Intro

  This post is about a crazy experiment that I undertook today: find as many decent chess YouTubers and create an Excel with their characteristics, with the purpose of finding the best chess YouTuber for 2025. I have to say the result is underwhelming, but the effort is real.

Methodology

  So, I started with a list of 70 people! First the people that I already knew about and which I either followed or had decided are not worth it. Then I search on YouTube, via both YouTube and Google search engines, for the word "chess" and picked the channels that appeared with content in 2025. Then I started analysing on several criteria:

• country of origin
• language of videos (is it in English or not)
• subscribers
• professional or high rated content
• discussing their own games
• discussing other people's games
• having content specifically about chess theory, openings, that kind of thing
• is content generated with AI (like reading the prompt with a machine or showing only images and video that is generated by AI)
• whether it is a personal channel or that of an institution of multiple people
• if the videos feature the human faces of their owners (or are just audio or just video footage of other people)
• a rating on how entertaining the channel is (the amusing factor, as separate from the chess content)
• a rating on how instructive the channel is (based on chess learning)
• how many videos they've uploaded in February
• when was the last time they uploaded a video
• if their videos contain sponsored content (not ads that you can skip, specifically, as much as banners of chess*com and stuff like that, which is not owned by the channel owner)
• if they have click baity titles and thumbnails
• if they have only short videos or they also have long ones

Note that these are calculated on recent videos and more on a fuzzy logic. If one video out of twenty are going to have a characteristic, maybe I will count as not there. Based on these criteria I've devised a score that functions like this:

• 1 if the content is English
• 1 if they have more than ten thousand subscribers
• 2 if they feature some professional content
• 1 if they analyse their own games
• 1 if they analyse other people's games
• 2 for chess theory
• 2 if they don't use exclusively AI for the audio or video
• 1 if it's a personal channel
• 1 for human face
• 3 for high instructive chess
• 2 for high entertainment value
• 2 points for having more than 2 videos in February
• 1 point for having less than 15 videos in February
• 10 for content this year
• 3 for no sponsored labels on the video
• 3 for normal titles and thumbnails
• the country of origin and length of videos are just informational

State of chess and finding chess content

Before I reveal the results, a small detour. Google/YouTube search was AWFUL! It probably only found the channels that had paid for promotion. I went so far as the 20th Google page to create this list and the vast majority of the people that I had added manually were not even there! Meanwhile Top Chess was everywhere, which to be honest, isn't even a real chess channel. I tried Grok and ChatGPT and I got slightly better results, with Gotham first place (ChatGPT even helpfully informed me that his real name is Andrew Tang), Agadmator, Fins, Danya and Hanging Pawns being the common names in the list.

Also, I was sad to see some people I really enjoyed watching doing less and less and more rarely than before. Some even gave up completely. Such is life, but I miss those guys.

So believe you me, going on Reddit, searching on Google or asking some AI about this kind of stuff is much worse than actually caring about the game and looking for the interesting people yourself.

Results

OK, based on the totally arbitrary system above, these are the winners:

Third place:

• Hanging Pawns (Stjepan Tomic) - Croatia - 252K subs
• Loris Tavernier - Liechtenstein - 1K subs
• Silicon Road (Matthew Sadler) - UK - 7K subs
• Chess Vibes (Nelson Lopez) - US - 591K subs

Second place:

• Big Mio (Miodrag Perunovic) - Serbia - 33K subs
• KingsCrusher (Tryfon Gavriel) - UK - 120K subs
• Irina Krush - US - 25K subs
• PowerPlayChess - Daniel King - 110K subs

First place:

• Arturs Neikšāns - Latvia - 20K subs
• William Graif- US - 7K subs

Considering I am the one choosing the fitness function, it's not unexpected, but GambitMan - the same guy I pegged as the best chess YouTuber two years ago, is still first place! Initially I've put a lot of points on high level chess and instructive content, so I tweaked the parameters a little bit with smaller values, but the winners were the same! And I am sorry, but I have no sympathy for click bait and sponsor paid subscribers.

Compare the subscriptions to these channels as compared to the ones that have the most followers:

• GothamChess - 6M subs
• GMHikaru - 2.8M subs
• BotezLive - 1.8M subs
• ChessTalk - 1.7M subs
• AnnaCramling - 1.5M subs

The most active by numbers of videos in February are:

• agadmator
• GMHikaru
• GMBenjaminFinegold
• ChessBootCamp
• ChessNetwork

It's a little bit unfair to them to have deducted a point for being TOO active, but I believe having to watch a chess video a day from the same person just to keep up is a bit too much. I guess penalizing people for no content in 2025 that hard is also unfair, but there is no way to determine if someone gave up or just likes to upload a video a year.

