In the 1980s, Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books forged the way for children (and many adults) to enter fantastic worlds, where they held a measure of control in the outcome. The books allowed the reader to steer the plotline of the story through a finite number of variations, many of which ended […]
Bloody good: A review of Kieron Gillen’s Uber
Blood, gore, super-powers and the Nazis; what a heady mix. Uber is set at what would have been the tail end of World War II. There’s just one catch. The Nazis have just released their final secret weapon – super soldiers. These “Wunderwafen” are brutal. Uber pulls no punches. The pages of this full colour […]
Blasted Martian Skies: A Review of Rocket Age and Blood Red Mars
Rocket Age embraces the science fiction of a century past and the radio dramas of the 30s, the likes of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and John Carter, blended with the pulp action heroics of characters like Doc Savage or Allan Quatermain. Heroes of the new colonial frontier, varied personalities seek to hunt, explorer, unearth and […]
High Rises, Low Morals: A Review of Venture City Stories
The real superheroes of the City have corporate sponsorship… or at least those heroes who have sanctioned powers and the legal teams behind them to cover for claims of massive structural and collateral damage. Superpowers appear to be a natural phenomenon, a potential in the whole of humanity, activated in a lucky few – or […]
Irregular Reconnaissance: Anime #7
You’re a roleplayer with a healthy interest in anime. Or you’re an anime fan tempted by roleplaying. In either scenario there’s a wide range of anime titles to pick from. It’s a challenge. In the anime slice of Irregular Reconnaissance a gaming anime fan walks through his most recent watching. It’s a catch-up. It’s a […]
Ghost clans go to war: Review of Nura – Rise of the Yokai Clan
Nura – Rise of the Yokai Clan series 2 part 1 hit the UK shelves this month care of Manga UK. It was an interesting set of discs for me. I had been watching the Yokai Clan via Anime on Demand and must have got more than halfway through when the site closed up. Could […]
Chilling: A review of Snow Piercer
Back in January I shared some pictures, concept art and music from a Joon-ho Bong film called Snowpiercer. It looked incredible, based on a French graphic novel and starting the likes of Chris Evans, John Hurt and Tilda Swinton. The film is reviewing well at IMDB which also suggests the US release is still to […]
Wheels Within Wheels – A Review of Beyond The Edge: Buried Burdens
The townsfolk of Ample Quarry make their livelihood from quartz mining in the Scattered Lands beyond The Beyond. Once part of the Kingdom of Xendalia, that civilisation collapsed millennia ago and what remains jutts awkwardly and mysteriously from the landscape – pillars and pylons of rocks, ceramics or metal. While mining proves might be thankless […]
A Terrible, Indescribable Thing – A Review of Hideous Creatures: Shoggoth
Long before the gelatinous geometric monstrosities and semi-aware slimes, iridescent and menacing blobs of goo threatened the lives and sanities of those adventurous enough to probe the depths of civilisations past. While dungeon explorers might consider them an inconvenience at best, possessed of little more than a hunger-driven intuition, Lovecraft served up an insidious and […]
Nirvana: A review of Fairy Tail part 5
Part 5 of Fairy Tail means episodes 49 to 60. It’s an important section of the Fairy Tail mythos too. In the previous 50 or so episodes we’ve met Natsu, Lucy and then the Fairy Tail guild. We’ve gone on missions with Erza and Gray, encountered the Tower of Heaven and really serious Guild politics. […]
