TheLastBaron

Licensed Novel of Games

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So yesterday when the Humble daily deal was CKII related I saw that one of the things in the bundle was a CKII novel and I started wondering does anyone read novels of video games?  I think there's some from Dragon age and such, and I remember people in 6th grade reading Halo books back when it was the biggest game ever and people were super excited for Halo 2.  I remember I even read a couple Warcraft books back when I was super deep into WC3 and WoW had just come out, but I haven't read anything besides those.  Has anyone here ever read a licensed novel for a video game?  Was it good? Was it bad?  There are also comic books so I guess if you've read a comic book for a video game that's fair game in this thread as well, though I'm assuming no one has (I personally have not).

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I read the first 4 Halo books when they were coming out. They were actually pretty decent SciFi books that were made slightly more accessible by having characters, locations and objects you might recognize from the Halo games. These were actually good books that expanded upon stuff not included (as far as I know) in the main games themselves. I really enjoyed reading them.

I also read Assassin's Creed: Renaissance. It's based off of Assassin's Creed 2, and does not include any of the present-future Animus baloney. It is basically just a retelling of Ezio's story in AC2. While that might sound good at face value, it wasn't written very well. In addition it was sometimes confusing. Entire months would be skipped between two paragraphs. I get that you can do that in the game with fancy white grid wishy-washy Animus voodoo, but it doesn't work like that in a book. The action parts were really boring, and the entire thing felt very rushed. Also, my final complaint about the book is incredibly petty... In the game, the poison makes the enemies sort of lose their minds and attack other guards. In the book, it just kills them quietly.

There is one thing about the book that annoyed me at first but turned out alright, and that was that some pieces of the dialogue are changed in the book. Most notably, in my opinion, was Ezio's uncle Mario not once saying "Its-a me, Mario" (which I understand, given the stupidity of the line). But this eventually morphed into a bit of a fan theory that the book is the official version of Ezio's adventures, and discrepancies between the book and game are because of the Animus and that maybe Desmond's mind is sort of changing things slightly... so in the game, Mario says, "Its-a me, Mario!" because Desmond knows about Super Mario Bros and that gets sort of fed back into the Animus... Anyways, enough rambling about that book.

I also read Mass Effect: Retribution. This was a great novel, expanding upon the Mass Effect universe and not including Shepard at all. It's essentially a side story involving the Illusive Man and Anderson. Besides just being a really good book, it also led to some backstory about Kai Leng, the assassin guy who appeared in Mass Effect 3 for seemingly no reason.

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I read the first two Mass Effect novels and they were dumb fun. I read a bunch of Warcraft novels long ago and they were dumb fun.

 

I don't think I've read anything else, gaming-related, and none of what I read did I walk away from feeling like it was anything spectacular.

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Garth Nix wrote a tie-in novel to a browser game that looks like it never came out. Garth Nix knows how to write, but the book's premise is video gamey in a really distracting way. They all claim the book came first, but having read the book I find it a little hard to swallow.

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I've always liked the Gears of War books. They're all written by Karen Traviss, who's also well known for Star Wars books in the Republic Commando series. She even went on to be a writer for Gears of War 3, and there were pretty significant tie-ins between the books and that game in particular since there was a back-and-forth relationship between them (unlike most game novelizations; I doubt we'll really be seeing Spartans from the Halo novels in Halo 5).

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"I will drink your spirit like cherry pop!" said the count, flapping his cape and showing his fangs. "Yes, Simon Belmont! You will become one of my children of the night!" Simon shivered with fear. They both stood upon a castle tower. Beyond was darkness, except for a cold moon in the sky like a dead eye. Wind chuckled softly along the battlements. The air was full of the smell of the garlic-clove necklace Simon had around his neck.

"No, Count Dracula! You will not drink my spirit this day!" he said, snapping his thorn whip with a crack as loud as a gun-shot. "And by the way, it doesn't taste like cherry pop at all, so it's nothing you'd want anyway!"
"Let me be the judge of that!" And the vampire leapt at him.

 

 

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I've never read an actual licensed novel, but I read the manual for StarCraft several times.  The backgrounds for the races was basically a short book.

 

I also have a promotional Dead Island comic from PAX around somewhere.

