Re: So, What Games Are You Looking Forward To? (2025 Ed)

On Sat, 25 Jan 2025 18:47:22 -0500, Xocyll <Xocyll@gmx.com> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:
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On Fri, 24 Jan 2025 09:30:21 -0800, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:
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On 1/23/2025 9:00 AM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

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I don't even know if I can rouse myself to play PC games much anymore.
I got hooked on reading sci-fi/fantasy again and have been blowing
through books like crazy.

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Heh. Oddly enough, me too. I mean, I tend to go through books fairly
regularly anyway, but recently I've been hitting the pages a lot more
often. It's definitely cutting into my video-game time!
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I'm working my way through Ian Bank's "Culture" series again.Well,
most of them. A couple of his books are written in first-person, and
that's just not a format I enjoy. But all the rest.  They aren't
/great/, but they're imaginative and passably well written (even if
every book does seem like he just ran out of ideas and just decided to
end it at some random point).

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Consider Phlebas and that execution method?

Or "Matter", where the heroes are all (mostly) killed off and the
story ends. "Excession" is similar too.

I don't actually think it's the author running out of ideas; it's part
of his style and messaging. But given the pacing and tone of the rest
of his books, the sudden end leaving so many things unresolved (the
latter of which, I think is the whole point) is incredibly jarring.

It's as if Star Wars ended right when the X-wings start attacking the
Death Star. Because of how the rest of the story goes, you know the
heroes --armed with mystical powers and knowledge of the planet's
secret weakness-- are likely to win... but you sort of want that
resolution. And I think that's an apt comparison, because in many ways
the Culture books are very space-opera sci-fi, and that genre
typically gets its heroic end. Banks is obviously writing in a way
that purposefully subverts those expectations, which is an interesting
experiment but overall not to my liking.