If I had to use one word to describe Three Axes to Fall it would be: lazy. The title is lazy, as it has no connection to the content. It only gets worse from there. The characterization is lazy, the same repetition used ... repeatedly... to convey emotional depth, the random characters doing random stuff just in the nick of time, the relationships started haphazardly and ended stupidly or not at all the inept enemies that have a lot of power and do nothing with it except boast and bluster, even the book cover is lazy. But the worst part is Sam Sykes was too lazy to finish the story or even remember why he started it.

  Remember Sal? The woman so brutally betrayed that she wants to burn the world to get revenge? Sam doesn't. In the first book she was an angry, driven, asshole who could spare no quarter for anything that wouldn't further her deadly goals. I liked her then. She was smart and surprisingly funny. In the second book she was turned for no actual reason from an anti hero to a tragic hero, a repentant protector who kills tens of people with her sword in a single fight and still keeps running. In this third book she is a tired, exhausted, fleeing person who thinks about things, reflects a lot and whines the entire book, until she forgets who she is and stumbles into being a messianic savior surrounded by a fast and furious family.

  Now imagine John Wick, hunting for the people who killed his dog, the only living thing reminding him of his dead wife, and then somehow deciding he wants to do something else and start a hobby, finding forgiveness in his heart. It's almost that bad. I could have forgiven (heh!) this book if it were half as short and ended prematurely because the writer died. But no, it's just a lazy, half-assed non-ending that leads to nothing except a long final chapter in which people part ways smiling wisely and wearily after doing fuck all the entire book.

  You want to know what happened to her magic? Nope. You wondered why her list grew from what seemed like a short one in the first book to more than thirty names? Nope. You frustrated she barely started on that list before she let it go? Who cares? How about the frenemies she made, who grew along with her trying to kill her, like Velline and Tretta? Nah! Want to know where the gun gets its bullets anymore when Liette is not around? Bah! This goes on and on and on.

  Bottom line: a captivating book lost its way in the sequel and collapsed in the third, with no meaningful closure or payoff for reading through 2500 pages of story.

  The first book in the Grave of Empires series felt refreshing. A new magical steam punk world, an interesting roguish hero and entertaining fantasy adventures. I needed that, for some reason. Yet reading the second book, Ten Arrows of Iron, filled me with disappointment. It's not a bad book by itself, it's just so much less good than the first.

  First of all, it's basically a heist story, a genre that I despise with all my heart. But even without that, it's inconsistent, repetitive, lazy. There are even some scenes where Sal oscillates between having no weapons, using a sword and an axe that she lost in a previous scene. A lot more characters have been added, while the ones in the first book were eliminated or sidelined, yet all of these new characters are almost cardboard, doing stuff that's in their character sheet, but for reasons often not consistent with previous behavior and that feel artificial.

  Yes, the scope of the battles is huge, the threats are cosmic, the body count horrendous, the romantic angles multiplied and pumped up, but I felt almost nothing as Sal just went through the motions, one moment hurt and exhausted, the next killing hundreds of people with a sword and a gun, the next flirting with the people who want to kill her. The writing is using the same formulas that worked in the first book, but repeated again and again, until they lose their strength. And so many things just happen because they have to happen. The last scene, where she randomly finds a guy in a tent on the road she was randomly travelling on was soo bad!

  But I feel the worst transgression was that Sam Sykes changed the character of Sal the Cacophony from a damaged person seeking revenge at all costs to an anti-hero, who is kind and thoughtful and ultimately good, only misunderstood while she kills whole communities. I had no need of that. The original single-minded character who sometimes did something good by mistake was enough for me.

  Bottom line is that I hope the character can be salvaged in the third book, but I fear it might not happen. Falling in love with your own character is a sure way to ruin them.

  While the Philidor Defense has fallen out of favor for not being ambitious enough, it is one of the oldest and most played openings for Black. So one might forgive you for thinking the theory for it is well known, yet it is still played now and has 45% winning chances for Black. In this post I will describe a weapon that will utterly crush your Philidor opponent with seemingly crazy moves that nevertheless never leave White at a disadvantage. In fact, from the critical position of this gambit, less than 3% of people play the correct move with White, meaning it's something of a novelty your opponents won't be prepared for.

