Book Review: The Stardust Grail, by Yume Kitasei

A perfectly reasonable space adventure

Some books do exactly what they say they will do, and nothing more. The Stardust Grail is one of those. Its hook has all the right trimmings to beguile the willing reader: a graduate student protagonist, a reformed thief, multiple heists, androids who want to be human, wormholes, ex-soldiers with fancy armour-tech, squid-tentacle aliens, hive minds, shady organizations, plagues, and ray guns. All these components are woven together into a quest narrative for a MacGuffin whose recovery spells the difference between survival and extinction, and indeed the fate of galactic civilization. It’s practically a paint-by-numbers example of a sci-fi space adventure. This is not to say that it’s bad. It’s just not particularly surprising.

Our main character, Maya Hoshimoto, used to be a thief for hire, travelling around the galaxy with her partner Auncle, a member of the dwindling alien species known as the Frenro. Together they made a reasonably satisfactory living stealing cultural artifactes for clients, until Maya decides that she wants to build a different life for herself, and returns to graduate school in… cultural xeno-anthropology? Something like that. The specific field of study is never named, but it’s one that involves examining alien cultural artifacts, which her practical stealing experience has equipped her to understand very well. (Readers with experience in academic publishing are encouraged to skim past the bit where Maya’s academic advisor tells her to write an entire article for submission to a prestigious journal in the space of two days, and her research consists of getting a librarian who is entirely unconnected to the project to select some books on the right general topic for her.)

One day, the special collections library where Maya works receives a bequest containing a lost volume of the journal of Dr. Huang, a wildly famous human space explorer from the previous century. The same day, a visiting researcher, Dr. Garcia, approaches Maya and reveals that the entire transportation web of wormhole-flavoured nodes that ties the galaxy together is breaking down. He further reveals that he knows about her criminal past, and threatens her with exposure unless she helps him and the fascist-leaning organization he works for track down a MacGuffin referenced in Dr. Huang’s journal, which for Reasons is the only hope of restoring the transportation web. And, to complete the trifecta of inciting incidents, Auncle returns, and begs for Maya’s help recovering the same missing MacGuffin, which can not only create new nodes, but also an object that is essential for the Frenro’s ability to reproduce. Behold, an ethical dilemma: save the entire galactic civilization from utter collapse, or save the Frenro species from extinction?

As ethical dilemmas go, this is a pretty good one, in part because it avoids the more common plot-driving dilemma structure, which pits smaller, personal obligations against much larger societal stakes. Typically, we get protagonists agonizing over questions like Do I stay home with my family or answer my country’s call and do one last spy mission for the good of AMERICA? Or Do I obey commands and do my duty or do I give up everything, abandon the mission, and rescue my best friend/beloved? These personal-vs-big-stakes dilemmas are common in fiction, because they make the protagonist’s dithering believable while still making it possible to enforce a narratively correct decision. But precisely because the narratively correct answer is obvious, the dithering gets awfully tiresome to the reader. Of course you’re going to abandon your family for one last job, otherwise there won’t be a plot! Or: Of course you’re going to abandon the mission and rescue your friend, otherwise we’ve wasted chapters and chapters of backstory about why your friendship is so important! Quit Hamleting about, unholster your raygun, and go kick some betentacled tushes!

[pant pant pant] Sorry, got worked up there. Anyway, the point is: Maya’s dithering is not frustrating, because both sides of her dilemma are personal and also carry genuinely huge stakes. On the one hand, recovering the MacGuffin to restore the Frenro’s ability to reproduce is personal because Auncle, Maya’s dearest friend in the world, is Frenro, and desperately wants to raise children. If she recovers the MacGuffin and turns it over to Dr. Garcia, she is destroying her best friend’s chances for reproducing, which is a terrible betrayal. She’s also causing an entire species to go extinct. That’s a heckuva bad outcome on both levels.

