Game Review: The Legend of Zelda

Release Date: 15 November 1987
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)

In preparation for the upcoming release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild I decided it was time to direct my nascent love of this franchise to its beginnings and see how far we’ve managed to come in 30 years. Since I was one of the fortunate few who was able to secure an NES Mini when it launched I decided to rock it old school with a controller far too small for adult hands, printed out maps of Hyrule, and a handy guide to see me through this adventure.

Was my day in Hyrule well spent? Not really, but it was insightful nevertheless.

Can’t have a review of this game without this image somewhere.

The Plot

Fun thing about this game – it tells you nothing. This wouldn’t have been a problem back in the day when the game cartridge came with all manner of accompaniments, including a story breakdown, but in 2017 it requires a little navigation of Wikipedia to understand your motivation.

In a timeline that would later follow the Hero of Time’s defeat in Ocarina of Time Ganon has invaded Hyrule and stolen the Triforce of Power. Princess Zelda, hoping to stop Ganon from gaining too much power, chooses to split the Triforce of Wisdom into eight fragments and hide them in temples throughout the kingdom before she’s eventually kidnapped (as all princesses back in the day were). Before being spirited away she did manage to instruct her nursemaid to find someone courageous enough to retrieve the eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom, defeat Ganon, and rescue Hyrule from certain doom – and so Link’s adventure begins.

This is an awful lot of map.

The Gameplay

This game is a bizarre combination of infuriating difficulty and mind-boggling simplicity.

Much like with the plot the game gives you nothing when it comes to telling you how to actually play it. Unlike later games which tend to point you in the right direction and arm you with a variety of assistants to give you a hint when you get a bit stuck, the original Legend of Zelda is entirely non-linear and completely unhelpful. Its exploration elements hark back to the days of playground discussions to find out what your friends had discovered and to trade in secrets found. There are no environmental clues to tell you where hidden rooms might be, nothing to tell you what the item you just found actually does, and dungeons aren’t so much areas with elaborate puzzles that need solving as they are mazes of similar-looking rooms that involve little more than key-finding expeditions. I’m nearly 30-years-old now, so it would be a little creepy for me to hop into a playground full of young children to discuss a game most probably haven’t even heard of, so I resorted to a guide by the good people over at Zelda Dungeon. It was that or spend days walking aimlessly through this 8-bit Hyrule without a clue about what I should be doing.

In contrast to this ‘you need to get this item but we’re not going to tell you where it is or what it does but you’ll die very quickly if you don’t have it’ approach to exploration, combat is relatively simple and few enemies provide any real challenge. Those that do tend to veer off to the decidedly difficult side of the spectrum, but other than that all it takes are one or two hits at something and you’re in the clear. This is particularly true of dungeon bosses, and if you know what you’re doing it often takes more time to walk from one end of a room to the other than it takes to defeat them. It can be rather anti-climatic in a way, given how tricky it can be to actually find the boss, but I guess allowances must be made.

Would have been useful to find this much earlier on than I actually did.

The Feelings

Here’s the thing – on the one hand it feels unfair to judge a game older than I am by the standards of modern gaming, but on the other hand you need to decide if the game is worth playing in 2017.

The Legend of Zelda is an interesting game to play because you can see all the rudimentary bits of what would later become franchise staples. If you know what you’re doing (or have a guide like I did) it’s also quite a short game – I finished it in one sitting that lasted around 5 hours, so it’s useful if you feel like saving Hyrule but don’t have a ton of time to spare. That being said I can’t say that it was a particularly fun game to play. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just that it’s a product of a different time and as a result didn’t offer up anything challenging since discovering things is more down to dumb luck and candle-driven pyromania than to clever deduction.

But at least I can say that I have played it, ever desperate as I am to avoid accusations of being a filthy casual.

My Final Rating: 5 / 10
Buy an NES Classic Edition at Amazon.com

 

Book Review: Dark Eden

Author: Chris Beckett
Genre: Science Fiction
Published: 2012

In my home holiday time is reading time, a chance to catch up on the growing digital pile of reading material that I just kept on buying throughout the year like I had all the time in the world for leisurely pursuits. Having been blown away by Adrian Tchaikovksy’s Children of Time I decided to see if anything else on the list of Arthur C. Clarke Award winners grabbed my attention, and Dark Eden seemed like a reasonably safe bet.

And so I lost myself in another culture on a different planet for the two days that I only put this book down to sleep and make the occasional snack.

The Plot

160 years ago Angela and Tommy found themselves stuck on Eden, a sunless rogue planet, after their companions Mehmet, Michael, and Dixon attempted to make their way back to a damaged spaceship and then to Earth to call for help. But help has been very slow in arriving.

In the 160 years that have passed Angela and Tommy’s 532 descendants have developed a matriarchal society (Family) whose sole purpose is to stay close to the initial landing site where Angela and Tommy landed on Eden and to “maintain the ways of Earth” so that when help arrives from the home world they will be deserving of rescue and a place on a planet where light streams down from the sky.

John Redlantern, who recently entered his teenage years, doesn’t agree with the highly conservative teachings of Family, and knows that if it continues to grow at its current rate it will rapidly outgrow the valley it calls home and deplete its already limited food source. By going against all the wisdom and teachings handed down he will eventually break Family and commit atrocities never before seen on Eden, and in doing so hopefully ensure the survival of humans on this dark little planet.