  Meet the Zombie King gambit, an opening named and popularized by YouTuber Adamisko šach. It arises from natural moves on both sides (the losing move for Black is even considered good at low engine depths): 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 reaches the Philidor defense. We reply with 3. Bc4 and they have to go 3...h6, which is the most played move in the position. From there we attack the center with 4. d4, they take, most common and best move 4...exd4 to which we replay with 5. c3, gambitting a pawn. We have reached the critical position.

  From here, only two moves are worth taking into consideration: 5...dxc3, by far the most played in 65% of the cases, and 5...Nf6, played in 15% of the cases. The first one is a blunder that accepts the Zombie King gambit and leads to most satisfying continuations, the second one we will consider declining the gambit, in which we just capture back the d-pawn and we go either Bd3 or Qb3, depending on whether Black captures the e-pawn or not, then play normal chess.

Now, the Zombie King gets activated when Black greedily captures the c3 pawn. Having hyped it so much, you know that the next moves will not be mild and positional , so we follow 5...dxc3 with 6. Bxf7!! Black has no other reasonable options than to eat the bishop, hence the name of the gambit. The Black zombified king will mindlessly eat our pieces until finally getting decapitated.

From this position, only three moves don't lead to mate. From those, one of them is giving up the queen, the other is giving up the rook. Most played move, Ke8, leads to mate in 3 after Qh5+ and  Qf7#, and has been played in 40% of cases. The most challenging (and still badly losing) response from Black is 7...Kf6, to which we respond with 8. Qf3+, feeding the king one more piece, then 9. Qf7, cutting off any escape.

In this position, Black has +7 points of material: a pawn, a bishop and a knight. The Stockfish eval is +2.5 for White! Four moves don't lead to mate from here: two of them just give up the queen outright, another is cutting off the e7-b3 diagonal for our queen, giving back all material while the king runs away in shame all over the board, while the last one, the best, is the one that maintains the +2.5 eval: 9...Nf6.

Now whichever move we respond with: 10. f4+ (recommended by the engines) or 10. Nxc3 (which is still good and leads to funnier lines), Black is lost. Remember that this is after they played the best possible moves after Bxf7+. And look at the Black's position! The only pieces that are developed are a knight and the king. This opening is another reminder that it doesn't matter how many pieces you have, but how many you can use.

Feel free to explore all the possibilities with the Zombie King Gambit study on Lichess (the LiChess Tools browser extension is recommended to be installed, but it works without it, as well).

Here is the video Adamisko made for the same gambit:
[youtube:ZpDaO0ZfVso]

  One day Sam Sykes woke up and said to Diana Gabaldon: "Mom! I can write a lot of huge fantasy books, too!". I like his writing, so this is good, but Seven Blades in Black, the first book in the Grave of Empires series, is a 700 page book, which is bad. It was a very entertaining and captivating story, which is good, but it ended 90% there, which is bad. Still less than the 850 pages of the first Outlander book, which is good. Just wanted to end things on a good note, so that it will never be said that Siderite is not graciously optimistic. And handsome.

  Weird paragraph? That's kind of the vibe of the book. The story is about a mysterious bounty hunter with a strange magical gun, who is looking for seven mages to kill. As the story progresses we get world building, action, magic, death, friendship, romance and a slow explanation of what the hell this was all about. Since it's one of those books where the main character is telling her story to another character, it's written in the first person, which gives it a bit more humor, as Sal is both cocky and possibly an unreliable narrator. I did get a bit of The Usual Suspects while reading, but it's not quite like that.

  I liked the story, I liked the world, with the two magical vs technological groups that both boldly claim to fight for peace and stability while destroying everything in their path with their pointless battles. I thought the romantic angles were kind of strained, to be honest. The ending is almost satisfying, but it ends on a weird vibe, with still some stuff to be resolved. It felt like an artificial cliffhanger: read my next book! Funny thing is that it worked. I plan to read the next book in the series next, but it's going to hurt my rating of the book.

  Bottom line: if you like the classic likeable rogue trope, the grandiose adventures and fast action in an almost steampunk world that is both alien and similar to our own, then you will like this.

