Comic Books (AIPT): Titan Comics and Heroic Signatures’ upcoming Conan the Barbarian series is getting a Free Comic Book Day comic. Announced today, the FCBD edition will kick off the brand-new ongoing written by Jim Zub and will feature art by Roberto De La Torre and colorist José Villarrubia. Free Comic Book Day will take place on May 6, 2023.
Doc Savage (Sprague de Camp Fan): The new Doc Savage “thriller” The Perfect Assassin by James Patterson and Brian Sitts just came out. It isn’t often that a book’s advertising copy invites a joke by providing such a straight line. I could mention a litany of bugaboos that I think made the novel go wrong but this novel wasn’t meant for guys like me. Guys who loved the original Doc Savage pulp adventures reprinted in the Bantam paperbacks.
Firearms (Special Ops): Since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24th, Ukrainian armed forces have gotten a lot of new weaponry. Some of it was received as donations, much was purchased, and a good amount was captured. Today we will talk about the top five machine guns used by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Note that we are only listing belt-fed general-purpose machine guns. Read More
J. T. T. Ryder’s Hag of the Hills is a new novel from 2022. It is the first part of the Bronze Sword Duology.
The novel is set on the island of Skye around 200 B.C. Brennus is the youngest son of a famed warrior. His oldest brother Bodvoc is a metal smith, the middle brother Fennigus has plans on being a great warrior.
Brennus is a farm boy talked into a raid with his brother that goes wrong. Returning from the disastrous raid, he enters the hovel of a crone who is the Celtic goddess Babd. He has to swear an oath of giving something of value in return for greatness. Read More
Cultivation (Battle Mage Farmer #3) – Seth Ring
With the mystery of the world deepening, John Sutton is running out of time.
The apocalypse is approaching as his Doom Points tick up and John is finding it harder and harder to keep it together. His deepening knowledge of magic seems to be helping but as a hidden society creeps out of the shadows, intent on throwing the world into chaos, it may not be enough.
The only good news seems to be the new crops springing up on his farm. Balancing his growing relationship with Ellie and the increasing productivity of the farm with the impending destruction of everything he fought for, John has no choice but to step back into the limelight, whether he wants to or not.
The Hidden Space (The Glass Book #2) – Nathan Hystad
The Visitors have departed, but why did the Glass appear in the first place?
There’s a sense of normalcy for the community in Monterey, California, but their peace doesn’t last long. When they’re pushed to leave, they encounter something they never expected to find.
The Glass remain, but they’ve shifted positions.
Peggy reveals she used to have dreams, but prescription medication kept them at bay. Now she’s off the pills and is determined to visit Spokane with Will.
Alternate Earths, alien ships, and time travel revelations.
Ransom doesn’t know why he ever listened to Cedric. His journey with Joel to the Other Place offers a new perspective on their situation.
Maybe there can be peace in the aftermath…
Drake finds a group in Tucson, and all paths collide as they uncover the truth.
Perry Rhodan NEO: Volume 10 – Marc R. Herren and Hermann Ritter
When Crest leads an unlikely group on his search for the Planet of Eternal Life, they end up on a version of Ferrol that shouldn’t exist. Are they in a parallel universe that will somehow let them find immortality?
Meanwhile, Sid comes face to face with his greatest foe…or so it seems. Ivanovich Goratschin killed Sid’s childhood friend, but he’s been dead for a long time. His twin brother claims to be making a fresh start—but how much can Sid trust him?
Far away in the Vega system, Rhodan’s crew, lost in space and time after landing on the Ferron world of Reyan, discovers a conflict brewing between the water-dwellers and the land-dwellers, two groups descended from the original colonists.
Back home, Dr. Manoli and the historian Aescunnar have begun a space journey of their own as they attempt to learn more about the Arkonides’ prior activities in Earth’s solar system. Their research soon brings them to Saturn’s moons, where danger and an uncertain fate await them. Read More
Men’s Adventure Quarterly issue number 5 is “The Dirty Dozen Issue.” I read and wrote about the novel The Dirty Dozen last year. Dimensions are 8 x 10 inches, 171 pages.
Contents include three editorials. There is a section devoted to model Eva Lynd including art and poses. Read More
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet currently sit with the worst reviews in the series. A 77 from critics, a 2.8 of 10 (!!!) from fans, and widespread uproar from the overall community. So what the heck happened? Are they really that bad?
And yet…
Wolfe Glick, a competitive pokemon player, said they were his favorite pokemon games. In fact, the streaming community as a whole, even otherwise negative folks like DistantKingdom, are really positive towards the game. So are they actually really good?
As I played through this game, I realized I had to write something about it. I’m going to lay my cards out on the table. Everyone is right.
On the negative side: These games are not finished. They just aren’t. They’re full of bugs and glitches, the visuals are simply terrible, and the performance sometimes lags to 20 FPS. It is actually hard to find a spot in the game where the performance or visuals AREN’T off in some way. it affects everything you do in every moment of the game.
