A Dance with Dragons, the fifth volume of A Song of Ice and Fire,  despite being one of the more concise volumes in the series, containing virtually only three main plots – which helps to move the narrative forward –, still suffers from the remnants of the bad planning surrounding the previous book, A Feast for Crows. A Dance with …

If it is said a reader lives a thousand lives before they die, how about an author? Telling the life story of Julian Carax, a mysterious writer, and that of Daniel Sempere, the eleven-year-old boy who picks, from the labyrinthine shelves of a forgotten library, exactly the last book written by Carax, The Shadow of the Wind is a novel …

A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in A Song of Ice and Fire, was released five years after A Storm of Swords, following a troubled writing process. George R. R. Martin first decided that the plot would jump five years in time, which would allow the children and dragons to grow. However, long after he had produced enough material, …

Zero Time Dilemma, the third and final entry in the great adventure series Zero Escape, has a narrative structure as complex as those of previous games, although it introduces less interesting characters and ends with a couple of questionable twists that don’t survive retrospection. The game begins when nine people wake up trapped in a cell and are approached by …

The multiplayer moments that Mario Kart games provide are always entertaining. It’s an ever-shifting chaos of flying shells and exploding items, but the secret is that it’s usually a controllable one. A rookie can take advantage of the speed boost and invulnerability of special stars to not finish in the last place, for example, while experienced players can break when …

The Lovecraft Project: Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding. The plan is to write a few …

The Lovecraft Project: Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the father of cosmic horror – the genre constructed around the notion that we humans are just a tiny, insignificant part of the universe, which holds much bigger, ancient, more powerful beings. We are nothing compared to what lies out there, beyond our reach and understanding. The plan is to write a few …

After the Assassin’s Creed franchise became very successful, its producer Ubisoft adopted the strategy of releasing one title per year: they must make money while the iron is hot. It was inevitable, then, that the games would eventually show clear signs of a rushed development cycle, being devoid of any creative reason to exist. Assassin’s Creed Revelations is the first …

3D Mario games have always excelled at renewing themselves, making their most basic mechanics – like jumping – more interesting in the most imaginative ways possible, either by abusing and twisting gravity in Super Mario Galaxy or by prolonging the jump in Super Mario Sunshine. The current 2D titles appear to follow a different guideline, basing their design on familiar …

Written by Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist seeks to mix a horror story with the typical structure of a thriller while building an allegory on depression. The novel may contain a couple of exciting scenes, but its incoherent story is ultimately incapable of sustaining itself. The novel’s protagonist is David Ullman, a university professor and specialist in the most famous work …