On the other hand, rebuilding the galactic transportation network is personal to Maya, because she is living on Earth and her family are living on a different planet. The breakdown of interstellar travel means she will never see her family again. It’s also huge stakes because, remember, the entire galaxy depends on this network. If it continues to break down, all worlds will end up isolated, and not all worlds are self-sufficient. Entire planetfuls of people may die. The urgency of this all is rather nicely backed up by a resonance with Maya’s own personal history. Her childhood was marked by scarcity that is an inherent part of trying to subsist on a colony planet where humans did not evolve. Everything was made even more difficult by a horrific disease that swept through the galactic civilization, killed many, and left others—including Maya—struggling with permanent consequences. (This is a 2024 publication. The covid-coding is not a coincidence, I'm sure.) Quarantines were instituted; people starved. Maya therefore knows firsthand the devastation wrought by a much smaller version of this looming total isolation. That is another heckuva bad outcome associated with losing interstellar travel.

So: on the whole, the character motivations, interstellar politics, and betentacled aliens are all very competently accomplished. Maya’s dithering is not frustrating, precisely because there is no good outcome. There is no choice she can make that satisfies either personal or societal constraints. But precisely because there is no good outcome, in a book that is not intended to be any kind of grimdark, it also became clear before the halfway mark that there was only one way the dilemma could be resolved without betraying the entire value system the book presented to us.

This book delivers on everything it says on the tin. But it doesn’t deliver anything more. And at the end, when I arrived exactly where I had predicted hundreds of pages earlier, I found myself wondering whether all those museum heists were really necessary to get there.

Nerd coefficient: 7/10. An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws.

Highlights:

• Believable dilemmas
• Tentacled aliens
• Overpowered MacGuffins
• Lore

Reference: Kitasei, Yume. The Stardust Grail [Flatiron Books 2024].

CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social 

First Contact: The Terminator

A machine monster chase film with a romantic, time loop twist

The Terminator debuted in theaters in 1984. I’m embarrassed to admit that forty years later, I’m seeing this blockbuster for the first time. I’m an old-school nerd, so I’m not sure how this happened—especially since the original The Terminator is one of my sister’s favorite movies. She speaks of it with such intense affection that I have always felt as if I knew the story or at least the concept: A time-traveling hero goes back in time to save a woman from a time-traveling android assassin. Long before he was the governor of California, this was the film that solidified Arnold Schwarzenegger as a box office superstar and was soon followed by the even more famous sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day, which gave us android Arnold as a hero. I’ve heard the Terminator lingo with classic lines like “I’ll be back” and “Hasta la vista, baby.” I knew all the catch phrases anecdotally and I have seen clips and parodies over the years as the Terminator films became entrenched in our culture the way Star Wars and Rocky did. Film clips were played so often that I felt as if I understood it enough. Did I even need to see the actual films? My sister was horrified to recently discover that I had never actually watched the original 1984 The Terminator. So, a few weeks ago, I bought a digital copy of the film and, for the first time, I sat down and finally watched it.

Summary: [Warning: Spoilers] The Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a killer android from the future who arrives in town on a mission to kill a woman named Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). Soon after, a young man (Michael Biehn) also arrives from the future to intercept the Terminator and save Sarah. Sarah Connor is an ordinary and unremarkable young woman working as a waitress. After seeing news reports of the murders of other women named Sarah Connor, she quickly realizes she is the next target. She contacts the police but they are largely unhelpful. Sarah notices a young man following her and fears he is the serial killer. However, the man, Reese, protects her when the real Terminator shows up and ultimately, after a brief encounter with the police, the two go on the run. Reese explains that he is from the future, where Skynet, an organization of intelligent machines, has subjugated and almost destroyed humanity. The Terminator has been sent to kill Sarah because she is destined to have a son, John Connor, who will lead a successful rebellion against the machines. While hiding at a motel, Reese confesses his love for Sarah and the two spend an intimate night together. Later, the Terminator arrives, and after an extended violent confrontation with Reese and Sarah, the Terminator is finally defeated, but Reese is killed in the process. Later, a pregnant and grieving Sarah leaves town while planning for the future battle that is to come. In classic time loop fashion, Reese became the father to the same John Connor who sent him there.

