Book Review - On Basilisk Station

Last month I was browsing a Chapters store that was about to go out of business, I have not been reading much science fiction outside of the Star Wars series, and I took this as a chance to pickup a good book on sale to get into the genre. While wandering the aisle trying to pick a good book, a complete stranger came over and tried to help me make my choice. He was a fellow customer, but he was such a fan of the genre he enjoyed introducing people to good science fictions series. In my case he pointed me in the direction of On Basilisk Station by David Weber.

 The Review:

So first and foremost, one thing all science fiction stories have in common, is that they are filled with science. This means that the author spends a good chunk of time trying to download fictional scientific information which is probably very close to what we currently know into your head. In that way this book is true to its genre. The story takes place in a system far far away, approximately 512 light years from earth in the year 4003 CE (although the story uses a different Calendar). Humans have expanded far into space and have divided themselves into separate Space Nations around the systems they have colonized.

On Basilisk Station is the first book in a long running series that follows the exploits of one Honor Harrington a member of the Royal Manticoran Navy, which is a space navy build around the Star Nation of Manticore. Honor Harrington has just been awarded her first captaincy of a spaceship due to her excellence over the course of 25 years of military service. However life isn't fair, her first ship has its weapons gutted, the crew starts to hate her due to the resulting failures in the ship's military performance and she is sent off to watch over the backwater system of the galaxy. Little does anyone know, that backwater system is about to be the powder keg that starts a 13 book long war that spans several star systems and Billions of lives.

As I mentioned above, the story stays true to the science fiction genre in terms of how much you have to learn about the technology and the time period. The series places a lot of emphasis on the ship capabilities and ship to ship combat, as a result there is a lot to learn about how a space ship in this universe works and how it can come apart. In addition there is a brief glimpse into the government of the Star Nation of Manticore which while not as important for this novel, becomes a much more important focus of the following books in the series.

On Basilisk Station has several supporting characters introduced who reflect the varied workforce needed within a single ship to keep it running. Having read most of the series before returning to write this review, I can say that you have to try and remember these characters as they will keep coming back throughout the series. What is most irritating to me is that like the realities of war, people can die too easily and too suddenly, Weber does an amazing job surprising you when a supporting character you have spent a fair bit of time following through the story and cheering on suddenly dies. Weber is fairly detailed on how these characters die as they don't just vanish when the ship takes a hit, He describes how a piece of the ship usually breaks apart and smashes into them or some kind of power source overloads after too much stress.

This particular book has a good chunk of time devoted to mystery solving as Harrington and her crew try to solve a conspiracy that seems to be happening in the Solar System they are in charge of protecting. Unfortunately, Weber tells the story from multiple points of view including the Antagonists' as such for you the reader the mystery is spoiled, but it is still interesting to see the strands of clues that lead Harrington and her crew to putting together the puzzle.


Overall, I found On Basilisk Station to be a great book to get my feet wet in the world of Science Fiction. You get detailed space battles, conspiracies, and a realistic interpretation what it might be like in a future society with a space navy. I give this book a 9/10 as I couldn't find too many faults with the story outside of the fact that too much of the book was spent downloading information on how this fictional universe works. I highly recommend everyone tries it, even just borrowing it from the library for a one time read. 

Update - March 25, 2016

Hello to all who have visited my blog. As you may have noticed I have been away for quite a while. Last Summer I was able to get employed Full-Time. As a result I am now working 5 days a week and have had a lot less time than I expected for my hobbies, including this Blog.

Gaming:
I continue to play Guild Wars 2 albeit less time online than before, however it is still my favourite MMO. In previous posts I mentioned looking into Wildstar and EVE Online. I did try Wildstar for a few months, however I found the community and the lack of folks to play with while leveling to be very lacking. In a way Guild Wars 2 might have spoiled me with an expectation that people still play low-level maps for fun. EVE Online is fun especially because I'm a guy who likes playing with spreadsheets, but it is too PvP oriented for my tastes, as such I have stopped playing it as well. I have had quite a bit of time playing the new expansion for Guild Wars 2 and I will be putting up a post about my thoughts on what has been done, and where I hope the game goes.

