Wow. I bought this little paperback eleven years ago. I don’t even remember the church where the garage sale was held–it’s probably turned over a couple times since then as it’s a large space on the end of a building with a Subway and fusion Chinese restaurant in it. I’m not sure if it’s a business or church these days–I will have to give it a passing glance when I’m passing by next time.
At any rate, this is a prequel to the XBox game Brute Force which is a squad shooter. Those days were before the Internet-connected games really took off, so it’s one player switching between the characters, and you don’t get to choose the characters. You get a tank, a sniper, a thief, and the other guy. I presume. I haven’t played it, and it does not look to have spawned a franchise like Halo did.
So the book starts off with two different special ops teams handling two different assignments on two different planets; Hawk and Flint are taking down some rebels on a planet, and Tank is inserted to take down some space pirates. Each is on a team of four, but I name the people who apparently make it into the game (again, this is a prequel about how they meet). Each finds evidence that high-ranking officials might be working with the space pirates and/or a religious cult, including high-ranking officials in the special operations heirarchy. So you get a lot of intrigue amongst those corrupt officials and then some set battles with a video game flavor. Game mechanics are nodded to, as the operatives can have a share of the “treasury” of the mission target and buy better armor. So part of the plotting is unraveled, the operatives go on a mission that is set up to eliminate them but emerge triumphant, and then they’re sent on another mission and the book ends unsatisfyingly as it sets the story up for the game. Maybe they were hoping to set up a franchise, but did not for some reason. Apparently, the game was very big in the day, but it never got a follow up.
I know, I know; I dinged Ben Wolf’s book The Ghost Mine for being too informed by video games (and I just bought the others in the series because I didn’t want to hurt the kid’s feelings). So this is a book based on a video game, but its writing is informed by other books–that is, the writing has a little more depth to it maybe than the Wolf books (although I have started on the second in the series immediately upon finishing this book, so I will better be able to speak to that in a week or so). Kind of like old movies were informed by stage plays and books, but modern movies are based on older movies and television shows, so we’re getting photocopies of photocopies now. Maybe I’m painting with too broad of a brush (sorry, Ben, if so).
But I’ve found that older books based on video games are just better than modern self-published books. Perhaps mine included, although I do laugh at John Donnelly’s Gold when I re-read it. Perhaps I should actually write something else to see how I would measure up. But I’m afraid I would find my writing informed by twee blog book reports and one line “ha, ha!”s at modern events.
