First releases with NBP…

In my absence, I’ve been working to update some of my books and send them to No Boundaries Press. Today, I can tell you about my first round of titles through my new vendor. In this first set I’ve re-released The Lesser of Two Evils, Little Monsters, The Sole Survivors’ Club, Sandy Morrison and the Pack of Pussies, Peter the Wolf, and Dogs of War (Peter the Wolf, book 2). If you’d like to keep up with my releases, you can either bookmark my author page or subscribe to the NBP newsletter to follow all of NBP’s new releases.

New updates on these titles will be uploaded to Amazon today, so if you’re waiting for the revised Kindle version The Sole Survivors’ Club, just wait until you see the cover change. That should happen sometime tonight or tomorrow, so you won’t have to wait long.

And once again, I apologize for the inconvenience to y’all as I make this transition. Thanks for your patience, and for your help in these shaky and uncertain times. Many time in the last few months, I’ve reached the point of wanting to give up and just pull all my titles, and only the encouragement of y’all kind folks has kept me going. So, thanks for offering that support when I need it the most.

Game review: Super Stardust Delta

As one of the Vita’s cheaper launch titles, I was drawn to Super Stardust Delta by the graphics, and by early reviews that had compared the game play as similar to Beat Hazard, which is one of my favorite arcade shooters to waste time on. The comparison isn’t quite right, but Super Stardust Delta is a fun arcade shooter with plenty of challenges in its six levels of hot and twin-sticky death.

You move the starship using the left analog stick, and the right shoots. The game can be run in Delta or Pure mode. Delta makes use of the Vita’s touch features, but given how often I accidentally set off a black hole or a flurry of missiles when I didn’t mean to, I tended to play pure more. So this isn’t quite a knock to the touch screen options, just an admission that I’m a bit of a klutz.

What makes this game different from Beat Hazard is the globe you fly around. You’re in a geosynchronous orbit with one of six planets, always keeping an eye on the horizons for the arrival of enemies or giant space rocks. The objective is to clear all the junk out of the airspace using a fire-whip to bust up asteroids, and an ice gun to break up comets. Both types of space rock contain green glowing chunks that will yield power ups for your weapons. Rocks and enemies also release stardust, and by collecting this glowing green dust, you increase a point multiplier and unlock some extra gifts along the way.

I’m not doing the game justice, though. Each planet is vastly different from the last, and the background graphics are gorgeous. The music is pretty standard fare for shooters, but it isn’t grating on the ears. The music and graphics in combination with the simple game play make for a “sticky game” that keeps you coming back for more.

Game review: Mutant Blobs Attack

Having beaten Uncharted: Golden Abyss on every mode except for crushing, I decided to look at some of the lower priced PS Vita games until I can find free time to get to Fnac for my next game card. (I’m waffling between Shinobido 2 or F1 2011.) My first choice was Super Stardust Delta, but after seeing so many great reviews for Mutant Blobs Attack, I figured that might be good for a laugh. In fact, it’s not good for ANY laughs, or much of anything else, either.

The premise sounds interesting: a “Humane Blob Torture Museum” is host to a bunch of blobs that the humans made as a result of torturing one blob who crash landed on Earth. (This being a sequel to a PS3 game, I’m guessing the spiky main character is the descendant of the first blob.) This torture makes the main mutant blob angry enough to arrange for an escape, and so our game begins. But, thereafter nothing about this game makes much sense, and not in a cute cartoon kind of way. No, it’s more like an “incomplete project from a kid snorting too many Pixie Stix” kind of way.

Before I start bitching, I’ll mention what I liked. Before they’re shrunken and impossible to see, the humans moving around in the early levels used a cute and simple animation style. I also liked how the outer edges of the screen are made grimy and reflective, like you’re watching all of this on an old tube TV. And, as I said to the artist of the game on Twitter, the art used for the humans and the backgrounds is nice in an old cartoons kind of way.

But despite the art and music trying to capture old campy feelings from a long-gone era, the level designs are absurdly and haphazardly assembled without taking advantage of the new concepts the game makers are introducing to the familiar attacking blob trope. It doesn’t help that the blob’s half lidded eye conveys a sense of boredom more than anger. He looks bored going through every level, and in this regard, I was able to identify with him well enough. Right from level one, I was bored too.