Books:
No matter how busy I get at work, I always make time for reading. As such I have gone through quite a few different novel series and I intend to put up reviews in the coming month on the books I have read. I am slowly getting into the Science Fiction novel series which is quite exciting.


Thats all for the quick update on what is happening right now, please leave any comments if you have an suggestions for what you would like to see more of.

Heart of Thorns Impression.

LSo two weeks ago ArenaNet surprised the Guild Wars 2 community with an announcement that there would be an Expansion Pack coming out sometime soon. This Expansion Pack would continue the story from the current Living World story arc as well as adding a lot of new content to the game that has been in demand for a while. I'm going to talk about the pieces of revealed information that I liked and what I'm hoping for in the upcoming expansion. 

 Lets start with the story, the current story arc ended on a cliffhanger showing the Tyria's greatest united military the 'Pact' being destroyed during assault of the Maguuma Jungle where the Elder Dragon Mordremoth was hiding. Through the story instances I found out that the Sylvari were minions of an Elder Dragon, however Caithe a Sylvari disappeared with a promise to protect the only remaining legacy of the player friendly dragon Glint. When the expansion starts I think that the new chapter in the continuing story to involve me the player convincing the world that maybe some of the Sylvari are still friendly, or that there may be a way to save the Sylvari from the influence of the Elder Dragon. Between finding a way to save the Sylvari race, locating Caithe and Glint's Legacy that she stole as well as figuring out how to beat the Elder Dragon I expect there to be a lot of story content to rival a few chapters worth of the living world stories. Considering that I will be paying for a full expansion, I hope that this new expansion story is at least as long as the personal story that came with the release of the base game.

 In regards to the new maps and Player vs Environment (PVE) gameplay, with the lack of a standing army to fight the Elder Dragon, it suggests that players will probably be doing more of the activities that were previously assigned to NPCs in earlier content. The latest map released for Guild Wars 2 had a map where players were entrusted with securing and upgrading fortresses and escorting supplies to upgrade these fortresses to withstand enemy attacks. I expect that the new maps will build up on this style of gameplay with more content being dependent on player involvement in the various regions of the maps. Since the pact's airship invasion failed we will probably have to progress a long siege over land and through the jungle reminiscent of the straights of devastation invasion gameplay, to bring the heavy weapons of the world to bare against the might of Mordremoth.

The Expansion announcement also told us that there would be a new heavy armor profession the Revenant and a specialization for every profession in the game. This means that everyone will be busy learning the new abilities of the existing professions or learning the new one. So everyone will be returned to their 'newb' like state where they don't know for certain what works best for their chosen profession at launch. This is good, as currently there are 'efficient' builds which causes folks to all follow the exact same blueprint for creating their characters and I want there to be more opportunity for builds to move away from these Meta (cookie cutter) builds. As for the changes to each profession, as there have been no releases on what kind of adjustments are going to be coming for them, so I can't really say anything about them.

Lastly the new feature I am most happy about is the announcement of more Guild based activities including the ability to obtain a 'Guild Hall'. ArenaNet has clearly announced that they intend to put the 'Guild' back in Guild Wars 2, so I'm hoping for possibly dungeons or fights that require a high level of coordination but are still completable by small Guilds with around 10 people representing.

What I've been doing until now

So its been about 4 months since my last Blog Post. During this time I wandered around a bit between several books, games and tv shows, which is why I didn't have any specific topics to talk about.

However towards the end of October during some casual gameplay I came across a new Guild to join in Guild Wars 2 (GW2). After joining this guild my interest in the game sky rocketed and while I wanted to make a few posts about it, between school and my new dedication catching up on content in GW2 I had less time to spend on creating blog posts. Goes to show that a game is more enjoyable when you have good company to play it with.

Since I have now caught up on all the living story content and achievements, I'm going to be going back and talking about what I've experiences this past few months.

Visiting Dry Top

First thing I did when I got back into Guild Wars 2 was try and catch up on the Living World story. I missed a huge chunk of content from the season 1 of the living world including the destruction of Lion's Arch. I have to say seeing Lion's arch a ruin and all those memorials scattered around the map made me wonder as to whether Lion's Arch will ever be remade, most of the buildings in the city were made out of the hulls of boats that were washed on top of the cliffs. Now those boats are all wrecked and in pieces, while it might be possible to repair them I suspect that Lion's Arch will get an overhaul, all those boats will have to be removed and brand new structures will be made.