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21yiV5X.jpg

 

 

 

Justin Halley strode purposefully through the underground hallways of Fox Hound Command.  At age twenty, he was the youngest captain ever to serve in the U.S. Marines Special Forces antiterrorist squad known as the Snake Men.  His code name — Solid Snake.

"Also on the seat was a pack of cigarettes. Halley reached for them, but drew his hand back. Could they be poisoned? His instincts told him that they could be a deadly trap. And, even if the cigarettes contained no added poisons, they were deadly enough in themselves. He decided to leave them where they were."

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Oh wow, I had completely forgotten about the Worlds of Power books!

I remember I was in a used bookstore one time and saw the Ninja Gaiden one. I opened it up and read a bit of the first couple of pages, and, if I recall correctly, it started off with the main character doing stuff while blindfolded. (It is worth pointing out at this point that I had never played Ninja Gaiden) I didn't end up buying that book, but the thought stuck with me of an NES game starting with the main character being blindfolded, and how that would work mechanically in a game.

Of course I later found out when I actually played Ninja Gaiden that no such consideration was taken and in fact had nothing to do with the game whatsoever, thus making me incredibly disappointed in the game.

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I tried reading the Brian Bendis/Alex Maleev HALO miniseries before HALO 3 came out, but it was a joyless slog.

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The Halo books I read and enjoyed were the first three, which I think were written by Eric Nylund. They were pretty good, and I'm not a Halo fan by any stretch. 

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I read a lot of the first batch of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo books. They were all of them pretty low-brow adventure pulp, though some were better than others. A hated a few of them, since they even got the characters wrong, which seems weird.

 

I'm interested in the Mass Effect: Retribution book, but beyond that not much else. I do think there's an opportunity to write a good book based on video game series though, but that's just like any book: it depends on the writer how good it is.

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I feel like Halo 4 was practically impossible to understand if you didn't read the related Forerunner books (Cryptum, Primordium, Silentium). I didn't think the books were amazing, but they at least added needed context to that otherwise baffling game (especially the Terminals).

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I read Sonic the hedgehog in the fourth dimension when I was probably 8 or 9. I really liked it, and read it 2 or 3 times to completion. It's definitely a load of shit though, I just wanted to read everything, and was awed at seeing a character from a game in a book (that wasn't a manual)

 

Now that I'm a bit older, I've very little interest in reading any novels based on games. I'd dip my toe in for the right game, but I don't even know myself what that could be. 

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Krondor: The Betrayal is Raymond Feist's novelization of Betrayal at Krondor, which is a game written by other people but set within the world of Feist's Riftwar novels. It wasn't too bad, but it's also a slightly different circumstance than your usual licensed novel.

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I bought  two Mass Effect novels... the one where Saren is a spectre, and i think the one between 1 and 2.. they were kinda fun, though hardly great literature. I also bought the Elder Scrolls book The Infernal City.

 

My favourite game related book is the opposite of the licensed game novel: Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish, a collection of stories about the Witcher, Geralt of Rivia. It is set in a fantasy world that is similar to the ones we are familiar with, but is refreshingly different I think. I started reading it after playing thr first Witcher game, and it has stood me in good stead when trying to understand that game and the first sequel. I am really looking forward to the Witcher 3.

 

The upcoming game Elite Dangerous was initially funded by a Kickstarter where some of the highest pledge levels included the rights to publish a work of official Elite fiction. The first Elite game came out with possibly the first game novella in 1984, called the Dark Wheel. This game will have an official sequel to the Dark Wheel, along with a whole bunch written by backers, and many of these projects were funded by Kickstarter themselves! I have pledged to receive 7 books, so I will have plenty of reading to do when they come out!

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21yiV5X.jpg

Oh wow.

To be fair, the novelizations of the later games are worse if anything. I can remember that the author of the Metal Gear Solid one thought it was a great idea to directly translate the games limited hand to hand combat moveset into the far too many fight sequences. At one point I think it's literally "Snake round house kicked two Genome soldiers."

The german translation was pretty awkward too and kept stuff like "hell yeah" and "babe" in, which made every character sound like they were a bunch of kids raised in Rhineland-Palatia during the nineties whose only exposure to the english language had been through a battered (but uncut) VHS-copy of Commando.

 

As for good novelizations: Does the Battletech/Mech Warrior stuff count? I can remember some of them being fairly entertaining military sci-fi in a pretty cool setting, but I guess they're based on the tabletop game rather than the PC stuff?

