This is the Dystopian Novels Book Club pick for this month. I remember thinking that the Netflix film was okay, but very overhyped. I enjoyed the book quite a lot more, but maybe I’m just able to accept it on it’s own terms more easily without the hype.
This was published in 1939, and is set in 1930s Berlin. I’m not sure how much this book is real events and how much is fiction. The main character is the author, although he is mostly just an observer of interesting characters. Each chapter is a different subject, or a diary entry of a different time.
This book was written in a rush and then hastily extended and edited during the disastrous Truss government. It shows in places, reading like a tabloid opinion column and lacking depth. It’s fair enough given how little time they had to write it I guess.
I never got around to finishing the original Resident Evil 3, I think I got really quite far though. I remember the clock tower. From memory I think they’ve changed quite a lot in this remake.
This is a return to the earlier style of books where the plot is only there to ferry you from one joke to the next. The dungeon dimensions don’t really serve much purpose other than to add some “boding” as Gaspode would call it. I guess also to be able to wrap it all up in the end so that Holy Wood doesn’t exist again.
I played this for about 4-5 hours. I was intrigued by the premise and the cutscenes at first but it’s just complete drudgery. I’m done with games that are just wondering around empty fields, and if I wanted to see beautiful scenery I can go take my dog for a walk on Dartmoor.
This is the sort of meal I really love, unfussy and fulfilling. I think this is a pretty bog standard approach.
Rory Stewart walks from Herat to Kabul in Afghanistan not long after the fall of the Taliban. He does the walk in the winter months, stopping off at the villages and towns along the way.
Miso soup is a Japanese soup, made by mixing miso paste into dashi. Dashi is a Japanese stock, made with seaweed and dried and smoked tuna flakes.
This is a Japanese food that’s a little like a rice sandwich.
Killer 7 was originally a GameCube game released by Capcom in 2005. I played it at the time, but got stuck in the theme park level. It’s since been ported to Windows, and plays brilliantly on the Steam Deck. At the time of original release it was unlike anything else, and although it is still an unusual game it stylistically fits in well with a lot of modern indie games.
Fatal Labyrinth is a roguelike RPG for the Mega Drive by Sega released in 1991. It’s a very early example of the genre for consoles. There are thirty randomly generated floors of a dungeon to explore, then you need to kill a dragon and collect a goblet. I found it quite easy, which is surprising since these games are normally extremely hard. When you die you don’t start completely from scratch but can restart from a checkpoint in an earlier floor.
This is written by the guy that wrote The Stanley Parable, which I absolutely love. You are presented with a series of tiny games that are supposedly created by a friend of his, while he narrates his thoughts about what they mean and what it tells us about the creator of the games.
I just finished Yakuza 0 on the Steam Deck. You play as Kazama Kiryu who gets accused of a murder he didn’t commit, and Goro Majima who is being forced to run a cabaret club and is not allowed to leave his city. The game is really long, both characters stories could be a standalone game. They end up tying together in a really interesting way I didn’t see coming though.
This month’s book club pick.