Bernice Summerfield: Secret Histories

Apparently I don't update this blog enough. Which I don't, so that's fair comment.

Readers will recall that ten weeks and an embarrassingly small number of updates ago I posted about Venus Mantrap, the Bernice Summerfield audio play that Lance Parkin and I wrote.

Well, I'm not finished with Bernice just yet. Out in December this year is Secret Histories, a short story collection edited by myself with contributions from... well, see below about that. Click on the link to read the blurb. Rather than an over-arching theme which might tie the authors down, I opted for a framing sequence which threads the stories into a larger narrative. The framing sequence is written by myself, but doesn't lock the stories so tightly together that the reader can't dip in and out and read the actual stories in whatever order they please.

I'm delighted by how the book is coming together. By way of an easter egg hunt, and to try and fan the flames a little in advance of the book coming out, I'm announcing the stories and authors one-by-one across various Who fora, starting with the soon to be dead Outpost Gallifrey Forum. You can read that announcement here. More to come, on Outpost Who, via an agent of chaos on my behalf on this place, and possibly even the Jade Pagoda if I feel like it - they could do with a post or two now and again. If you don't care to chase these up, worry not - full details will be on the appropriate page of the BF website in due course.

As well as being able to pre-order Secret Histories on its own, you can also buy it, along with Venus Mantrap and the other audios in this season, as a 2009 bundle with this excellent Special Offer. That's a mere £40 for not only Histories and Mantrap, but also three other audios.

You. Know. You. Want. To.

Anyway, that's enough for now. I'll try not to leave it so long next time.

Mark

Creedy Bastard

I’d like to say I’ve been busy with manner of significant artistic endeavors since my last post, but that would be a blatant lie. No, in between a number of social engagements (a wedding, the Bristol Comics Expo, visiting family) and the pesky day job, I’ve mainly been throwing my time into Assassin’s Creed on the XBox 360. (Yes, it’s not a recent game, with the sequel due out later this year, but I’m slow like that.)

Assassin’s Creed has proven to be a substantial timesink and sleep-preventer for the last few weeks, up until last night, at which point I very suddenly stopped. (I’ll get to the reasons for that halt in due course.)

For the majority of my time with it, AC has been a great experience. Spawned from the ribs of the last-gen Prince of Persia trilogy, Creed takes the free-running and jumping dynamic of the beloved Sands of Time and applies it to an ostensibly more realistic portrayal of the middle east. You can see how it started out as a possible PoP title, and evolved into something else – instead of slowing time and battling demons, protagonist Altair runs around the Holy Land in the 12^th century fighting guards and stealth assassinating his prey. There’s a conspiracy thread to the plot, and an SF framing sequence that cleverly, but arguably unnecessarily, contextualizes the game mechanics within the fiction, but otherwise this is far removed from the fairytale mood of the best PoP titles.

Most of the time, it works very well. The mechanics and missions are samey – fight guards to rescue citizens, climb buildings to fill in the gaps on your map, eavesdrop on certain citizens and pickpocket evidence from others, then when you have investigated enough use what you know to go in and kill your target – but the execution (if you’ll pardon the pun) is so good that I could easily forgive the repetition. The central movement mechanic, which allows you to fluidly run, climb and jump around beautiful environments, is tremendous fun, and aside from the first person free-running of Mirror’s Edge has the greatest sense of joyous, athletic exploration I’ve played yet.

What AC has over Edge is its atmosphere, the sights and sounds of exotic cities. Climbing to the top of a church or temple, and ‘synchronizing’ to gain an overview of the city below you, is a stunning experience. Between the cities is an open world of rolling hills, little villages and military encampments that can be ridden across on horseback. It’s a game that, were it not for your grisly job and whole armies wanting to kill you, you’d quite like to live in. As it is, it’s a pleasure to run around seeing the sites, exploring for collectible hidden flags and the like.

So far, so good. Having got over an initial hump with one of the mission types I was away, assassinating targets, racking up various sub-missions and opening up all the districts of the game’s three main cities. Some of the main targets were difficult to kill, but there was always a way to manage it – when surrounded by enemies, there was always a way to get to relative safety, ways of disabling or thinning the herd so that you could pick them off one by one. Sometimes it took multiple attempts, but with stealth, evasion, and the odd well-placed throwing knife, even difficult missions could be conquered. I was having fun, I was unlocking achievements, I was near to the end. Stealth, evasion, strategy – these were my watchwords as an assassin.

all pics nicked from gamespressure - click to see their detailed walkthroughs!

