In 2007, the hotly anticipated Star Wars video game The Force Unleashed debuted its epic trailer at that year’s E3 convention. This trailer’s most notable feature was the amazing and dramatic footage of an anonymous Force-wielding character bringing a huge Star Destroyer crashing to the ground using only the Force.
It definitely impressed me, and I made a mental note that I was going to play this game.
I recently had a chance to play a version of this game that included this mission (previously, I had played the Wii version, which was cool because you got to wave the wand like a lightsaber and things like Force Push actually required a push action, but the Star Destroyer battle was omitted), and found myself immediately in two minds about it.
While I don’t think this battle was the unmitigated disaster that so many people on the internet seem to have written it off as, it wasn’t the jaw-dropping teeth-clenching awe-inspiring life-defining battle it had been built up as. Here are a few reasons why.
Read More
Last week, a job ad appeared on SEEK for a Biotic-Powered Super-Soldier. It was, of course, an ad for the upcoming PC and XBox 360 game Mass Effect 2. After a bit of thought, and after perusing the Terms Of Use on the SEEK website, I find myself wondering whether it was right (or even legal) for this ad to have been posted.
No one could claim that advertising is a morally (or even legally) upright field. In fact, there’s no one who wouldn’t actually laugh at that suggestion. But this ad for Mass Effect 2 has gotten me thinking all over again about advertising, and how it really has infiltrated every aspect of our lives.
Read More
My manager wore a “Where’s My Jetpack?” T-shirt to work the other day, and that got me thinking. A lot, actually. About all of the stuff that could exist now, given current levels of technology, and all the stuff that might exist in the future for consumers to purchase and operate.
After some very careful pondering, I have reached the conclusion that despite frequent appearances in science fiction tales (including mine) a flying car or hovercar will probably never make it onto the market. Here are some reasons why.
Read More
A work in progress: a short dissertation on the personal appeal that science fiction and comic books have to me, and why they currently represent the best mode for my stories. Expect references to Worlds Apart: The Narratology of Science Fiction, the academic journal TEXT (in which I have been published), and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, among others.
The following thoughts have been collected by me over many years, and they have helped me to become a better reader and writer. I hope they have the same positive impact upon you … and I also hope that you choose not to view this page as the desperate self-serving defence of my own work that it clearly is.
Read More
