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NEWS AND VIEWS - SEPTEMBER 2022
WRITING NEWS A City Burnished Silver, the final book in the Chemical Empires trilogy, is now available on Amazon. Here's the back cover copy: Luc d'Fensi spent years exploring the deep Rahal and fighting pirates in the tropical Els, but all he wants now is to settle down and lead a quiet life with his new wife, Naia. When his friend Orrey shows up at his saloon, however, and asks for his help in finding his missing brother, Luc finds himself forced into another adventure...because Orrey and his backer, the chemist Aemilia Owen, plan to travel to the illegal Mornish mining colony of Brokehell, and without a guide, these unseasoned travelers are doomed to die in the desert. The book also includes a twenty-five page appendix, which has some information on the setting and on how aurichalcum works. You can also find some maps here. Like I wrote last month, I have mixed feelings about this series. I'm personally pretty satisfied with how the books came out, which I guess is the most important thing, but I had high hopes for this series and I'm disappointed it didn't catch on more than it did. Anyway, here's the cover. The art is once again by Jorge Jacinto, who did another excellent job. If I was as good a writer as he is an artist, these books would be blockbusters. 
My next project is slated to be Playground Noir, a set of novellas about a kid detective, written in a funny hard-boiled style. I've never really written anything like this before, so I'm not sure how it'll turn out, but I think it's a pretty amusing idea and I'm hoping for the best. * * * * * * * * HORROR MOVIES I'm not a huge fan of horror movies. I like older horror movies, like Dracula and The Wolfman and the old Hammer films, but modern horror movies...not so much. Most of them are just torture porn, which I find repellant, and the ones that aren't are usually grim and nihilistic. And also, they simply don't scare me. I can be unsettled, perhaps, by a creepy scene, or startled by a jump scare, or grossed out by some creative gore, but movies by themselves, scripted stories on a screen, just don't scare me. I don't experience that fear, that terror, that some people do, so the whole point of these movies is kind of wasted on me. This wasn't always the case. When I was a kid my parents were pretty strict about not letting me watch R-rated movies, or anything else they thought was inappropriate, so I didn't watch my first horror movie until I was like twelve or thirteen years old (at a friend's house). The movie was Sleepwalkers, which was about some weird cat-hating vampire-people or something. It was a pretty bad movie, but it scared the crap out of me at the time, especially the scene where Otho from Beetlejuice is pestering the vampire-guy and the vampire-guy, annoyed, finally rips his arm off, spraying blood all over the windshield of his car. It took me weeks to get over that, and for the next couple of years I was extremely careful not to watch anything remotely scary. At that same friend's house, a few years later, he wanted to watch an episode of Tales from the Crypt, and not wanting to seem like a wimp, I watched it with him -- but I kept my eyes fixed on the wall above the TV the whole time. (The episode was "Four-Sided Triangle", which was actually a pretty tame episode for that series.) But after that, I gradually got over my fear of these scary movies and TV shows, and I haven't been scared by a horror movie in a long, long time. Now, when I see a guy getting his arm ripped out of its socket in a movie, instead of recoiling in horror, I laugh and think, "That's a neat trick. How did they do that?" But like I said, I prefer not to watch horror movies at all these days. If I'm going to take a couple hours out of my day to watch a movie, I'd rather be uplifted than brought down by horror, tragedy, and disgusting imagery. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M PLAYING After basically giving up on Triangle Strategy a few weeks ago, I started playing Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout, which is the first game I've played in Gust's Atelier series. It's not bad. It's mostly about gathering and crafting and creating new and more powerful items, which scratches a certain JRPG itch I've always had. The music is also phenomenal -- fun, exciting, distinctive. This is one of the best game soundtracks I've heard in a long time. On the other hand, the battle system feels clunky and awkward to me -- I wish they'd gone with a straightforward turn-based system -- and the story is nothing special. And although the characters are likable, Ryza has a very fan-servicey design, with her big, bouncy boobs and shapely thighs (she wears short-shorts). Another character, Lila, has an absolutely gigantic chest, maybe even rivaling Selvaria's from Valkyria Chronicles. Her design is so over-the-top I get embarrassed whenever she appears on the screen; I find myself looking over my shoulder to make sure no one's around to see what I'm playing. 
Anyway, after I get through this game (I'm probably about 80% into it) I'm going to try Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which I've heard nothing but good things about. And then, this winter, I'll probably be playing Tales of Arise, the new Trials of Mana remake, and Trails of Cold Steel IV. I like these Japanese games. |