Alright, I really quite like the fact that Yahtzee has been writing stories for the website as of late.
It brings me back to the days when writing was what his website was about. That, and crappy web comics that never-the-less succeeded in making a good joke, on occasion.
That being said . . .
Although it's hard to judge a trend from two stories, Yahtzee seems to have taken the exact same theme and put it in with two different universes.
"Let's find a position that these people have never been in before, then solve it by making them jackasses."
Trilby got rid of the ghost by asshole-ish trickery, the Elaborate Gesture ate due to asshole-ish trickery.
Basically, the over-riding character attributes so far seem the same. Yahtzee's using the same methods and techniques to advance the plot and stuff.
I barely know what I'm talking about here.
My worry is that the similarities will continue to pile on as he writes more stories, while at the current moment, it may just be a coincidence or result of getting back into writing stories after a long break.
edit:
If cerberus comes in here and tells me that i have no right to criticize Yahtzee, he's probably right.
^^^posted here because I think we should keep the topic of the story to one thread if we possibly can. Clutter is for desks and for closet floors, not for forum pages. So says momma me.
I'm reviewing this as someone who has not played the games, so if that makes my opinion moot then just skip over the following.
As someone who has never played the games i
t was almost impossible to keep all the characters straight in my head. No doubt someone who had played the games would not have this problem, but not only are we never introduced properly to the characters, we're not told anything about them either. Character has to be built-up by heresay, by observation rather then explaination and while that can work just fine (see "The Three Musketeers" for the most famous example of this kind of portraiture), unless it's integrated into the action it can leave the reader feeling lost.
Here's what I managed to gather: Eric is nice (and small), Dan is "ever the everyman," Hole is a thug, Bromide is a girl without pupils who reminds me of Rose from "The Search for Something" in that shes the kind of Woman in Power who is more One of the Guys then a genuine leader who sometimes rolls her eyes but usually defers to her crew's choices.
Again, playing the games might change those perceptions, but this is the call with what I got here.
....That's really all I can say about the characters with the information I got. Not that it really seemed to matter if I couldn't tell them apart: the Crew was essentially a single character with different, intermingling voices.
Which leads me to the next issue: overdescription of dialog.
Most of the action in this story is dialog. That's where the drama is coming from: the "what are we going to do with the babies" problem. Awesome as the concept of Murderous Polite Society Ladies are, I'm not sure what point they served in the end: the story could have left that action out entirely and it wouldn't have much affected the story's outcome. Seems kinda like it was there just to raise the stakes, but when baby eating is on the line, everything else seems kinda unimportant, even space dog fights.
The people very "said" anything in this story. It's always: "repeated," "went," "droned," "Shhed," "coughed" and lots of "-ly" words there to break things up which is fine when I haven't just stopped listening to someone talk and it's usually clear enough what they meant.
All around I think the Trilby story was superior to this one, if just because it was more accessible: only one character was a game left-over, and his set-up only took a paragraph or so and the rest was new, the conflict was a simple one, everything there was there for a reason and the twist ending made perfect sense even if it was shocking when it happened: it was in keeping with all we had learned about the situation and the characters involved.
Here, the same sort of Massiah Backstabber strikes again, but due to the diffusion of responsibility for the betrayal and the weaker characterization, it doesn't work as well. These guys are inept mercenaries who require enemy attacks to even rattle some professionalism out of them, they're not painted as particularly cunning or ruthless, and it seems to just come out of nowhere.
Where Trilby's professional pride won the day, for the Crew the real winner was their stomachs. And I find that rather weak.
Sorry about the rambling, it's late late late late....