And then all of that went right out of the fucking window. Having taken it upon yourself to stop the big bad guy and bring peace to the land, you rush to confront him. Along the way, you get a couple of tedious fights in boxed-in areas, but even then you have a bit of leeway to play clever. So not much fun, but largely bearable. However, when you confront said villain, before you can fight him directly you’re surrounded by nine or so of his men, three of whom are rock hard templar bastards who can take a mighty chunk out of you with one blow. Oh, and you’re confined to a tight area with no environmental features to help you.

Yes, after a couple of week’s mastering stealth kills and acrobatics, you get stuck in a fucking hell for leather arena battle. At which point, if you’ve not got the head-to-head combat mechanics mastered to twitch perfection, you’re fucked. I was fucked, because I hadn’t learned to take whole armies on head first, because that wasn’t the bloody game I’d been playing. The game had actively taught me to be clever, and then decided to kick me repeatedly in the ballsack for doing so. It’s a nasty bait and switch – take the mechanics you’ve been learning, strip them away and force you to do something completely different. I failed, and failed, and failed for about an hour.

Then I gave up. Nasty trick to play, Assassin’s Creed. After all that enjoyment, I’m not sure whether I’ll ever master the skills necessary to get through that fight, which is a bloody shame and a pain in the arse. By all accounts I’m not the only person pissed off with the descent into gruelling hack and slash in the game’s last hour (hour! I must have been so close to the end, yet so far), so hopefully this’ll be fixed in the sequel. I’m still looking forward to Assassin’s Creed 2, to getting back to the running, jumping, exploring action in the new setting of a sumptuous renaissance Italy, but the way my experience of the first game has suddenly ended has left me a little wary, and fairly pissed off.

Damn it, Ubisoft. Why’d you have to do that to me?

Acheivement Unlocked: Unhealthy Obsession, 30G

Apologies for the relative silence since returning from my wedding. I do, theoretically, have more time on my hands, but a series of weekends away, and a desire to spend every waking hour in London I have squeezing value from my Gold Membership, have prevented that so far.

Oh, and I'm working on some other stuff that hasn't been announced yet.

Anyway, there's some stuff from me and pals on Shiny Shelf at the moment, including a countdown of all the previous Trek movies in the run up to the new prequels, and a rather rambling review of the Wolverine movie from myself.

So, by way of an excuse for new content, a few plugs for things that for various reasons Shiny Shelf is too biased to review independently. Yes, it's Corruption Corner:

• The Torchwood graphic novel, Rift War, turned up through the post the other day. Collecting most of the strips so far from the monthly magazine, sans long interviews with actors and all that other stuff that I'd have read excitedly if I was ten years younger and had the time, this constitutes probably the best T'wood story in any medium. Titan and the BBC licensing people are to be credited for setting distinctive artists like Paul Grist and D'Israeli loose on the kind of material usually lumbered with stiff, heavily photo-reffed work. A great value package, nicely put together by Titan.
  

• Colin Brockhurst, who edited the great fanzine Circus back in the day, has a new website. Well worth looking at for vintage 'zine articles and some witty images.
  

• Obverse Books is a new publisher, and its first book, Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus, has a story by my wife in it. So you should definitely pre-order that.
  

• I have a story in next year's Accent UK anthology, Predators. In the mean time, this year's anthology is Western. Please ask for it from your local comic shop, especially if that comic shop is in the US.

• The very talented Phil Purser-Hallard has weaponised Twitter as a means of delivering pithy fictions. You can find (and follow) them at http://twitter.com/trapphic.
  

I'm sure I've forgotten something, but that's enough for now.

Mark

Division of labour

As in any traditional marriage, my wife spent the evening blogging our wedding here and here, so I could devote time to more sensible manly pursuits, like playing Gears of War 2 and watching Highlander: The Source.

Mark

Bernice Summerfield: Venus Mantrap

Big Finish have now put up the cover art to mine and Lance Parkin's Bernice Summerfield play, Venus Mantrap:
Pretty awesome, huh? I love Adrian Salmon's stuff, and he absolutely nails the tone of the play. Cheers, Ade! Also, many thanks to Lance for buying the artwork for me and Mags as a wedding present. So cheers to both of those guys.

