Bungie

"Mike, are you reading four books at once? And one of them is a video game tie-in?"

Look, COVID-19 has made fools of us all in all kinds of different ways.

The storyline of Destiny - Bungie's followup to the juggernaut Halo series - is maybe one of the most formally interesting experiments in big-budget video games (in my opinion, at least). The main storyline feeds you the usual pablum-y "fight this bad guy" stuff, and then drops you the real WEIRD stuff in hidden collectibles throughout the game that are shockingly well-written (probably because a good chunk of it is the work of Seth Dickinson of The-X-Baru-Cormorant fame). There's outright short story-type work but tons of fun epistolary stuff too - transcripts of surveillance footage, excerpts from scholarly texts, letters to the player character, emails from artificial intelligences. The writing also embraces unreliable narrators and "show, don't tell" - the closest it ever gets to explaining exactly how the core conflict of the game began is in a series of letters from the archvillain itself.

Anyhow, Bungie sat down and put together the text story entries from the game in a series of these "grimoire" books that also come with some nice art from the art team. Dark Mirror is broken up into three parts that I will touch on briefly here:

- A Book of Sorrow: Maybe the point where the "Destiny lore is good actually?" train kicked into high gear, and one of the parts Dickinson definitely wrote (it's frustratingly hard to understand exactly who is writing what parts of the lore). Tracks the tragic evolution of the "krill people" into the Hive, one of the primary antagonists of the game.

- The Burden of Light/Shadows Beyond: The weaker parts of the book, a sort of Wild-West-ish story about three men and two legendary guns.

- A Vacancy: The coda to A Book of Sorrow, which is extremely short but just as good as the main body.

Overall, I gave this five stars because I think Dickinson's work is this weird, astonishingly good outlier and I'm biased by all the time I've spent with these games during the coronavirus nightmare, but it's hard to make a recommendation to someone who hasn't played the games - there is a lot of context that's lost if you're just reading this straight through. I hope Bungie is able to keep up their level of quality for a long time to come, though.… (mehr)

You are a super space marine on a planet called Reach that is being invaded by aliens, who you must kill to accomplish mission objectives. Halo: Reach is an installment in the popular first person shooter Halo series for the Xbox gaming platform. The game can be played singly or multiplayer as well as multiplayer online if the Xbox is hooked up to the internet. The game is definitely violent and it deserves its' M for mature rating in terms of this being a first person shooting game and third person aerial shots that depict the players' violent death when their health reaches zero. Blood in the game is a bit cartoonish with aliens bleeding blue and humans bleeding red. Graphics are meant to be somewhat realistic but still easily within the realm of video game standard, rather than say true cartoonishness like Spongebob or extreme reality like Final Fantasy. One negative is that the controls in the game were somewhat tetchy for precision aiming but if the older teenager is an experienced gamer and/or has played the Halo series extensively, they won't have this problem. Recommended for older teens.… (mehr)

Die Schlacht um Reach.
Eigentlich weiß man am Anfang schon wie das Spiel endet aber der Weg dahin ist einfach bombastisch. Man weiß das man am Ende verliert aber trotzdem macht es Spaß zu spielen und sein bestes zu geben.
So sollte es sein. Ein Musterbeispiel für ein packendes Spiel.
Leichte Änderungen in der Steuerung und in der Infomationsverteilung auf dem Bildschirm die aber alle leicht verständlich sind und nach kurzer Zeit ist man dann wieder zuhause. Die Neue Grafik fällt auch sofort ins Auge und hebt das Spiel allein optisch schon deutlich aus der Menge.… (mehr)