In preparation for my upcoming reviews on the books from the past 3 seasons of Boss Fight Books (BFB henceforth) and also of the 4th season as they become available to me, let’s have a brief overview of what BFB is and how it came to be. Most of this information can be found online on Kickstarter, the official Boss Fight website or even Wikipedia. Consequently, I will skim over certain easily gathered details and give a general idea about who they are and what they do, accompanied of course by some opinion of this initiative.

The heart and soul of BFB is Gabe Durham, who also happens to be one of the authors, and who made a very strange choice to cover in his book. More on that in another post. He founded BFB in 2013, presented his idea to the Kickstarter community and to people he knew, and the reception was positive. The Kickstarter having succeeded, the first book released early 2014. The idea behind the concept is simple: many books about video games and computing talk about a range of titles and technologies, analyzing their influences on the market and the populations affected as a whole. But sometimes, maybe all we could want to hear about is that ONE game: a story of its making, of the author’s relationship to it, of its narrative, distilled to the max in a way fitting a paperback with hours of gameplay. And that is the main premise of Boss Fight Books titles. Understandably, many of the games covered so far are rather old-school. These are games from the NES era or before, the same can be said for the PC games in the list. This is due to the fact that age-wise, the authors fall within a certain range and have been most impacted on by video games from a specific era or generation.

The general structure followed by the books is thus: historical fact, author’s personal experiences associated with the game, depiction of narrative and or gameplay from start to finish with inclusion of some juicy tidbits and secrets, and, most prominently in the latest season, direct or indirect comments/stories from the game creators themselves. It’s very nice knowing what to expect from these books and the structure makes sense to me, even if you could wonder how in the world that fits a narrative less arcade game like Galaga? It’s a particular case and still, the author did a great job with that one.

The first book I am going to review is the first one of the season 4: Final Fantasy V by Chris Kohler. It’s due out soon, but backers got the copy early. Here is a list of all BFB titles by season in case anyone needs to check them out. I highly recommend Chrono Trigger and Shadow of the Colossus books.

Stay tuned for reviews to come. It’s easy to figure out how I feel about 2 of the books from above, details can help you see whether or not it may be a good read for you. Until then….

Cheers!

For all my nerdy friends, lovers of swag, check out Lootcrate. You can just subscribe and get a “crate” (figurative, it’s not like a giant thing lol) of stuff. Things like T-Shirts, bobbleheads, figurines etc. They are most often sent as a theme per month, for example, this month is Titan month due to the release of the ever AWESOME Titanfall. I don’t play multiplayer much but if anyone does, TITANFALL is a must try! So go ahead y’all, take a look at what the website has to offer and try it even for just a month. If you like it go ahead and stay, the longer your subscription the less it will cost. And since I’m such a nice fella, here a link to show you the way 🙂

Mar 2nd, 2008 3:58 PM

“I had a crack at the new Japanese import “Soma Bringer” today. Though I suck at Japanese, unlike my friend who borrowed me the cart, I did not exactly need to know much to actually play. I mean, storywise I was in the dark more or less, but otherwise, they had those nice tutorials with very self-explanatory images. Hell, I got to the first boss and beat him without knowing the fine details of what was going except what I could make of the cutscenes. I really can’t wait for this to come to the US, it had better! If it goes on to be as good as I felt it be in the beginning and if the story holds, it’ll be a hit!”

For some reason, I cannot find a way to export my old 1up blog to a file. The site is still there but as some of you know, 1up is gone. SO, since I have found nothing on the internet about an easy way to do that, I will very simply undertake to copy and pasting the contents (but not the comments). I will also manually add on top of each pasted post the date it was originally created on 1up. Starting tomorrow, unless in the meantime someone can tell me of another more convenient way of migrating your posts from 1up.com …

Today, I jumped on the Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) bandwagon. I wanted to try it before, but the size of the download is really intimidating. Recently I signed up for a Coursera course about Online Games, the teachers seemed liked rather big fans of the game and I felt like I might get more out of the course if I played. There are two tracks in the course as you will see. I wish to be part of the crowd that plays, maybe all of us students can form kinship as I don’t have one yet.
I’m still in the introduction part of the game, and this is for me the one big interesting factor: the progressive downloading. After looking around in forums, once I was past my amazement when I stumbled upon the start screen after just a little while, I found that there are 3 stages to the download, and the first stage is only after roughly 250mb!! That is for the very short tutorial. And other stages are at other points (Introduction and full respectively). So basically, after the download reaches a certain stage you are allowed to play that portion while the rest of the game downloads! It’s pretty nice I think, instead of just sitting around waiting for the darn thing to finish you can jump right in and learn the ropes. I know it’s probably old news for a lot of people, but I was never much an MMO fan, mostly because the best time for ME to find adequate bandwidth is in the middle of the night.
For those who need proof, my screen right now:

I have missed one PAX too many. Though I know I will probably miss most PAX primes, I was really gearing up for the East edition.
The universe conspired against me in that matter. By giving one of the things on my bucket list, allied with an obligation: traveling to London for the very first time…. for work. I could not pass up this opportunity to instantly eliminate one of the costly top targets on my list, and I could certainly not refuse to go present my work (do or die). It is my hope that this time around there will be no overlap with the Pax East dates. If that proves to be the case then maybe the Fates are trying to tell me something I don’t want to hear.
Oh well! By the by, coming soon: my shirt bucket list!