Sometimes life works in mysterious ways. Take author Amy Talkington. Before she penned her first novel — the young adult ghost story Liv, Forever — she was going to tell her tale as a screenplay for a movie. But after she wrote it as a book, it got optioned by a film company…who hired Talkington to write the screenplay. Though in talking to her about the book, it seems that some of what happened while she wrote the novel wasn’t so mysterious.
With the novel Diablo III: Storm Of Light, writer Nate Kenyon isn’t just delivering another epic set in the world of Blizzard’s fantasy role-playing game, he’s helping set the stage for the game’s next chapter, Reaper Of Souls. Though in talking to him, it’s clear he didn’t just write this novel to get gamers from one plot point to another.
Released in 1976, the movie Network took a grim and darkly comic look at the state of television and TV news. In the almost forty years since it came out, though, the movie has become less of a satire of what could be and more of sad case of art imitating life. It’s a transition explored by New York Times writer — and my pal and former editor at Spin and Maxim — Dave Itzkoff in his new book, Mad As Hell: The Making Of ‘Network’ And The Fateful Vision Of The Angriest Man In Movies (hardcover, paperback, Kindle)
Given the popularity of the Monster Hunter games, especially in Japan, it’s hardly surprising that other game developers would make similar hunting action games. But Toukiden: The Age Of Demons — which Tecmo Koei America have released for the PlayStation Vita — manages to differentiate itself by not having you hunt monsters. Well, not the same monsters as in those other games. We’ll let Kenichi Ogasawara, Toukiden’s Producer, explain what that means.
Be it Scrabble or Words With Friends, many word games are reliant on players having a big vocabulary. But in the word game Phrazzle, which is available for iOS and Android from GameFly Games, it’s more about how you put all those words together. In the following interview 47 Games’ Benjamin Hoyt, Phrazzle’s lead designer and Executive Producer, explains how this game works, where the original idea for this word game came from, and just how creative you can get with it.
When you’re a barbarian, all your problems are solved with a sword. But what if you were a barbarian who preferred to solve your problems with a song? Such is the plight of Brad, a barbarian mercenary in the new iOS game Bardbarian, which was made by TreeFortress and published by BulkyPix. But in talking to TreeFortress illustrator and animator Mike Gaboury, their heroes penchant for music over might isn’t the only thing that makes Bardbarian unique.
Ever since Counter-Strike went from being a Half-Life mod to its own stand alone game, it’s been the dream of modders everywhere to have theirs make the same leap. The latest to do so is Insurgency, a tactical first-person shooter from New World Interactive that’s a spin-off of the Half-Life 2 mod Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat. But in talking to designer Andrew Spearin, it’s obvious that they’re not just trying to make Counter-Strike 2: Electric Boogaloo.
With his new medical sci-fi horror novel Pandemic (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), writer Scott Sigler brings his Infected trilogy to a close. In honor of this, I spoke to him about his original influences, how this series could be adapted to other media, and which of his other books you should read when you’re done with Pandemic.
Much like chocolate and peanut butter or Anthrax and Public Enemy, the idea of mixing of cyberpunk atmospheres and pulp crime aesthetics probably seemed weird before someone tried to do it (that someone being Philip K. Dick with his novella “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?”). But we’re glad someone did since it’s led us to Shovel Ready, a new novel by Adam Sternbergh (Crown Publishing). In it, a hit man in the not-so-distant future is hired to whack an evangelist’s daughter, and, suffice it to say, it does not go well for our “hero.”