Robot Entertainment has done it again! Patch 1.1 went live last week, and Hero Academy is a brand new game. The Dwarves have been added as the next playable team. Dwarves use devastating explosive attacks and augmented bonuses from boost squares…
Hero Academy: Late G...
posted by james m. toburen
Many Hero Academy matches are going to be neck-and-neck races to shatter your enemy’s gem, or a brutal exchange between units, leaving a definitive victor and a loser. But sometimes, that doesn’t happen. Let’s say you’ve managed to get most of your army on the field,...
Hero Academy: Dark E...
posted by james m. toburen
When Hero Academy was launched, Robot Entertainment provided a second team for immediate download, the Dark Elves. Thankfully, Robot Entertainment worked carefully to ensure that buying this second team wasn’t an “I win” button.
Hero Academy: The Co...
posted by james m. toburen
Most players starting Hero Academy will play with the Council; the humans are a pretty straightforward faction to wrap your brain around. The knights serve as hard-to-kill tanks, the archers provide long-range single-target damage, mages handle crowd control, and the clerics heal units. No surprises there!
Hero Academy: Quick ...
posted by james m. toburen
Chances are, if you’re reading this, that you’re already a big fan of Robot Entertainment’s Hero Academy. Released just a few weeks ago, Hero Academy has already proven to be quite the popular little game…
Business time
posted by james m. toburen
James Toburen, Senior Editor, Writer, and Web Designer of the james review, now has business cards, courtesy of his better half!
Otherland headed to ...
posted by james m. toburen
Warner Brothers picked up the film rights to Tad Williams’ Otherland! They’ve placed Dan Lin in charge of production duties, notable for the recent Sherlock Holmes films, in addition to currently producing the star-studded Gangster Squad, arriving in theaters later this year…
Review: REAMDE
posted by james m. toburen
Neal Stephenson‘s willingness to skip through time to tell his stories flaunts an authorial fearlessness. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer both envisioned possible futures, near and far, respectively. Anathem leapt even further into the future, in addition to occupying an entirely different dimension. Cryptonomicon explored a fictionalized history of the modern computer’s origin during the events of the World Wars; the multi-volume Baroque Cycle followed characters fictional and historical at the beginning of the 18th century. Zodiac, The Big U, and (portions of) Cryptonomicon all reside somewhere near our own time…
…Reamde
posted by james m. toburen
With the arrival of e-books and online retailers, I fret that local book shops might be doomed to extinction, along with the dodo, glaciers, and letting children trick-or-treat on Halloween without supervision. I love wandering amidst the towering bookshelves of a book store or library, but I admit that I often turn to the Internet…
Review: Ship Breaker
posted by james m. toburen
After the huge success of Paolo Bacigalupi’s 2010 debut novel, The Windup Girl, the science fiction world waited with baited breath for his sophomore effort. Could he repeat his early success? After all, The Windup Girl struck an incredible cord with fans and critics alike, winning both the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Nebula Award for Best Novel. Time Magazine went so far as to declare the story one of the top ten fiction novels of the year. So when Ship Breaker was announced, fans lined up to discover if Bacigalupi could once again snag the haunting thread woven through The Windup Girl. So, has he?
…Ship Breaker
posted by james m. toburen
After having read (and been quite impressed by) Paolo Bacigalupi’s Nebula Award- and Hugo Award-winning debut novel The Windup Girl, I was curious to see how he hoped to expand the world of young adult dystopian fiction. The genre has grown in popularity in recent years, with the City...
Review: Clementine
posted by james m. toburen
Seattle-based author Cherie Priest has established herself as a writer to keep a close eye on, first garnering fame for the Lulu Blooker-winning Four and Twenty Blackbirds, the opening novel of her Eden Moore trilogy. More recently, her series of steampunk tales have been earning her further attention; the stories of the Clockwork Century universe showcase an America that never came to be: the Civil War extended, both sides armed with strange new weapons, nimble airships roaming the skies. Boneshaker connected with fans and critics alike…
…Clementine
posted by james m. toburen
100 pages into Clementine, and I couldn’t help but notice that the protagonist, Maria Isabella Boyd, possesses a little more spine than your average wilting flower. Cherie Priest‘s Clementine, the second work in her Clockwork Century timeline, follows characters new and old after...
Review: The Heroes
posted by james m. toburen
Joe Abercrombie has earned a reputation as a writer of gritty, intense fantasy that’s unafraid to deconstruct and reexamine the typical fantasy assumptions. For many readers, this falls firmly in the camp of being “a very good thing,” though individual mileage may vary (see here for an interesting blog post and an impressive thread of commentary responding to one critic’s unfavorable opinions on postmodern interpretations of the fantasy genre). His freshman effort, The First Law, offered up a fresh, violent, and often funny take on epic fantasy…
…The Heroes
posted by james m. toburen
Joe Abercrombie has earned a reputation for writing gritty, intense fantasy that’s unafraid to deconstruct and reexamine the old fantasy tropes. I’m glad to say, “Joe’s back,” this time with The Heroes, another standalone novel set in the world of The First Law trilogy.
