osmosisch

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Posts posted by osmosisch

  4. Posted

    Has anyone recommended anything by Guy Gavriel Kay? I've only just started reading his stuff (just finished The Lion of Al Rassan) but it's quite good.

    It's my go-to author for when women ask me to recommend a fantasy novel. His flowery romantic writing sits well with them, or so I find. Not to say that I don't enjoy his books myself but it's a bit much at times for me. Especially the 'both sides are good in some ways therefore the inevitable confrontation that kills them will be super-dramatic' thing that he likes so much can grate on my nerves. Basically, the kind of writer one needs to be in the mood for.

    I've probably enjoyed his novel Tigana the most because it's as far as I recall the most self-contained and efficient of his works. A song for Narbonne was also quite good I thought because I'm a sucker for stories that are in the troubadour milieu.

    Kay got his start with the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy which is an interesting blend of Tolkien and alternate-reality fantasy, doing a good job of blending common folktales and more personal-level tragedy into your classic type of fantasy epic a la Donaldson and Tolkien. That series' similarity to Tolkien isn't coincidental by the way, he collaborated with Christopher Tolkien quite a lot, working on the posthumous editing and publication of JRR's material.

  6. Posted

    Ha, I know what you mean. Plenty of the comments by people like it make me not want to play it :-/

    This is as many have said a testament to its success. It's amazing that it's taken so long for games to come out that really challenge the idea that every game should be enjoyable to everyone barring some very strong personal preferences.

  14. Posted

    Seeing that photo makes me realize, I've never used tape cassettes for computer data. I mean I've been aware of it, but I've never written or read data to them first hand. I'd like to, just so that I can say I have.

    Until my last move, I still had some cassettes with programs on it that I had recorded from the radio. There used to be a show that would tell you when to start recording, then there would be an interminable sequence of awful modem noises, and then you could load that into memory.

    I remember this was the first time I realised how abstract the concepts of information and its representation are.

  17. Posted

    The abominable aesthetics basically killed this game for me before it even started. Especially the humanoid just make me despair. It's on some weird uncanny valley between brown, cartoony, realistic and hydrocephalism.

    I still tried to get past this and played for a couple of hours, but the tactical combat is just too uninteresting to me, while it should be one of the two main draws next to the global strategy. And woe betide you if you try to autoresolve any battle with a magic-user because then you can kiss your magic reserves goodbye, if your forces even manage to win.

    Basically, for interesting global fantastic strategy stick with Fall from Heaven, and for fun semi-tactical combat there's stuff like Warlock. Both of which look and play better than this game.

  19. Posted

    Chabon's Bookworm episode is a really good interview with the author, for anyone hankering for an early dose before the bookcast.

    Hooooly shit I could not get through more than 10 seconds of the interviewer's voice. That was like fingernails down my spine, ugh.

    As far as the book goes, I seem to be closest to Chris' position: there are quite a few unfortunate choices (the Obama scene, the overall flabbiness of the book, the at times unrealistically inserted references) but to me the characters especially made it worth reading. I also found the dialogues very pleasant to read, to the point that all of the characters developed a voice for me. Especially Gwen (mentally cast as Pam Grier with dreads) was a plasure to read.

    I've seen some reference in the thread to people being annoyed that the characters do things they know they shouldn't. To me that is kind of confusing, because, well, who hasn't? It's how they deal with it afterwards that makes it interesting, such as for example Gwen's path through winning in the hospital to apologising to the father in the final scene. Similarly I rather enjoyed Titus' inscrutability because, well, some people just are like that.

    That said, the actual plot does leave a lot to be desired as others have pointed out.

    Anyway, I'm overall glad I read this although I'm a bigger fan of Chabon's other works.

  20. Posted

    Smite is really fun! Especially nice is that games are over in 30 mins usually rather than the 1-hour games that are common in scrub play of other Lords Managements (I'm a scrub).

    If anyone wants a beta key let me know, I think I still have some referrals left.

    Add me in the game, same name as here (: