Seven days in Tokyo and the world's your oyster.

You're in Tokyo (inside the Yamanote Circle, to be specific) when a lockdown goes into effect, and demons start popping up. Right next to you. Time to save the fucking world, and by the way, you can see a little death clock over everybody's heads, and nobody has more than seven days to live. You? You have ONE. Better get cracking, changing destiny is hard work.

That's as far as I'm going to go into the story, I'm afraid. While the story is decent to good, the whole thing is made entirely out of religion, and I do not talk about religion here. It's not worth the trouble. Suffice it to say that I got what I consider to be the good end, and you can go get what you consider to be the good end, and we'll leave it at that. There are three real paths (there are four paths, one of them is a trick BAD END), and all of them are good, depending on your perspective.

The gameplay, though, is pretty fucking awesome. I described the game previously as pokemon tactics, and that's fairly accurate. You have up to four parties active per battle, each led by one human (or, in one case, a particularly awesome demon that fights for love and beatings), and including two subordinate demons.

You wander around on a tactical map where facing does not matter, and when you choose to attack, you commence 1.5 rounds (appx) of a traditional RPG battle. each side is guaranteed one action per character (barring deaths before action) and has a chance to earn an extra action, usually by hitting an opponent weakness, or critting with a physical attack.

While the roster of demons isn't exactly Pokemon-huge, there are plenty of them, and the fusion system is just deep enough that you can spend hours trying to get exactly your preferred combination of command, passive, and racial abilities on your demons.

Adding to this is the fact that while you can have four leaders, you can only crack each ability -once-, and an ability cannot be equipped to multiple leaders at a time. This forces party diversification, keeping you from having a final fantasy-like team of nearly identical characters. It also helps that of all the leaders you get, you have control over the stat advancement of only one of them, the main character.

Unfortunately, the system starts to break down at the end. You can only have 3 command abilities per leader/monster, and there are five main damage types (physical, fire, cold, force, lightning) all of which can be weak, average, strong, null, drain, and reflect, and enemy parties are frequently a mix of all of them on any given element, you really end up having to brute force things using the sixth damage type, Almighty, and particularly, the best boss killing spell in the game, Holy Dance.

For most of the game, though, you're faced with a series of increasingly difficult missions, many of which are my least favorite type, escort/protect missions, which has forced me to get better at them quickly. They all make plenty of sense, though, and while grinding isn't exactly easy in this game, you can easily grind just far enough to pick up all the available abilities for your point in the game, and be able to take on a plot fight without too much trouble.

Me? I think that's easy mode. I lost a lot of plot fights.

In conclusion: I am officially dubbing this game Worth The Money if you like tactics/strategy games or monster breeding, or a good story.

Okay, so everybody and their left nut is making new and awesome adaptations of old fairy tales. This is not unexpected, and just like everything else, ninety percent of them are shit.

Yesterday, I discovered one that is not shit. It is constructed(or maybe DE-constructed) from three fairy tales: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White. It is also surprisingly awesome, with demon summonings, attempted murder, and relatively sparing use of the "Here's how the tale really went" dodge. There IS, however, a fair amount of grimdark, even slightly above what you'd expect from, well, the older, unsanitized versions of the stories.

There's also a fair amount of one of my favorite activities, finding ways to beat fairies at their own game, by making promises that will never be fulfilled, or creatively interpreting your obligations, or just tricking them into speaking before they think. I would tell you all my favorite of the instances in the book, but damn if it's not a huge fucking spoiler for two major points, so screw that. Let's just say that Talia is kind of awesome, and Snow is, too. Unfortunately, the third of the trio is the noob, which pretty much puts her in the position of "ignorant heroine who gets ahead of herself and fucks things up all the time and occasionally does something totally right on accident", and that makes me less pleased with her, but I suppose there's no such thing as a perfect book.

In conclusion: It was still enough to keep me up until midnight finishing it, and not all the twists are totally obvious, but they also don't come out of nowhere, which is a definite point in its favor. Definitely one of the best in genre, here.

Okay, Sting is kind of notorious for making retardedly difficult games. I have the PSP remake of Yggdra Union, and it's hard enough, even though they dumbed it down from the GBA release. Knights in the Nightmare is difficult. It takes Nintendo Hard back to the bad old days, where sheer difficulty was added to by a gawdawful control scheme that was actively fighting against you.

