Author Archives: Henry

The Last Colony, by John Scalzi

Posted on by Henry

I really should have written this review last week.  I’ve been on a Scalzi kick, and finished The Last Colony last Wednesday.  Then I started and finished Zoe’s Tale on Saturday, and started The Human Division Saturday evening.  I’m afraid that things have gotten more than a little jumbled in my mind at this point.  That said, I’ve still got enough details in order that I can tell you for certain that The Last Colony follows in the footsteps of its predecessors and offers up a fabulous read.

Also, I know that it shouldn’t matter to the book itself, but John Harris’ cover art for the book is just gorgeous.

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The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi

Posted on by Henry

I shouldn’t be surprised that I went through The Ghost Brigades in one day.  After my experience of reading Old Man’s War I should have expected this compulsion, the need to rush headlong through the story as quickly as I could, even to the point of ignoring my friends and the rest of the world.  All of the nice things that I said about John Scalzi’s writing last time still apply.  This book is easy to read and hard to put down, and when I finished it I was left wanting more.  Fortunately, my friend whom I’d been ignoring sympathized with my plight and had a copy of the next book in the series ready to loan to me.  So, of course, I stayed up late reading more of that.

Right, series: in my review of Old Man’s War, I think I somehow failed to mention that it was the start of a series of books.  The Ghost Brigades is the first of several sequels, but while it builds on the setting established in Old Man’s War and even features some of the same characters, its story builds off in an entirely new direction.  It reads like a standalone story, but if you really want the full experience I strongly suggest that you read Old Man’s War first.  There are interlocking complexities that become readily apparent as you continue the series, and you’ll benefit from reading the books in order.

My verdict, once again, is that you should get your hands on this book with all possible haste.  Right after you get your hands on Old Man’s War, of course.  For more of my thoughts on the story, read on below…

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Everything is Awesome: The LEGO Movie

Posted on by Henry

The entirely appropriate theme song.

The LEGO Movie is exceptional.

Watching it feels like watching a virtuoso performance; the people who made the movie clearly know their craft, and you can see them having fun playing around inside the boundaries set out for them, playing with the audience’s expectations even as they satisfy them.  And they do it so skillfully that they are able to take a story that we’ve heard millions of times before and turn it into something wonderfully fresh and enjoyable.

You certainly have heard the story before, because The LEGO Movie is built around the monomyth.  It also, by virtue of its medium and a few helpful hints, manages to tell a story outside of the story with which the film opens.  I’ll talk more about that later, but that topic is full of spoilers.

I strongly recommend that you go and watch The LEGO Movie.  As my friend Ben put it, “this could be the Toy Story of this generation.”  If you want more of my thoughts on the movie’s virtuosity, read on…

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What Flavor Is Your Game?

Posted on by Henry

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I like vanilla ice cream.  I have for a very long time.  Before I knew my alphabet, much less how to read, I knew that hearing my older brother spell out “I-C-E-C-R-E-A-M” meant that I should start asking Mom for ice cream too.  Better yet, as I got older and discovered the joys of living in Vermont (home of Ben & Jerry’s before it was bought out by Unilever), I learned that there were far more flavors of ice cream available, and that many of them were exceedingly tasty as well.

When I was little, I played make-believe all the time.  A number of my friends simply couldn’t understand the appeal, and stopped playing with me, but at the tender age of seven my older siblings harnessed my ambitions and introduced me to 2nd Edition AD&D.  My introduction might actually have been earlier, but that year was the first time I can remember staying up until midnight to play RPGs with them.  Over the next few years, I was introduced to Vampire: The Masquerade (along with a bundle of other White Wolf games), D&D’s 3rd Edition, In Nomine, and GURPS.  More other games followed.  Just like with ice cream, I had discovered a whole new world of flavors to choose from.  I was very nearly overwhelmed by my enthusiasm.  These days, some people refer to me as an RPG snob.  I much prefer the term ‘connoisseur’: through dedicated consumption, I have built an appreciation for the inherent flavors of different game systems.

But what the heck do I mean by “flavor”?  And how do you figure out what a game’s flavor is?

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Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi

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I’m delaying my game-system flavor post again due to overexcitement.  You see, I finished Old Man’s War yesterday and I just had to share my thoughts with you.  In case you were wondering, I also started Old Man’s War yesterday.  What can I say about this book that hasn’t already been better put by Cory Doctorow and Ken MacLeod?  I suppose I’ll start with, “I was silly not to read this ages ago, because it’s really damn good.”

