Though only recently hatched, the Opte Project seems interesting. Basically, it’s another map of the Internet, but designed to be generated in a matter of hours rather than months, which is what some similar projects take.
Update: Oh, bother. Looks like Slashdot mentioned it, which was probably a component in the path the URL took to get to me. Oh, well.
Well, it’s certainly not Grandia II. Grandia Xtreme took Grandia II’s excellent battle system and improved on it. Unfortunately, that’s the only thing it improved on. The plot is simplistic, the characters are unbelievable, the dialog is crappy, and the voice acting (with the possible exception of Kroitz, voiced by Mark Hamil) is horrid.
The main character is Evann, a Ranger with the ability to travel via Geo Stream. This allows you to teleport deep into various dungeons, after you’ve visited the destination the hard way, of course. In what appears to be an attempt to make the game longer, at various plot points the Geo Streams get reset and you have to go back through the areas if you want to reopen them. (Note that doing this is completely optional, for plot purposes at least. But really, you don’t want to play this game for the plot.)
And then there are the corridors. At various points of the game, you must go through randomly-generated areas. Presumably the random generation is to enhance replay value. I found it annoying.
There are parts I liked. Junctioning eggs was fun for a while. Magic is contained within magic eggs; in order to cast a particular set of spells, you must have an egg that provides those spells equipped. You find eggs with only the barest minimal spells. You may then, however, junction them in pairs to get better eggs. Different combinations give different results, and the really powerful eggs are, understandably, difficult to create. (I ended up taking a chart of combinations out of a FAQ and writing a Perl script to list optimal recipes.)
I’ll complain about the ending after the spoiler barrier. Just note that if you do stay with the game long enough to beat it, you should wait through the end of the credits, as with any console RPG, really.
Ultimately, I really can’t recommend playing this game unless you’re much more interested in gameplay than story, characterization, voice acting, and dialog.
The ending. Ugh. For one thing, I was surprised by the ending; I wasn’t expecting the game to end there. (Contrast to Grandia II, where I kept going, “The ending’s close now…”) And the characterization continued to be horrid. Quanlee suddenly having a revelation (“Yes! That’s it! I was lonely!”) from an offhand comment by Evann has got to rank as one of the most annoying character developments I’ve seen.
I still go back and play it because I haven’t finished the void corridor, and I want to see what’s at the end, but I have to take long breaks between plays, because most of the stuff is tedious and annoying.
One of my favorite networking tales is The case of the 500-mile email, now happily ensconced at ibiblio.org.
Drinker of Souls is, on balance, a fairly average fantasy book. While there’s nothing particularly special about the story it tells, it is, at least, an interesting tale. The characterization is pretty good, especially Brann’s. The writing varies. I found parts of the book rather difficult to get through (most notably the first section; fortunately, things got better), while others elicited eager anticipation. (Partly, this is because I have a weakness for performing art. I found the descriptions of the music and dancing of some of the characters to be quite compelling.)
I have several books by Jo Clayton. The others are from the 70s and have covers that tend to imply crappy hack-and-slash fantasy, so I decided to use this one as a litmus test for Clayton’s writing. It’s at least good enough that I’ll give the others a go.
Endless Nights is another book from Neil Gaiman in the world of The Sandman. It contains seven stories, one for each of the Endless. It is … impressive.
Each of the stories captures the personality of one of the Endless. Possibly the weakest of them in that respect are Death’s and Dream’s, but they’re also probably the most prominent characters in the Sandman series, so the lapse is forgivable, especially since Dream’s gives some very nice backstory for the Endless.
Probably my favorites from the set are Desire’s and Destiny’s stories. Each is a succinct encapsulation of its respective Endless’s personality, combined with some stunning artwork. Death’s, Dream’s, Delirium’s, and Destruction’s are all good stories, with excellent artwork of their own. Despair’s story is probably the one most different from the others, and while it’s very well done, I can’t say that I enjoyed it, largely because it isn’t really meant to be enjoyed. I’ll say simply that it is very well executed, contains superb artwork, and I had to rest for a while after reading it to recover.
If you’re a fan of Sandman, buy this book. If you’re not familiar with Sandman, a lot of the point of this will be missing. It’s probably still worth reading for the artwork alone, but the Endless are what really drive this book.
For my part, I’m very happy to place this book on my shelf beside my other Sandman novels.