Today I finally got out of the stock market, for many different reasons. I don’t know if the trend reversal is here (and nobody can ever time the market), but as Warren Buffet said, he made most of his profit by selling too early. I felt like I lifted a burden off my shoulder. No doubt I will pick up new vices, mostly other people’s demons as my own in due time, but hay at least now I can go live in the forest (or go on a trip) without net access and having to worry about the market crashing. No, not really, I don’t think I can live without the net, I feel like I am cut off from the rest of the world.

Now to my real topic, coming back from Europe, the package that waited for me at home I pre-ordered from amazon contained the book Confessor, and 360 games Assasin’s Creed and Mass Effect. You have no idea how much I have looked forward to these three things. I will get to them in order. Confessor is Book 11 of the Sword of Truth series. Its the big finale and a big letdown as I have expected, but its one of those things that because you started, you have to finish. I grew up reading a lot of fantasy novels, and I think I stopped reading them at some point because they became repetitive. The Sword of Truth series is one of the only two series I keep following, the other one being the Song of Ice and Fire by George Martin which I wholeheartedly recommend to everyone because that is a series that can be compared to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Hay there’s always a chance a series get so long the author would die first before completing it (look at Wheel of Time), but Ice and Fire is pretty worth it. Sword of Truth started out pretty uniquely and the pinnacle of the series is really the first trilogy, and also book 6 which started the dreamwalker thread but it deteriated from there pretty much. Book 1 was famous for its S&M scenes (not so much about the sex but the torture), the mod-siths (these red leather-clad succubus like chicks) hold this rod thing called the Agiel (think of it a giant dildo) that causes pain to their victim. I don’t want to dive into the whole series but Goodkind’s writing deteriated from having good torture scenes, good swordplay scenes, good hopeless trapped scenarios, to very childish elementary-level writing that keeps on rambling about the philosophy of life, as to why they are fighting which is repeated over and over from book 6, and the whole book 11 felt like a drag to the end. Overall the plot is tied up nicely, and Goodkind managed to put every major plot device (usually some kinda magic thing) in use for the finale and it feels like he hasn’t really wasted too much time writing fillers (other than the horrible Pillars of Creation). In the series everything counter everything else, War Wizard and the bond of Rahl vs the Dreamwalker, the boxes of Orden countering Chainfire, and there is the ending. Yes, like the stock market, I feel like I lifted another burden off my shoulder, I no longer have to follow the stuff he writes. I really believe in this: truly great writers don’t really become popular, at least not in their lifetime. And things you get from the best seller’s list, they are never terrible, but they are just popular. I am not sure if I would recommend the series to everyone, but chances are if you started the books, you will want to finish it, just because you can.

Assassin’s Creed: a truly flawed game that is, well, I think great in its own way. I hated it as much as I loved it while I played it. Watch Zero Puntuation’s awesome review here. To sum up Assasin’s Creed in 1 sentence is Prince of Persia meets GTA, or in other words, Tenchu placed in a sandbox with Conspiracy Theory. The gameplay gets repetitive but just being in the game should take your breathe away, it IS that beautiful. Combat is love it or hate it, and it gets from ridiculously easy to ultra hard. The only thing I care about is plot? And the good news is there is one, and it’s a pretty good one at that, it is at least complicated and trying something new.

Mass Effect: it is the culimination of all things that is good. It is KOTOR meets Star Control 2 (in a good way), and the plot rivals one of the best Space Opera-ish SF novels, and looks better than most dramas on TV. The game is full of choices (which I love), and for the first time in a game, I think, investing points into charisma affects the plot (no you still can’t defeat the final boss with charm). I think people play games for different reasons, and I play it to experience art, and most importantly, the plot. I no longer like games that make me level grind or repeat a platform jumps 10 million times before I get to the enxt level, I don’t like the challenge, I just want to get to the end and see how the script unfolds itself. And i have proven that here that some games have better plot and writing than books. But if you like plot, why not experience it all?