Crisis on Uncertain Earths
Well, they’ve only gone and done it. Kotaku are reporting that Rock Band 2 has been announced – officially this time. And it’s coming sooner than you might think – sometime in September, which, would you believe it, is less than three months from now. On the bright side, Harmonix have already sworn that it’ll be the first game “to support fully fuctional cross-title DLC”, and that’s a relief to say the least.
Still. This wasn’t supposed to be a cash cow. The dev team are the very best at what they do, and they’re perfectly entitled to roll in the profits of their efforts, but you just know there’s going to be a new set of instruments – sure, you’ll be able to use your old guitars and drums, but the new ones will be better put together; they’ll offer extra functionality, new knobs and waggly bits only true Spartans could resist. I fear I’m not up to the task.
Just as well I hadn’t gotten around to getting the original Band in a Box, then. Kiss your £100 goodbye Harmonix. Admittedly you can probably have it this holiday anyhow, but I won’t take any pleasure in giving it to you. Oh no!
Black Holes and Revelations
Plenty to report, but it’s all a little scattershot; the day job’s been keeping me plenty busy lately, leeching at the time I put aside to keep All Things Uncertain a going concern. To hell with it.
I’ve a couple of interesting news stories earmarked for your pleasure. First of all, there’s been another outbreak of mad scientists and the otherwise well-to-do making science-fiction a reality. The Earth, reports the BBC, is not at significant risk from the Large Hadron Collider.
If you’re too lazy to click the link, let me spell it out: in a facility on the French/Swiss border due to become operational this Summer, particle physicists mean to collide quarks and gluons inside protons – creating, in so doing, their very own bonzai black holes.
A Detective, Darkly: A Review of Tana French’s In the Woods
One Summer night, two decades ago, three missing children. Peter, Jamie and Adam. For them, the woods that reach around Knocknaree have been a home away from home. They’ve picnicked in the ruins of an dilapidated old castle, made mischief in their favourite clearing, but they’re almost in their teens; adult enough, at least, to understand that change is in the air. Jamie’s mother is about to send her to boarding school, and the children know that her looming absence will mean the end of the precious bond that ties them together. They take to the woods. It’s as easy a decision for them as A, B, C.
As day draws on and the evening gives way to a forbidding darkness, the police are called in to comb through the forest. After hours of searching, aided by townspeople and fearful parents, they find only Adam, catatonic against a tree. His shirt has two appalling tears through it; his shoes are sodden, black with blood. He survives, but his memory fails. Ryan grows up an amnesiac, unable to remember anything about the night his innocence was stolen – along, presumably, with the lives of his closest friends.
All Things Beta
Outlook just heralded the arrival of my key for the Endwar beta. I remember e-signing some sort of non-disclosure agreement, so the chances of a real preview here or on Ace Gamez are slim, but in any case I can’t say my hopes are high. From the rumblings thus far it sounds like the thing that sets this RTS apart from all the others to have come to console – which is to say, voice-control of your units through a headset mic – works, against all odds, pretty well. The problem being that this promising new interface has been wrapped around a pretty dull game. Still, I’ve enjoyed all the Tom Clancy games I’ve played thus far – Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell et al. There’s a chance this won’t be derivative tripe yet.
Still, I’d sooner have Red Alert 3 with (optional) voice control; an army of soviet suicide-bomber dolphins to order around is more up my alley.
***
Meanwhile – back at the ranch – Crisis Core has exceeded all my expectations. I loved Final Fantasy VII, truly I did; in its time it was impossible not to fall for the pseudo-3D and the balls-to-the-wall bravery of its second act, but all things considered, I think Crisis Core may well be a better game. Who’d have thunk it?
The Last Remnants of Hope: Japan and the 360 RPG
I try to write a news story and this is what I come up with:
http://www.acegamez.co.uk/blog/2008/06/last-remnants-of-hope-360-and-rpg-in.htm
I’m not going to cross post because wordpress won’t let me embed trailers from gamevideos, and I gah at the thought of wading through the Web 2.0 filth to source them elsewhere – but do check it out.
In other news I’ve been assigned the Ace Gamez review of Final Fantasy: Crisis Core on the PSP, which means, at the least, that I’ll play a game that otherwise I probably couldn’t condone spending much time with at all. Here’s to new experiences – like 40 hours spent squinting at a tiny screen with persistent earbud-ache!
