Classic SF with Andy Johnson

Another month bites the dust, and it was a busy one for me. Writing for Entertainium, I reviewed three games in September - a record. First up was Circus Electrique, an interesting mix of management and turn-based battles in steampunk London. I was much less impressed by No Place for Bravery, a Brazilian indie Soulslike which I found to be way wide of the mark. Conversely, I liked Sunday Gold far more than I expected to. My hatred of point-and-click adventure games is on the record, but this one won me over with its logical puzzles and the addition of its own turn-based combat.

This month’s update also features two older games. I caught up with Iron Harvest (2020), a noble effort to revitalise the ailing real-time strategy genre which meets with mixed results. And lastly for September, I finally played BioShock Infinite (2013), a full nine years after it came out. Irrational’s sequel is showing its age a bit, but it’s still easy to see why it received such a rapturous reception at the time.

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American author Patricia A. McKillip passed away in May 2022. This episode covers her breakthrough novel for adults, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (1974), which won the first World Fantasy Award. The book focuses on a wizard-woman who commands a group of magical animals and gradually becomes drawn into human conflicts. But how does McKillip's novel weave a spell of its own?

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Each month, I take a look back at the games I've played recently - be they new or old - and share my quick thoughts. In this instalment, I cover new releases Hard West II and Cursed to Golf, as well as Metro: Last Light (2013) and There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension (2020).

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Would you believe it, it's the 75th episode! Thank you to everyone who has listened to this odd, bitesize, sort-of-podcast and its highly inconsistent subject matter. 

Barry Malzberg's breakthrough science fiction novel Beyond Apollo (1972) was the first ever winner of the prestigious Campbell award. Not everyone liked the book's experimental approach, though.  Expect sex, madness, and a completely unreliable narrator in this brief tour of one of the most controversial SF books of the 1970s.

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Originally serialised in Analog magazine in 1975, Lifeboat is a collaborative SF novel by Harry Harrison and Gordon R. Dickson. Can the humans and aliens trapped together in a cramped interstellar escape module find a way to survive? And did Harrison and Dickson deliver an engaging story?

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Inflation is rising rapidly, plunging working people into poverty. A huge strike wave spreads from one sector to another. A major economy has pulled out of Europe, adding to the economic chaos, and a new disease spreads around the continent. The British government neglects these crises, and instead pursues a culture war.

This bleak description fits the UK in the summer of 2022, but it is also the backdrop to John Brunner’s 1973 novel The Stone That Never Came Down. This episode takes a look at this prescient novel of a declining, crisis-stricken UK.

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This latest instalment of my monthly series on the games I’ve played has four entries. It kicks off with Strange Brigade and Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair, two very different games which are united by their unmistakable Britishness, sense of humour, and love of alliteration. Next up I have a few words about the fairly obscure action RPG Of Orcs and Men, made across the Channel in France. If you’ve enjoyed the fantasy stealth games in the Styx series, then you may enjoy the game that first introduced that gregarious goblin.

Finally for July, I revisited an indie masterpiece which has just been given a free and impressive overhaul. Tactics classic Into the Breach has been picked up by Netflix, who are making it available to their subscribers. To celebrate, Subset Games have upgraded all versions of the game to the even more excellent Advanced Edition. This gratis update adds a ton of new features, and makes one of the best indie games ever somehow even more perfect.

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Normal human lives are in short supply in The Time Dweller. Originally published in 1969, this collection is one of the earliest efforts to gather together some of Michael Moorcock’s shorter stories. Of the nine entries in this volume, seven were originally published in New Worlds, one of the leading British SF magazines. It might not have been too difficult to get them published, because at the time the editor was one... Michael Moorcock.

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Today, developers Bungie are known for the blockbuster Halo series and more recently, for the Destiny games. And while the studio changed first-person shooters forever, first on the Mac and then on consoles, none of their later successes would have been possible without their earlier work in a different genre altogether. It was the success of pioneering real-time tactics game Myth: The Fallen Lords which, in part, prompted Microsoft to purchase Bungie and to help propel Halo to industry-shaking success in 2001.

Myth was ahead of its time. Its 3D environments were some of the first in the genre and Bungie’s work helped to forge a new style of gameplay. They cut away the base building, resource management, and large unit counts that defined Command & Conquer (1995) and Total Annihilation (1997). Myth isn’t a strategy title at all - but part of the first wave of real-time tactics games. It does more than make players think; it makes them feel. Thanks a unique union of writing and gameplay, each of Myth’s missions inspires feelings of desperation, terror, relief and - hopefully - triumph. 25 years later, it’s the emotional impact of Myth which makes it special to this day.

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There’s not much need for preamble this month - I had a busy June, but still managed to play quite a few games. They were mostly on the older side; in fact the only 2022 release I played during June was a demo, and I rarely play those.

I revisited two classics from my youth which still stand up remarkably well, in the form of gloomy tactics game Myth: The Fallen Lords (1997) and the forgotten Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb (2003). I continued my increasingly familiar ramble through the Halo series with the fairly tiresome spinoff Halo 3: ODST (2009), and that demo I mentioned was for the upcoming Agent 64: Spies Never Die. The real standout for me, though, was definitely Dragon’s Dogma. Inspired by the long-awaited announcement of a sequel, I finally picked up Hideaki Itsuno’s cult favourite action RPG and have been revelling in its idiosyncratic charms.

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