While most space blobs shown in the intro seemed resilient to all forms of torture, the blob I’m playing is slow, hard to control, and frail. So pretty much everything can kill it, and probably has a few dozen times. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if levels weren’t designed to make every move a life or death decision. Which would kinda make sense if our blob was trapped in the bowels of a lab still desperately trying to contain the “hero.” But the blob easily escaped the scientists’ clutches by hiding in a student’s bag, and his course begins in a mundane college dorm.

And yet, there’s lasers in the dorm living room; floor-to-ceiling lasers that force you to rush through the room or be insta-killed. (Yet don’t set fire to all the trash lying around, or burn the carpets…or the people.) There’s moving lasers in the air conditioning ducts, lasers in the plumbing, and lasers on the “football training field”. There’s even a blob-seeking laser. Clearly, the men behind this game are fond of lasers, whether they fit a location or not. Or, maybe they didn’t have any other ideas for what could harm a blob and just kept tossing out the same crap answer over, and over, and over and… I mean, heaven forbid they should make it go through a walk in freezer (a known problem spot for ALL space blobs) and perhaps avoid ice cubes or touching the frozen metal floor. Nope, just lasers, lasers, and more lasers.

Book review: Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr

I wanted to like this book because I liked the characters. Well, most of the characters. But Wicked Lovely has a lousy villain, and a plot centered all around said villain. The bigger crime of this book lies in the cover, which proclaims “Enter a world of faery romance.” In fact, there is absolutely nothing the faery king, Keenan, does that could be considered even slightly romantic. That’s because he’s not courting the main character, Ash, because he loves her. He’s doing it because if he doesn’t, THE WHOLE WORLD WILL DIE.

WHY? Why must a freaking romance novel eschew all pretense of romance in favor of a plot that MAKES NO SENSE. And why must a romance book about fae go all the way to a plot about saving the world just to build tension? I… *deep breaths. I need to calm down.

Okay, I’m going to list what I liked. I liked Ash, and I liked that Ash already had a great guy who had been courting her long term. I liked how their relationship developed, and I give kudos to the writer for covering oral sex, even in the coy way in which she did. I liked Keenan, at first. But the more desperate he gets about saving the world, the stupider his ideas are. It’s like he’s the dumb teenager, and Ash is the millennium-old fae.

But the whole reason all of these characters are interacting is because Keenan’s mother, Beira, has seen one too many Disney movies and thought, “I could be a villain too.” Her plot is stupid, and frankly pathetic, and because her plot is the only reason all of this is happening, it strips away all the great possible conflicts that could have come through these same characters and a different motivation for their actions. But having a crappy cardboard cutout standing in place of a plot is still a plot device.

Also, what is the deal with YA and their unhealthy fixation on preserving virginity until one is 17? I used to read penny porn as a teen, and there was this recurring plot were a girl just turns 18 and becomes hot to trot. We can all agree that’s ridiculous, and this books tries to address the cliche by giving Ash a boyfriend, Seth. But he’s not sexually active with her despite his being a “player” and them being together 7 months. Why? Because Ash is worried about keeping their relationship “pure.” If this wasn’t bad enough, with two separate subplots, Ash is made to worry about whether or not she’s still a virgin, and this is the best the writer could come up with for tension, apparently.

That’s why, with a broken heart, I give Wicked Lovely 2 stars, and would recommend that romance fans avoid it because there’s not a whiff of romance anywhere in the story. The closest the book came to a romantic scene, the author “fades to black” and then implies with one coy sentence what an awesome cunnilinguist Seth is. Oh, be still my Puritan heart.

The romance label is false advertising from the publisher, in my opinion, and I will not bother picking up the next book in the series. I also wouldn’t suggest this book to anyone, unless they just had to have a complete collection of texts on faeries.

Game review: Escape Plan

I went into this game wanting to love it. I was a HUGE fan of Limbo, and many comparisons have been made between the two games. Which is a complete sham because aside from both games using the same color scheme, they’ve got nothing else in common. The worst part that they don’t have in common is that Limbo was fun, while Escape Plan is so dull, it couldn’t even provoke my famous gamer rage.

