Wyrm , by Mark Fabi. He’s gotta be a doper-- Cecil shows up. There’s a crossword puzzle in the middle for the fun of it, and waay too many Monty Python jokes for your normal y2k novel.
Also, Bruce Sterling’s Hacker Crackdown is a must. And it’s free (like beer)…
I’m a big fan of the Wing Commander novels from Baen, particularly End Run, which took place largely separated from any of the games, with the exception of a couple of characters from Wing Commander II being present (Doomsday and Admiral Tolwyn, IIRC).
When I was on medical hold in Basic, I read the first book of the MechWarrior: The Dark Age series, which was narrated in the first-person-limited-perspective, with some hillarious asides and by-the-ways.
Oh, and I’ve also read one of the Halo novels, Ghost of Onyx. It was entertaining fluff, not terribly well written nor terribly deep, but very action packed.
One of the rooms has a door disguised as a table, which is the entrance to room 17. I never would have seen it if I hadn’t read about it on the Web, but looking at it now it’s one of the few cases where I can see the text does provide a big clue.
That looks like computer-assisted trial and error to me. It certainly can’t be what the author had in mind when he wrote
The shortest route is well known at this point, but I’ve yet to see any explanation of which clues lead to each room.
Can you tell this book has been bugging me for a long time? It’s only one of the things my ex-girlfriend did to mess with my head.
She had another book that was a large-format, full-color picture book where the object was to determine who stole the food from an elaborate feast. Again there were clues planted in the pictures and text, but it was a much more straightforward puzzle. I think the solution may have even been included in the book.Mice. It hasn’t haunted me like Maze has.
I forgot about the Battletech books, I read a few of those when I was at school too and really enjoyed them, far more than the Warhammer 40K stuff. The clans trilogy was particularly good, but I also enjoyed the invasion of the inner sphere series too.
On reflection, Quag Keep must be the first book based on a game. Very early, & obviously 1st ed D&D.
That sounds a lot like Sherwood Game. It’s been a few years since I’ve read it, but the AI coming to life inside a Virtual World stuck with me.
The Myst books were the first things that sprung to my mind. Although they really didn’t have all that much to do with the game. I haven’t re-read them in years, but I remember at the time thinking they were pretty decent.
The first book was pretty good and I liked the “foot soldier in a mercenary corps” angle. But, yeah, the second one turned into “Paksenarrion’s Dungeon Crawl” and the third was about the same.
I read the one based off of Wraith: the Oblivion and it was pretty bad. I don’t remember details because I only read it once – a rarity with me and novels.
Remember the Magic: the Gathering novels with the card offer in back? Wow, that was not good literature and the ability to summon a badger didn’t exactly make up for it.
I had a game store and we had a few of those that never sold…yeah they sucked ass, but for some redemption the offer had one of the best cards in the game…wtf was it called? artifact that you could tap for 3 mana, I think it was free to cast with the drawback being that during your upkeep you had to flip a coin and if you lost you took 3 damage and it tapped. so all you needed was a 3 mana to use card that you could fire off during your upkeep and you were set. I had a land destruction deck that earned the name “the Landlord” that used them.
There was a Sonja Blue book that took a perfectly decent regular vampire series that had urn for three or four books and crammed it into the Vampire: The Masquerade setting. It was weird.
The ones I read were based off of Vampire The Masquerade. Not the clan books though, one was about Lot (a Sabbat vampire, I forget what clan) and Bianka (A Toreador/Brujah mix who was Inconnu… yeah, that’s right) and she was trying to help the Camarilla vamps escape the Box in Toronto (or so she said…). It wasn’t bad, I enjoyed the book but when I knew more about V:tM it was weird.
I read those. I liked the regular ones but the ones crammed into the Masquerade setting were horrible.
There are a lot of books based on the Magic: the Gathering card game. They generally release a book with each card set. The quality is very spotty. I’ve read about a half-dozen of them, and that included at least one that was quite well-done, and at least one that looked like it had been edited by a junior-high student.
One egregious example was one of the books in the Mirrodin block. I had to reread the section several times to figure out what was going on. There was a character that changed gender twice in a three-page section. I think that an editor must have decided “we need more female characters.” They changed most occurrences of he/him/his to she/her/hers, but missed a couple, both on the same page. So the character is “she” on one page, “he” on the next, and “she” on the one after that.
Snort. I must be the only one that read a series of Rifts©™®(etc) books.
The story itself wasn’t so bad. However, the editing was done by an ADD-addled illiterate on meth. I think. I believe it was Simbieda’s wife who was responsible for the alleged “editing”.
The funniest part? Probably where someone over at Palladium Books ©™®(etc) decided that “Rift”, “Rifts”, and “Rifters” should be capitalized. So, she must have decided to do a cut-and-paste.
How do I know this? Am I as brilliant as Sherlock Holmes? Was it because of a strange type of fungus under her fingers which infected all the words in the pages?
Yes, I am that brilliant, but there was no fungus involved. No, it was the remarkable frequency of words like “dRift”, “dRifted”, and “dRifting” throughout all THREE books in the trilogy.
Pathetic in a time when Word will underline crap like that for you.
-Joe