Belt, which is situated more or less into the Confederate states claimed during the American Civil War. The tagline for the book is unofficially, “The Terrorists Have Already Won — Literally!” That’s what Prayers gives the audience (or attempts to give): A look at an America dominated by Islam.

  The setting in this book is awesome. Awesome, and completely creepy, because Ferrigno fairly successfully meshes American landmarks, history and geography with Islamic law and culture. The conversion of a nation from 300 years of Christanity to Islam didn’t happen overnight and without event, of course: Chicago and Detroit are ghost towns, destroyed by war; Phoenix is quarantined due to disease planted by avenging Bible Belters; Washington and New York have been nuked by Jews in retaliation against the now-domestic Muslim population. Considering the modern staff of interpolitical affairs, the interior of this book caused a “What If?” shiver more than once.

  But in the end, I thought the setting was far and away the best part of Prayers. The book is a thriller, which brings my total read-count of Thrillers to two — the last was the ubiquitous Da Vinci Code. Da Vinci Code at least, y’know, thrilled: Cliff-hanger endings, sudden and swerving plotpoints, surprise twists, chases, close-calls, the whole lot. Not so much involved on characters as in what the characters are knowledged about and what they going to do with the knowledge. (Class is in session — please find your way to the nearest exit.)

  Prayers was, for almost the entire time, was reduced to things like, “Hey, Disneyland is a city now! Isn’t that crazy?” It was all about the setting — the plot didn’t move quickly, new developments seemed obvious twenty pages before they were introduced, and the characters didn’t have anything interesting to offer. The book is about 400 pages and is in relatively large print, but it still took me over five weeks to read it. Over five weeks — to read a thriller novel, which are supposed to be real page-burners. Just didn’t grab me.

  Still, if you see the hardcover edition in a bookstore, crack it open to the inside binding cover, and take a look at the USA map that details the State of the Nation in Prayers’ time. Everything detailed on that map — the nuke symbols over NYC, the stars and cresents placed liberally over the upper States, the skull and crossbones placed over the location of Phoenix — that’s the good stuff in the book. Give that a serious “No, really — what if?” gander for a moment, fall prey to a shiver or two, shut the book, and move along.

• Nightwish is finally looking for a singer to replace Prima Tarja. I thought Tuomas had said several weeks ago the music for the next album was just about finished, but the group is just now getting to finding a vocalist? Well, I guess if the writing part is all done, you’ll need instruments to play it…
• I like the new Joe Satriani album. Here’s hoping that Crowd Chant (iTunes link) will become a favorite at hockey and football arenas soon. Clips and video podcasts from every song and more from the new album available on the great Satriani’s web page.

  Also enjoy: The great and goofy March 10th web greeting, where Satriani himself introduces the band! Woo!