OK, that's enough insular backslapping, let's widen the circle to the other ten of you reading this with a little background, or more to the point a sales pitch.

I can't recall which came first, but there were two things I knew I wanted to do with a Bernice audio when I pitched to producer Eddie Robson: co-write the audio with Lance Parkin, with whom I'd first written for Bernice in Beige Planet Mars; and write a follow-up of sorts to that book. Venus Mantrap isn't a sequel to BPM, and you certainly don't need to have read the book to enjoy the audio, but it has a similar tone and one recurring character.

In terms of tone and setting, we're back in the solar system (Venus Mantrap was a title I came up with back in the late 90s, which has been searching for a project ever since), and it's still a future where people live and work as they always have done, but in a heightened, alien landscape with heightened, alien problems. Lance and I always liked that aspect of BPM and wanted to revisit it - that there was action and drama and things blowing up, but that the everyday life in the future was still going on, albeit disrupted. In BPM the characters worked in hotels and attended academic conferences - not everyone was a space marine or spy. In VM... well, that would be telling.

The choice of which character to bring back alongside Benny... well, there really wasn't a choice to make. Professor Scoblow, academic and love rival, tweedy space rodent and over-sexed self-mythologiser, wasn't even in the original plot outline of BPM, but I wrote her in for some minor expositional reason (I can't remember what, it was over a decade ago) as a throwaway and she ended up taking on a bigger and bigger role in the plot. So we wanted to bring her back, and force her and Bernice to work together on a common problem. I haven't heard an edit of the finished play yet, but having been at the recording I can honestly say that Jo Castleton just is Scoblow, and she and Lisa (Bernice) Bowerman spark off each other very nicely indeed.

(To slide into backslap mode again for a second, director John Ainsworth cast the whole play very well, and hit exactly the right tone in his direction.)

Anyway, the play isn't out for another four months so I won't go into any more detail at this stage as there'll no doubt be future posts on this in the months ahead. In the mean time, please pre-order the play on its own, or if you so wish subscribe to the whole season. (Highly recommended, as all three other plays are written by excellent writers, and the last of the season has the legendary Doug Bradley in it, and everyone loves Pinhead, don't they?)

A bargain at £9.99 (or an even more bargainous £35 for the four-play sub), and American listeners should benefit from the pound's parlous state against the dollar these days.

Anyway, I'm off to get married and go on honeymoon, and will return some time towards the end of the month. Not that with my recent posting rate the difference will be that notable.

Au Revoir,

Mark

OutRun Online Arcade for XBox 360 - a short review.

FUCKING AWESOME.

That is all.

M

Shiny Shelf, and a minor tease...

I wrote this thing about some British TV crime stuff. It took ages, so please read it. Plead plead, whimper whimper.

In other news: job stuff, wedding prep, Left4Dead, Peggle, whine whine, blah blah.

But who is this, on the horizon, in an image of a slightly different character of the same species ripped off the Happy Endings cover via postmodernbarney?:

RETURNS

31 AUGUST 2009

More on that soon...

Mark

Busy with wedding preparations

Less than a month to go to my wedding. Blogging will be intermittent (yes, even more so than it is already) 'til after the big day, indeed the honeymoon, as preparations get more hectic. Got a few writing things to discuss and plug, but have to work those posts around making arrangements for becoming Mr Yoko Halliday. It's all good fun.

Mark

House

This one looks great. Come on Five, get on with it:



Mark

Shiny Shelf latest

Updated 8 March 2009 - too lazy to write a new post, so I'm editing this one, here's a review of 'Jersey Gods' as well.

Some small Shiny Shelf updates: over the weekend I've knocked out an almost entirely pointless ramble about the editorial tone of '2000AD' and the 'Judge Dredd Megazine' (well, quite), and rather more pertinently a review of 'Midnight Meat Train', which comes out on DVD in the UK tomorrow.

Elsewhere on the site, keep an eye on Fifth, our miscellany section, for a weekly countdown to the release of the new 'Star Trek' movie.

And finally, apologies for the fact that archive searches aren't currently working, making access to old features impossible without a direct link. We're aware of the issue, but fixing this has been rolled into a more comprehensive site revision in future, so we may not be able to get around to it for a while.

Mark