I'm going to be very clear about this up front. I like danmaku. I like tactics games. I like tower defense games. But when you combine all three, well... maybe it could be done well, but what we have here is a steaming pile of crap. It's like they took every possible idea they could brainstorm, and then decided that they were all such good ideas that if they put them all in a single game, it would be great!

So your only method of control input is the wisp. It's your cursor. You input commands via hardpoints on the screen, rather than menus. There's just one wee problem. Enemies are shooting at your cursor. Each turn of battle has a time limit, rather than number of actions, and only two things reduce your time: making attacks and the wisp getting hit. In theory, this means that you have infinite time in which to dodge. In practice, that is complete bullshit unless you are someone who plays Touhou on absurd difficulty.

The tower defense part comes in when you realize that except for two units (Lance Knight and Duelist), your pieces are 100% stationary. Duelist can spend vitality and time to move one square, while Lance Knight can spend vitality and time to move two squares. Mostly. As well, every piece is limited in how it can attack, usually to two directions, and also to two attack shapes, one for Law and one for Chaos.

Getting confused yet? I haven't even explained a third of the mechanics, and you have to keep every one of them in mind at all times. You also have to remember to store up attacks (using another hardpoint) so that you can unleash combos, you have to remember to keep flipping the Law/Chaos phase, otherwise you stop getting MP crystals to allow you to make the skill attacks that allow you to actually win, you have to remember that each item that makes those skill attacks requires either Law or Chaos phase, as well as dragging them from the hardpoint to the relevant attacker, and each of those items also has durability AND one of six elemental alignments. You also have to keep track of objects in their squares, because you have to destroy them (but not too quickly!) in order to get key items that let you recruit allies (permadeath on, btw), and in order to get some key items, you have to destroy an object AND wait for it to respawn on later turns so you can destroy it again. Attacking uses up not just time, but the attacker's vitality. Lose all the vitality and it's permadeath for you, and there are only two ways to restore vitality, one of which requires permanently losing characters. You can also exile characters that you aren't using in order to get bonuses, and in order to win battles at all, you have to play a slot machine system on a 4x4 grid in order to get enemies into the right grid slots so that when you kill them, you connect four.

And I -still- haven't finished explaining all the mechanics. That is, however, as far as I'm willing to compromise the integrity of what remains of my mind for you suckers.

That's not to say there's no good things about Knights in the Nightmare. The art is decent, the music is excellent, and the story is also pretty good, if a tad convoluted. On the other hand, none of those things are, uh... the game. You can put as much lipstick on a pile of shit as you want, that won't make it stink any less.

In conclusion: Holy fucking shit, Sting. You don't have to use every fucking idea you think of! Save something for other games! If you'd just made the game with a third of the mechanics you threw in, you'd have had a chance at being just plain awesome. Instead, steaming pile.

Once upon an NES, there was Lolo. Lolo had adventures. At least as many as three, because that is how many my babysitter and I played through, but there may have been more. Lolo was a hell of a game. All three games were more or less the same. Someone was kidnapped or whatnot, and you had to find your way through enemy puzzle mazes to save them, while enemies tried to keep you from doing so. You moved at a slow, consistent waddle, and you had to figure out how to make it through each self-contained one screen maze with the barely-sufficient tools that they gave you.

Steal Princess is just like Lolo, if you changed it to isometric perspective, added a third dimension, reskinned it to look kinda like Disgaea, added an annoying fairy companion (HEY! LISTEN!) and then removed any challenge whatsoever.

The art is painful to look at, the sprites are lazily done. I like sprite art, I adore well executed 2d games, but fucking hell, the sprites are just BAD. Put a little effort into making your game NOT eye rending, people, the DS is not the fucking NES.

The sound effects are likewise bad, though they may have been made somewhat worse in my estimation by the fact that I'd just come off a jag of Disgaea and The World Ends With You, both of which have excellent soundtracks that make Steal Princess look like they blew all their money on the shitty sprites.

Lolo was retardedly, supremely, Nintendo Hard. You were frequently, even -usually-, given just barely enough resources to make it through the level. Making it through anything but the opening levels on your first try was rare, and to be prized. The only thing to be prized in Steal Princess is achieving Gold on a level, which is timed, and is apparently unrewarded, and also, not that difficult.

In conclusion: I paid 35bux for this pile of steaming turds? What? Bad controls, bad music, bad replayability, bad graphics. Fuck you, Climax, for making this game so shitty, and fuck you, Atlus, for publishing it.

If you don't know if you like tower defense games (in particular, this one, because this one has a format that is extremely uncommon), you can try out DTD here.