  In The Horror from the Hills - which is quite a silly name, because not much happens on the hills to begin with - an archeologist brings back to America the statue of an ancient malevolent god. Well, it doesn't bode well, I can tell you that. It's published in 1963, but it feels written decades earlier. I thought maybe it was an artistic choice, but no, it was actually published prior in 1931 in a serialized form. In Weird Tales! Remember those?

  A Lovecraftian story, it features the usual high class gentlemen whose passion is knowledge and science, talking very convincingly in archaic pompous terms and being very sensitive to how things ought to be and are not. They kind of bring a sleeping god in the U.S. and, feeling bad about it, strive to save the world. It made me feel nostalgic for the eras where science and rational thought would solve problems in stories. Well, they do solve it with a death ray, basically a sci-fi bazooka, but Frank Belknap Long is an American author, so it tracks.

  Did I like the book? It was strange, like Lovecraftian mythos books usually are, but also weirdly progressive. There is an entire scene where a policeman explains how he is going to solve the crime by finding a Chinaman, spewing all kinds of ridiculously false preconceptions that the main character is disgusted with. And while people are often repulsed, offended or otherwise unwilling to put horrible things into words, the book just feels old, not laughable.

  Funny enough, apparently this is an H.P.Lovecraft story, or rather a dream that he recounted to Long, which then published it with Lovecraft's permission almost word for word. Poor Frank wrote all kinds of stuff for decades, but what he is most known for are short stories in the Lovecraft universe. I do not mind that, to be honest.

  Bottom line: a fine short story to bring you back to an age where things were very different and remind you that whatever nonsense bothers you today, it shall pass like all things do.

  I had no idea there were so many games in the Alien universe, 61 so far, starting from 1982! Like four games for every movie, although that also counts expansions of existing games. The fact that they have very similar names doesn't help. And these are the official games. There is an Alien based board game from 1979! Age 7+ LOL! Gotta love the '70s!

  Aliens vs. Predator 2010 is visually impressive, but it's basically a first person shooter. And you don't feel any satisfaction in terms of story, except when playing the Marine. I actually played the original AvP game, the one with the ridiculous graphics from 1993 - at least I think it was that one, it was a long time ago. Anyway, that game made you feel different when playing the various species: you got the special field of view of the alien, the speed and wall crawling, the almost sensual way in which it would embrace its victims, relish in their terror, then bite their heads off. You can probably guess that was my favorite to play. Anyway, this is lacking from this game. 17 years later the story and visuals are amazing, the actual feel is gone. A personal peeve of mine.

  The story is another Weyland-Yutani installation that is overrun by xenomorphs, you have to escape from and that explodes at the end. This Weyland guy sucks when it comes to work safety, huh? Anyway, I liked that it kind of explained what happened with Karl Bishop Weyland. Spoilers: he had cancer, so he uploaded himself into androids. In a lot of games you meet Weylands that seem to be the real deal, only to shoot them and see them bleed white, but you assume that there is a real one somewhere. Well, it's bishops all the way down.

  There are also audio logs that show the drive of the guy. He's basically Elon Musk, wanting to achieve maximum progress, profit and immortality.  One of them says "Obsession is the only path to progress. We forgive many things to great men, as long as they achieve their goals". It's true. It's the role of the rebel scapegoat who can either save the system when it gets too complacent and its decaying, or fail and be blamed for it. Ha! I finally understand The Architect from Matrix! Rebels are not outside the system, they are its safeguards.

  Anyway, the sets were nice. There were even jungle arenas, which made for interesting visuals of aliens jumping and walking on trees. However, I decry the lack of exploration of the concept. All the species in the jungle should be infestable, right? What about plants? How would xenomorphs adapt to and then change a fully functional ecosystem? There were fatality-like kills, even if some were kind of reused for the xenomorphs and predators, which looked nice, but got old fast. And the only alien thing I liked is when it held its victims for face huggers, almost caringly.

  Bottom line: an interesting foray into the combined Alien and Predator universe. Personally I think combining them was dumb, but we're there already, so let's hope for the best. The story itself is not very complicated, this being a shooter and all, but all the gameplay and cinematics combined made for an entertaining movie.

