Timewaster's Guide Archive

First off: don't be too eager to see a good book  in VG form.

Anyone here play the Wheel of Time video game?

yeah.


the magic system doesn't exactly lend itself well to a controller.

Imagine running along, halo style, with a videogame controller in your hand.  you see an enemy ahead of you, and press the "Steel/iron" button.  a dozen blue lines appear on the screen.  you want to pull on the one attached to the target's sword.

right now, as you are reading this, put your hands in front of you and try to imagine the complexity in the controls of trying to select a single blue line out of the dozen.  would you use the stick to select it on the screen?  would you use the right and left shoulder buttons to cycle through all of them?

now imagine doing it in combat, where you have a split second to burn the metals, select the thread, push the "pull" button, and react to the outcome.

this is assuming the most intuitive control scheme, where the left/ right sticks are for moving/looking, the d-pad is for burning/deactivating different metals (grouped in twos: the metal and its alloy) A/B are for pushing/pulling the current activated metal, and X/Y are for "jump" and "ready a coin"

if you can think of a better control scheme, tell me.

unless this will be made for the wii, where the point& click interface makes  it natural, but you would run out of buttons to assign things to very, very quickly.


the MMORPG is pretty much right out, unless you don't mind destroying the world you've created and replacing it with one where 1/3 of the population is mistborn.  do you really think the players would choose anything else?  the other 2/3 would be (presumably) hazekillers and Inquisitors.

last thing: atium in multiplayer? impossible.  in singleplayer, it would work a lot like bullet-time, but atium is supposed to tell you what will happen in the very near future.  the only way for the computer to know that (and display it to you) is if it's just for NPC's


[edit] this might sound a bit disparaging, and don't get me wrong: I'd love to see a good Mistborn videogame, but don't be too optimistic.  the magic system is incredibly complicated to convert to a playable form, and in the end, I'd rather see no videogame than a bad videogame

I disagree demented, I don't think that, in a book, you can ever say that what someone did is more important than how they did it. Otherwise, plotlines become arbitrary, and the author is just playing around. True, fantasy mixes the possible with the impossible, but there have to be reasons and explanations for the impossibilities, otherwise the reader will never be able to relate to the book.

I'm not saying that it should be that way all the time, but if he wrote a page in there with all the details of how heavily guarded the mines were and the pros/cons of putting more troops there, a lot of the impact of the scene would be lost, especially since his attack was a spur-of-the-moment thing in retaliation for Marsh's (presumed) death

Finally finished. It is a pretty complete novel. I was a little surprise by Kelsier's character. I wasn't surprised that he died but I was surprised how powerful his is right before he dies. He takes out the mines pretty easily when earlier it seems like he would need more help. It seems like Kelsier and Vin's powers fluctuated to fit the story, rather being consistent.

Overall, it was a satisfying book and I look forward to reading next one. The magic system is clever.

why would the mines be harder to break into?

you can't guard it with mistborn or allomancers: they'd destroy the crystals.

you can't guard it with the anti-allomantic soldiers (can't remember their names), because if you station enough of them there to be effective, it'd be kinda hard to keep the place a secret. (well, keep the 'mines' part a secret, anyway)

and you can't station a large army there for the same reason.


basically, the only people he had to kill were the guards that were supposed to watch over the prisoners.

like storing a word document on a floppy disc rather than on the hard drive.

once the floppy is removed, the computer is unable to read the file. (so once you take the rings off, you can't remember those things)

i can't wait to see electrum and malatium in action.  

oh, and i hope you take the 'p' out of 'warmth' before it goes off to print  

true...

but Starting in Hallendren loses a lot of the impact of the entrance scene later.


perhaps the prologue could be told decades earlier: when the revolution took place and the monarchy was exiled.

that would give us a background of the political situation, start off in exciting and important times, and still keep the look and feel of modern Hallendren hidden.  (I assume that the flamboyant decor is the result of the new pantheon of gods, and did not exist when the old monarchy was in power?)

It was just as good the second time.