First impressions: 1) The overall vibe of the film is intensely and nostalgically ’80s: the muted audio, the intensely teased hair, the ’80s acting style (in your face, no subtlety). 2) Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor is so different from the tough, weapon-toting person I have often seen in the clips from later Terminator films. In The Terminator, she is ordinary, unsure, and not particularly skilled. 3) Michael Biehn as Kyle Reese is so young. I’ve seen him in later roles in Aliens and The Abyss, playing the sturdy, mature, good-hearted hero, but here he is almost adolescent. He’s not just physically young, but also emotionally immature. He is the most stressed and angsty character in the film. 4) The thing that made the biggest impression on me was the Terminator himself. I can see why this role was so pivotal. In a sea of subdued dialogue, he was a scene-stealing show-stopper. He shows up (body-builder) naked in the first scene and walks around unconcernedly wreaking carnage until he finds clothes and goes hunting for guns and ammo. His flat, pragmatic, lethal persona was a perfect foil to the emotional drama in the film.

What surprised me: 1) The famous Sarah Connor, the main character in the film, has almost no backstory and very little context. She doesn’t have tragic origins, major life obstacles, special skills, or even a goal she is working towards. She is a blank slate on which the ensuing adventure is written. 2) Likewise, the Terminator is just a killing machine. It has no stated unique motivation or agenda other than the assassination ordered by Skynet. In our current era of complex or semi-sympathetic villains, I was surprised to be so entertained by a straightforward killing machine. 3) Most surprising is Reese. Of all the characters, he has the most emotional context. He comes from a war-torn life and he is her (future) son’s friend who volunteered to protect Sarah. He volunteered to go back in time because he was in love with the idea of her. He does not grow to love her; he arrives in love with her —fairy-tale style— because he has fallen in love with a photograph of her long before he meets her. He shows her the photo and says he always wondered what she was thinking about in that moment. Later we see the photo being taken while she is thinking of Reese. I love a good time loop. And it’s remarkably romantic for a film that’s mostly about killing. 4) Sarah’s roommate and the roommate’s boyfriend get a significant amount of screen time. They are adorable side characters who meet a violent end. I’m not sure why we see so much of them, but it’s surprisingly enjoyable. 5) Finally, in addition to the leads, I was surprised to see veteran actor Paul Winfield in the role of the grumpy Black police captain and the immediately recognizable Lance Henriksen, who plays Bishop, the future android of the Alien franchise. These reverse cameos helped anchor my sense of The Terminator’s place in my film-watching timeline.

Overall impression: After so many years of knowing about the franchise but never really watching it, The Terminator feels like a classic human-versus-machine story. As our society struggles with issues related to technology and AI, The Terminator still feels relevant, although the film style seems intensely old fashioned. And, honestly, I love the irony of that.

--

The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

Highlights:

• Excruciatingly ’80s
• Classic chase film
• Surprisingly romantic

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Review: Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology

An eclectic collection of African-futuristic stories blending myth, magic, and technology in bold new ways

Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology is an anthology of short stories written by a range of authors in the African diaspora. Through the variety of writing styles, we get an eclectic collection of African-futuristic stories blending myth, magic, and technology in bold new ways. All of the tales are set in the “Sauútiverse,” a fictional star system inspired by African mythology and African-futuristic sci-fi. Most of the stories in the anthology are infused with evocative imagery and gorgeous, immersive lyrical prose.

The anthology opens with several layers of commentary on the creation and inspiration for the collection, followed by sections of explanatory discourse on the makeup of the Sauútiverse. Fans of detailed world-building might enjoy the deep dive into politics, mythology, magic, technology, and planetary ecology. But plot driven readers will prefer to skim the preliminary details and dive into the stories. Throughout the book, the stories vary from lyrical world-building to fast-paced adventures to introspective character narratives. Each tale is carefully woven and thoughtful but some are more philosophical and abstract while some are grounded in active struggles and adventures.

Each story is preceded by a backstory explanation passage which, like the prologues, may appeal to those who like technical details. However, this technique is distractingly lecture-like to readers who just want to dive in and escape to another world. The details from each preceding passage are helpful for understanding the context of the tale but the decision to speak directly to readers reminds us that this isn’t real. For those who prefer to be transported and immersed in a new reality, the information could be better woven into the introductory sentences of the story or provided by a recurring fictional storyteller sharing the information in between the tales.

Despite this shortcoming, many of the stories in the collection are fascinating, immersive, and engaging. A few stood out in particular for me.