The Writing Style

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of everything there is one issue that you should consider if you’re thinking of picking this book up, and one which many Amazon reviewers have taken exception to – the language spoken on Eden. The way in which the various characters speak is relatively unsophisticated, and admittedly takes a bit of getting used to in the first few chapters. The reason for this is that Eden was settled by two adults and their later offspring – what you essentially have is a mixed dialect based on the speech patterns and sayings of Londoners (from Angela) and Brooklynites (from Tommy) and heavily influenced by baby-speak, which in turn is being used to describe an alien world. While it takes a bit of getting used to it’s (1) entirely worthwhile because the story is amazing, and (2) lends far greater understanding later on to the way in which the characters see their world.

What I truly enjoyed about Beckett’s writing is just how simultaneously amazing and horrible Eden is. Nearly all life on the planet is bio-luminescent, including its trees, which is how humans are able to see despite the lack of a star, and most of the trees are geothermal, which keeps the planet warm enough for habitation. That covers a lot of the scientific ground, but the thought of living life in perpetual night with absolutely no chance of a sun ever rising is absolutely terrifying. Equally horrifying is the fact that all the animals on Eden have been named after an Earth equivalent. For example, leopards are known to hunt on the periphery of the area inhabited by Family – except these leopards are six-legged, furless creatures with bio-luminescent stripes, feelers around their mouths, and flat, black, unblinking eyes; the people of Eden may not know the difference, but the reader sure as hell does.

The culture and people are also incredibly well described, again in a way that is a wonder and truly horrifying. If nothing else 160 years of non-stop inbreeding has taken its toll, and its reasonably common to find adults with the mental capacity of infants. Equally problematic are genetic issues inherited from Tommy and Angela, coupled with the fact that nutrition on Eden is in short supply, resulting in numerous children being born with cleft lips and palates (‘Batfaces’) and club feet (‘Claw Feet’). Again, the people of Eden know no different, and have formed a societal hierarchy based on limited knowledge that includes and makes provision for all the members of Family while simultaneously trying to reduce the number of children born with such limitations, but for the reader it’s difficult since we understand that inbreeding is dangerous (and have enough options on Earth to avoid it), and that medical issues like a cleft lip can be easily treated.

The Feelings

What really struck me while reading Dark Eden was this sense of people being completely out-of-place. While Eden may be technically habitable it’s a world that was never meant to accommodate creatures like humans – the reader knows that, and the people of Eden know that as well. But coupled with this is the conflict that forms the crux of the entire story – do you stay in one place and hope that things will magically get better, or do you strike out and make the best of a bad situation?

What really helped in creating this sense of isolation and being out-of-place is the fact that, unlike almost all other books in this genre, Tommy and Angela were not scientists. Eden wasn’t intentionally colonised by highly skilled individuals who would know how to adapt their environment to be more suitable for human habitation – Tommy was some kind of thief and Angela was a police officer, so they have no scientific knowledge to pass onto their children and brought nothing with them to make life on Eden any easier. For example, the people of Eden have a rudimentary idea of what electricity is, but have no idea where it comes from or how to generate it because Tommy and Angela, much like most people, would have known how to use it, not how to make it. This creates a culture beholden to ideals of Earth without actually knowing exactly what those ideals are, let alone how to accomplish them.

By the author’s own admittance you could probably rip many a hole through the probability of this book, but in reality Dark Eden is more a sociological adventure than one based on hard science fiction, and I look forward to reading its sequels and seeing where this world takes me.

My Final Rating: 8 / 10
Buy Dark Eden at Amazon.com

 

Book Review: Children of Time

Author: Adrian Tchaikovksy
Genre: Science Fiction
Published: 2015

To be honest, I didn’t really know what to expect going into this book – I’d never heard of Adrian Tchaikovsky and I’m not one to buy something just because it won an award (in this case, the 30th Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel). All I had to go one was a blurb that it turns out I’d misread, and the words “Like a Stephen Baxter novel…” under one of its Amazon reviews.

But I’m glad I misread the blurb – what I thought I was going to be reading sounded interesting, but what it landed up being was even better. Children of Time is a masterclass of science fiction writing that ranks, in my humble opinion, with some of the best classics of the genre and one that I hope will continue to be read by people for many years to come.

The Plot

Mankind stood on the verge of becoming an almost god-like species with the technology to turn lifeless pieces of rock into fully habitable worlds. One of these, known throughout the story only as ‘the green planet’, is the site of Dr Avrana Kern’s experiment. Dr Kern will populate the now-terraformed planet with primates and release a cultured nanovirus into the planet’s atmosphere. The nanovirus will go to work on the primates and help their evolution along and hopefully accomplish in millennia what would take nature millions of years to get right until such time as the planet is populated by primates with human-equivalent intelligence.

But mankind is a fickle species. A group under the banner of Non Ultra Natura (‘Not Greater Than Nature’) doesn’t believe that we should play god and try to bring up our evolutionary lessers to our level. They sabotage the station Dr Kern is working on (and through a massive EMP wipeout most of human technology throughout the galaxy), thinking that they can stop this unholy experiment from happening. They get it half right at least.

