Thursday, April 05, 2012
A decent book, but the lack of wit, boring characters, and exceptional prose prevents it from becoming a favorite. Three separate stories are intertwined in a relatively unique way which keeps you slightly guessing, but never seems to deliver. The work feels devoid of climax and closure.
Thursday, April 05, 2012
The Deafening by Itani writes great characters into perception. The hardships of war are captured in full grotesque nature with a moving narrative that follows the lives of a deaf woman and her husband who left home to join World War I. Details of human emotion are perfectly articulated through the writing and you will probably find yourself laughing or sobbing along at various points in the story.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Dark Souls can be taxing at times, but it is a great game. With a few fixes, the game would be epic, but these shortcomings do not stop it from being far better than most other games on the market.
The game features a variety of bad guys that each have generally unique animations and abilities that must be countered to progress. Remarkably similar to The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: Each and every enemy brings a puzzle to the table. How is this opponent weak? What is the tell to watch for before countering with a killing blow? Which attack must be entirely dodged? Unfortunately, bad guys are a lot less forgiving than in Skyward Sword (and compared to pretty much every other recent game in memory) and the curve feels very stiff in the beginning but ends with an easy finish.
The story is sparse, but the storytelling isn’t. The player is expected to simply come to his or her own conclusions through inspection of the world when combined with an intro and exit film and a small touch of dialog. Admittedly, a refreshing breath from the information overload of a game like Skyrim with its countless (and pointless) books and characters.
The world is amazingly woven together. I get the impression that actually traveling to other parts of the world would be possible, as you see it from afar. There are elevators to reach varying degrees of elevation but the vast majority of the world seems to actually be entirely connected and to scale. In other words, if flight were possible, I have faith that directly flying to what you see in the distance would actually take you there and not just be some pre-rendered façade, like in so many other games. The level design is top notch and the world is effectively one giant level.
Though Dark Souls has some shortcomings in the randomness department (of item drops and boss encounters) and the learning curve for combat, they do not outweigh its overall very high quality.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Fantastic storytelling. Blackswangreen reads like the fountain of thought from a thirteen-year-old with dashes of profound realizations bubbling to the top in the form of short one-liner witticisms.
Lustful urges and raw emotions of an adolescent boy (Jason Taylor) are perfectly expressed through inexplicable and explicit sexual musings involving the girls in his life. The cast of characters is quite large, but entirely familiar. With a unique perspective on life, and great dialog, each of the characters comes into Jason’s world and leads him to further insights about adulthood.
David Mitchell also wrote another great book, Cloud Atlas.
Friday, February 03, 2012
Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of nature and the propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs … these are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of the greatest poet from his birth out of his mother’s womb and from her birth out of her mother’s.
— Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass: The First Edition (1855)
The whole preface (or epic poem?) reads like this. It feels like an overflowing garden of emotion in full bloom.
I don't think anything else I've read is quite like it. Maybe I should make it a mission to read banned books?