In The Way of Baa'gh by Cheryl S. Ntumy, a crab-like creature tries to sabotage an alliance of his people with the humanoids. Unlike prior stories, this is a tale told from the point of view of humanity’s enemy, a monster who despises, fears, and misunderstands humans and remains determined to sabotage them when the humans and Baa’gh form an alliance to try to harness control of time. Through the protagonist we see humans as dangerous aliens. This clever literary technique allows the story to unfold in a unique and tragic way.

The Grove’s Lament by Tobias S. Buckell is the story of Ami-inata, one of several refugees rehabbing a wasteland and trying to protect the fragile ecosystem. But she must fight for her life when a chaotic scientist from their ruined world tries to reenact the same type of dangerous experiment that destroyed their home world. He is mystical and destructive but Ami-inata is practical and focused as they clash with the safety of their people in the balance.

Xhova by Adelehin Ijasan is one of many stories in the anthology which addresses the intersection of technology with spirituality and magic. A human child is raised by an android parent, Xhova, in a post-apocalyptic society where androids control the creation and raising of humans. Xhova has grown attached to his human child but testing reveals she possesses magic which dooms her to death and Xhova has to choose whether to save his human daughter. The story is told from Xhova's first-person perspective and also from his second person perspective to his daughter. As a result, it becomes an immersive confluence of mythology and technology.

My favorite tale in the collection is A City, a Desert, and All Their Dirges by Somto Ihezue and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. A young man, Ajubiju, is bored with his highly spiritual, rural, nomadic people. He gets a chance to change his destiny when he meets a high tech foreign entourage (the Lomanoo) to his community. Two of their high councilors have been murdered by spiritual means and, since they only have high tech at their disposal, they need a person from a magic community to help them solve the mystery. Ajubiju is tired of his isolated, spiritual nomadic life and craves adventure with the technologically advanced society so he defies his mother and breaks his spiritual bond with his people to leave. This story is a futuristic crime thriller set in a high-tech city. Ajubiju is the magic wielder brought in to find the spiritual assassin in a city of non-believers. While there he befriends a young woman, the sister of one of the targeted councilors, who finds him fascinating. The story is a page-turner, with chase scenes and plot twists worthy of a big-screen adventure, but it still manages to be poignant, tragic, and thoughtful in its exploration of grief and revenge.

Sina, the Child with No Echo by Eugen Bacon is set in a society where all humans have an “echo,” a form of spiritual/magical hearing essential to their culture. In the story, Sina is born without an echo and left by his parents to die in the woods as an infant. But he is rescued by his aunt, a village leader who raises Sina as her son and trains him to use his skills to hunt and forage. Sina’s sister, Rehama’re, is a year younger than him and raised by their parents as a replacement for him. Understandably this creates an awkward relationship when they encounter each other in the village. The background is an allegory for society’s willingness to accommodate physical disabilities while the main plot focuses on the two siblings joining forces against a creature who has been ravaging the village. Overall, the story is an exploration of the true meaning of “family” and the value of unequivocal love that inspires Sina’s journey to his own self-acknowledgment.

Some of the stories focus on the theme of false histories versus the pursuit of societal truth. In Undulation by Stephen Embleton, an orphaned girl is tasked with reciting the origin story of her people in special public ceremonies. She struggles when she senses the falseness hidden in the words even as she comes to terms with her own personal tragedies. Muting Echoes, Breaking Tradition by Eye Kaye Nwaogu is the story of an opposing pair of secret assassins who must decide if truth and friendship can overcome murderous commands and institutional lies in this star-crossed lovers story.

Overall, editor Wole Talabi has created a memorable collection of clever stories set in a vivid universe. Although the world-building can be exhausting, the payoff is worth it. The tales blend technology, magic, and spirituality in a way that will appeal to readers with an appetite for immersive and innovative storytelling.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights

• Immersive imagery, gorgeous prose.

• Backstory overload.

• Engaging mix of magic, mythology, and high-tech futurism.

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.