The primates are sadly jettisoned off away from the planet to a very lonely death, but the nanovirus container does manage to enter the green planet’s atmosphere. Specifically designed to not target other vertebrates (the idea being that the monkeys shouldn’t have any competition as they climb the evolutionary ladder) it instead goes to work on what else it can find – insects. The results of this are a mixed bag with the exception of one particular species – portia labiata, a type of jumping spider, who slowly but surely begin to become self-aware and intelligent.

The novel then follows, over a period of several thousand years, the growth and development of spider society from its humble beginnings as nomadic hunters to fully developed cities of scientific innovation, with all the ups and downs that a nascent civilisation and intelligence have to offer. This society will eventually come face to face with its creators in the form of the Gilgamesh, an ark ship that fled a dying and toxic Earth with the last remnants of humanity several thousand years after the Non Ultra Natura-led war in the hopes of finding a new home on the green planet. Understandably, they may not be that wild about the idea of sharing their new home with giant insects.

The Writing Style

Adrian Tchaikovksy set himself no small task when he took to writing this novel and the two enormously different viewpoints that needed to be covered – those of the spiders, and those of the humans.

For the spiders the tricky part is that you’re usually not going to spend more than a chapter with any specific set of characters given the vast amount of time that’s covered in the book’s 600-or-so pages. Instead each spider-centric chapter deals with a specific point in this society’s growth focusing on key individuals who are dealing with the problems of their particular age. Continuity for the reader in these chapters comes in two forms, firstly the main spider characters tend to share names (Portia, Bianca, Viola and Fabian being the most common), and the second comes in what is known as Understandings. An Understanding is knowledge hard-coded to a spider’s genetic structure by the nanovirus, meaning that while you may be dealing with a spider many generations removed from those in the previous chapter, they have the memories of their long-dead ancestors, so one Portia tends to be able to recall everything that previous Portias have done, helping to keep the story nice and tidy.

For the humans it’s a rather different story, because their society isn’t going anywhere. Trapped on the Gilgamesh for thousands of years, most of mankind will spend the duration of their journey in long stages of stasis, being awoken only when their particular skills are needed. This results in a disjointed sense of time where someone can feel that something happened only recently, when it fact it took place centuries ago. In comparison to the spiders rapid evolutionary climb and the vibrancy of their culture, mankind by contrast is stuck in a highly artificial environment in permanent limbo until they can find a home, clinging desperately to the feats that were achieved during the terraforming days but in the full knowledge that they’ll never be able to achieve it.

Aside from these very specific characterisations of the two civilisations, the book is generally well-written and keeps the story moving along at a reasonable pace. As with most novels of this genre the story is rather dense, but this one has forgone the usual surplus of technical language in favour of a more sociological focus on the humans and the spiders, which overall makes for a far easier read than what you would find in your standard hard science fiction novel.

The Feelings

I can’t think of a better way to describe how much I enjoyed this book other than to say that I am one of the most severely arachnophobic people you are likely to meet, and I was rooting for those spiders. Many a time were the words “Come on Portia, I believe in you!” uttered in my home.

It’s also the sort of book that leaves you in a position where you don’t really know how to feel – on the one hand you don’t want the humans to arrive on the green planet, knowing full well our propensity for destruction and feeling that perhaps our time has passed. On the other, as the species that made all of this possible and knowing our innate capability for good when we set our minds on the right path, you also see the necessity of finding the species a new home, particularly when the destruction of the Earth wasn’t the result of this particular generation’s faults.

My Final Rating: 10/10
Buy Children of Time at Amazon.com

 

Movie Review: The Rezort

Released: 2015
Genre: Horror
IMDB Rating: 5.1 / 10

Those people who know me will testify to just how much of a wild child I am – staying up till 11 on a work night, playing music with swear words in them when an innocent child with ears like a bat might be within hearing distance, wearing mismatched socks and not giving a damn. I’m sure you get the picture. So my epic badassness decided it wanted to live on the edge, and nothing gets the adrenaline pumping quite like a 5.1 IMDB rating – it really could go either way. Will this be one of those hidden gems that you recommend to friends, or will it just be one of those hit and miss movies that bores you a little but you committed so you watch it to the end anyway?

Usually with this sort of thing you need to waste a good 40 minutes before you find out if you made a bad choice or not, but as soon as I heard British accents I knew we were going to be OK.

Ooh gurl, this my jam!

The Plot

10 years ago the world was ravaged by a virus that turned the dead into voracious killing machines. Unlike other zombie apocalypses where mankind just kinda lies down and takes it a British stiff upper lip led the world as it fought back and contained the outbreak, and now the world is more or less zombie free and back on its feet.

The only place that still has zombies in abundance is the Rezort, a holiday destination on an island off the coast of North Africa where those survivors who need to let off some steam can put the undead back in their graves in relative safety. Melanie thinks that this is just what she needs – still haunted by the war against the undead and the loss of her father, perhaps blowing some human corpses to smithereens will help give her some closure.