I am saving this Excel here: YouTubers2025.xslx, so you can alter the values and maybe get something else.

P.S. at the end of the file there is a list of 7 names that I had to exclude for various reasons: dead channels, not active enough, very few total videos, focusing on their chess platform rather than chess itself or not being the ones creating the content, like it's the case of Magnus himself. No blame there, he doesn't have time for stuff like that, but still.

Conclusion

I wanted to go for a more data driven approach, but the evaluations for various parameters were as subjective as before. I am pretty sure that the people at the end got screwed over because I got tired, so I encourage you to find the winners based on your own evaluations and fitness functions.

In a better world, I could have just listed the ones I like more, but in reality I don't follow most of the people in the first places because their content is going above my stupid head.

Hope you got something out of this. Cheers!

  John Higgs is a fool. Well educated and researched, but a fool nonetheless. In The Future Starts Here: An Optimistic Guide to What Comes Next he attempts to portray an optimistic vision of the future, but comes off as unconvinced himself. The main chapters of the book feel separated and often contradict each other. And that's sad, because some of the information and ideas presented are really interesting.

  You've seen this type of book before: it starts with research and interviews, then it's compiled into a documentary style narrative that is skewed towards a particular idea. This one is trying to say that the future is not as bleak as we make it out to be, that technology has the potential to enrich our lives if we are careful with what we choose to do with it, that the environment has the potential to recover and thrive if we choose to be mindful of it, that we can escape the trappings of the capitalist mediated dystopia that everybody delights in being terrified of and that young generations of people are trending towards empathy and awareness. You get the gist: things will be better if we make them so, even if the author himself seems to lose faith in humanity as a whole a lot of the times.

  The problem arises when Higgs starts contradicting himself or using some really cherry-picked examples that he doesn't often understand. The first chapter tells of how we can't build a bright future without imagining it and that media today is biased strongly towards the negative, including fiction with its many dystopian visions. We should be focused on truth and hope. A strong start. But then he starts talking about artificial intelligence, of which he understands little, showing a strong humanistic bias and bringing Penrose's quantum microtubules intelligence as a hopeful argument, obliterating his previous points.

  He talks about the neurological effects of stuff like watching the (terrible and uninformative) news, using social media and being exposed to advertising, how it changes us in ways I didn't think of before. Strong chapter. Until he starts talking about how individualism is bad and the new youngster trend of seeing each other as part of a network is the hopeful future. Only "network" and "friendship group" are just modern terms for "tribe", yet another way in which social interaction and belonging uses the same oxytocin mechanism he described in detail and warned about just a chapter before.

  Then he goes on and on about how the new generations - which he blissfully describes from a purely Western liberal perspective, ignoring all of the silent unmediated youngsters he forgets exist - are focused on emotional well being, awareness of their environment, capable of holding multiple contradicting ideas in their head and using the one that works best, like that's something new and positive. But then he talks of how intransigent these new hopefuls are with any ideas that are not about emotional well being, environment awareness or contradicting the handful of ideas they use to shield themselves from actual truth. And then, to top it off, speaks highly of the Greatest Generation and hopes this new one, coming from the 2008 economic crisis, will be similarly practical and emotionally grounded.

  But it's the ending that makes it all feel very funny. Funnier than a book about an optimistic future published early 2019, that is. The author concludes that people find meaning in their immediate unmediated interactions with other people and reveals that, in writing this book, he "experimented" by only presenting information from people he personally knows and met. He wanted to test the idea that your direct connections are more meaningful than any exhaustive research through impersonal papers or news items.

  Bottom line, he artificially constrained himself in a bubble, wrote several small papers on various future related subjects, then bundled them all in a book that manages to contradict itself about almost every major point made.

However, to focus on truth and hope, there is a way to enjoy this book in the spirit it was written in. You have to consider it as a conversation with a random guy. You don't have expectations of journalistic objectivity and scientific research when you talk to other people. You take what they say with a grain of salt, you pick and choose which parts of their discourse is interesting, useful or entertaining, and you have a pleasant time. If you do that with this book, you can learn some really interesting tidbits from what is basically a guy rambling.