  Ask and you shall receive. I was complaining of Alien: Stasis Interrupted about how the game switched from a claustrophobic survival game to a shooter. Then I watched Alien: Isolation, all the cinematics. A whooping five hours of it. And the entire game is about trying to survive! In truth, there is little difference between the gameplay and the cinematics, but the video was of all the actions required to finish the game in order and done perfectly, so I consider it a film.

  The main character is Amanda Ripley. Hey! Ripley is that woman from the first movie! Anyway, that's her daughter, still trying to find her mother when the flight recorder from the Nostromo is reported found. They go to the space station Sevastopol, where the ship that found the recorder - and also made a quick stop on LV-429, is docked.

  I loved that there is just one alien in the first half. In fact, I decry adding more of them later. But the beginning is great, with an alien that is murderous, cunning and unstoppable. There are also crazed androids, paranoid people and a lot of retro looking equipment like tape recorders and big hard electrical switches and hand-made weaponry towards the end.

  In Isolation, the enemy is not really the alien - well, one might argue that this is the general theme of Alien - but the humans and their smallmindedness. One motivated person almost fixes the entire station while evading aliens and synths, so imagine what all the people on the station could have achieved if they worked together, not selfishly thinking just of themselves. This idea is very strong in the game.

  This may be the most satisfying game entry in the Alien universe. And of course, being the most cinematic, the scariest, the one with the least shooting and the most difficult to finish, people meh-ed it. Anyway, I liked it a lot.

  Aliens: Colonial Marines - Stasis Interrupted is actually a prequel DLC pack for Colonial Marines, which I already covered. I felt this one was a lot nicer.

  You wake up from stasis in full chaos: people are dead and dying, either from chest bursters, mature xenomorphs or soldiers with flamethrowers killing human and alien alike. You find people along the way, allies, amongst which there is also Hicks. Hey! He's from the Aliens movie!

  There are actually multiple points of view as you play multiple characters. The sounds and music really bring you into the story, it feels like you are there or at least a more cinematic story. The emotions of the characters are much better expressed, adding more to the stakes.

  If I were to criticize something, and maybe this is a problem with a lot of more recent Alien productions, is how many aliens there are and how easy it is to kill them. The player can kill one adult xenomorph with a small burst from a flame thrower. Considering this is a prequel to a movie where the alien survives falling into molten metal, I would say that's a mistake. Also the adult aliens move too much like humans.

  I loved the beginning, though, the part where you wake up without any knowledge or weapons into total pandemonium and you must survive. I would have liked the entire game to be like this, unfortunately once guns come into play it turns into a classic first person shooter.

  Bottom line: it's one of the nicer additions to the Alien universe. I liked how it made me feel I am watching and am part of a movie.

  There is no story. In Aliens: Fireteam Elite you are an elite colonial marine commanding a team, killing aliens and discovering what evil Weyland-Yutani has been up to again. It's a straight out shooter.

  There are some positives: the sets are quite nice, the idea of the AI run science station and the alien ruins are good. It is more of a bait and switch, though, as all that lore is not used in any meaningful way. It's a very short game, too, with just four missions that you execute flawlessly, then the game ends.

  I almost gave up on We Sold Our Souls after falling asleep a few times on it, but I pushed through and I am happy I did. It reminded me of Tim Powers' Last Call, but being more straightforward. In a way it's also a last call to  wake up, be human and don't buy into the dullness taking over the world.

  Grady Hendrix does a good job generating the feeling of a doomed world in which nothing seems to matter anymore to anyone and in which the only salvation can come through raw creativity, also known as metal music. The book starts kind of slow and then does something explosive, then gets to some parts that are hard to understand, then goes back into something slightly unexpected. It's inconsistent that way, perhaps following the riffs of metal. The character of J.D. for example, seems to pop up out of nowhere, knowing more than he should and doing stuff just because the plot needs it. Or sometimes our heroine evades notice with ease only to fall into a crowd of perfectly coordinated people wanting to kill her. But if you push through the book, it provides quite a few nice surprises. Once I got into its rhythm, I couldn't put it down.

