Slowtrain

lemme guess. Harvery Smith is promising a totally immersive world where numbers don't matter and deep meaningful choices. lol. He has 0 credibility.

That's what I remember most about the Xanth series. Not the first couple, but the 73 or so that came afterwards. And the puns. omg, the puns. I thought the whole Blue Adept series (only three books!) to be markedly better.

I remember reading an article about Eddings or an interview with him and, to the best of my recollection, which might not be very good) it talked about how after a time as an unsuccessful mainstream writer he sat down with a bunch of bestselling fantasy books, made notes on how everything worked and what needed to be included, then basically developed a system for all his books and just kept doing ti all over and over again. I give the guy credit for making money at it.

The weird thing about Brooks is that he started OK, moderately derivitive as hell but fueld by a certain energy. Sword is a bit tedious, but Elfstones has a decent enough story and character and Wishsong has , which was somewhat suprising. But after a while he developed in almost a parody of himself, which is like being a parody of a parody of a parody or something. I kinda like those many years ago. Mostly because they just walk around killing everything that twitches. It's like a monty python skit. Feist to me is the best example of a fantasy author who has basically written the exact same book over and over again for the last thirty years. edit: added spolier tags because you just never know.

I was going to rip every Xanth novel ever written, but decided it would take way too long to even list them.

I dunno about that. If one can stomach high fantasy type of novels, especially the multi-volume ones that just seem to cycle ever endlesly onward, Martin seems a much better practioner of that sort of thing than most. Otoh, if one doesn't like high fantasy to begin with I don't think Martin is going to change one's mind. ANd again that isn't meant to put down fantasy or science fiction or imaginitive fiction as a whole in any way. There are a lot of good writers working in the genre. But this specific subset of fantasy seems to attract the worst of the lot.

Oh man, that was a bad book. It was hip, cool vapidity masquerading as William Gibsonesque science fiction. I haven't read anything by Stephenson since. Maybe he's gotten better? Question re: this thread content guidelines: Can I trash a book if I've only read part of it? I don't usually make it more than halfway through a book I don't like and sometimes less than that. I try to give a book 100 pages at least before I toss it, but after that I often don't stick around if I think it's really bad.

I read half of one way back. Even as a teenager, I thought it was crap.

lol. Mine really wasn't meant as bookhate, per se. But more just as comparison to GRRM's contemporaries, by which measure, I think he's a pretty good writer. And I don't even like his stuff paritcularly. Although if I had no choice I would probably read it over others.

I've read three books, by Erickson, and haven't finished any of them. He seems to be trying to work fantasy in a more interesting way than most fantasy authors, but I find his narratives just lack any forward momentum to keep me going. Possibly its because of the large numbers of characters, possibly he's just not very good at engaging stories. ANd he's still nowwhere near a good enough writer just to keep me reading for the sake of the writing. I find Cook's early work pretty dull, but Instrumentalities of the Night seems a big step up (or forward) for him. It's the only multi-voulme fantasy series that I've found at all interesting in the last 5 years or so. Sadly most high fantasy of this sort is incredibly bland, mostly just wish-fulfillment fiction of the worst sort. It was OK when I was 15, but I've found it mostly unreadable for a long time.

I don't see the point really in singling out GRRM as a particularly bad writer. Let's be honest, fantasy is the the haven for the bad writer, everyone from Eddings to Brooks to that clod who writes the sword of truth novels to Dennis Mckiernan and Ray Feist and Mercedes Lackey etc and so forth. Are there good writers in fantasy, both in the sense of writing interesting engaging texts while also coming up with interesting and unusual stories? Sure. But for whatever reason, they dont seem to be the ones that sell a lot of copies. I don't particularly like GRRM's work, but he's still a better writer than most of those working in a comparable genre.

Perfect symmetry is frightening as hell.

Russian vo work is great for games. I'd play all my games in Russian if I could. But, yeah, that looks like it might be good. Hard to tell from that trailer though really, which was 75% quick environment shots.

I think it's definitely a possibility. I do think Bethesda learned a lot in the process of making Oblivion and then Fallout 3. Just the fact that they are making big changes to the skill/leveling system is good news to me. The new system may not work, but at least they seem to understand how messed up the previous system was and are trying to fix it up.

Thanks, Purk. I'll check some of those out.

I dunno. I still think Skyrim looks reasonably promising, even given Beth's pr history. Basically it's Oblivion improved with some of the things Bethie learned from Fallout 3. I mean, I really couldn't stand Oblivion, but I'm mildly anticipating Skyrim. I didn't really read anything in the fan interview that I felt was particularly a negative. I fundamentally disagree with some core rpg concepts that Bethie seems to value highly, and I'm not expecting that to change with Skyrim, but I see a good deal of positives.

Healthy discussions are what this forum is all about!

I always thought cover was much more fun in a game like STALKER, where the whole idea and mechanic of using cover, while pretty dang important feels much more natural. *shrug* Not a big deal though.

That's not quite right. You can replay as many times as you like but your scores and any levels, characters, weapons and whatever else that you unlock will be permanently unlocked. ah ok. that isn't nearly so bad. I was really thinking game publishers were approaching the edge of the cliff by making full price games you could only play 1 time.

At least you could get a lot of play time out of one go through.

That

Yeah, but just like tweens don't really get why Citizen Kane is a great movie because they are dumbfounded by Michael Bay new "VSFXathon" they don't really get why DX is a good game. Part of it, is just that great games, and other things, are highly influential and they get copied so much that within a few years the original great game seems like nothing special because hundreds of games have copied everything it did. Half Life is a perfect example of that. Kids today playing HL would think it probably a poor game, but it's beyond their ability to understand what it was when it was originally released.

I don't see why I would need a union to defend my rights. aren't there courts to decide who's right and who's wrong? you don't like how you're being trated, you just have to point out what laws your employer is breaking, right? Ideally, unions give individuals a collective voice to negotiate with individuals who wield considerably more power and authority. Unions do bring their own problems with them, but in a world where altruism generally takes a back seat to greed, Unions are very valuable to people who lack individual power when confronting those that have a lot of it. In the US, other than the lucky few who come from a long line of steel magnates or oil barons, everyone has benefited from what unions have done over the last 100 years or so.

Unions are a neccessary evil. They've made the working world a lot better for a lot of people over the years.

Am seriously thinking about investing time in Stalker 2 now its dirt cheap on Amazon. Any views? They're all good, but Clear Sky the least so. If you enjoy the STALKER atmosphere and environments then it's definitely worth spending some time with it, especially if you can get it cheapish.