Of course there are still wackos in the world, and some believe that just because something’s a reanimated corpse with a desire for human flesh and the capability to bring about our complete and utter annihilation doesn’t mean it doesn’t have rights, so rightly or wrongly they aren’t the greatest fans of the Rezort. When one of them manages to hack into the Rezort’s servers and deactivate all of the security on the island all of the tourists must once again fight for their lives – not just against the zombies, but also against the Brimstone Protocol, which will see the island incinerated to stop a further outbreak in just a few hours.

Melanie’s gonna need to get a whole lotta closure if she’s gonna make it off the island.

Bitch please, I don’t have time for you to shoot me.

The Visual

Ever since The Walking Dead revitalised the genre zombie movies have become a dime a dozen, and more often than not get it very wrong since surprisingly few seem to understand that your zombie movie lives or dies on how good your zombies look and behave. Thankfully the good people behind The Rezort knew what they were doing, and the zombies are nicely put together and behave in a suitably menacing manner. The movie also goes for the ‘the fresher they are, the more they can move’ approach, which means that you only really need to make the older zombies look bedraggled while contact lenses and some fake blood will suffice for the newer ones without detracting from the overall scare factor.

Also, if they ever salvage the island from the Brimstone Protocol, I want to buy it. I imagine the property price will be quite low and the scenery is rather majestic.

Nothing compares to a child’s smile.

The Feelings

Satisfaction.

The Rezort is never going to be considered a classic, but what I liked most about it was its fresh approach to the zombie apocalypse – very rarely in these movies does mankind ever win the battle, let alone turn it into a thriving business opportunity. I can see something like this happening just as much as I can imagine there being zombie rights activists in the event of an outbreak.

In the midst of the general mayhem and panic the movie also manages to throw in some surprisingly good social commentary, which I commend since this is what drove a lot of zombie films, particularly Romero’s, in their nascent years. What it deals with is very timely given a number of disasters currently besetting the world without making the movie become preachy, which isn’t always the easiest balance to strike.

I vote that we just hand the zombie genre in its entirety over to the Brits to handle from here – when they do it, they just do it right.

My Final Rating: 7 / 10
Buy The Rezort at Amazon.com

TRAILER

 

Movie Review: 1313: Giant Killer Bees!

Released: 2011
Genre: Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 2.9 / 10

You know what, I’m not gonna rip this movie a new one right off the bat. I knew what I was getting myself into when I started watching it – I did review 1313: Cougar Cult back in the day, after all. Having seen Cougar Cult I knew that there wouldn’t be enough budget to pull off special effects (because all of the money goes into young men pulling off their clothes instead), but a little part of me wanted to see how they were going to (try and) pull off giant killer bees. Well, the long and short of it is they couldn’t, and they didn’t.

Me every second of this movie.

The Plot

Somewhere in the Caribbean there is a mystical research facility that is an abandoned hospital for exterior shots and someone’s house for interior shots. Here, in a high-tech breakfast nook/laboratory, research involving dipping bees into liquid is ongoing. But what research could you possibly be doing that involves dipping bees in liquid, I hear you ask? I can’t believe you couldn’t figure it out – they’re trying to make a more hardy bee that won’t die off simply because humans insist on killing the planet! These bees will be able to stand up to anything – pollutants, harsh weather, shirtless men everywhere, you name it.

Unfortunately Professor Generic wants results faster than the facility’s three-man team who never do any actual work can manage, so he sends in Too-Tight Wifebeater to spike the bee’s liquid with some other liquid. On the plus side this does make the bees more robust, but on the down side it also turns them into giant angry zombie werewolf vampire bees. These new and more deadly bees have a craving for man flesh, and upon stinging the more rugged and virile specimens these very same men become mindless drones so quickly that it blows all their clothes off.

The team must obviously do all it can to stop the bees from spreading from the island (?) and infecting other bees, and to do this they either lay around on beds in nothing but their underwear feeling themselves up, or in the shower feeling themselves up and never actually using soap and I fucking give up trying to make sense of what the hell was happening here.

The Walking “we weren’t hot enough to get into actual porn” Dead

The Visuals

Visuals? What visuals?! Let’s keep this nice and simple:

• If you want to watch an actual sci-fi thriller, don’t watch this. It’s not at all thrilling and there’s no actual sci-fi to it.
• If you want to watch something that’s homoerotic, don’t watch this. It contains neither homos or anything erotic.
• If you want to watch good-looking men running around in their underwear, don’t watch this. Rather just watch porn.
• If you want to watch something with a strong environmental message, don’t watch this. For all the prattling on about saving the environment I’m fairly sure you could’ve drained the Hoover Dam for all the unnecessary showering that was going on.

Also don’t watch this because watching this is physically very difficult since it has a very strange colour balance and everything looks like the cameraman got bacon grease on the lens and couldn’t be bothered to wash it off.

Have to have the occasional bee to ground the movie in its title.

The Feelings

Pulsating rage.

Again, perhaps I’m not really in a position to be angry – I should’ve known better about what I was doing to myself, or avoided watching the movie altogether. But I’m angry anyway!

