This is a 1950s post-apocalyptic novel about everyone in the world other than the protagonist turning into vampires. The main character still lives in his house, and has burnt the surrounding houses to the ground. Each night vampires bang on his walls and call out for him. His neighbour in particular calls for him by name over and over.
This game has a really unique premise. The story begins inside of a children’s book, with you playing a small boy on an adventure to save the kingdom. The thing that makes it unique is that you can leave the book at points, and enter the 3D world of the child’s desk that the book is placed on. As the game progresses you gain extra powers, including tilting the book to move objects on the pages, turning the pages to go back to earlier parts of the story or placing stamps on the pages to hold things in place.
This is a post-apocalyptic book from 1987 by Robert McCammon. It’s a very long book at nearly 1000 pages, and I think it’s heavily influenced by The Stand by Stephen King which was released years before. The apocalypse in this particular story is nuclear war between the US and Russia. Over the first few chapters missiles start flying overhead and destroying the world around the characters we have met.
This is the first PlayStation 5 game I’ve played in ages. It feels like I’ve barely used the console. I did love the small pack-in game though, Astro’s Playroom. This is the first full game in that series which doesn’t require a peripheral, and it is excellent. It is absolutely full of joy, graphically beautiful with controls that are just perfect. The game is packed with ideas. Each world and each level is throwing new things at you. For instance, one pick-up gives you frog gloves allowing you to punch enemies from a great distance, and swing off red surfaces.
I played the reboot game of the same name almost exactly a year ago. I remember this game having significantly less fighting, and more tomb raiding than that one. Turns out my memory is correct, and thankfully so because the fighting is pretty awful here. Despite that this is a great game, it gave me a real sense of adventure trying to navigate my way around the levels.
This is the pixel remaster version of the game. I’ve completed the original version on the NES a long time ago, but this one improves it in several ways. In the original if you target an enemy that another character kills in the same round you miss your attack. In this one your character will hit another enemy instead like the rest of the series. The graphics are completely redrawn, but they are still in a pixel style that keeps the spirit of the original designs.
This is the sequel to a game I played quite recently. This game I think is significantly better than the first. I was surprised just how much I enjoyed it.
This is a science fiction book by Iain M. Banks. The only book I’ve read by him before was The Wasp Factory, which despite having read it a long time ago I still think about every now and then. It has stuck with me as a particularly dark and intense read.
This is a 3D platformer made by several of the same people that created the Banjo-Kazooie games on the N64. It has the same humour and style, and I found it pretty funny. I particularly liked all of the characters.
This is a Mega Drive RPG, the third sequel to the game I played in 2018. I’ve never played II or III, but this one is apparently considered to be the best in the series. It’s set a long time after the events of the first game, where the characters in that have become legends.
This is a non-fiction book about a working class guy from London, who became a trader for Citibank. He makes a lot of money, but becomes increasingly disgusted about the inequality in the economy, and is predicting that it’s going to get progressively worse for ordinary working people.
This is a Philip K. Dick book. I’ve been a fan of his for years, but he wrote so many books that there are tons that I’ve never read. As is pretty common with his books this one deals with mental illness, and an unstable grip on reality.
This is a SNES RPG which came out very late in the system’s life, and was never released outside of Japan. I played this using a fan translation patch which itself is over twenty years old.
This is a British cyberpunk novel, which I’m reading as this month’s pick for the Exeter Dystopian Novels Book Club. Structurally, the book has two narratives that end up joining together. One is the story of a character named Y, who has had her memory erased and been subjected to extensive body modifications. Not least, a third arm coming out of one of her shoulders. It turns out that she is in another dimension, one that was discovered by humanity many years ago but kept secret. This place is run by a character resembling some kind of feudal king named the Manor Lord.
This was mentioned on the Exeter Social Discord group, and it made me curious to see how well it has held up. I played the Mega Drive version, which was what I had when I was younger. I remembered it being pretty mediocre, bad but not as bad as most of the mascot or tie-in platformers of the era. That’s exactly how I found it today as well, the graphics are nice, the music is good but the actual platforming is fiddly and hit boxes are very unpredictable. It’s very short though, only five levels with a few stages each.