What separates DTD from most of the genre, by the by, is that rather than there being a fixed path around which you must build, you are given a blank slate of a board that you are allowed near total freedom to build within. You're not allowed to block the entrances or exits, and the pathfinder always has to be able to find a path, but given the relatively small search area, there are few, if any hangups. Build a long and winding road out of guns and do your best to blow the enemies to kingdom come before they make it through the maze.

DTD DS is, uh... well, it's almost exactly the same game you can play at the link above. They shrunk the play area a little, and offer a new mode with way less play space, but the gameplay is exactly the same. They are only charging twenty bucks for it, and I love me some DTD, so it's worth it to be able to grab a game while I'm waiting for something to happen when I'm away from my computer.

In conclusion: So, uh, basically, go try it, and if you like it, give a thought to buying it. This is like, my easiest review ever.

Is your school so old that all your classmates are dead? Is your core so hard that not even a cyclone laser can pierce it? Then boy do I have the game for you.

Okay, here's the rub. The Dark Spire is kinda like Etrian Odyssey, only with less animu stylings, and instead of making you draw your map, they provide you with an automap. Oh, and instead of putting a reasonably sensible, easy to use system behind it, they brought back all the worst parts of every old school D&D-derived RPG ever created.

Random stat generation so that you have to spend minutes trying to get just the right set of stats if you want to not die constantly? Check.

Super low oD&D style HP, so that your characters die at the drop of a hat? ANY hat? Check.

Random HP gains, so that leveling up becomes an exercise in save and reload? Check.

A small portal view into the world where everything is GRIMDARK and GOTHIC, making it hard to see what the hell you're fighting, or tell what's ahead? DOUBLE CHECK.

In conclusion: The only good thing about this fucking game is the music, which Atlus handily included on a CD, so you don't have to play the game to hear it. Don't waste your hard earned moneys on this steaming pile.

I was totally supposed to get Arcane Power on Wednesday after work, but for various reasons managed to not get it until friday after work. In any case, I probably wouldn't have managed to review it until today anyway, so here we go.

( Bards )

( Sorcerer )

( Swordmage )

( Warlock )

( Wizard )

( Feats )

In conclusion: Holy fucking shit, that's another huge batch of material. If you play arcane characters, or multi as arcane characters, go buy this book. Or a subscription to DDI, as like 95% of the material in here is going to be in the compendium on Tuesday.

I have no idea whether or not Jim Butcher is ever actually going to end this series. I'm kind of hoping he will, only to branch off with other characters. What I do know is that this book actually progresses the uberplot. As its main plot. No, really. Just when you thought that Butcher was maybe allergic to progressing the Black Council plot, BAM, not only is there advancement, but it's the main plot of the book, AND it's an actual, honest to goddess whodunit. Of course, if you have any ranks in Genre Savvy, you're going to figure out who did it, and how, ten chapters in, tops, but damn, it's a nice change.

Of course, this being a Dresden novel, he can't manage to go more than three or four chapters without getting his ass beat to hell in a fight, and baddies get imported just to beat him up. Cut the man a break, Dresden, seriously. The only good part of the imported baddie is the duel between it and Listens-To-Wind.

And, of course, blatant foreshadowing of future developments, including more about that damn deserted island out in the middle of Lake Michigan, which everybody knew had to be significant, they just didn't know why.

Worth the money, for me. It's easily one of the best books so far, not for sheer awesome, but for actually being something slightly different.

In conclusion: I can't believe my spellchecker recognizes "whodunit".

I have figured out what I don't like about Trackmania DS. Now, this may be no surprise to anybody who is intimately acquainted with Trackmania in all its variations, and for those that love it, I mean no insult, really.

Trackmania, if I can judge from the DS game, is a 'pure' game, and by that, I mean that the game is essentially a series of time trials. There are no opponents to race against, only ghosts. Courses only rarely involve laps, and again, there's little need to, since there are no opponents, only ghosts. The controls are dead simple. You can turn, you can accelerate, and you can brake. The only real variable is the courses themselves, which can get reasonably complex, but don't manage to be more complex or fun than, say, your average Mariokart track.

Even accumulating the coins necessary to unlock skins for your car (worthless) and track bits (meh) and new tracks (more of the same) are more a matter of grinding than anything else. For what was billed to me as an amazing racing game, I was sorely disappointed. I would rather go back and play more Mariokart DS. Even online multiplayer with random snakers.