Then there is the living story season 2, I am extremely grateful and happy that ArenaNet has decided to make each chapter of the Living World Story in season 2 re-playable as long as you have the chapter unlocked. I went and spent a few gems to purchase the chapters I missed, and I must say it was well worth it. These last few chapters have had a lot more intricate stories to them and I feel that the new personal story style approach to telling the living world is a brilliant system. It also makes sense to do it this way since from lvl 1-80 we've had a 'personal story' that used the same system to get us into what is happening in the Tyria.

The two new maps 'Dry Top' and 'Silverwastes' are also amazingly well crafted, when I first got back into Guild Wars 2, I spent most of my time running about events in Dry Top. The way there is always something happening, layered areas that can only be reached by clever use of the Zephyrite crystals is a good way to keep folks active in the map.

Then there is the main reason I'm staying in Guild Wars 2, my Guild. My last guild was friendly and somewhat active, but I guess I didn't click so well with the way things worked in that guild. This guild however, its a challenge to not get involved in the Guild Chat no matter how strange things get. Recently we started making animal noises whenever things seemed quiet, yes it is strange but oddly fun. For our Guild events (missions, challenges, puzzles) for several weeks now we've struggled to try and complete things on our own, only to need the aid of other guild in completing our objectives. This weekend however we were able to get through the puzzle and the one challenge we kept failing all by ourselves, I felt very proud and ecstatic of the Guild upon achieving this. I think I've finally found the Guild that I've been looking for.

TL;DR - I'm back in Guild Wars 2 having joined a new Guild and I'm enjoying myself. I will be updating this blog, hopefully more regularly. I've already got a few topics to post about this week.


More things to come:
What I think of GW2 - Heart of Thorns
Book Review - Sword and Staff trilogy
Game Review - Space Engineers 

Review of Wildstar

So yes I'm not the best blogger out there, as I am unable to stick to a single game. I've tried Wildstar out for 4 months now and I've lost my interest in the game. So here is my review of what I liked and didn't like about the game.

I loved that there was a lot lore and text to read through in the quests, I'm a huge lore fan so it worked out in my favor.  The customization options were amazing, Housing especially was very fun to figure out how to create something completely new. Housing and Role-Play were probably my favourite parts of the game. The ability to customize the housing plot any way you wanted to, allowed for nearly endless scenario's for Roleplaying. I created 2 characters, a scientist and a settler as such I got a lot of lore and I got to create several structures in the world.

That said I found the settler path to become a chore after the first month as most players had power leveled to max in order to hit the end game content as such I ended up alone creating structures by myself which took a lot longer than I would have liked. I'm not a power leveler, in my opinion doing that kind of thing takes away from the wonders of the game. As such it took me a couple of months to reach max level, and even so I found the game to be very grindy.
 
In fact there was a grind in pretty much everything there was in the game, which made me wonder....why am I paying ~$15 a month to work instead of having fun ? The crafting was interesting but involved playing a mini-game where you had a chance of getting exactly what you want. Coming from Guild Wars 2 this seemed strange. In my opinion if you had the materials, and the necessary crafting level then you should be able to craft it, not play a RNG game to have a chance at creating it. I found this annoying and going through the levels I found I leveled my character faster than my crafting skill as I just couldn't bare to continue playing the mini game anymore.

As of October 2014 here is my verdict :

I am rating this game a 7/10 based on how much I enjoyed playing the game. In terms of graphics yes I will give them the full 10/10 because the world did look quite beautiful and at times a bit awe-inspiring. I had heard that Wildstar was being aimed at the more hardcore crowd of MMORPG players, it wasn't until I played it for a few months that I realized that I probably didn't count as a member of this hardcore crowd. If you are a hardcore MMORPG gamer I do recommend giving wildstar a try, if you are not such a player hold off... this game is extremely punishing in terms of how much time and effort you have to put in to get much out of it.