Mortal Kombat X - Mobile Edition

[Moral Kombat X (mobile), NetherRealm Studios, Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2015]

The Violentest Game Ever Comes to Your Apple and Android Device

That's right, the title that brought us the E for everyone, E10+, T for teen, and M for mature game rating system has finally come to your mobile device of choice, and not in a throwback nod to the original 1992 version, but in the form of a massive 1.1 Gigabyte, state-of-the-art addition to the wildly popular console title of the same name. Although it requires a hefty bit of free memory to download, it's worth every penny. By that I don't mean to insult the game. That was my witty way of saying, "It's FREE!" That's right, for once a game that isn't made for 6-year-olds that involves colored, avian balls or talking cats. This one is for the Mature gaming audience, down to the inclusion of the ever-controversial Fatalities. If you haven't had the pleasure of witnessing the brutal, match-ending murders that take place in this title, let me be the first to tell you that they maybe the most violent thing I've ever seen in a video game to date including the multitude of Calls of Duty, Auto Theft of the Grandest Kind, and their ultra-violent cousins in the gaming universe. 

First, a Little History

Not only is Mortal Kombat singly responsible for the ratings system we now have on all games, but it was the proud owner of the highest opening weekend sales for a short time following the release of Mortal Kombat II. Not only that, but it signalled a shift in financial paradigms. The debut weekend sales of $50 million marked the first time that a video game surpassed Hollywood movies in opening weekend sales. In the summer of 1994, it topped every last Hollywood blockbuster from that year including Mask, True Lies, Forrest Gump, and Lion King. Considering the acceptably arguable statement that this list includes both Jim Carrie's and Arnold Schwarzenegger's best films as well as the best thing Disney has done in decades, then top it off with a six-time Academy Award winning film that garnered Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director awards, among others. 

MKII didn't just beat a bunch of humps. That list makes up one of the best ever in combined quality of summer blockbusters. Go ahead, tell me you'd rather see Avengers 2, Furious 7, Jurassic World, and the remake of Poltergeist for the first time instead of getting a second chance at reliving your first viewing of that list from 1994, but be prepared to be called a stinking liar. Fair warning. 

MKII didn't just create a new set of laws about what kids could and couldn't play with it's murderous violence, it was THE pioneer in a change in the way investors look at our top two forms of entertainment. What had been seen as the purvey of sad loners and prepubescents busted onto the scene with blood-dripping savagery, proving that this was an art form that would not be ignored. Yes, I believe games, especially the really good ones, to be a form of art on par with film, television, literature, comics, photography, painting, and any other traditional and/or non-traditional undertakings that require great creativity to produce. The trend that was started in 1994 by the most violent video game created up to that time has continued and the gap in revenues between games and movies has only grown since that time. 

Pop culture they may be, but I challenge you to play Valiant Hearts and not cry at the touching emotion found within, or Contrast and not spend the next several days contemplating the possibilities of the multiverse and all the variations to existence that title implies. My old man might argue with me, but he doesn't believe that Hip Hip is an art form, either. My immediate retort is, if rhyme isn't an artform, then what was Shakespeare doing penning those 34 plays and 154 sonnets that are nearly all about sex, violence, war, and murder? His answer is always Gangsta Rap. My answer is Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets, and pretty much the entire Ninja Tune catalog. He doesn't know I'm speaking English. The saddest part about that is that we're all inevitably going to turn into our parents. Argh. Oh well, enough losing the plot, let's get back to the game!

 

I Used to Know Every Fatality in the Game

I even knew the Babalities and other alternative endings. However, that was in 1994-96 or so. Along with the free mobile versions of Mortal Kombat X, I also purchased the Xbox One version, but I've spent twice as much time playing the iPad version as I have on the console one. One of the big reasons for that, I suspect, is that I have forgotten the vast majority of special moves and Fatalities. Luckily, that doesn't matter in the mobile version. Anybody can pick up this game and be decent at it. You don't have to spend hours memorizing controller combinations then practicing them in two-player mode against nobody. The control scheme for the mobile title is exactly what all successful mobile title control schemes are: simple. You tap the screen with one finger to attack and hold down two fingers to block. That's pretty much it. There are occasional prompts to swipe the screen for extra moves as seen above 

and successful attacks build your special attack meter, which appears on the bottom left as seen below. 

So It's Easy to Play, What's the Game About?

What is any fighting game about? Kicking arse and leaving the dead in your wake! Like all previous Mortal Kombat Games, they attempt to put some unintelligible plotline together about Elder Gods, invading demons, some evil God, and some sort of tournament for the future of "Earth Realm." It falls as flat on my 2015 ears as it did on my 1994 pair, but it doesn't really matter. If you're playing Mortal Kombat for the plotline, then I'm afraid it's you who have lost the plot, seriously and to an unrecoverable point. 