In conclusion: Wasted money. Maybe my brother will enjoy it.

Here's a little tip for designers. I do not care if you give me a flyover of the room before you make me try to solve it. If you give me a puzzle room to solve and I cannot see the fucking puzzle, you have failed as a designer.

Avalon Code is, in theory, a good game. It's got decent gameplay, I love having two independently usable weapons equipped at a time, there's a decent variety of weapons, and I enjoy trying to find new combinations of codes to buff my weapons even more. Even better, both the concept and story are solid, even if they're not exactly for-the-ages material.

Unfortunately, the developers also coded in a hell of a lot of fail. The book interface is great and all, but it takes way too fucking long to navigate, and you are forced to navigate it constantly by the second flaw, namely, that you have an inventory space of exactly FOUR code blocks. No more. Since more complex codes can often take six or eight blocks, as well as requiring so much space that you have to swap entire huge codes out on your weapons all the damn time.

As well, since you have no nicely sorted inventory, you are forced to flip through pages constantly to try and figure out where the hell you left that 3x Silver or Bug block or whatever the fuck you happen to need at the moment. This is a colossal failure on the part of the UI designers. There is really no excuse for it. At the VERY least, they could have made it possible for your recipe section to assemble the blocks you need for a recipe with a single tap.

In conclusion: Decent gameplay, good mechanics design. Fucking awful UI in many different ways, especially the totally fixed location camera. Also... armor doesn't seem to do a hell of a lot, especially given that you generally only take one point of damage per hit, and only get single digit HP.

I'm going to make this short and sweet, because basically the entire fucking book is privileged info for people who haven't read the last book. I'm looking at you, .

I can summarize the entire book in a couple lines.

Angst, guilt, angst, guilt, shit goes wrong, angst, guilt, shit goes more wrong, angst, guilt, people get played like a fucking piano, angst,guilt, shit goes even more wrong, shit explodes, new boyfriend.

So, uh, basically it's like every other book in the series, only with way more angst. Stupid amounts of angst. Offputting amounts of angst.

In conclusion: If the angst level doesn't start dropping a bit, I'm going to be revisiting my preorders.

Okay, so, I totally didn't know when I signed up that this game was made by the same guys who did Master of the Monster Lair, which, as you may remember, I hated with the burning cinder fury of crimson chaos fire.

I am pleased, in a way, to say that My World, My Way, is a pretty big step up from Master of the Monster Lair.

Not in graphics, or mechanics, or anything like that. In fact, in most of those ways, it's exactly the same. You learn magic somewhat differently, by getting hit with it rather than exclusively as purchase/quest reward, but you still get a mimic slime, the dungeons are exactly the same, and the combat mechanics have changed only slightly, in that there is now a back row when more than two monsters appear.

Both games even have excellent concepts. MotML is about a boy who is chosen by a magical shovel to dig dungeons, because there's a monster plague, and by digging dungeons, he can lure the monsters in where they won't be making a nuisance of themselves and can generally be slain pretty easily. My World, My Way is set in the same world (in fact, the protagonists of MotML make appearances in this game), but is about a spoiled rotten princess who can literally make the world jump to please her by pouting at it. There's only one thing in the world that has dared defy her. Unfortunately, that one thing is the boy she has set her heart on. This is kind of an awesome concept for a game.

I'm going to say up front, and this should give you an idea of just how deep my loathing for MotML is, My World, My Way, is significantly less grindy than Master of the Monster Lair. By a LONG shot. The grindiness in general feels less, but as well, the princess can pout at the world to make it send her more monsters, more loot, more XP, and more gold. This really cuts down on grind time, and increasing your pout points should be a priority.

On the other hand... the game is -still- incredibly grindy. You will spend huge amounts of time grinding for XP and money, but also to complete mandatory quests that are literally designed to slow you down until the previous game's protagonists can have the dungeons ready for you to defile. You will be doing a LOT of these quests. At least one or two per area, and in one area where the people are panicking because you're going too fast, they give you five separate quests ranging from finding five of a rare drop to collecting twenty randomly occurring items of a given type. It isn't even fun grinding, it's the kind of grinding where you really wish that you had an autofire controller.

The combat and equipment mechanics are the definition of shallow, as well, being limited almost exclusively to "has a better attack/defense rating" with some weapons having better stun or crit chances, and the rare mage staff with a proc.

