And here I pause to ramble a bit…

Delays between reviews on my site are something most of you should be used to by now, but this time around, the delays have to do with a number of disasters that I knew were coming. The biggest of those is that my beloved dinosaur PC died, and now I am stuck trying to steal time on hubby’s computer. Hubby is both a gamer and an internet addict, so this is really quite hard. (He really is an addict, by the way. We had service go down for half a day, and within two hours, he was wandering around the front of another provider near our home.)

So while I have some time during one of his naps, I wanted to let y’all know what’s going on here. (Besides the PC breaking.) Those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook may know that I lost my wallet last year, and that I have been languishing in the bureaucratic hell that Italy puts all immigrants through. I finally got my sojourn permit back, and so now I can hopefully get my debit card reinstated. This is important because without it, I can’t sell any books. Or rather, I can, but I can’t get access to any profits I make from those sales. There is a chance that I still won’t be able to get my card without a carta identita (ID card), but I don’t know that just yet.

Even if I can get the debit card, it may still be a bit longer before I can sell new books because I need to get a PC of my own to finish editing and formatting the next book to go out. This should take a few months at the very least. So if you’re one of the people who have been waiting patiently for the next book in the Alice the Wolf series, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait a little more until I can sort out this mess.

I will have some money coming in that may cover the cost of a new PC, as I was invited to travel to Spain to attend a company exhibition and act as a journalist for hubby’s company. I’m working on the article for that event now, and if my work pleases both the boss and the company that hosted us, it’s entirely possible that I will be sent on more assignments in the coming year. I also have a couple upcoming short term assignments editing the company’s news articles for their web site, and that pays really good even in the short term. I can’t say exactly when I’ll be able to afford a new PC, but I do believe it will happen sometime in the fall.

While I have this time to write, I also want to assure you there are reviews in the queue, both for games and for books. I’ll be trying to space those out a bit to give y’all something to read about once a week. I will say that there is one game I’d mentioned wanting to play that won’t be getting a review, I Want to be Human. As a platformer, one of my favorite genres of game, it does most everything right, with one deal breaking exception: the shooting sucks. The main character has a shotgun, and it’s aimed with the left stick. Most games that put aiming and movement on the same stick provide a button so the character can aim without moving. Not this game, and if I had a nickel for every time the game misinterpreted the direction I wanted to aim, I’d have a shit stack of nickels. I spent way too much time wiggling on a ledge trying to aim at a downward diagonal, only to fall off the ledge because the controls are way too fiddly. I reached a point about three hours in that I said out loud, “Okay, I really hate this,” and then shut off the game and deleted it. It really is a shame, too. This could have been something special, like a new Super Mario Bros. to treasure forever in my mental archive of great platformers. Alas, it slips away from my memory like a fart in a tornado.

There is another game which I’m debating reviewing unfinished, and that’s Rain World. I want to be clear, this is a game that I’ve seen break the most hardcore YouTuber’s, even bringing some to genuine tears of frustration. As for myself, I have picked up half a dozen rare trophies, among them Dragon Slayer. You get this for killing one lizard from each of the five colors, and two of those can only be found later in the game. It’s an ultra-rare trophy, with only 0.6% of the players being able to do it. I did it. I also reached the very end of the game, only to be rebuffed and tossed aside. I had to go to a wiki to look up why, and it’s apparently because I have not fully explored some other area of the game, and thus I lack the right Karmic symbol. I’m not even sure where to go to get said symbol or what the symbol looks like because the wiki is vague on details. So if I do review this, I might have to do it with the game unfinished simply because I have no clue how to get what I need to reach the true ending.

But here’s the thing: I kind of hate the game. The source of my hate can be attributed mainly to the controls, which are unforgivably sloppy. This is a game that demands pixel-perfect precise movements, and you cannot do that with a character who on a whim will decide to do its own thing and ignore whatever command you just put in. There are places where you must wall jump Slug Cat up thirty feet of pipe and then super leap across a wide chasm to reach the next save point. I did that the first time, only to realize I didn’t have enough food to hibernate. Thereafter, I have been unable to reach the save point. Slug Cat will either decide he doesn’t want to stick to the pipe wall and send himself plunging back to the bottom, or he will deign to reach the top, only to ignore the super jump command to plunge headfirst into the chasm. This is but one example of a soul crushing experience that’s never fun. There’s a reason so many review sites gave this a low score, and why so many YouTubers who started it enthusiastically have given up after just a few sessions. The reason is, this isn’t a fun game. It’s a cheese grater meant for grinding away bits of your soul. So if I do review it, you can be sure it will not be a glowing praise post, and will likely be full of more examples of what made me hate it.

About the only other news is that my web host has sent me a bill to renew my contract,and I’m going to have to ask hubby for the money rather than pay for it out of my book sales. Sales have not been high enough to cover the cost, and even if they were, I don’t have a way to consolidate and access those funds. The faults for this are entirely on me. I’ve done a terrible job of promotion the last year, mainly because I feel awful having to constantly drone on about buying my books. But this is something I have to do, or else how will anyone know I have something new out? I can’t put all of this on my faithful minions, who have done so much for me over the last couple of years. Word of mouth advertising can only do so much, and I need to get over my dislike of advertising and get my ass back in high gear if I want to be able to afford the web hosting fees next year. So on that point, I want to apologize to my Twitter and Facebook followers. I’m going to have to annoy y’all with more ads. I don’t want to do it, really, but staying quiet isn’t doing me any favors, either.

And that’s about it for the updates. I’ll have a review up for God Eater 2: Rage Burst in the next few days, and after that there will be a book review, followed by another game review, and then another book review. I can’t say what comes after that, but with the right spacing, that will at least be four weeks worth of content.

And as always, thanks for being here and for reading my rambling. Y’all are great, and I really appreciate your continued support.