Force + Form

The gameplay itself takes on a singular form with several small variations. Basically, you pick a team of three fighters and they face off against three others. The fighting character can one of the two remaining ones if they have sustained too much damage or you just want to switch it up. There are three tiers of character: bronze, silver, and gold. Their attack, health, and recovery levels increase significantly with each jump in the corresponding metal's worth. You can also purchase increases in these statistical categories for individual characters using "Koins" (See what they did there? :-) or by earning equipment through battle. The equipment can be moved from character to character, but the statistical category increases can not so choose wisely, unlike this poor Nazi sympathizer. 

There are usually two main types of gameplay with a special offering going on now for a limited time. The first is Battle Mode. Here you move from tower to tower taking on (usually) six groups of opponents that contain three fighters each. There are 33 such towers and you must beat every group in each of them to beat the game. The second is Faction Wars. This takes you online to fight against other real players' teams. While it's not a true online multiplayer in the same sense as Call of Duty or Elder Scrolls Online where you are facing off against other players live in real time, it brings an interesting aspect to the gameplay in that you never really know who you're going to face. Sometimes you get three bronze level characters who belong to a level 4 player. Other times it's two golds and a silver that have been carefully crafted by a level 35 opponent. Although I would prefer live face-offs against real opponents, I'm not sure that mobile platforms are up to that challenge yet, at least with a game of this size and graphic superiority. I'm afraid it would cause lag of unbearable proportions that would make the game mode unplayable.

Whatever the developers' reasoning, they have mostly made up for the lack of true online battles with the addition of factions. You join a particular faction at the beginning of every week. Depending on how many points you get for your faction and how well the team does throughout the week, you will get a certain set of rewards. If your team comes in last, guess what? Sucky rewards. First place, though, and it's rare equipment and statistical increases out the wazoo, not to mention the money. 

Finally, there are the limited time Character Challenge Towers. This week completion of the challenge will land you Raiden, my personal favorite character in the MK series. You have to complete five increasingly difficult towers in order to earn the elusive character types, and keep your eye on that clock, because if you haven't completed every last one before it runs out then you're S.O.L. 

Summ Fun, Huh?

I had initially planned to review the console version of Mortal Kombat X, but while in the Play Store looking for a companion app, I discovered this free game and decided to give it a try, especially considering I haven't discussed a mobile game for some time now and there are considerably more readers with smartphones out there than next-gen consoles. I was afraid I would quickly lose interest and long for the console game, but that hasn't happened. If anything, it's a relief to not be forced into re-learning special moves and Fatalities combinations that I used to know by heart but have long since forgotten. Don't get me wrong, the console version is far and away the best fighting game I've played in years. That said, NetherRealm Studios did a fantastic job in creating this game and not trying to push the control scheme past the abilities of the platform to handle. There's nothing I hate more than trying to play a game on my phone or tablet where the controller is drawn onto the screen. My thumbs continually slip off their appointed areas and it's nearly impossible to control them with any semblance of dexterity. So, if you're looking for a mobile app that is high on action, graphics, and gameplay options, give Mortal Kombat X a try (unless you're too young). Even if you haven't played an MK title since high school, you should be able to pick it up quickly and easily, and you'll have a lot more fun than flinging around a flock of angry pigeons in the process. 

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for vastly exceeding my expectations and making a really solid mobile version that could very easily have turned out to be nothing more than a piss-poor carbon copy of the actual game.

Penalties: -1 I almost feel bad for taking a point away for this, but if you're going to call it "Fight Online" then you should supply an online opponent, not a team of Avatars that someone else created. That said, I don't know the logistics of online match play on mobile platforms, especially for a game of this size and memory requirements. I'd like to give them a pass, but I've got to take off for something. 

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. Well worth your time and attention.

See here for our scoring system. 

2014 Games of the Year

It's the end of the year, which means time to look back on what our favorite games this year have been. Here at Nerds of a Feather, we are doing things a bit different. Recognizing that coming to a consensus is painful and often unnecessary, instead of a canonical top 10, we've each provided our top three. This way, we can highlight what we found to be the best games we played this year without creating some Frankenstein's monster that represents the tastes of none of us entirely. Also, recognizing that we're adults who don't get around to every game each year, we've expanded the scope to include games that were not necessarily released in 2014. After all, a good game is good no matter what year it came out. With that said, here are our individual 2014 Games of the Year!