Also noteable comic person Greg Rucka apparently wrote a tie-in novel for Perfect Dark Zero which isn't supposed to be half-bad, though I wouldn't know.

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I read The Zork Chronicles just a couple of years ago, because I ran across a copy in a used bookstore and couldn't resist.  It was surprisingly good and charming.  Although it's more of a satire on the hero's journey and video games than it is a faithful extension of a game universe. 

 

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Oh wow.

To be fair, the novelizations of the later games are worse if anything. I can remember that the author of the Metal Gear Solid one thought it was a great idea to directly translate the games limited hand to hand combat moveset into the far too many fight sequences. At one point I think it's literally "Snake round house kicked two Genome soldiers."

The german translation was pretty awkward too and kept stuff like "hell yeah" and "babe" in, which made every character sound like they were a bunch of kids raised in Rhineland-Palatia during the nineties whose only exposure to the english language had been through a battered (but uncut) VHS-copy of Commando.

 

As for good novelizations: Does the Battletech/Mech Warrior stuff count? I can remember some of them being fairly entertaining military sci-fi in a pretty cool setting, but I guess they're based on the tabletop game rather than the PC stuff?

Also noteable comic person Greg Rucka apparently wrote a tie-in novel for Perfect Dark Zero which isn't supposed to be half-bad, though I wouldn't know.

Oh man! I had completely forgotten about the Metal Gear Solid novelizations!

 

I read the novelizations of Metal Gear Solid and Metal Gear Solid 2. They were complete garbage. On the other hand, I was about to start MGS2 when I read the first MGS book, and hadn't played MGS1 in a while, so in a way it was a nice refresher of what happened... even though it turned out I needed basically none of that knowledge at all in MGS2.

...turns out I read a lot of video game novel adaptations. I may have a problem.

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The Metal Gear comics sound like they are much much better.

 

I've read more than a few licensed comics of games, but this is a book thread so I will stop.

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If we were to include comics I would have to include Sonic the Hedgehog and Megaman comics...

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I read The Zork Chronicles just a couple of years ago, because I ran across a copy in a used bookstore and couldn't resist.  It was surprisingly good and charming.  Although it's more of a satire on the hero's journey and video games than it is a faithful extension of a game universe. 

 

attachicon.gif51NX-xL5VwL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

 

So long as the White House features, this sounds like the best way to adapt Zork.

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I read the first Doom novel when I was a kid. I don't remember much about it except that the pinky demon didn't seem very accurate to the game, and at one point a woman tells the protagonist something like, "As much as I like looking at your... manly chest, we should probably find some clothes." (It is implied that "manly chest" is a euphemism for "enormous penis.")

 

I also read the Super Mario World choose your own adventure book "Dinosaur Dilemma." It wasn't great.

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Another!

I also used to have the Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book! It was kind of neat, but I never got a chance to play either of the Oracle games so I feel like it was a bit wasted on me.

...also, I don't know if this counts exactly because it wasn't a standalone book, but there was a magazine thingy I got on occasion called "Disney Adventures", and there was I think one issue dedicated to video games. Either that or they had a video game section that had some weird video game related stuff in it each month. Anyways, I remember one of these issues included a thing about Crash Bandicoot, and another one having a little "day in the life of Mario" type of thing. But one of them was a short story about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It was about Link meeting the Gorons and defeating the Dodongo. It wasn't until I actually played OoT some months later that I realized it was basically a strategy guide written in a fictional way, it was really cool.

Ah! I found some images from other video game stuff in that Disney Adventures magazine:

tumblr_m61p68NEHf1qcwfygo1_1280.jpg

 

tumblr_m61p33Sj6l1qcwfygo1_1280.jpg

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I do have the two Gabriel Knight novels but I haven't gotten to them and probably won't anytime soon after Moebius. The only reason I'm actually interested in reading those is that they were adapted by Jane Jensen.

 

But ultimately I feel like making a novel (even if it's a continuation or side story) of a video game, where a lot of the involvement comes with the visuals and interactivity, is futile. I don't feel like most games come with a good enough story to base a novel on. Some companies tend to make a lot of comics, sometimes with the idea of an official prequel or bridging a story (New Tomb Raider, DMC, Metroid, Infamous, and Ratchet and Clank), but it's only effective in that you can get the comics with over faster than a novel and therefore get the missing story/backstory.

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