Never Rising Above The WaterLine

I found the story of the book-description interesting and decided to give it a try. Well, these were some hours I will never get back, no matter how much I would like to.

Suspension of disbelief is a requirement to enjoy fiction - but a basic logical scaffolding is still essential. Otherwise no immersion is possible.

Some other reviewer compared Antarktos Risisng to a Michael Crichton novel - but, besides the quick passing of some dinosaurs, I fail to see the connection. Crichton's science was cutting edge yet solid. The "science" behind Robinson's claims is half-baked at best, if not simply not there. And he is sloppy as well. Unless the continent some way acquired...a metabolism, there are no "katabolic" winds in Antarctica (p.35). The author probably refers to katabatic winds. Then again, the novel had much more serious problems than poor proofreading.

A character, being the sole survivor of her home-city and after weathering the worse of the climactic change in her well-stocked basement, she decides to take off: what she deems essential to pack in this post-apocalyptic world. What does she pack? Her ...DSLR camera (whose characteristics she describes in excruciating details in p.53) complete with its 200mm lens! What's a extinction event if one cannot snap some decent sunset pictures, right?! 

Antarctica thawing in...days - and then turning into a tropical environment, complete with 15ft tall trees within...weeks? No even if said trees were on springs!

Full-grown dinosaurs thawing out to packs with well set hierarchy (not to mention cool nicknames!)?

Gigantic demon-spawns living undetected for centuries, having to resort to...eating their own babies (need I point out how inefficient this is, to say the least?) - yet, not neglecting to learn English, taught by the scientists/"teachers" they captured? Forget English, eat the teachers and let your babies live! 

In this light of stretched-out allowances, the incorporation of Creationism and "scientific" verification of Biblical claims would not have bothered me so much, were they presented in a more logical basis. On that note, I never understood the impetus behind strong-arming science into "proving" claims that are supposedly articles of faith.

Again, a novel that fails to work in every level. It is not even bad enough to claim cult status.

Failure Of The Obsidian Order

Strange things expectations. Receiving the same item may trigger either satisfaction or disappointment depending on what you were expecting. From a game that was developed by members of OBSIDIAN, the people who had released such masterpieces as Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate, one expects lightening to strike yet another time. Unfortunately, they seem to have stroked out.

The first thing that strikes you with Alpha Protocol, however, are how bad the graphics are. Admittedly, great games have worked wonders and have been offering great fun with only limited graphics. There are games that are 10 or even 15 years old, when graphical capabilities were but a fraction of what they are today, and yet they are still more fun to play than most of the vapid eye-candies released these days. Unfortunately Alpha Protocol is not one of them.

The graphics look just bad. From the institutional colors to the awkward movements of the characters and the almost non-existent interactive environment, the game feels like a cookie-cutter Third-Person Shooter game found in a sales-bin.

Of course this is not a simple TPS game, it is rather a Third-Person RolePlaying Shooter (RPS). Your character advances in level and he also has an inventory. There are classes to choose from and skills to add to. There are different weapons and armor to equip with. Stealth is very important yet not the only way to go and there is a spy story unfolding through the dialogue options and cut-scenes. All this looks quite good on paper yet, somehow, it failed to work for me. And I have been an RPG fan for years.

The story is not absorbing and the characters are caricatures rather than the deep, complex characters one enjoys in a good RPG. The RPG elements are all there but they seem to get in the way of one another and work together. Having a time limit on the (Mass Effect 2-short) dialogue options is not a good thing either.

ALPHA PROTOCOL also sports...mini games. With variations of ideas we have seen in Fallout 3 and BioShock, hacking and lock-picking are carried out by completing mini-games that (just like in those previous games) get old and tedious. Fast.

As DRM goes, good ol' SEGA slipped in a Limited Activations scheme - but promised to patch it out in about a year, so the game will stay yours. If promises are kept that is.

An RPG that strives to also be a shooter, a stealth tactical game with the possibility of bullet time, an endlessly bifurcating story that manages to end up predictable. This is a game that takes up a lot of different elements on its brush but the picture it paints in the end is unoriginal if not confusing. Had all the different elements worked together, this would had been a masterpiece. Unfortunately, inspiration alone is not enough.

All in all, Alpha Protocol consists of a lot of good ideas that got thrown together but were then left underdeveloped and unrefined. Maybe they exhausted their A-game on developing Fallout: New Vegas, who knows.

Because of the developing team's history, I will be overlooking this one.

If you are out of ideas guys, I would propose developing a game looking like Diablo III and playing like Baldur's Gate. And if it had a steampunk setting it would be heaven.

Alpha Protocol will be remembered as a bump on the road.

A SIGMA Sequel

James Rollins has penned a number of excellent escapist novels. I would recommend Ice Hunt, Subterranean, Amazonia and Sandstorm to anyone who enjoys adventuring science/techno-thrillers. I would be more reluctant to do so with The Doomsday Key, though.

This is yet another thoroughly researched, keep-surviving-by-the-skin-of-your-teeth adventure. Less pronounced in this book yet still present is Rollins' tendency to move from cliffhanger to cliffhanger, with small breathers in between. It is a book to enjoy during a flight or a rainy weekend - and it will keep you turning pages for hours. However, for a number of reasons this would had been a much better book had it not been yet another Sigma sequel.

Sigma simply does not work that good for me. I cannot buy the small number of people undertaking such critical tasks. In fact, Sigma is so understaffed that not only has to rely on certified idiots (sorry Kowalski, but you know it is true...) but even the director himself has to go into the field. They operate all over the world under thin pretexts, they do not even seem to be official sanctioned. And to add insult to injury, most new recruits seem to suffer the Star Trek's away-party odd crew-member fate...

On top of that, Sigma seems to deal with one crisis after another while under attack from both a shadow power group and other government secret services. For a writer who takes great pride in the accuracy of his facts interweaved with his fiction, this requires a continuous leap of faith.

I can understand how having a book franchise can work for both the writer and his publisher. The first has a set framework of characters to weave his new plot with whereas the later has a more or less loyal fun-base to fall back to. However, they should both keep in mind that this does not always work for the reader.