There really is no point to this film – its plot is flimsy, the acting is horrific, the production values are non-existent, and for the one sad attempt at a sex scene you could’ve cut the sexual tension with a dessert spoon. The action, for lack of a better term, is also very short-lived – 1313: Giant Killer Bees! is only about 80 minutes long, but at least 40 minutes of that is taken up by men feeling themselves up or walking around a deserted castle (for reasons that well and truly escaped me).

Don’t ever watch this – not ever.

My Final Rating: 1 / 10
Buy 1313: Giant Killer Bees! at Amazon.com

TRAILER

 

Movie Review: Urotsukidōji V: The Final Chapter

Released: 1996
Genre: Anime / Horror
IMDB Rating: 6.1 / 10

For a while there I thought this day would never come. After more than a year of subjecting myself to a never-ending barrage of penis tornadoes, Nazi death rape machines, incest-not-incest, and Orgies By Infants™, I’m finally free! I have borne witness to things that no person, Japanese or otherwise, should to be subjected to (the inhuman things that Russian women were offering to do for and to me while I was trying to find subtitles alone would make your hair stand on end). With the closing credits to Urotsukidōji V: The Final Chapter I rid myself of this evil and draw to an end this protracted attack on my psyche!

Giving birth is a beautiful miracle.

The Plot

Unlike the other installments in this franchise, which were complete if nonsensical, part 5 was scrapped before it was finished, so what we have here is the beginning of a story without an end, and it’s got some major retconning it wants to do in its 50 or so minutes of runtime.

Remember the Overfiend from all the previous installments? Wrong! That wasn’t the Overfiend. That was a false Overfiend sent from the Demon Realm to fool us into something something something. In order to make itself more powerful it tried to steal the Lord of Chaos’ power by sexing it out of her. Himi (the Lord of Chaos) isn’t one to be out-sexed, however, and launches a counter sex attack and steals all of his power instead. The false Overfiend vanquished and its powers slowly dripping down Himi’s thigh the Lord of Chaos vanishes, never to bog down the new story line again.

So where does that leave us? Somehow through a series of explanations that really didn’t make any sense Amano (our always lovely anti-hero) finds himself staring out at the same evening from the end of the first installment: Nagumo, in the form of the Destroyer Demon, is busy destroying the world, Akemi’s still pregnant with the Overfiend, and demons are running around raping and killing everything in sight. BUT! while it is still the exact same evening, 100 years have also passed, and the true Overfiend is ready to be born.

I don’t remember buying these…

In a manner truly becoming of the Urotsukidōji series the Overfiend isn’t so much born as it is orgasmed out of Akemi in a truly bizarre and green-tinged birthing/self-pleasure scene. Her duties fulfilled Amano moves to save Akemi and return her to a normal life (in a world that’s being blown to pieces), but the Overfiend isn’t done with any of them yet.

The true Overfiend has grown tired of the Humans, Beasts, and Demons, and has decided to pit these three against one another until they bring about their own mutually assured extinction. In their place the Overfiend wants to leave his new race: the Messengers of Imagination. This race is neither male nor female but at the same time is both. What I mean by this is that they have masculine and feminine features (a very feminine face but a flat masculine chest, for example) and no demonstrable genitalia. No demonstrable genitalia, that is, unless they want to have sex, in which case they can grow whatever they want and swap between the two at will. They also speak to one another by making a noise that sounds like a very sexy and seductive pigeon.

Naturally Amano isn’t about to just hand over the collapsing world to these oddly ravishing creatures in their skin-tight pink outfits who keep falling from the sky out of the Overfiend’s vagina spaceship. The war to save the three warring races from the new genocidal race is on (and we’re never going to find out how it ends)!

I always knew our end would come in the form of pink spandex.

The Visuals

The whole thing harks back to the first installment in terms of its graphic depiction of violence and general sexual depravity, so a lot of whether you’re going to enjoy The Final Chapter hinges on whether or not you enjoyed where the story began.

What does become an issue is that not only was the story left unfinished, this actual episode was unfinished as well. As a result the animation is rather choppy, with in-between frames missing which leaves the action happening on-screen jumping around a little bit. It also relies a fair bit on re-using scenes from previous installments (again, primarily the first one) to pad out its runtime. Given that the style shifted and changed slightly over the years, added to the unpolished veneer of its own animation, what you’re left with can, at times, be a somewhat jarring backwards and forwards in terms of quality.

We call this position ‘the tantric apocalypse’.

The Feelings

Oddly disappointed.

Over the course of the depravity that is Urotsukidōji I have come, the unnerving father animatronic-daughter sex scene aside, to appreciate this series for what it is. This story, and particularly the new race of beings it introduced, had a lot of potential. Squelchy potential, mind you, but potential none the less. For the first time I was actually quite interested to see where they wanted to go with the story, and it seems a tad bit unfair that by the time I eventually get into what I’m watching they decide that they don’t want to do anything with it anymore. I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles sometimes, and believe me, many cookies have crumbled over the course of this franchise.

So, to reiterate: it’s done! It’s finally done! Never again will I be subjected to a… what’s that?… I’m sorry, I must have misheard you. I could’ve sworn that you… The New Saga?! YOU HAVE TO BE FUCKING KIDD… We’ll be right back.

