Has anyone here read and enjoyed any of the Mistborn books, and if so can you please tell me exactly how much of a head injury I'll need to give myself so that I can stop the cold dread creeping in every time I see its cover on my Kindle.
I cannot fathom how a person can build this world and this magic system and these characters, and then proceed to tell a story with such a lack of panache, wit or poetry. It's the most clinical, uninspiring prose I can recall reading in my life.
Any curiosity I have about what's going to happen next is suffocated under a thousand tons of Sanderson's own apparent disinterest in the moment to moment happenings. Someone needs to buy this man a thesaurus and beat him around the head with it until he learns what a metaphor is; even if he deployed them poorly it would be a towering improvement over this bland gruel of a novel.
I really enjoyed it. From the trailers, I'd expected it to be over-stuffed with bad guys and subplots, but it was actually pretty focused (if a little over-explained at points by that tedious AI assistant in his suit).
Stuff I particularly liked:
- The amount of time he was in the suit.
- The cops weren't grumpily hunting Spidey down.
- Every interaction between Spider-Man and the Punisher.
The mutation stuff felt a bit under-baked (and wasn't really resolved?), but whatever.
Headhunter is really janky and cheesy (and has aged like fine milk in many respects), but it's another Dreamcast game worth tracking down. It takes some big swings for the time, and has a great soundtrack.
It won't be a good if you're single-player-only, but Power Stone is worth a look. (The sequel gets a lot more praise, but I never liked how gimmicky its stages were.)
ChuChu Rocket is also more interesting as a multiplayer game, though I remember its single player puzzles being pretty good.
Time has not been kind to its voice acting and storyline, but I still think Silver is worth a look for an alternative to the turn-based JRPG headliners.
Outrigger and Slave Zero did some interesting things for control schemes given the lack of a second analogue stick on the DC pad.
Even at the time, I found Toy Commander's low poly look a bit outputting, and the difficulty spikes are no joke, but there's some interesting design going on nonetheless.
Sega Rally 2 and Metropolis Street Racer are both very good, but horrendously difficult (for my ham fisted racing skills, anyway).
Play
The kid made me download Planet Crafter on GamePass. It's one of those low-budget "dropped in a desolate landscape with nothing but your wits and an unreasonably deep crafting tree" survival games, which I've never gotten into previously (I liked No Man's Sky before it went this direction) but I've been completely sucked into it this time. There are loads of QoL things that annoy the shit out of me (not being able to stack resources in your inventory slots), but not enough to stop playing.
Want
Quite keen to get Splatoon Raiders, but not sure I can justify it right now.
Bin
The old job, as it turns out. I evaded a round of layoffs, but realised that I can never trust any of the leadership team again, so I've found another role and will be starting there at the beginning of September.
I loved Unicorn Overlord, despite its atrocious title. The combination RTS/Fire Emblem battles, powered by the Gambits system from FFXII, could maybe have been more challenging—hardcore gamers might find it a bit on the easy side— but it was better than 13 Sentinels' brainless combat at least, even if I don't recall ever feeling overly pressured in the main campaign.
From memory its anime outfits aren't so bad, either.
aniki