  The Englund Gambit is a weird opening that at first seems a one trick pony, something that either gets your opponent with a cheap shot or fails miserably. But when you look closer, you see it as a functional opening with a high win rate for Black, something chess experts have spent hours of content refuting and also, if I may, one of the funnier jokes in chess.

  You see, the joke starts from its very name. Fritz Englund did not play this opening. He was a very good chess player from the beginning of the 20th century and in 1932, just a year before his death, he organized a chess tournament where the opening moves were 1. d4 e5 2. dxe5 Nc6 3. Nf3 Qe7 4. Qd5, what we now call the Stockholm Variation of the Englund Gambit, because of this very tournament and it's not even considered the main line.

  I don't know why he chose these moves, but I feel like he tried for the more unprincipled opening out there. That's how the joke continues. You sacrifice the important center king pawn and then, with only one knight developed, you make multiple queen moves. From then, you either destroy your opponent immediately or are forced to run away with your queen, never castle, make moves like Kd8, Na6, Ne7, Rb8 and d6, f6, c6 - in some variations all of them. It is a positional joke, where you lose little material and sometimes you gain some, but the eval is almost always favoring your opponent.

  Yet, as funny as it is, this is not a ridiculous opening. Natural moves often lead to a quick defeat for your opponent and, even if they defend against your initial attack, it's White that has to prove they know what to do next. This turned out to be a very entertaining opening to study, as at the end, escaping after you failed to assassinate your target and fighting for survival, the game becomes really thrilling. A bit like a hitman action movie.

  Also, take a look at the popularity of this opening. It has exploded since the end of 2020 and is still played a lot today.

  In order to document myself on this opening I've created a Lichess study, complete with very detailed video explanations from experts such as Daniel Naroditsky, Miodrag Perunovic, Stjepan Tomic and Igor Smirnov, which try very hard to show you how to play against it. You can follow the videos directly from the study if you have my LiChess Tools browser extension installed and you use Chrome (Firefox does not allow that video popup functionality). I've identified six main traps from the Englund as well as some lesser played lines that give you a theoretical advantage against ill prepared opponents.

  Companion study: Englund Gambit - with videos

So let us begin.

Basics

  The opening requires just two moves: White starts with d4 and Black replies with e5, a kind of mirrored Scandinavian, but completely different because the e5 pawn, a very important one as it protects the king and controls the center, is completely undefended. The purpose of the Englund Gambit is to draw out your opponent's pieces in protection of a pawn, while the queen sneaks in and kills the king. This is the most critical position:

  It looks promising: a triple attack that White can't possibly completely protect against in a position that has been reached four million times on Lichess with a win rate for Black of 60%. Even for games 1600+ blitz+ from the last year the win rate is still unreasonable high: 55%. White has to be very careful here.

  This is not the only way you can play this opening, though. White might bring their bishop to g5, showing they know what the Englund is about, so maybe instead of the usual Qb4 change your plans by going to the very rare Qc5, confusing your opponent:

  Or maybe, guessing your opponent is prepared for your usual Englund trick, you don't even play Qe7 and instead pivot to the equally dangerous Hartlaub-Charlick Gambit, where you gambit even more pawns, but gain initiative:

  There is more than meets the eye with the Englund, far beyond the simple "mate in 8 moves" trick that people are usually emphasizing to try to sell it to you. In fact, I am not even going to mention the normal mate tricks in this blog post! You have the study available to check out any variation your heart desires. Instead, I will focus on the chase, the part where the initial attack failed and White is gleefully counterattacking and trying to punish your queen.

Going for the tricks

  This is the next critical position. You went for the tricks and White defended well. You are now woefully undeveloped and your queen has to escape from behind enemy lines. There is one more trick with Nb4 which could work, but it can be easily counteracted by White with Nd4 to which your best reply is probably Na6. It's wild stuff, but I don't recommend it.

  Instead, go for the normal Bb4 - which may look unnecessarily dangerous, but it is by far the best move. This is the punchline of the Englund joke: you are no longer down material, but the eval is +2 for White. They will viciously attack your queen with Rb1, then , after you dodge with Qa3, either go for the more recent main line with Nd5 or with the more classical Rb3.

  

  But still, there is one more trick that you can try! (you're seeing the pattern now, don't you?). The queen has no other square to escape to other than a3, everything else is covered by rook, knight and pawns. What else could you do? Enter the Hambleton Gambit, the variation that Aman Hambleton of Chessbrah fame popularized: Qxc3!?. You exchange your wayward queen for two of White's more active pieces and a pawn, but you only lose less than one more eval point. You might say that you reconcile the material with the positional evaluation, reaching a position where you are 2 material points down with close to +3 eval for White.