My Final Rating: 5 / 10

 

Book Review: Be a Dear and Give My Tight, Virgin Hole a Hard, Sloppy Pounding

Author: The Honourable Sir Edmund Quimlove
Genre: Erotica
Published: 2015

“Dare he bury his musket betwixt the nether lips of such an innocent girl…”

You know, I like it when people (and books) are upfront with me: if you’re gonna be a trashy piece of filth, just tell me that. I’ll respect you all the more for it. So when I happened upon Be a Dear and Give My Tight, Virgin Hole a Hard, Sloppy Pounding I imagined I’d come across just that: a little toilet tissue that was open about wanting to get down and nasty for 20 pages or so.

But alas, it wasn’t to be. Who would’ve thought that someone as honourable as Sir Edmund Quimlove would have dared to lead his audience astray? There I was, reluctantly anticipating tight virgins and sloppy poundings, but what did I get instead? Some very odd and poorly thought out roleplay. For shame Sir Quimlove, for shame.

The Plot

Jonathan and Tabitha Pemberton are an ever so loving couple living an ever so delightful life and who speak in an ever so confusing old-timey rural British accent. While peacefully reclining after a delightful supper but finding the larder entirely devoid of cherry pie for dessert the two decide that this would be a most opportune time to make the beast with two backs.

But what to do? Having recently attempted anal and faced with the reality that Tabitha only has so many orifices in which to stuff things the two need to decide on some other way of spicing up their after dinner carnal treat. Thankfully Tabitha is as smart as she is whorish and she comes up with a most titillating idea (that she probably read about in Ye Olde Cosmo): roleplay. She’ll play the virgin recently come of age whose body pulses with the need for sexual release whenever her father pops off to market, and Jonathan will be a door-to-door lion tamer.

With such a hungry and ferocious kitty as Tabitha’s, will Jonathan’s expert (and somewhat unorthodox) lion taming skills quell the fire in the savage beast? Carry on dear reader, and be left completely unshocked and unaroused!

The Writing Style

You would think that the idea of a door-to-door lion tamer would be the most bizarre thing you’d come across in a work such as this, but Sir Quimlove has a few more tricks up his sleeve.

To start with the positives, from a technical point of view there isn’t anything wrong with the way Be a Dear… (I’m not writing that title out over and over) is written, with impeccable grammar and a varied vocabulary throughout. The issue for me was in the way that the characters’ copious dialogue was written.

Jonathan and Tabitha, when not in an aroused state, speak in a very prim and proper Victorian manner becoming of a young couple from decent backgrounds who take picnics by the river bank. When aroused, however, Tabitha’s regular speech pattern becomes interspersed with a vocabulary more becoming of an aging Eastern bloc porn star with tattooed-on makeup who isn’t afraid to finger herself while wearing false nails. For example:

“It hardly seems proper to have relations with a girl whose name I don’t even know.’
“Call me your fucking slut, or perhaps your filthy whore, or even your pretty, little cocksucker.“

Not convinced? How about this one:

“Will you coat my limber, young body in gallons of your sloppy cum until my sweet, innocent face is dripping with the liquid remnants of our torrid relations?”

Perhaps this would all make a bit more sense if I’d known that this was the second book in a series before I read it, but I stand by the fact that trying to be a posh Victorian and a 40-something prostitute named Olga just doesn’t work. Either go all out and be filthy right the way through, or (especially for comedic effect) have really rough sex being described by really polite country folk. Just don’t try and do both – it’s more jarring than what was happening to Tabitha’s poor kitty.

The Feelings

Confused, briefly laughing, and then bored.

For all the big promises in this book’s title and the rather bizarre approach it takes to character portrayal, ultimately it’s completely lacking in anything vaguely erotic. Maybe I’m just boring in bed, but my understanding of roleplay is that it’s meant to allow you to play out some kind of fantasy with your significant other. If this is the case, if someone came to me saying that they were a door-to-door lion tamer while trying to be all sensual and whatnot I think I’d collapse on the floor laughing and sexy time would be over well before it ever started. Of course we at A World of Weird don’t advocate judging anyone based on their sexual proclivities, so if you wanna get it on with a door-to-door lion tamer then you let your freak flag fly high!

Once you put the odd choice of situation to the side all you’re left with is the usual slopping orifices, raging erections, vicious poundings and unnatural quantities of semen. Sir Quimlove, while I commend you for managing to write something that is both peculiar and mundane it simply isn’t enough to earn a recommendation from my side.

My Final Rating: 3 / 10
Buy Be a Dear and Give My Tight, Virgin Hole a Hard, Sloppy Pounding at Amazon.com

 

Book Review: Chapter Five and the Axe-Wielding Maniac

Author: Marie Sexton
Genre: Romance / Comedy
Published: 2014

“Too bad nobody had given me advance warning about the axe-wielding maniac. I might have made myself a bit more presentable.”

It’s an incredibly rare thing, but every now and then you land up downloading something from Amazon that you are absolutely convinced will be rubbish but that somehow turns out to be a decent read. I wouldn’t have thought Chapter Five and the Axe-Wielding Maniac would be such a find – it’s only 38 pages long, so I was expecting the usual poorly written pseudo-porno setup between an author and a maniac on the run, and if there was an unnecessary amount of thrusting then so be it. What I had instead was a quick little read that was both humorous and touching enough to earn a recommendation.