Mikey

Mario Kart 8 - Nintendo has the best exclusives of any console hands down.  Mario Kart 8 is an amazing update to this classic franchise.  The courses are a throwback to the classic tracks I used to race in college.  I haven't played online much, but this was a feature that was sorely needed and done well.  Nintendo knows fun better than anyone else and this is the most fun I've had on the Wii U.

Skylanders Trap Team - I will admit to being underwhelmed with the upgrades to this game since it originally dropped.  Giants was fun, Swap Force was kind of neat, but the ability to trap and use villains opens up another level of gameplay that refreshed this series.  All of the games have been good, but none have felt as magical as this one.  From the video of the character getting beamed into the trap to the noises that are emitted from the speaker in the portal, this game makes me feel like a kid.  

MLB The Show - I have been pleased with my PS4 and feel it has provided a decent graphics upgrade from the PS3.  I thought it was only decent until I popped this title in.  On multiple occasions I have had people watch me play for over five minutes before realizing that it is a video game.  MLB The Show is pure eye candy and it remains as the premier baseball video game on any system.

Brad

1. Destiny - I know the story sucked, but I just can't stop playing this. It's the first time I've enjoyed grinding!

2. Forza Horizon 2 - Easily the most fun I've had playing a racing game, and the simulation is still top notch despite the move to an open-world style.

 

3. Valiant Hearts: The Great War - Gameplay was serviceable and story was phenomenal. Actually made me cry once. Seriously.

Honorable Mention: Contrast - Although a bit too short, it's completely unique gameplay and intimations about multiple universes made the whole thing like watching one of those movies that, once finished, you realize you are going to have to see it again in order to understand what just happened.

The G

For fun's sake, or just to be different, I'm ranking my top 3 games according to Olympic medal-granting conventions.

Gold - Out There (iOS/Android)

It feels strange to pick a touch/tablet game, rather than console or PC, as my Game of the Year—but Out There was far and away the best thing I played in 2014. It’s a roguelike with roots in 4x titles like Master of Orion. It has an elegant design, a compelling story, boatloads of atmosphere, addictive gameplay and—notably—does not rely on violence to move the narrative forward.

Silver - Shadowrun Returns (PC/Mac/iOS/Android)

Disclaimer: this game is from 2013 not 2014, but if we look past the superlative Out There, this was the next best game I played in 2014. A kickstarter-funded reboot of the video game franchise/return to the cyberpunk+fantasy universe originally popularized in tabletop gaming, Shadowrun Returns neatly captures all the fun and retro style of 1990s RPGs.  

Bronze – Destiny (Xbox One/PS4)

Nothing on consoles really knocked it out of the park for me, so I guess Destiny wins bronze by default. The game looks gorgeous and plays like Halo updated for the new generation, and that’s a good thing. Plus I appreciate that Bungie are trying to do something different with how they’ve structured the game and narrative. Unfortunately, the gameplay is too repetitive and the narrative feels half-baked, so in the end I didn’t like it as much as Brad did.

brian

Wolfenstein: The New Order - I am a big fan of the Wolfenstein series, but I didn't have high expectations for The New Order. I mean, certainly I have a lot of fond memories of Wolfenstein 3D, but Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Wolfenstein were good games, but not great games. Wolfenstein: The New Order is a great game.  It's probably one of the best first-person shooters of all time. The story, the pacing, the gameplay, the graphics, the sounds, and the whole package is top-notch. It flew under a lot of people's radars, but it should be played by every first-person shooter fan.

Alien: Isolation - In another big victory for first-person games in 2014, Alien: Isolation does this movie series justice. You can read my review here, but the long and the short of it is that it's a well-made game that accurately emulates the atmosphere of the first Alien movie. 

Transistor - Supergiant Games really nailed it with Bastion, and they did it again with Transistor. It has a unique setting, interesting story and characters, and a deep gameplay loop. It's not as straightforward as Bastion, but it's amazing nonetheless.

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POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014