  You can consider this a metal modern version of a fantasy quest. The hero needs to get somewhere and do something to save the world, while the forces of good and evil are swirling around them. There is a lot of music lore in the book, but not so much as to become oppressive or intrusive. I found it amazing that the author wrote lyrics for the fictional Troglodyte album. Or is it fictional?

  The ending is... not as satisfying as I expected, with many things remaining vague. But that's OK, as most of the book is metaphorical.

  Bottom line is that I liked the book, but it could have been better. 

  Darksiders is a very beautiful game. All of the characters are meticulously crafted, with wings, shiny eyes, sculpted swords scythes, rods and hammers with flames coming out of different orifices. The story is not bad either, inspired from Christian mythology of angels and devils and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It's basically Constantine without the people and much more fun, as the main characters and heroes are the aforementioned horsemen.

  This first game shows the story of War and Death. I say the first game because obviously there should be two more horsemen, although hard to understand how Famine could be a positive character, while Conquest is overlapping too much with War. But anyway, in the game the characters are just overpowered fighters that have a distinct style, rather than actual personifications of anything.

  If there is something that might rub people the wrong way here, it's the moral relativism of the story. I mean, it's a fun story, but it portrays all of the characters of Heaven and Hell as opportunistic asses who spew around words of honor, purity or balance, but they only care about themselves most of the time. Also, humanity has been destroyed already and everybody is fighting with everybody. The guy I liked the most was the demon scheming to overthrow The Destroyer and The Destroyer himself was not who you would think he's be.

  To be fair, it was extremely ballsy to create a game that makes angels and devils look and feel cool, considering they are basically Asian anime characters with big weapons and light effects in a story invented by a Christian fan boy in the first century. I can't say I admired the complexity of the story a lot, because it's basically a series of quests where you have to battle some guy or another to get a McGuffin that allows you to proceed to the next state, but boy did I enjoy the visuals and the voice acting!

  Bottom line: I don't know much about the gameplay, but I can tell you right now that I enjoyed the "movie" a lot.

  Again I watch the full cinematic story of a game, without playing it, to examine its story. Aliens: Colonial Marines is a first person shooter, so you move around ships and compounds being hunted and attacked and killing stuff. There is a plot, but it is quite simplistic compared to the action, which is a good thing in a game like this. No need for complications as the hapless marines need to kill everything while slowly learning what we, as Alien fans, know already.

  The graphics are that of a 2013 game, nothing to be very proud of, either. They do the job. The story is about a ship of marines that encounters the Sulaco, sometime after the events of Alien 3. There are aliens, and mean Yutani-Weyland people and chest bursters and all kind of mad frantic action. Hicks makes an appearance, in the era when anything Alien had to have some personal connection with movie characters, but he is basically a cameo.

  At this point I would say what I liked about the story and what I would change, but there is no need. Even if much more streamlined than Dark Descent, I had more fun watching this one. There are multiple chapters, each feeling like a standalone story. And in every one the phrase "Leave no man behind" is repeated obsessively, while most of the time someone runs through hordes of xenomorphs to save some person or another. It gets old, but the action provides compensation. And what I liked is that most "command decisions" are taken when talking on the radio with someone while being attacked by aliens. No people slowly walking in a room to confer. That could have been an email!

  Bottom line: I would much more enjoy a modern Alien game that is based on the same concept as Colonial Marines than the Starcraft-cloney Dark Descent. The new graphics card power and AI graphics would bring a lot of value to a game such as this, even for someone like me who would rather play the alien.

  After watching another YouTube video with the full cinematics, I can tell you that I liked the story in Aliens: Dark Descent, but the same formula is starting to get old.

  You see, I loved the movies, I like the universe - especially if you consider Blade Runner as part of it, and I've also read a couple of books in the Alien universe and my impression is that with whatever you start with, even Prometheus and that crap, you will probably like it, too. However, you will start losing enjoyment as you go along, as almost every Alien story is exactly the same. You have to appreciate the Alien: Resurrection movie because, as weird and euro as it was, it felt different. I know it's an unpopular belief, but I really liked that film.