The Plot

Josh is a 42-year-old author who’s having a bit of a rough time in life. His partner of many years has recently left him and he’s sequestered himself at the family cabin in a vain attempt to get over his writer’s block. None of this is helped when the rather excitable and bouncy (and considerably younger) Rad Fox rocks up on his doorstep with a crowbar and pickaxe asking to dig up the floor in Josh’s lounge. Josh is a sensible being and decides that this is a decidedly unsafe and weird request, and bids Rad to be on his way.

But Rad’s not without his tricks, and knows the way into a man’s heart and lounge – with a good coconut chicken curry. Through the course of the evening’s conversation it comes out that the request to dig up the lounge isn’t as bizarre as it originally sounded – turns out that way back in the day Rad’s grandfather and Josh’s great-uncle were a couple in a far less forgiving time, and mementos of their relationship are buried somewhere under the lounge.

What follows is a surprisingly touching story of lost love, adventure, and sexual re-awakenings.

The Writing Style

Praise be to Mother Isis, not a run-on sentence in sight!

Given that this is a very short read I commend Marie Sexton for being able to construct a fully coherent story with well-realised characters. Both Josh and Rad have their own distinct personalities with just enough back story for them to make sense. There are moments of genuine humour as the encounter between the two is set up in a very clichéd manner only to have (particularly) Josh react in very real and lucid ways. There are also moments that are genuinely heartfelt, and again points must go to the author for being able to squeeze this into a very short amount of space.

What I also liked is the way the two sexual encounters were dealt with. There’s nary a raging cock nor flying bodily fluid to be found, for which I am eternally grateful. More people need to learn from Ms Sexton’s example that balls-to-the-wall vulgarity does not necessarily equate to erotic or romantic writing. The sex itself isn’t really described beyond the fact that it happened, with the first time being a lusty and animalistic affair while the second time is a more tender and slow approach, which makes complete sense in the context of the story.

The Feelings

Very pleasantly surprised.

I’m not very big into romance stories, so you need to tickle something in me to get my attention. Unlike most of what I read for this blog, which seem to want to tickle my prostate with a rusty rake, Chapter Five and the Axe-Wielding Maniac goes for the light and fuzzy with just the right amount of situational comedy to elicit a few laughs and the occasional raised eyebrow. In amongst all this it also manages to touch on shifting societal values, issues of perception when it comes to aging, and a very realistic approach to an adventurous new relationship.

Props also to Marie Sexton for being realistic enough to admit that there is a very real danger of concussion when you have sex up against a solid fireplace.

My Final Rating: 6 / 10
Buy Chapter Five and the Axe-Wielding Maniac at Amazon.com

 

Movie Review: Ice Sharks

Released: 2016
Genre: Action / Sci-Fi
IMDB Rating: 3.6 / 10

Just after I reviewed the decidedly average Mega Shark VS Kolossus a little something from one of its lead actors popped up in my Twitter notifications:

Not wanting this to be another Kacey Zen-type incident I decided that there was only one rational thing I could do: become the President and Chief Financial Officer of the Unofficial Edward DeRuiter fan club. It made sense – he tends to be in movies I enjoy watching and he had that oddly buff office worker vibe going on. And so it was decided that I would watch any movie that Mr DeRuiter had a starring role in after the aforementioned Mega Shark VS Kolossus, and the fan club kicked off its run with Ice Sharks.

Once they reach a specific age marine bases swim off to start families of their own.

The Plot

On at undisclosed island somewhere around Greenland at an unnamed facility doing unspecified but very wide-reaching research things are about to get a little hairy. According to the local Scottish Indian Inuit people are going missing on the ice, and Tracy and David (played by the ever-charming DeRuiter) decide to head out and see whether the polar bears are snacking on things they shouldn’t. It all goes a bit pear-shaped when it becomes apparent that several creatures lying in bits and pieces on the ice have been attacked by Greenland sharks, and even David’s swoon-inducing smile isn’t enough to ward off an attack, and he and Tracy barely make it back to the facility alive.

But these are clever sharks, evolved to have razor-sharp fins and a strong understanding of circles. Working as a group they saw through the ice, separating the facility from the connecting land and causing it to float off into the sea. Cautionary tale kids: don’t build your research facility on wafer-thin ice – not even David’s rippling biceps will be able to reconnect that to the rest of the shelf.

Things take a decided turn for the worse when the sharks rally once more and sink the facility, sending it to the sea floor from whence they can pick off the survivors one by one. It’ll be up to David and all his sensuous manoeuvres (and the help of several unimportant characters and a large ice breaking ship) to make effective use of soft science that’ll refloat the facility if anyone’s going to have a chance of seeing the surface world again.

Ain’t nothing wrong with a little extra thigh.

The Visuals

I’ll say this: leave The Asylum to its own devices and it can really throw some painful stuff your way, but have SyFy pitch in with a little spare cash and what I presume must be a vision of some sort and you end up with something that, while not tremendously good, is still quite entertaining. I mean I’m not quite sure why we’re building things on tiny flecks of ice or how a tank that sunk right down landed up half a kilometre away from where it was dropped or how one short cable can turn into four very long sunken-facility-lifting cables, but if that’s what the movie wants to throw at its audience then fine, I’ll accept that. Of course the vast majority of everything is also that CGI work from circa 2002, but it wouldn’t be an Asylum or SyFy movie without it. The day they cough up for real special effects is the day I tap out.