In conclusion: The game has a killer premise, a better execution than the previous game, but still falls a hell of a long way short of actually being good, or even average. I am, however, less sorry that I purchased it than I was for Master of the Monster Lair. If they keep improving, someday these guys might make a good game!

Where to begin, where to begin. For starters, I'm doing all three books at once, here, because really, they don't bear looking at alone.

( Cut for huge fucking length. )

In conclusion: Any potential I had seen in the first book of the sequel to this trilogy is not present in the first, and I didn't see enough to keep reading that one. I only kept reading this one to see just how low it could go. I would rather, were I forced to reread a shitty series, reread the Merry Gentry series. At least that has tentacles.

( We're skipping straight to the meat. )

And that, as they say, is that.

In conclusion: Most of the book is fluff, with a lot of good crunch and a bit of bad crunch. It's just too bad they didn't go ahead and make it into a full setting book already. This is an easy book to pass up if you're strapped for cash or not all that interested in the planes in general, though.

I like Jim Butcher. I don't know Jim Butcher, except through his writing, but I like him anyway. On the other hand, like or no like, I would like to punch him because I'd like Codex Alera so much more if it didn't have the damn Zerg. Zerg and other hive mind/collective baddies make really shitty BBEGs. As an evil horde, they're not particularly compelling. All they bring to the table is a lack of moral considerations, overwhelming numbers (including the ability to breed like rabbits on spanish fly), and adaptability. You can get that, or better, with basically any other race.

That's why, for me, book 3 was the peak of the series, beyond a shadow of a doubt. It focused mainly on strikingly good military action and drama between humans and gnolls. This book almost sorta gets back to that, but because it's the freaking zerg, it's lacking in the back and forth that made that one really good. When you're fighting the zerg, their entire tactics pretty invariably boil down to "get killed, assimilate, and overwhelm with numbers/assimilated stuff". You can try to humanize the queen(s) all you want, but having one person with over nine thousand bodies just isn't going to be all that interesting no matter how you slice it.

Aside from that, though, this is a solid book, with plenty of awesome moments, most of which aren't even Tavi's. I kinda wish that Bernard and Amara would kick the bucket, but they've got plot armor and and some ability to think ahead, making that kind of unlikely. Rather more importantly, the high level casters go to actual war in this one, and they awesome all over the fucking pages. Even when they're being colossal dicks, as Gaius Sextus is inclined to be, there the awesome flows in great quantity. The wrath of an epic mage backed into a corner should be fucking impressive, and on this, at least, Butcher fucking delivers.

And then there's the last fucking line of the book. Man. What a fucking line to end on.

In conclusion: Well, it's a series, so what the fuck can I say? If you're into the series, go get it, if you're not, uh... start? It may not be getting -better- anymore, but it's still way the fuck better than the first book or two let on.

PS: ZAA WARUDO!

( Cut for so much crunch you won't believe it. )

And that's that. Okay, that was a fucking lot of crunch. It seriously took me something like eight hours to go through this book. That's a fucking lot of crunch.

If you're playing a martial character, you really gotta get this book. It doubles the number of powers available to you, easily.

Hell, if you're NOT playing a martial character, you should probably pick it up just in case. Also, to support this new regime of little fluff and lots of crunch in the crunch books.

In conclusion: Worth the money and then some.

My initial reaction to the game is a few entries back. My reaction upon prolonged play of the game can be summed up in just a few words:

Holy fucking shit, I want to gouge my brain out, give me my fucking money back, you bastards!

If I can't have the money back, can I at least have the fucking TIME back?

The basic concept of the game is solid. There are monsters all over the fucking place, and there's nothing that monsters like more than a nice cozy dungeon to hide in and amass treasure. You, having been chosen by the annoying talking shovel that you found in the forest around your town, are tasked with digging out and furnishing that dungeon so that all the monsters will move in there, turning your home town into the awesome town from Etrian Odyssey.

What is actually built on that premise is a fucking travesty. Ignore the characters and town, both of which get about as much development as the relevant components of Etrian Odyssey. They're irrelevant, here. I didn't buy the game for the engaging storyline. I bought it because I wanted to be the master of the fucking monster lair.

When you enter a new dungeon level, you are faced with an immense expanse of brown bounded by a large red box, and occasionally some smaller red boxes. These red bits are brick walls that you cannot dig through. Okay, sure, you need some fucking boundaries. That's great. But your fucking shovel can only do so many actions a day, and the limit starts out retardedly small, only ten actions. Removing one block of dirt is one action, replacing is is one, and placing a room is one. The basic consequence of this is that it takes forever to build any given floor of your dungeon, JUST for the digging out space part.