  Anyway, back to the game: aliens gets loose in a closed environment - even if it's big as a planet, there is no escape from it, and people try to survive, helped by marines and hindered by greedy psychopathic corporate shills. There, that's almost every Alien story. Sometimes they throw a Predator in there, for good measure, and lately they put Engineers in there, too, but the plot is the same. Dark Descent is no exception. There is a downed ship, some towns, a corporate tower, synths, automated turrets, APCs, marines, corporation stuff, Weyland Yutani and so on. The only difference might be the appearance of Cassandra, a woman that seems to be able to communicate telepathically with the aliens.

  Now, in the lore that is not movies, there is an extended version of the story described above where the aliens are not just mindless creatures, but somehow project this mental field that can sometimes attract some people to their side. There is also the royal jelly, a substance only the queen makes and that has great effects on humans as well. In the game there is no jelly and Cassandra's gift seems to be a genetic fluke. Whatever her abilities mean will have to wait for a sequel to the game.

  I can't say anything about the gameplay. Seemed to be mostly top down, like those cheap horror survival games that sometimes you play online, only slightly better. The cut scene animations, though, were pretty good and amounted to about two hours put together. It's funny when game companies just make full movies as an afterthought, to enhance the experience of the game proper.

  Now, about the story. There is this woman administrator in the corporation that sees aliens killing everybody and initializes the Cerberus protocol, which means satellites around the planet will stop anything from escaping, shooting everything down. Nothing in, nothing out. Even synths will make everything possible to enforce this. She ends up on a ship that gets almost shut down by the satellites, but it's a military vessel, so it survives reentry. It is her job (yours) to collaborate with the marines to save as many people as possible, get to the bottom of the mystery and, of course, live.

What would I change so that story feels fresh? Well, it's now canon that you have to have a sleazy corporate ass making everything harder. In fact, the main character of the game does start as one, only she's a good woman. I wouldn't do that. I would let the player decide the level of sleaziness and if they want to play it psycho or good guy or something in between. Basically Witcherize the game (talking about the game, not the books, where Geralt is a boyscout). Increase personal stakes, give her some competence other than "administrator" - which means she gets to move around talking to people all the time - and a secret to protect. Basically combine the main characters in the game: the admin, the father of Cassandra and the scientist.

  What if the main character is the mother of Cassandra? Maybe she's not her biological mother, to add some distance, so she could conceivably save her ass and sell her to the company. What if she is afraid something would come up and destroy her life, so she has incentives to leave everybody else behind, maybe even this Cassandra stuff. What is she is indebted to the company and she needs a way out, to add to the desperation? You could add a bit of romantic tension between the soldier and her, making an eventual death more meaningful. You could manipulate people, seduce them, intimidate them or even shoot them, kind of like Vampire: The Masquerade, adding to the agency of the player.

  Because in this game you only run a linear story. There are no alternative outcomes. You fail a mission, you die, and if you played the game already you know what's coming but you can't stop it. Just add a diversity of choice. And I know you will say that this would make the two hour cinematics be 10 hours. Not necessarily. Olden games managed to do wonders reusing parts of animations to construct multiple stories. The knowledge is there.

  Bottom line: a true Alien story, but bringing nothing new to the table. A linear gameplay, that provides little choice other than just go with the flow. The top-down thing, as well as the "command room decision" animations makes it look like a rip-off of Starcraft playing the marines, so it didn't really captivate my imagination. A decent game, but nothing more.

  XCOM was one of my favorite games from when I was a kid. I didn't have the personal time resources to play XCOM2, though, and besides it felt quite different. You see, in the first game I liked collecting alien stuff and researching it. The tactics were fun, but I was all into the research tree. So I though, after playing the beginning of XCOM2 a few times then forgetting about it, how about I watch the entire storyline on YouTube, like a complete ass, and then comment on the game like I know what I am talking about?

  So here is goes. I think one of the major things going against XCOM2 is its timing. XCOM was first released in 1994, when telling a story like this felt fresh and being able to play through it amazing. XCOM2 was released in 2016, 22 years later, with so much sci-fi content in the form of TV, movies and games having been released since. There were a bunch of TV series covering the alien invasion and resistance angle, all of them devolving into the lazy German vs French resistance with ray guns tropes, and having yet another thing like this wasn't awesome. Add to it that the mystery was already revealed and it would explain my lack of interest at least.