The premise, like most indie games, is very simplistic. There’s an evil guy, and he wants to kill your characters. The game breaks fourth wall to reveal that you will be the silent accomplice to these two “lovable” characters. Without you to guide these simple creatures, they’d otherwise just stand around and wait to be killed. And that would be a real shame, that idiots die when someone else could save them and let them breed future idiots. Why doesn’t anyone think of the shallow end of the gene pool, huh?

Anywho, let’s start with the biggest problem, the scoring system, which requires an extremely low number of gestures to get a positive score. This despite the fact that your fingers will hit the back touch pad or the front screen all the time in your efforts to find some way to hold the Vita for best effect for each level, resulting in false gestures. In theory, I could go back and replay these levels to get a better star rating, like on Angry Birds. But that assumes that I had fun playing the level once and care to try for a better score. This was true of Angry Birds, but since I didn’t like the levels in Escape Plan the first time through, I see no reason to try for a better score. In fact, I’d rather masturbate with a cheese grater than play any of these levels over. It’s really that dull.

Next, let’s talk about levels that require pinching a tiny character the size of a housefly to make them fart and speed across trap-rigged areas. (Side note, the sound effects in this game suck. From the canned audience to the machinery sounds, everything sounds like it came off a low grade sound effects CD.) I can’t see my finger through the device, obviously, and the tiny size of the character Lil means I spent more time trying to get a hold of the character than I did navigating the courses. Even when I was sure I was pinching the right spot, my finger wold be off a micrometer, resulting in two extra gestures, and still no movement from the helium-bloated Lil.

Then there’s the levels where you must tap items in the front, and then the back in rapid order. There’s no comfortable way to hold the Vita to accomplish this, and since the items that must be taped from the back are so small, you can count on killing your character with your inaccuracy more than any of these so-called diabolical traps.

AND THEN there’s level where you must herd sheep by tapping the back “wall”, move electric rods by tapping the front, shepherd your sheep safely through a long fall AND operate the screen camera using the right stick. Even if you somehow manage all of this, your right hand is forced to hold the whole weight of the unit on three fingers. This is so, so not comfortable. And, did I mention that the game regularly shifts the camera back to the characters, even if you were across the level trying to herd the world’s stupidest sheep?

About halfway through the game, I found the skip button, and afterward just made a few attempts at levels before skipping them. Every level idea that the designers must have thought was clever is instead clumsy and a poor use of the Vita’s hardware. I said on Twitter, about the only reason I think you should get Escape Plan is to see the WORST implementation of touch controls for a Vita game. About the only other thing I can think to mention is, the fat guy, Laarg, got off real light in the game. At the end of my playing for real, (before Skipopalooza started, that is) Laarg had 25 deaths to Lil’s 68. So, clearly the folks who made this game hate skinny people. They also may think fat people are mentally retarded. Or, that’s the message I’m choosing to take away from this game.

I really can’t think of anything nice to say about this disaster. Oh wait, I liked the selections for background music. Also the end credits song is a personal favorite of mine, the remake of Lean on Me by Club Nouveau. Oh, and during the credits, you can bounce the characters into each other, which was more fun than most of the game. Yeah, that’s about all I can think of that’s nice about this miserable pain in the ass. (That pain is my wallet complaining, by the way.)

Dull, uninspired, and a complicated mess to play, I give Escape Plan 1 star out of 5, and I’d recommend it only to people I don’t like.

Found a vendor…

So, thanks to a tip from Becka over on Twitter, AKA @shutsumon, I’ve gotten in contact with No Boundaries Press, and they have agreed to carry all of my titles. My first email was sent asking about my banned books to make sure I wasn’t violating some moral code for them too, and they said they would carry those titles as well as my less triggery stuff.

This is good news, but there’s a catch. I’ll need to send along books at the rate of 5-6 per month, so for a while, many of my back catalog books will only be available at Amazon. The main problem is, if I dump all my books into the NBP queue at the same time, I’m making it harder for other authors to get their books processed. This isn’t fair to the others or to the staff at NBP either. Also, NBP publishes a release update for their newsletter, and I don’t want to flood that with 37 titles. It’s a bit much. Releasing a few titles at a time means being able to keep my name in the promotion list for many months, and in this way, I hope to be able to make some kind of positive impression with NBP’s established reader base.

As for my freebie novel, My Gay Sparkly Vampire Romance: A Twilight Parody, I’ll have to move it over to this blog and give it a separate link in the sidebar so people can still find it.