This is not excusable. The game needed six months. They never should have released it like this.
But here’s where things get weird. That’s…where the negatives just about end.
Once you get past the glitchy, buggy, sloppy visuals and performance, the game itself is…
Look man, I don’t know what you want me to say. The game is freaking great.
The game is open world, and the world is ENORMOUS. And it is a real open world. You can go anywhere, and, more importantly for an open world game, you’re rewarded for going everywhere. Pokemon stay in packs and herds and are actually interacting with the environment, and everywhere you go there’s bound to be something interesting to find, some new pokemon you haven’t seen yet.
No, there is no level scaling, and yes, there should be. But considering there is at any given time one of three different main storylines you can interact with, all of which are fun to play, this is less of a problem than you’d imagine.
The stories are simple and straightforward but they work to keep you moving through the game. But really, the most important thing is that, and I cannot stress this enough, they decided to move Pokemon to an open world and they did it just about perfectly. Not TECHNICALLY, you understand, but the gameplay choices they make are all great. The new “let’s go” system eases grinding. Making trainer battles optional? Great choice. Creating so many interesting and varied environments with new pokemon in each area? Great choice. Having gym challenges utilize the full cities when you visit them? Great choice. The Terra raid co-op battles are simply a better-in-every-way version of dynamax raids from gen 8 – faster and more fun. The game itself is actually a pretty fair level of difficulty, where you actually need to pay attention to what you’re doing to win prominent battles (one took me six tries). Exploring is exciting and it feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface hours in. That is not how Sword and Shield felt. They took all of the right lessons from those games and this improved on Sword and Shield’s abortive open world attempts in every way.
The soundtrack is once again glorious, with the new gym battle theme somehow being even better than the old one.
This is Pokemon, finally, for the 21st century, with 21st century design principles made to work with Pokemon’s core philosophy in a way that is actually an absolute blast to play. Exploring and battling and finding new Pokemon and even completing those stories has simply never felt so…modern before. Not in a bad way. In a “we never had the technical ability to do this before, now we do and it’s about time Pokemon took advantage” way.
Yet I need to emphasize just how bad it is technically. The people who are saying it’s unacceptably bad and it never should have been released are completely and `100% right. If you were to say the technical issues made it unplayable I not only couldn’t blame you, I sympathize with you. Something technical is going wrong practically every single moment of the game. Once in a battle that took place in a tunnel a pokemon clipped directly halfway into me. Shadows are weirdly blocky and pixelated. Any time there is more than one person on screen it turns into stop-motion animation.
Yet I can’t call it lazy. The game is huge and a clear amount of time and effort and thought went into it; if not there’s no way all of the gameplay elements would be synergizing as well as they are. What it is, is rushed. This is a game that NEEDED six more months. With six months, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a game of the year contender. But that isn’t what we got and we’re stuck with this.
Truthfully, I’m at a loss at what to make of this game. Two things I can say are absolutely true:
We’re stuck with the Fallout: New Vegas of Pokemon games.
Should you buy the game? That’s up to you in the end. I can see both sides of the argument. But ultimately all I’ll say is that after a half hour into the game, I was planning on writing the “Pokemon Scarlet and Violet is the worst game in the series” article, and that is not the article I wrote.
I’m glad about that, and glad I own the game. I guess I’ll just end the review there.
Cinema (Horror Obsessive): I’m a huge fan of Lovecraftian horror. I’ve read a bunch of Lovecraft’s stories, and I absolutely eat up films that riff on the themes and ideas he popularized. So from the moment I heard about Freeze, I knew I had to check out the trailer. Not only is this an obvious homage to all things Lovecraftian, but the movie also won Best Feature Film at the 2022 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival last month, so I was pretty sure it would be right up my alley. And from the looks of it, I was 100% right. Here’s what the movie is about:
Audio Books (HPLHS): Dark Adventure Radio Theatre presents Robert E. Howard’s tale of horrors in Eastern Europe in a 1930s-style radio drama. The story bounds to life with a cast of nineteen professional actors, thrilling sound effects and an original orchestral score by Troy Sterling Nies. Click here for more information about our other Lovecraft stories in the Dark Adventure Radio Theatre series. They’re like movies you can enjoy with your eyes closed.
Review (Sprague de Camp Fan): Blood of the Serpent is the latest Robert Jordan Tor Conan novel. Although this time the book is by S. M. Stirling and published by Titan books. But it is essentially a Robert Jordan Tor Conan novel. Lest some interpret that as a criticism, I want to stress that I do not mean it as such. Read More
Monster Hunter Bloodlines by Larry Correia is the ninth novel in this popular series. Baen Books published the hardback last year, the paperback just came out a couple months ago.
The novel starts out with the crew from Monster Hunter International watching a deal for a Newton Ward Stone so they can get their hands on it. Things go wrong between snake cultists, the Federal agents of MCB, and the rogue former Federal agent Stricken. Things go haywire when a shape shifter absconds with the ward stone while the Feds raid the premises. Read More
“As I am, you once were. As you are, I must someday be.”