40 hours, I should add, that I won’t be spending finishing up GTA IV or getting started on Snake’s final mission: Guns of the Patriots.
Wait, is that a 6′ Solid Snake figurine I see in the post this morning?
Oh yes, yes indeed.
I Want To Believe
This Summer? Really?
Well sign me up. I really would like to believe, but we’ll see.
The Day Begins At Sunset: A Review of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project
Lazarus of Bethany was survived by his sisters, Mary and Martha, who had during his fatal sickness bade Jesus to come cure their beloved. But the Bible testifies that even Jesus was not innocent of tardiness on occasion, and his lingering meant that when at last the prophet arrived in the town of Bethany, Lazarus has been entombed for four days. Jesus was not, however, discouraged. To the sisters he is said to have declared: “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die,” and without another moment’s indecision raised the corpse of Lazarus back to the land of the living, wrapped in grave-shrouds and presumably rather the worse for wear. The Bible has it that the Lord granted Lazarus a second chance – as, some might assert, the first recorded zombie – and leaves it at that ominous point in the proceedings, but the lore was embellished in the 13th century to include Lazarus’ latter-life escape to Cyprus, where he become an immigrant who lived the proverbial dream, ascending up the rank and file of religion to become the first Larnacan bishop; and without once devouring the brains of his fellows. More power to him.
To a self-confessed heretic such as myself, it’s not difficult to see why Alexsandar Hemon takes the story for an anchor of sorts. With such a commingling of appealing themes – of power; the glib timeline of life; of hope against reason; and ultimately, of otherness and its recurrence in time and place – it’s a concise and moreover an appropriate means of fastening the narrative of The Lazarus Project as it trips from country to country and skips from a plot thread in one time period to the next in another. Alongside the Passion – another of the so-called signs chronicled in the books of the disciple John – the story of Lazarus is among the Bible’s most disturbing, and it fits that Hemon’s modern-day protagonist, Brik, is moved from time to time to consider those hopes and fears that must have plagued Lazarus after his resurrection. The second chance he was granted is cited, after all, as one of the reasons the high priests and judges sentenced Jesus to the cross. His death and rebirth helped to spark a revolution, a religion, and much more besides.
Stories Within Storytellers: A Review of The Mayor’s Tongue by Nathaniel Rich
Nathaniel Rich took five years to write The Mayor’s Tongue, and in that time, the erstwhile editor of The Paris Review spoke not a word about it. Fearful, as he says, that all his “notes and jottings might not add up to a finished novel”, there were times when Rich “seriously doubted the sanity, let alone the merits, of what [he] was writing”. All of which seems symptomatic of the very problems that plague the central characters of his ultimately assured debut: self-consciousness, nervousness – an inability to communicate in the face of a desperate need to do so. But the author need not have worried. The Mayor’s Tongue is a spare masterpiece of postmodernism, an incisive fable whose myriad threads of plot and thought take the inhibitions of our era to task and make Rich’s first novel a New York Trilogy for the new millennium.
Bottom Line Band
Say it ain’t so, Harmonix – tell me you’re just fooling about.
£150 is a lot of money. Here in grand old Euroland Rock Band just came out, and the thought of a sequel so soon makes my skin crawl, quite frankly. Harmonix: you promised there would have to be a compelling reason for a sequel. You promised to support the game through DLC, and we’re only just beginning to see the full capabilities of that facility brought to bear. Keep on releasing the full albums, satisfy your fans – no-one really needs Keyboard Hero and I don’t see any such thing on the potential cover. So why a new box product; another unneccesary sequel?
Money is why, Harmonix, and don’t for a minute think we don’t – every one of us – see it.
Stop the badness.
Travels Through The Redtubes: World Cup Fucking
Not to lower the tone – there are two very literary book reviews coming in the next few days – but first I’d like to share a peculiar little clip I came across in my unending search for stimulation. For the feint of heart, or those readers who might find a thousand nubile Japanese grinding in perfect harmony objectionable, I’m putting the video behind a link. That, and wordpress won’t let me embed it.
You have been warned.
Behold, then: world cup fucking.
All Things Uncertain 