Anywho, I have to sort out paperwork, and then I have to start going over a release schedule that balances triggery titles with something more friendly to casual readers. Once I have a release schedule, I need to go back through the titles for another round of edits. Might as well, since I have to make my own epubs, PDFs, and mobi files. And speaking of mobi files, I’ll be sure to upload updated versions to Amazon too. So once my new and improved books are out at NBP, the improvements will also show up for Amazon customers. (Even though I totally hate Amazon, I still love their customers. ^_^ )

So, have I missed anything? No, I guess that’s it for now. I want to once again thank folks on twitter for the tweets of support. You’ve been helpful in finding me alternate solutions during this minor crisis, and I wouldn’t be half as calm if I didn’t have so many folks sending their condolences and what not. I’m sure I’ll eventually get back around to rants about “you people,” but for now, I’m feelin’ the love, and I’m trying to return it.

Bye, Smashwords…

So, Smashwords has banned three of my books, Little Monsters, Peter the Wolf, and Penny for Your Debts. Curiously, they’d left Dogs of War despite it containing the same themes, and they left up Bran of Greenwood and the Scary Fairy Princess despite it having bestiality themes. With this inconsistent handling of my titles, I’ve decided to remove all my books from Smashwords. I’ll be removing all links to Smashwords from my sidebar, but some old posts may still point to bad links to them.

Also, I will no longer promote titles from authors working with Smashwords. By this, I mean that if you tweet a link that leads to Smashwords, I won’t retweet it. I want to be clear that this does not mean I wouldn’t promote the same title as an Amazon link, or as a link from the publisher’s site. Also, do not think that I am telling you other authors that you should boycott Smashwords too. You’re all grown adults and can make your own decisions about who you sell through. I am just making the personal choice not to promote their store, or any products sold through it. No one has to follow me down the same path.

I apologize to all the Smashwords-affiliated indie authors who are losing my Twitter promotions because of this fiasco, but Mark Coker has made it clear that he does not support freedom of expression, nor does he really support the authors he works for. Yeah, I know, it’s his sandbox, and his toys, so he can make up whatever rules he wants. But the dude has standards so ridiculous, he couldn’t sell books that traditional publishers and brick and mortar stores have no problems carrying. For a dude running a porn ebook shop, he’s pretty hypocritical, in my opinion.

I want to stress again, Mark took down books that were not erotic in nature, but left up my one porno title. That’s seriously inconsistent policy making, and it’s par for the course with Smashwords. Despite my many problems with Mark and his policies, I have always worked to promote Smashwords over Amazon. I did so because to my knowledge, Mark was not censoring authors the way Amazon was. Clearly, I was misinformed on my opinion, and Smashwords is no better than Amazon about arbitrarily deciding what they are willing to sell.

And, rather than rant about how unfair it is, I’ll just pack up the rest of my toys and walk away. I’ll be looking at another vendor today, but this may or may not work out. So for right now, my books are Amazon-exclusives. No, I don’t like that, so I will be working to find other options.

To my readers who bought through Smashwords, I apologize for the inconvenience. I’ve appreciated your support, and should you choose to stick with Smashwords to support other authors, that’s your decision to make. But Smashwords has lost me as an author, and as a customer.

Finally, I want to close this out by asking a favor. If I can find a new vendor, I hope that you will be willing to try them out instead of shopping at Amazon. To me, Amazon is the other gorilla waiting for their turn to smother authors with their arbitrary policies. Right now, they’re playing pricing games, forcing folks to raise or lower prices as they see fit. They’ve also been known to ban books, so I can’t delude myself enough to believe it can’t happen to me. It just happened to me on another vendor, after all. So if I can find a vendor willing to carry my titles, please, help me prove that I’m worth the trouble by buying my books on their site. That’s really all I can ask, and if you still buy my stuff on Amazon, well, all I can say then is, “Thanks for the support.”

All right, one last thing. Thank you to everyone on Twitter who wrote with messages of support last night. I can’t say I was upset about this, because I had a week to prepare myself for the inevitable. Nevertheless, it felt good to get so many messages agreeing that this decision by Smashwords stinks. I appreciate that, and I hope I don’t come across as complaining at you.