  Anyway, the story here is that 20 years later "the commander", meaning you, is rescued by the resistance from an alien device that was using him as a hub for tactical information. With your brilliant leadership, they can now fight against an enemy that has conquered the world and controls it via propaganda, empty promises and ultimately violence. Somehow, after full control over the planet for 20 years, the aliens still have a lot of trouble locating and fighting you.

  The tactical fighting and upgrade system was improved dramatically. It's so complex that... it bored me to death. Tactical games afficionados loved it, though, and for good reasons. You can do all kinds of things, based on the enemy, the team composition, the tech tree, etc. However the story felt lackluster to me. A new McGuffin every stage of the game and the ending... how do American stories end? You find the source and you blow it up!... did nothing for me. Really, it felt like they were rehashing the Falling Skies story, even the end scene.

  Bottom line: if you love turn based tactical games, this should be one of your favorites, but the story is simplistic and derivative.

  P.S. and if you're wondering why XCOM3 is not out there, it's because of Marvel.

  P.S.too - "so if you are so smart, how would you have written the story?".

  Well, I am no writer, but I can tell you something after decades of consuming popularized science and a lot of Dunning Kruger: any space conquering force would have two characteristics. First, they would have limited resources. Without some very cheap space travel option that seems unlikely, it should be very expensive to come to our planet. Second: it's so easy to destroy anything on Earth from space. It's ridiculously easy if you have mastered interstellar travel. So the story would have to take that into account. XCOM2 actually used that, with the discovery of the final McGuffin, to explain and then solve the game, but it was a lazy solution.

Here is my take: alien intervention is being suspected, so X-COM is created. They have to solve the mystery of what is going on, considering they are an organization working on a hunch. This is more like X-Files than X-Com. Then the aliens are not all powerful, they are a bridgehead force, if not fugitives or a small team stranded here. They may be not malevolent outside considering humans a bunch of stupid monkeys to be used to further their goals. And when people are stranded amongst aliens, they tend to be terrified and act more psychotically than normal. The advantage of this take is that you can play both sides. So this would be more of an adventure game than a tactical shooter, although the horror of fighting what you thought were aliens, but in fact were human and animal chimeras should be there.

For the sequel, continue from the last scene of the first, when you discover that the small force on Earth is actually a small tactical team that operates behind enemy lines. The alien ship and their main force is located on some large asteroid in the Asteroid Belt or maybe a moon of Jupiter. With their presence and their source location revealed, now humanity must race to build the infrastructure required to defend and attack in space, when at any moment the desperate aliens might throw an asteroid or two at us. This would be tactical, but also strategic. We switch from a mystery adventure to a tactical space exploration and warfare game, akin to The Expanse.

Bonus: the third part, a continuation of the second where you have discovered the aliens themselves, which you may have seen as desperate and sympathetic, were actually just another version of chimeras, made out of organic and machine parts by the real culprit, a semi-sentient machine intelligence that has the mission to explore, exploit and contain any threat to its original builders. Now the enemy is a bunch of von Neumann probes that have no qualms in capturing and using for parts any of their human prisoners or craft.

The whole idea of the series is not that some malevolent Elders want to rule the world, but that a very small and resource poor alien presence can wreak havoc and endanger our very existence. It's you who has all the resources and they have the technology and relentless cunning. The terror is just as for someone with cancer. Even when you get rid of it, you don't know for sure and must remain eternally vigilant. We are the sheep and they are the wolves in the night. In each of the games you can choose to play the humans or the aliens. DO NOT create the common enemy that we would join forces to defeat, a la Starcraft, it's not that kind of story, although you can play around with altered humans and manufactured alien forces that escape their control as a third wildcard faction. And of course, as any good game, the story would change based on your approach.

This would be it. It's not like my ideas are not derivative, but they would be more fun to play outside the tactical shooter, mystery adventure or space RTS mechanics. At least they would make a good YouTube cutscenes video.

  Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence is not so much a scientific book as an informed opinion piece. I kind of had different expectations for a book that starts with a chemical name for a neurotransmitter.  This book is about addiction, not dopamine per se. Anna Lembke is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University., so she knows what she's talking about.