Of course, with all these CGI sharks and floating research facilities, one thing that’s all real (and all man) is Edward DeRuiter, and that’s all that matters at the end of the day.

He got that, he got that, he got that D.I.L.F. $

The Feelings

I went into this movie for ice sharks and Edward DeRuiter, and I left satisfied.

At the end of the day you’re going to get out of this movie exactly what its title and lineage suggest: sharks in and around the ice, some very questionable science, and a bonus round of cockblocking from a Scottish Indian Inuit. In my humble opinion there are far worse ways to spend a Sunday night.

And of course, it has Edward DeRuiter. With absolutely no knowledge of a Germanic language other than English I’m fairly sure his surname must translate to ‘the dreamy one’, and that’s the most important thing this movie will teach you.

My Final Rating: 4 / 10
Buy Ice Sharks at Amazon.com

TRAILER

 

Book Review: The Bagel Sandwich Bang

Author: Oliver Clozov
Genre: Erotica
Published: 2015

“…he never imagined that an everyday snack could turn into an everyday fuck.”

As much as I do enjoy seeing Tropical Mary go through agony at the sheer assault on the senses that is the Amazon erotica section, I felt that our joint escapade with Lord Metalcock was perhaps one step too far and that it would be unfair for her to suffer an ordeal like reviewing Oliver Clozov on her own. To atone for this I dutifully went off to find the author’s page so I could subject myself to some of his literary offal as well. Enter (literally and figuratively) The Bagel Sandwich Bang.

I had a lot of questions. For example: Why? What is going on with this cover? Am I really going to spend $1.13 on this? Is it a sentient bagel? The Stygian Mole also asked aloud what I had only dared to ponder internally: was it a cream cheese bagel? I was fairly certain that whatever happened it was going to end up being one, but perhaps the bagel’s origin story deserved to be told.

Such is the story of how I don’t feel like eating lunch today.

The Plot

“Plot” is too generous a word for what’s going on here. Prior experience should have taught me not to expect anything so tremendously outlandish as a sentient bagel from this fool, but dare to dream I did.

This story really is nothing other than a guy named Randy fucking a sandwich. He kicked his girlfriend out of the house and to get over his instantaneous loneliness he makes a sandwich and, on the spur of the moment, decides to fuck it. I take that back – “fuck it” isn’t the right term for what happens here. Randy makes love to the sandwich. That sandwich knew a type of affection that most of us can only dream of. For 20 minutes that sandwich knew love and the tender touch of a man.

But then the sandwich got chucked out because nobody wants to eat their own mayonnaise. And in the end, despite all the loving words and his gentle caresses, Randy isn’t any better than any other guy – his needs satiated by its wholegrain crust he turns his eye to the ripe and fruity cantaloupe just sitting there in his kitchen.

Ladies (and gents), don’t feel bad if your man has a bit of a wandering eye. It’s not you – if this sandwich couldn’t keep a man, then us lesser beings really shouldn’t be down on ourselves if we can’t either.

The Writing Style

Unlike with the misadventures of Lord Metalcock, Oliver (who I’m still convinced is 13-years-old) didn’t turn himself on halfway through the story, so instead of starting out badly and getting horribly worse it just started out as miserably below par and stayed there, so if not for style it at least scores points for consistency.

And say what you want about this piece of trash but you could use it in high schools to teach kids the concept of personification. That sandwich wasn’t doing a damn thing except being the unknowing recipient of unnatural lust for the course of this toilet tissue’s 23 pages, but Randy loved that thing more than any man has ever loved another human being. And I say good for the sandwich, everything deserves to feel loved.

The Feelings

So very confused.

Lord Metalcock taught me that little Oliver doesn’t have the slightest understanding of how sex works. The Bagel Sandwich Bang taught me that he doesn’t have the slightest understanding of how sandwich making or bagels work either. Granted I come from South Africa, so maybe it’s a cultural difference, but down here our bagels already have a hole in the centre – it’s kind of what makes them bagels. So I’m really not sure why Randy had to cut a hole into his bagel before he could have sex with it.

I’m equally unclear about how this could be as pleasurable as described, for two reasons. Firstly, this is a wholegrain bagel. Wholegrain usually has bits of grain in it, and given the circumstances those bits are going to land up in places you really don’t want them. Given that I prefer to eat my food in a more traditional manner I may be missing something here, but I imagine that a white bagel would be a smoother ride. I leave this point to those who are more familiar with the practices described in this book to point out if I am wrong. Secondly, and again maybe things are different overseas, my experience of bagels is that they aren’t a tremendously robust bread product. For this reason I’m not convinced that a single bagel, particularly one that has already been piled full of condiments, could withstand a 20 minute pounding. Perhaps there are especially durable bagels that one can purchase for alternative uses such as this, but if so I must again defer to the wisdom of those more familiar with sitophilia than myself.

My Final Rating: 1 / 10
Buy The Bagel Sandwich Bang at Amazon.com