STG's

When I saw a new SF book by Peter F. Hamilton (also by Gareth L. Powell, but I didn't know him), I got it immediately, as he is one of my favorite authors. Light Chaser doesn't take place in one of his universes, but on the domain, where a bunch of human planets live in serious stability - which turns out is for reason.  Our main protagonist is a light chaser - someone who goes on 1000 year circuits (they don't have FTL propulsion) around worlds exchanging the use of memory collars - entertainment for the higher-level worlds -  for various goods in an AI run ship. But everything changes when someone starts showing in several memory collars, in different planets... Which was supposed to be impossible. I thought it was funny that this book had resurrections and such, but then I remembered the Night Dawn trilogy, which had some aspects like that, too. Overall, strongly recommended. My only complaint is that it was pretty short.

 Infinitode 2 is an abstract tower defense game. It is available both for PC and Android, with only minor differences (the only obvious one to me is that you can watch ads to get extra stuff). I initially bought it on Steam, at a ridiculous price (about US$1.5 in R$), played it on the PC, and enjoyed it. Then I tried it on my tablet, discovered I had download it several months ago, synced to the same place  via their login(which is a nice feature!), and tried it there. Graphics are pretty much abstract, but they look ok. Music is ok at some times, and painful at others. You get all the common TD stuff - towers in a range of specific places, regular/fast/strong/etc enemies, basic/splash/sniper/etc towers, etc.  There are also a bunch of objectives per level, and you get a lot of items, which you can later use for research, which has a pretty large tree. You also get things like mining for resources for research. Basic tutorial is good, but seems to completely ignore all th...

 Black Book is another RPG with a card game. These are obviously popular now. The art is quite distinctive, and the subject matter too - you are a "witch" (it is actually russian folklore, so unless you are russian, you probably won't recognize their names for things) in training, and the equivalent of the traditional paths is you going to tasks. The first is dealing with a demon, in a card battle, of course. I really like the art, and the gameplay is overall very good, and seems not to have too many complicated mechanics. There are some small segments that remind me of 90s Sierra adventure games (when they started getting isometric 3D), but while a bit silly they are short.

 Mini Motorways is a simple puzzle game (or a minimalist sim), just like Mini Metro, where you have to connect houses and stores/malls/whatever using roads, roadways, traffic lights and roundabouts. It is still in early access, but seems fun enough. The music is super annoying, though. It was very, very cheap here (less than US$3 with exchange rate + Miniverse Collection discount).

 Nowhere Prophet is a card game, which naturally reminds me of Slay the Spire (that being my favorite in the genre). You travel with a convoy (your followers and powers are cards) in a randomly generated map, in an SF like dystopic, messed up world. There is also equipment, cargo, weapons you can buy, force fields, etc. It seems interesting in many ways, but very, very complicated - which over time I have less and less patience for... Nice graphics, sound and ok music. Tutorial is ok. 

 Agency, by William Gibson, is a SF novel, and the sequel to The Peripheral  . This happens on another stub, which is a nice story mechanic for less phony sounding multiverses, and concerns Verity, an "app whisperer" testing some software, which turns out to be sentient. A whole mess ensues - both in the stub and in the "future", which is trying to improve the mess caused by creating that stub. Overall, good, although nothing revolutionary. The whole drone and distributed AI things were fun, though.

 Planet Alpha looks great. It does seem to have a multi-year bug (there were 2018 posts about it) where it starts on the wrong size, and thus unusable (can't change resolution).  This was fixable by starting with -windowed.  But then the game has minimal tutorials, and questionable UI choices (like not using the mouse for the menu, for some reason you have to use the arrow keys). Also, escape doesn't open it on the start screen, which is why I couldn't change the settings on the game. I did play for a few minutes (the start is VERY slow, basically you keep pressing D for like 3 minutes). After about 10m, when the game failed to demonstrate a mechanic I needed to progress (for the second time, but I guessed it the first time), I just gave up and uninstalled it.

 Billy Summers is the latest Stephen King book.  This one has mostly nothing supernatural (not that unusual for him, of course) - the main character (Billy Summers) is an assassin (sniper), who only kills bad people, and who got a job that seems a little weird... There is even a girl that was attacked that the assassin saves, which no doubt reminds you of a dozen other cases (for me, it is The Professional that comes to mind first). It's certainly nothing out of the ordinary as big plot points go, but as it was very well written, it was very enjoyable, and one of the rare cases lately where I really have to work at it to not skip sleep to read another chapter. There are some references to the shining, but they are minimal and have no real importance to the story. It ends fairly, and featured a double ending. This immediately reminds me of The Dark Tower's ending, but this one manages to fit well instead of sounding like an author comment. Overall, very good. Much better than t...