  I am torn between me agreeing with most of what the book says and an instinctive dislike of the author. She came off to me as a conservative American prude, talking about the positive results of the Prohibition or prosocial shame and skewing statistics to make a point. But, really, when I try to pinpoint the things she said that I feel are completely wrong, there aren't many. She is just honest with herself and with the reader. Yes, she is appalled by the patient who builds machines to masturbate him and shares this online, but she doesn't lack the empathy required to help him. Yes, she does believe the Prohibition had positive effects, presenting statistics about it, but she's aware of the organized crime effect of it. Yes, she believes shame has a positive effect, but only in a community that also supports you and guides you to get out of the situation you're in.

  I guess my instinct is to reject any social solution to one's personal problems, so that might be it. I also have a rather addictive personality, so it might be a defensive reaction. So let's discuss the book, and not how the author felt to me.

  Starting with the end, here are the 10 steps that Lembke recommends for handling addiction, defined in the book as any behavior that causes harm to you or your group that you are having difficulty stopping:

1. The relentless pursuit of pleasure (and avoidance of pain) leads to pain. - this is something to take note of
2. Recovery begins with abstinence. - I partly agree with this
3. Abstinence resets the brain’s reward pathway and with it our capacity to take joy in simpler pleasures. - this is a reductive idea, contradicted by the book's thesis, since things to get addicted to are all around us and part of what is considered normal social life
4. Self-binding creates literal and metacognitive space between desire and consumption, a modern necessity in our dopamine-overloaded world. - self-binding is putting barriers between you and the thing that addicts you. - agreed.
5. Medications can restore homeostasis, but consider what we lose by medicating away our pain. - agreed.
6. Pressing on the pain side resets our balance to the side of pleasure. - I agree that facing your pain opens the door to more pleasure, but depends on the context.
7. Beware of getting addicted to pain. - this is another thing to take note of. Pain and pleasure are not antonyms inside the brain, they are closely related in a functional sense.
8. Radical honesty promotes awareness, enhances intimacy, and fosters a plenty mindset. - this is one of her central points in the book. I fully agree.
9. Prosocial shame affirms that we belong to the human tribe. - tribalism is something that automatically repels me.
10. Instead of running away from the world, we can find escape by immersing ourselves in it. - I am not doing that, and I should. However, going fully in the other extreme is probably worse.

And I agree with most of what she says. We live in times of abundance, where the next fix to escape reality is right around the corner. And doesn't it feel good? Apparently... not. People are more and more dissatisfied with their lives, even when those would have appeared miraculous even to people living in the '80s. It might not be hard drugs, but alcohol, maybe weed, maybe a video game or two, maybe romance novels, maybe TV series or news watching. The act of escaping reality makes us feel less real ourselves and that is what leads to that feeling of unmoored loss.

  However, I don't agree with everything. One of the things that bothered me from the beginning was the way she presented statistics. Comparing absolute values of population size today and in the 1980s completely ignored the global population nearly doubled since then. Also showing relative percentual statistics between the same kind of values means nothing. I can't imagine someone as mature and educated like the author could make these kinds of mistakes unknowingly.

  Then there is this idea of abstinence. I personally know what this is the method that works best against addiction, too, however it works best because it is the easiest. Just like I agree with her that our hysterical overprotection of children deprives them of skills they should have learned before they go into the world by themselves, using abstinence to evade addiction is also a type of escapism. An addict dreams of two things: the thing they are addicted to and living a normal life where they are not addicted. Well, being perfectly honest with yourself and others and going to meetings and relying on others to not relapse is all nice and good, but it's not a normal life. It's still the life of an addict. And while abstinence from hard opioid drugs is obviously a good idea, I don't know what to say about stuff like reading or watching movies. Start with abstinence, but that should be the first step only.

  As for the prosocial shame, I almost agree, because in principle having people to lovingly point out your mistakes and help you get out of them is a good thing, but I don't think that the social groups Lembke was thinking about are also what I would be willing to accept.

  Bottom line: something fell a bit off to me, a bit culty, in this book. I think I reacted to the overconfidence of how the author expresses her opinions. However the content is very informative and informed, while also reenforced by personal experience as a therapist. The book is also short, you can read it in a few hours, so I recommend it, but with a personal warning of caution.