GD Planet Earth!

Good Day to Planet Earth

Breaking the long silence today with a post about some of the things I've been up to as of late.

First-
A few things are finally coming together for me.  I'm changing my surname to match that of my biological father's.  It's something I've wanted to do since high school, and something I wished my mother had not made necessary since the first time I got teased about my present family name.  I know kids can make fun of virtually anything, but let's just say my present legal last name is easy mode for such things.  In about a week or so all of the paperwork should be done for the change to be finalized, and I can finally assume, legally, the name I feel I should have had in the first place.

Second-
Publication of my first book to be out in the world (tears welling up) is coming and I'm super excited.  I'm working with a very talented artist who I met in college, Jerry Minor (http://jerantino.deviantart.com/), and the cover art proofs look fantastic!  The first real public marketing for my book looks like it will be at Norwescon!  If you live in the Pacific Northwest, I highly recommend you check it out (and be sure to seek out the artists' area).

This, of course, means I have to get my act together and come up with a release date pronto!  For a few legal reasons that is going to depend on my first announcement, but I'm aiming for an April or early May release!  Go self-publishing FTW!

I'm 90% sure I'll be publishing with lulu.com right now.  Unless something else really catches my eye, I think this is going to be the one.  If any of you have suggestions or warnings, or what have you, please let me know in the comments below.

Finally-

I have some bad news.  Mass Effect 3 was a great game, until you reach the end.  I had really high expectations for this game.  My previous experiences with ME-1 and ME-2 led me to believe that ME-3 was going to be the greatest game of all time...  And, well...

Here's the mostly spoiler-free re-post of my amazon.com review of ME3:

I was a huge fan of the Mass Effect universe until about the last 3 hours of this game.  ME1 & ME2 are some of the best, innovative, and fun games I've ever played.  ME3 starts out that way, too.  I had high hopes throughout the game that it would live up to its predecessors.  ME3 even managed to get me to tear up about 5 times.  I was thinking to myself "what an amazing game to elicit such an emotional response" (really, I'm that geeky).
-And then came the final hours of the game.

Sadly, the last 3 hours, in terms of story and game play, felt rushed.  The game pushes you through the final battle to take back Earth in a series of short combat sequences mixed with minimal story elements.  The final push is more movie than gaming, thereby robbing the player of a truly satisfying payoff (like, say, FFVII had).  After a long, brutal yawn-fest series of "move here, okay, now watch this, now move up, now watch this" you get to the final decision that will decide the fate of the galaxy.

And that's where the game totally comes off the rails.  Story-wise, all 3 options are contradictory to everything you just spent the last 40-50 hours of your life doing.  The final "choice" doesn't even make sense in the context of the rest of the game, and ruins the internal consistency of the story that made the other games in the series so good.  It's probably the worst ending to any game I've played in a long, long time.  It made me not want to have anything to do with the ME series ever again.  I don't know if taking an extra 6 months to write and program a better ending would have helped or not, but the ME3 team was deluded if they think that this was a satisfying, fan-creating ending.

Although the director has denied fans' calls to issue DLC to fix the ending, I really think he should reconsider.  Unless something like that happens, avoid this one.  It's not worth your time, and that's a sad, sad thing.

An ignoble, disappointing end to a once great series.

And that's it for today!  Be well to you all!