September 21

Fuck Yeah, Video Games: The Life and Extra Lives of a Professional Nerd – Daniel Hardcastle

As Daniel Hardcastle careers towards thirty, he looks back on what has really made him happy in life: the friends, the romances… the video games. Told through encounters with the most remarkable and the most mind-boggling games of the last thirty-odd years, Fuck Yeah, Video Games is also a love letter to the greatest hobby in the world.

From God of War to Tomb Raider, Pokémon to The Sims, Daniel relives each game with countless in-jokes, obscure references and his signature wit, as well as intricate, original illustrations by Rebecca Maughan. Alongside this march of merriment are chapters dedicated to the hardware behind the games: a veritable history of Sony, Nintendo, Sega and Atari consoles.

Joyous, absurd, personal and at times sweary, Daniel’s memoir is a celebration of the sheer brilliance of video games.

 

My thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours who invited me to join the blog tour – also to the publishers, Unbound, for my review copy.

 

First things first…the title. Now I am no prude and, as a person of Scottish persuasion, I throw out expletives like punctuation. But I feel the F-Bomb in the title isn’t really needed and may put some folk off picking up what is actually a good wee book.  I hope I am wrong as Hardcastle’s love letter to around 30 years of gaming is well worth your attention.  Also when I think about my interactions with gamers on platforms such as Twitter and Mixer – they swear like fuck too so perhaps the swearyness will draw them in.

Fuck Yeah turned out to be a tricky book to review. Not because it is hard to follow or because it is poorly written. It is neither of those things.  There are many short sections and bite-sized discussions which make it perfect to pick up and put down.  It is well written with many laugh out loud moments. Clearly Hardcastle and I have experienced similar frustrations and enjoyed the same big moments in several games so the personal nostalgia his observations brought ticked all the right boxes for me.

No the problem I had with reviewing Fuck Yeah was that my son decided he wanted to read it too and my book vanished to places unknown whenever I set it down. Sometimes tracking it down was easy. Son would be heard guffawing with laughter and I could trace him that way.  Other times he would wander through the house, book in hand, reading sections out loud to me (an audiobook experience that Audible are yet to fully master). The failsafe way of recovering my review copy was to wait for the child to fall asleep and then liberate the book from beside his bed. We got there in the end!

So two generations in the one family have enjoyed (or are still enjoying) Fuck Yeah.  Definitely a good sign and reflects well that the selection of games Hardcastle discusses is appreciated by a teenager and a man in his mid 40’s.

Before the book arrived I did wonder how the selection of games the author selected to focus on may fare. Pretty well as it turns out. The games I have played which are discussed are very well covered. My kid has not played most of the games but is currently contemplating picking up one or two of the titles still available on current platforms.  Even if I hadn’t played some of the games under discussion Hardcastle’s observations on the titles in question were still enjoyable so my biggest concern over how much I may get from the book were quickly quashed.

In between discussions on particular games are some additional chat points about life in games in general. These were fascinating too.  I particularly enjoyed learning how badly Nintendo seemed to have botched the launch of the Wii. Trivia and gaming gems which I have missed over the years made the pages fly by.

When I first heard about Fuck Yeah I thought that’s a book I am definitely going to enjoy.  Reader – I was right.

 

Fuck Yeah, Video Games: The Life and Extra Lives of a Professional Nerd is available in hardback and digital format.  You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fuck-Yeah-Video-Games-Professional/dp/1783527870/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1569011760&refinements=p_27%3ADaniel+Hardcastle&s=books&sr=1-1&text=Daniel+Hardcastle

 

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May 24

The Never Game – Jeffery Deaver

Escape or die trying…

No.1 international bestseller Jeffery Deaver returns with a stunning new thriller – the first in an exciting series featuring enigmatic investigator Colter Shaw.

A student kidnapped from the park.
Nineteen-year-old Sophie disappears one summer afternoon. She wakes up to find herself locked inside a derelict warehouse, surrounded by five objects. If she uses them wisely, she will escape her prison. Otherwise she will die.

An investigator running out of time.
Sophie’s distraught father calls in the one man who can help find his daughter: unique investigator Colter Shaw. Raised in the wilderness by survivalist parents, he is an expert tracker with a forensic mind trained to solve the most challenging cases. But this will be a test even for him.

A killer playing a dangerous game.
Soon a blogger called Henry is abducted – left to die in the dark heart of a remote forest – and the whole case gets turned on its head. Because this killer isn’t following the rules; he’s changing them. One murder at a time…

 

My thanks to Rebecca at Harper Collins for my review copy and for inviting me to host a leg of the blog tour.

 

An action packed thriller from Jeffery Deaver and a plot closely lined to videogames and puzzle solving.  This book is just a coffee and a danish away from filling my “favourite things” bingo card.

Readers are pitched straight into the action “Level 3: The Sinking Ship”

Wait…what?  Where is the prologue?  What’s happening?  *reads a few pages* Gosh this is exciting.

Level 1: The Abandoned Factory.  Oh two days earlier.  Cool how did we get to the sinking ship?  Will Colter Shaw manage to rescue….oh wait, there can be no SPOILERS.

The Never Game starts at 100mph and then takes the reader back to introduce the hero of the piece (Colter Shaw) and bring us back to a point where he is not diving into the water to try to save a life.  We know Shaw is one of the good guys from the very first page but as we learn more about him we also discover he is a bit of a loner, doesn’t smile much, is one of the best in the business at tracking (wilderness tracking) and he earns money by collecting rewards.  Not a cop, not an investigator, not a PI but a man who uses his skills to claim rewards. In the first instance he his working to find a young woman who has gone missing, her father has offered $10,000 if someone can find her.

Shaw is an engaging character, his reasoning and logical deductions are shared with the reader so we can keep up with his thought process and understand how he ticks.  Early in the story Shaw will have a run in with the police who don’t warm to his solo endeavours. If justice is to be found then Shaw and the police need to establish a working relationship so the bad guys can be brought down.

Action in The Never Game takes place in Silicone Valley.  Computing firms and videogame manufacturers are very much involved in the story.  Shaw is not comfortable in the world of gaming but fortunately he finds an expert to help him out in the form of the mysterious and secretive Maddie Poole. The relationship and interactions between Shaw and Poole are slick and entertaining. Each is trying to outsmart the other and there is a clear attraction between them but the author makes sure you never quite know Maddie’s motivations and cannot fully trust what she is saying.  That really hooked me in.

The Never Game was an enjoyable read.  Deaver knows how to deliver the thrills and the twists and as it appears Colter Shaw may well return in future I was pleased to get to the end of the book and find I wanted to read more about him. I had a couple of niggles about the gaming side of things which I blame on 30+ years of playing computer games. Non gaming readers will not spot the niggle points and need not worry about the book being too geeky (it is most certainly not).

There is a reason Jeffery Deaver is a household name – he writes great stories which readers love.  The Never Game delivers the thrills his readers are seeking.

 

The Never Game is published by Harper Collins and is available in Hardback, Digital and audiobook format.  You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Never-Game-Jeffery-Deaver/dp/000830372X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1558642377&sr=1-1

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