Then, once you've got everything prepared, you have to build rooms to attract various sorts of monsters. Well, I get ahead of myself. First, you have to BUY the rooms, from your friendly neighborhood furniture store, which happens to stock such things as garbage dumps, cellars, and evil altars.

Too bad your only way of getting more money to buy rooms is by going into your own dungeon and killing the handily refilling denizens. Yes, that's right. You are building the dungeon so that you can clear it out so that you can build more dungeon to clear out. It's the great circle of grind. You are literally grinding to create more grind for yourself to grind.

The dungeon design isn't even particularly imaginative. You have 0 incentive to place things cleverly, and, in fact, you have incentive to make your dungeon as stupidly straightforward as possible. Place things so that you can fight as many groups of 3 at a time as possible, giving you the maximum drop rate. Place treasure chests so that enemies will fill them with better treasure than they drop. Place rooms in combinations that make killing the monsters easier, because nobody but you is killing the damn things.

But the straw that breaks the back of every camel within a thousand light years is this: everything takes too fucking long. Delays between entering a command and choosing a target and executing the command. Unskippable delays for status popups, kill popups, and special attack popups in battle. A mandatory two second victory fanfare at the end of every battle, for no purpose whatsoever. Unskippable animations for adding rooms, digging, and undigging. Unskippable animations for getting jumped by enemies. Slow-ass attack animations. And slow ass-attack animations, for those into the xkcd thing. Enemies that look so retarded they make Dragon Quest monsters look fucking awesome. All of this shit combines to make sure you feel every fucking second of the endless grind.

In conclusion: Fuck this shit, I'm going back to Disgaea. At least there, the game makes me WANT to grind. Don't waste your money. I'd rather pay thirty bucks to be sodomized with a cactus.

As I was perusing books, I came across one that purported to be a (relatively) new urban fantasy series. This is not an uncommon occurrence for me, but I was heartened upon discovering that it has both a male writer and a male protagonist. Those are, unfortunately, good signs in a market flooded with "supernatural romance" novels that are thinly disguised furry/corpse porn masquerading as urban fantasy.

Okay, enough grousing about that stuff. The point is, Felix Castor. He's got no magic aside from all the magic he does have, which is pretty much psychometry stuff. Most people can see ghosts, but he can banish them even if they don't want to go, can sense traces of them, and does The Handshake Thing. That's where you read someone's mind/past by touching them. There's magic, but it's not on the level of Dresden Files, where people get to throw around fireballs. It's pretty much all classical black magic. Wards, summoning demons and other things, necromancy, and whatnot.

The first four fifths of the book is pretty solid. It doesn't exactly open with action, but it's far from the worst opening I've ever seen. From there, we've got a Constantine-like insane man possessed by a demon that acts as an oracle when it amuses him, giving prophecies that won't help the protagonist but will let a clever reader figure shit out faster, a bunch of flashbacks to show how Castor got to be as awesome as he is (he's not that awesome), some casual non-graphic sex, some demon attacks, some agnosticism, a preachy brother, a succubus, and a tangled mystery with over nine thousand villains.

In short, everything I like in a book.

And then Castor catches one of the villains and makes him talk, and inexplicably, instead of dialogue, there's a fucking WALL OF TEXT. Most of the text is completely fucking irrelevant, and it's all expository. Nothing will ruin a book faster than Too Much Exposition, and apparently this one saved all its exposition for this one moment.

The book wraps up, and then, inexplicably, at the end, is something that made me fucking hate the entire goddamn book. I'm going to cut it, because I can't bear not saying it, but ( if you don't want to be spoiled, don't read it. )

In conclusion: A good book, right up until the ending screwed the pooch. This needs a good editor, badly.

Okay, this is going to be short and ugly. Just like me.

Backup is short. It took me less than a half hour to read. What you get in those few minutes is concentrated vampire novel. I am not joking. Half the words are spent on angsting over being a white court vampire. Woe, he must chew off chunks of people's souls to survive. Woe, he cannot be with his one true love because her touch burns him. Woe woe woe.

The other half of the words are concentrated Dresden Files. You can tell Thomas is [SPOILER] because when he bothers to think, all he does is get himself in trouble, and when he doesn't think, it also gets him in trouble.

( And then, after that, I spoil the ending! )

In conclusion: If you've got the :10bux: to blow on it and -really- like Thomas, go for it.