The above is a refrain murmured throughout Misha Burnett’s An Atlas of Bad Roads, a collection of his short stories pulled from various start-up short story magazines and anthologies of the past few years. Not Cirsova, though. Not this time. The mood is different from the heroic adventures of science fiction and fantasy in that stalwart of the short story scene. (For those, try Misha’s Endless Summer.)
Instead, An Atlas of Bad Roads steers towards the third, and often neglected, pillar of weird fiction.
Horror.
Hard weird, Misha calls his style. It fits. These are tales of that old kind of fantasy, the one before Orks and Hobbits and other worlds. Where a wrong turn can drop you where there be dragons. Or fishmen. Or killer clowns.
Or demons.
Wrong turns that make what’s left of your life irrevocably changed through quiet moments of heroism. Or turn your final moments into a warning sign for others to take heed of.
Misha’s protagonists tend to be practical, blue collar maintenance folks. The rich and powerful do appear, but as warnings and demon fodder. And both are fed into moody, broken stories that Misha loves writing. Broken, as in the characters are broken, not in the mode of craft. Here, in this particular volume, there is often a way out–if one is willing to accept the rough grace that intertwines with mortality as the two themes of this anthology.
“Mystery Train” dips into into weird West, as a former marshal accompanies a dead man’s coffin on its way to his grave. But a simple act of kindness and a simple prayer thrust the marshal into a confrontation where no silver bullet can help him.
“The Summer of Love” is a time-traveling take on “The Man in the High Castle”–and a rebuttal to all those “time travel to kill baby Hitler” thought experiments. Sometimes the fight to vanquish great evil may prevent the rapid accumulation of petty evil into a system far more oppressive than that of said great evil. This one comes across as a warning in these compassionless times. Read More
Dao Destruction (The First Immortal #4) – Bruce Sentar
Darius and the village of Hearthway have prepared for the winter and even thrived in the middle of it. But as their leader, Dar needs to look to the future, to spring and the war that comes with it.
When military recruiters follow their barge down from Kindrake, he knows he needs to sever his ties with the Kingdom, and the best way to do that is seek The White and bring his village of ancients under her name.
He sets out on the journey, but gets far more than he bargained for. Dar finds Valdis, Lilith’s right hand, drinking her sorrows away in an abandoned village. The Death Spirit that followed Lilith, just might be able to help him solve the problems of the Mo once and for all.
Dawn’s Light (Sol Saga #1) – Hunter Blain
Which would you choose if given the chance? Peace…or freedom?
As Human civilization approaches interstellar and even interdimensional travel, a lone being, Sol, arrives on our planet. Hailing from an advanced society dedicated to ushering our world into a future of peace.
After stepping through the one-way portal, Sol discovers an unexpected side effect that this universe has on his body—power befitting those we mere humans call superheroes.
But, as is the law of unintended consequences, there is a cost to having tremendous abilities that Sol must learn to deal with in his quest for peace. Even worse, an old friend from the past follows Sol to our dimension with a unique powerset of his own.
Where Sol seeks peace, Tenebris offers our world freedom from those in power who only wish to serve themselves. He will stop at nothing to prove he has the strength to crumple the corrupt systems of man and set all people free.
Hammered (Legacy of Magic #1) – Lindsey Buroker
Seattle native Matti Puletasi has the strength of a bear, the stamina of an ox, and a magical hammer inherited from her dwarven mother.
She’s happy renovating homes and occasionally thumping bad guys until she learns of a mysterious artifact hidden under the house she’s working on. Everybody from humans to orcs to werewolves wants it, and they’re willing to kill to get it. Things go from bad to worse when someone frames her for murder.
The only person interested in helping her is a haughty elf assassin from another realm. He’s handsome, powerful, and deadly, but he’s got an agenda of his own. She dare not trust him—or be attracted to him.
But if she can’t clear her name, the assassin will be the least of her worries. Read More
I have posted before on New Texture’s art books. Their latest is George Gross Covered. George Gross (1909-2003) was one of the premier cover artists for the men’s adventure magazines that flourished in the 1950s through the early 1970s. Read More
RPG (Walker’s Retreat): If you managed to make a not-crap game, document it in a competent manner, target the right audience, and shill it to them properly then you will get attention that converts to sales- and sales that convert to an audience of users that want to give you more money.
Robert E. Howard (John C. Wright): The Black Stranger was unpublished in
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Robert E. Howard’s lifetime. It first appears in Fantasy Magazine, in March 1953, seven months after the posthumous publication of God in the Bowl. It is the second and last of his posthumous publications, not counting fragments and pastiches.
RPG (Grognardia): Japanophilia was a significant pop cultural force in North America and Europe during the 1980s. That Dungeons & Dragons would eventually embrace these interests would have surprised no one who had been paying attention to the matter. Read More