Open versus linear: a ramble…

My recent adventures in gaming have left me wondering why some games that are open worlds fail to hold my interest, while linear games with a single story and perhaps a few subplots work for me better. This is a ramble more than a rant, and before I start, I want to make clear, I’m not saying, “This is why games like this suck.” I’m listing why they don’t work for me.

The biggest problem with open worlds is the lack of a guiding narrative. When playing Enslaved: Odyssey to the West or Uncharted: Golden Abyss, there’s never any doubt about what your goals are, and what you need to do to win the game. But a lot of open world games like Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption give you a basic intro before you’re pitched into the world and told to make your own way through the games. The story will emerge if you play long enough, or if it doesn’t, you’ll end up forming your own story from the fragments of the world that you choose to engage

Now I’ve seen a lot of people talk up these games about having “unlimited” choices, but the problem is, there’s not a real choice offered, only the illusion of choice. Using Red Dead Redemption as an example, when you approach strangers to talk, they give you jobs. You have no options in the cut-scene dialogue, and you don’t have a choice about accepting the task. Once you have a task given, it will sit on your map forever, no matter how unrealistic that may be.

An old man I was supposed to rescue lay “dying” with a gut wound. After waiting a week in game for his map icon to go away, I finally tried the mission twice and had the old man die on the way to town both times. Not from his original wound, but from the robbers who were still hanging around A WEEK AFTER THEY SHOT HIM. This is so, so fucking stupid, but game makers just love to come up with bullshit challenges like this. Other players probably think the mission is loads of fun, but I don’t have enough fucking fingers to drive a horse team, maintain their course, and also have a gun fight.

And honestly, no one in real life was able to drive a coach and shoot bandits at the same time. That’s why they had someone riding shotgun, for fuck’s sake. It’s where the fucking term “riding shotgun” originated, and in a game about the Old West, you’d fucking expect them to…I said this was a ramble rather than a rant, didn’t I? Right, I did…deep breaths. I digress, the game is asking me to be Superman as a starting mission. My answer is a sincere “fuck that.”

Behold! A SEVEN page review for Uncharted: Golden Abyss! (with only one mild spolier)

I’ve just completed Uncharted: Golden Abyss, and while I was taking it on easy mode to make treasure hunting easier, all throughout the final chapters I’ve had sweaty hands. Thankfully, the PS Vita is not like my Win Phone, because when I get sweaty hands while gaming with my phone, that sucker is like a bar of soap in a bubble bath. I digress, I was taking the game easy to ensure that I could collect all the little artifacts and statues hidden in each level, and so I could take photos of…but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Before I really begin, I want to warn y’all that this is a LONG review. Some game reviews are like “It had pretty graphics, and I shot some stuff. It was great! I give it a 9.5!” But I’m a blabber mouth, and I want to talk about more than just the game play and graphics. I will cover those, and favorably in most cases. But I also want to talk about the story, which wasn’t so hot in several places. I will try to avoid spoilers, though, so you folks who haven’t played yet won’t feel cheated.

So, moving on, not having played any of the PS3 Uncharted titles, this is my first entry into the world of Nathan Drake. Drake is a brash treasure hunter who fancies himself as a “nice guy.” That he’s a tomb raider and a killer with a bigger trail of bodies than some horror movie monsters is somehow not important to this nice guy presentation. But I actually kind of like this because he’s not a completely good guy. No one in this game is truly good, except perhaps Marisa Chase, but I had more problems with her story than with anyone else in the game. More on her later.

The story opens on a prologue chapter, using a sequence that you’ll also play later in the game. In the prologue, the treasures and other objectives are removed to create a tutorial level about working the controls. This is where you first get used to the platforming and combat aspects of the game, and where you learn how to use the touch screen for interaction. Now, on my phone, touch gestures are sometimes iffy. I’ll swipe the screen for a jump, for instance, and have no response from the game. But there was never a time where I got tripped up by simple swipes to accomplish some goal in the game. The only time it tripped me up was when it wanted something like a curvy Z or figure four shape drawn, and that happened because my thumb gestures were too clumsy. So I had to let go of the unit on one side to use my finger. Thankfully, all of these complex swipes take place when you’re not in danger, and they don’t have to be done fast. They also aren’t life or death swipes. When those happen, you usually need swipe straight up, or to the side. It’s like quicktime events, but with a screen gesture instead of a button press.