Man, three months since the last Geeking Out? I'm a slacker...
Actually, I was in Florida til the end of February hanging out with the family, then I came back to Oakland and got the flu that wouldn't end, followed up by a sinus infection. I'm just now starting to feel a little better. I'm behind on everything (the website hasn't been updated in ages, despite the fact that I have like twenty reviews ready to go up) and new writing has been sporadic. Top that off with me watching the Penguins dismantle Ottawa in the playoffs...and well, I'm just way behind. But, enough with the excuses--let's talk about what my big nerdy ass is excited over at the moment.
Lost Odyssey: I'm a big videogame nerd and I've always loved RPGs. Lost Odyssey is the latest offering from Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi's Mistwalker Studios. Spanning four Xbox 360 discs, this is a pretty massive game that's traditional almost to a fault. Random encounters, turn-based fighting, people with amnesia...it's like RPG 101. And yet, somehow, it does all these little things right--things that make the whole of the game greater than the sum of its parts. Some of the stories in the game are so well written that they could have been collected into a book. Some of the moments that are supposed to be emotional actually become that instead of just pantomiming it in videogame fashion. It's not without its flaws, but it's certainly a better game than some of the review scores have indicated. Plus it kept me busy for 70 hours--that's less than a dollar per hour of entertainment.
Half the Blood of Brooklyn: Charlie Huston's latest Joe Pitt novel finds the vampire tough guy working as an enforcer for the neo-hippy Society clan, watching his girlfriend waste away to advanced AIDS, and sent over into the wilds of Brooklyn to deal with a clan of Hasidic Jew vampires--or in other words, just another typical day for Joe. Huston continues to write some of the most compulsively readable noir-esque fiction out there today, even if this is the weakest book in the series so far. Half the Blood is good--it rips along at a breakneck pace never letting up until the last sentence, and Huston's prose makes me weep with envy, but the book itself feels more like a set-up for the next book in the series than it does an actual stand alone piece of fiction (the earlier books managed to work as both). Personally, I think vampires are generally boring and totally played out--but Huston's so good that I actually look forward to reading about the bloodsuckers lurking in the shadows of Manhattan.
Check back next time when maybe I'll have finally seen Dario Argento's The Third Mother.
Oh yeah, only two more weeks til Grand Theft Auto IV.