Seriously, this book has been sitting on my reading list for years, ever since my brother Nate suggested that I should read it soon after it came out in 2005.  At the time, I had no idea who John Scalzi was or why I should like his work, and the title and concept simply didn’t grab me.  Apart from the prodigious numbers of recommendations I had received telling me to read the book (and my growing infatuation with Scalzi’s writing), not that much had changed as of yesterday.  Then I opened the book and read the first few pages, and boom, I was gone.

I really should have expected that something like this would happen again, given how I felt about Agent to the Stars and Redshirts, but I was once more taken by surprise and pulled right into the deep end.  I barely came up for air, and dove through the book in the course of several hours.  The short take?  Read it.  My more considered opinion?  Read on…

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Cordelia’s Honor, by Lois McMaster Bujold

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Ok, so I was planning to post a piece today on game-system flavors, but then I just kept writing and writing.  It turns out that that piece is going to be a bit longer than I’d anticipated.  Instead, I’ll give you an easy one: Cordelia’s Honor, by Lois McMaster Bujold.  Ostensibly the first set of stories in the long Vorkosigan series, I came to this book only after I’d already read a number of the other stories.  I feel that I benefited from the prior experience, and would recommend that you start elsewhere as well.  Not because the stories in Cordelia’s Honor are in any way bad, but because some parts of them are harder to engage with when you don’t already know and like some of the characters.  I feel like I had a deeper understanding and appreciation for the characters that I met because it wasn’t the first time that I’d met them, even though the events that I read about were obviously happening long before anything else that I already knew about.

My quick opinion before I get deeper into talking about the book?  Read it.  In fact, read all the Vorkosigan books.  They are very hard to put down once you start, but at least they come in manageable, more or less bite-sized chunks.

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The Brief Hiatus Continues

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I’ve been lax in my duties to this blog.  My apologies.  I should have explained further with my post last week: I’m in Portland, Oregon, and on Monday I spent all day running my Call of Cthulhu game for a number of fellow Reedies.  Today I’ll be co-teaching a stage combat class, and Saturday will see a second run of the same scenario from Monday.

I’m afraid that all means that I won’t have new material for you this week apart from this apology.  On the plus side, I finally cast my eyes upon RimWorld, a fascinating base-building simulation with an AI-managed event-engine that I’m itching to get my hands on and tell you about (yes, I want to tell you about the event engine, follow that link and read about it).  I’m also moving ever closer to having a complete version of my Call of Cthulhu scenario, though I’m not yet certain whether my most recent alterations are progress or regression.  Either way, I’ll be back here to bother you about cool stories, games, and story games next week.

A Glance at Shadowrun’s 5th Edition

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I’m busy getting ready to run the seventh iteration of my Call of Cthulhu scenario, Temple in the Sands, and I probably won’t have anything for you this Wednesday due to traveling.  But last weekend I had the chance to play a game of Shadowrun again, something I don’t often have an opportunity to do.  I had a good time, but I think I realized why it was that I play it so infrequently; Shadowrun looks like a chore and a half to run when compared with all the other RPGs that I play.

Shadowrun reminds me a bit of a glamorous ass.  You know what I’m talking about: one of those people with so much style, and with so many good stories told about them, that you forget just how frustrating they can be in person.  If you spend enough time hanging around them the aggravation (mostly) disappears into the background noise, but there’s a lot of settling in and acclimatizing that you have to do first.  And every so often (usually right in the middle of something that is pretty cool) you get a reminder of why you thought the person was an ass in the first place.  But because it’s so glamorous, because it’s practically oozing cool, I keep wanting to come back to it like the sucker I am.  I can explain, I swear. Continue reading →

Dominions 3’s Manual Seduces, Conquers All

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I sure did say a lot of mean things about Dominions 3 when I wrote about it last time.  I finished on a positive note, to be sure, but if you didn’t read that last bit it might have looked like very mild hate mail rather than an admission of my affections.  I won’t take those comments back (I still think they’re true, confirmed through further play), but I do have a few other thoughts to add.  First of all, giving me a copy of this game for Christmas is both wonderful and somewhat mean.  Secondly, I’m (not so) secretly in love with the game’s manual.  Third… well, my third thought is that the game is far more captivating than I had realized that it would be from my time as a spectator.

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The Forever Engine, by Frank Chadwick

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I hear you like adventures.  How about books that come complete with steam, airships, weird science, and doomsday devices?  Frank Chadwick’s new book The Forever Engine delivers action and adventure with all of those things, and good characters too.  Even better, the story follows an active style very similar to what I’ve come to expect from John Ringo, but without the moments that make you want to yell “Oh John Ringo, no!”  The main characters are competent, sometimes preposterously so, but they generally feel like whole people in a way that happens less often in action/adventure stories.  Already sold?  Go read the book!  If you’re not quite convinced, try reading a little more…

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