Last week I published a preview of the second episode in the Toy Noir episodic point & click adventure game Bear With Me.
Along with that preview, I posted the first part of the Bear With Me Episode 2 playthrough I recorded while getting the article together, and this week I’m following up with the rest of the episodes, I hope you enjoy them. Continue reading Bear With Me – Episode 2 Playthrough
Last year I played the first episode of the Toy Noir point & click adventure game, Bear With Me, where you play as crime fighting duo Amber Ashworth and the retired detective Ted. E. Bear, on the search for Amber’s missing brother, Flint, as well as trying to uncover the identity of the mysterious Red Man while trying to stay one step ahead of him, as he’s after Amber.
The first episode in the season, released in August 2016, ended with a cliffhanger as Amber and Ted leave the confines and comfort of Amber’s home for Paper City, the home of all toys, a place drawn from Amber’s imagination. Continue reading Preview: Bear With Me – Episode 2
During my holidays between Christmas and the end of 2016, I decided to jump into one of my story projects and get it going. I had my second novel to finish editing (second draft at around 40%), but decided to instead push on one of the story premises I’d posted some time ago, the Sci-Fi noir “The Song.”
As I sat at home, thinking what I should write, which story to pursue, this one kept coming back to me, with new details, new side-stories that branch off from the main one as the character listens to more of the same hypnotic melodies.
The Song is different to the other premises in that I had already written a few pages of it before I proposed it as another one-shot, and going back to it and advancing I remembered just how difficult it is to write Hardboiled stories, a genre I often and wrongfully call the same name as its film counterpart, “Noir.” Continue reading Detectives & Dames – Writing the Hardboiled Genre
It’s been a few months since I set up the page for people to vote on the short stories they wanted me to write. I have already written two, the first ones people voted for, Fringes and Lion’s Claw.
I sent them to one of my proofreader, my brother in law, but haven’t heard back from him yet. Then again, my sister had a little baby girl last month so they’re a bit busy. I’m going to try to find another proofreader/beta reader for the stories next week to hopefully get these new stories up and running here. Continue reading Fiction Update – New Premises Incoming!
Bear with Me is a new point & click adventure game. Yes, it’s episodic, because they’re all episodic now. Strangely, when I got the press release offering the review code it didn’t mention anything about it being just the first episode of the season, so imagine my surprise when, preparing myself for a long playthrough I find myself facing the dreaded sentence “End of Episode One.”
With that bit of discomfort out of the way, I have to say I enjoyed the first episode greatly. The game is full of wonderful atmosphere, a genius combination between childhood innocence and youthful imagination and the grim bitter reality of the Noir genre. When you have a convincing private detective in a teddy bear, you know you’re in for a nice adventuring romp. Continue reading Preview: Bear With Me – Episode 1
I’ll be honest, I was planning on having the first of my new short stories for you today, but I did go through a giant rant the other day about taking the time to make the stuff I write be as good as it can be, so I decided against it, so I can finish it properly, edit it as I should and polish it to near perfection for a story I came up with while riding the train back from the Bristol GeekOut Meetup.
But I do want to let you know that I have fun stuff coming, some stories I’ve had bouncing around my head for a while, some of them already started but never finished, in various genres, none of them Romance because if there’s one thing I learned while writing my third novel it’s that romance is not my thing. I’m a sucker or romance, that’s true, I know what makes good narrative romance and what’s bad one, and I can tell a good intense scene if I need to, but an entire novel based on the genre…yeah, not this guy, at least not yet anyway.
Right now I have five stories to work on, two of which are in progress and the others are barely an interesting premise in my mind. Continue reading Back in Fiction!
It’s a dangerous town and the cops struggle to keep a lid on organised crime, and when one of the local mob leaders dies, it throws the underworld into disarray and brings something new to the streets, the city’s new Major Crimes Unit, affectionately called The Detail.
I love The Untouchables, it’s one of my favourite films of all time and the Prohibition is an era of American history I’ve always found fascinating. The Mafia, the many branches and families forming syndicates and boozing up the dry nation against the very few cops they couldn’t buy. It’s amazing stuff really. I’ve watched documentaries, films, TV series and now played a games with those characters.
Blues and Bullets is a third person adventure game set twenty years after the fall of Al Capone at the hand of Elliot Ness and his Untouchables. I first saw it at Rezzed 2015 and recently received a press code for both of the currently released episodes. As you know very well, I don’t review episodic titles until the full season releases, but that doesn’t stop me from doing a nice preview and talk about the episodes and tell you what I thought about them…and share a metric ton of images from my playthrough. Continue reading Preview: Blues and Bullets
A Hollywood actor is dead, and there’s a media-frenzy around it. There’s also intrigue and danger and a blogger, a print journalist and a private detective are Knee Deep in it!
A few days ago, Alex Francois, the man behind Brainchild Studios and the recently released episodic adventure game The Slaughter, contacted me and graciously offered me a Steam key for the first episode of his game. Now, as you know, I don’t usually cover episodic games until the season releases, at least not for reviews, but as you saw earlier this week, I’ve decided to cover episodic games with Let’s Plays including my impressions of the game, some bad jokes and just trying to have fun with the episodes. Continue reading Let’s Play The Slaughter: Act One