  It's an amazing idea, but one that I am not confident enough to recommend. Aman himself played it a lot and created a lot of theory around it, kudos to him. He even played it in an official over the board tournament and only lost in a completely drawn position after more than a hundred moves being played. This is one of those variations where the opponent will get humiliated by a draw, but it's very difficult to play for a win.

  Anyway, let's get back to the Qa3 idea. Let's see what White wants to achieve:

  OK, a bit overwhelming, but that's what the position is. They will exchange the bishops then attack with two monstruous knights a Black king that was abandoned by its defenders. In view of this diagram, Hambleton's idea doesn't look so bad at all.

  Yet, there is one more trick. Who'd have thunk it? Indeed, it's a silly trick, but glorious when it works: 8. Nd5 Ba5 . We delay the exchange of bishops and also defend c7, giving White another opportunity to blunder by taking the bishop themselves. That move leads to the exchange of bishops and queens, with one of the knights retreating to protect the White king and giving Black the time to play Kd8.

  But that's not the trick, because a well studied White player will not capture on a5 and instead play 8. Rb5 to which we reply with Bxd2+. Why is exchanging the bishops good now? Well, first because there is no way to defend it and c7 and all of the other weaknesses White is attacking, but second because we're setting the last trap with Kd8, defending c7 and enticing White to give a check instead of playing one of the principled moves:

  There are three moves that White can make here, two of them are maintaining the (large) advantage and one is either equalizing or even losing. Best move is e4, opening the light bishop diagonal, but also providing an escape square for the king. Ng5 is the next best move, making it extremely difficult to protect both c7 and f7. The next move, a very natural move, is Qg5+, checking the king and also attacking g7. Oh how the tables have turned!

  Now White's queen is in your face, capturing your rook, and there is nothing you can do in order to protect it... 12... Qc1# That's the trick. There are tricks all the way down, young one!

The Siderite Variation

  OK, I am kidding. I have not invented a variation in the Englund Gambit, but I did find one that is reasonable for Black, extremely rarely played, and one of those weapons that good hitmen always hide in their hair or belt or whatever. So you have gauged your opponent and reached the conclusion they know what they are doing. Maybe you are playing the same person who you mercilessly tricked before in the Englund, again and again and again. He has come prepared and hungry for your blood. 1. d4 e5 2. dxe5 Nc6 3. Nf3 Qe7 4. Bg5 this guy has watched the beginning of Danya's video and is ready to pounce when you move Qb4+. He can see himself finally win. And you play 4...Qc5.

  Note that you can reach the same position if you go Qb4+ and he replies with Bd2 first. Then you go Qc5. The idea here is mostly psychological. The best move for White is to move the bishop, again, maybe for the third time in a row, to e3. There are other similarly good moves, don't kid yourself; objectively the Englund Gambit is not a sound opening, but when you play against people, you use their very instincts against them. So here we are, the last critical position I am going to present:

  There are no tricks from this position, really. Now you play chess and you prove you're better than your opponent. From the four moves White can do that don't lead to equality, one is retreating the most advanced piece that they just moved and the other three are apparently abandoning the e5 pawn. Engines are recommending Qe7, often followed by Qe6. Who can understand engines? Qc5, played in 1% of the games that have reached the position, reaches into your opponent's heart and tears their soul out.

  Your plan? Other than confusing the hell out of the other guy? Ne7 (not Nf6, running into b4 moves that Big Mio and Danya are recommending), followed by Ng6, perhaps. If they protect their pawn with Bf4, you can move your queen to b4, playing for a threefold repetition or maybe going for the tricks once again. And even if all else fails, even if your opponent plays the best moves and you get to the position recommended by the masters, eval is +1.7, you nicely move Qe6, finally appeasing the electronic gods, and you reach a position that has been played 6 times and from which Black won 5 times.

Conclusion

Most of the work for this post was the study, which I encourage you to examine carefully. Not for my recommendations in particular, because I am not that good of a chess player, but the multiple lines that provide a lot of entertainment. I have to admit I started this with the idea of finding some quick trick line that will catch your opponent unawares and I've spent instead most of a week looking into the beauty of this rich gambit and losing myself into analysis.

Whatever kind of player you are, I hope you will find this as useful and entertaining as possible. Enjoy!

  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.