The Forever Pact (The Bachelors of Paradise Valley Book 1) by Jaimie Casey (486 Reviews)    Price verified 7 minutes ago

What's that saying? What can go wrong will go wrong? I think that should be the saying for my life. I'm Pippa Chase. I was about to become Pippa Snothead, but then my fiancé cheated on me, and I called off the wedding... I'm heartbroken, but at least I avoided a horrible last name. And now, I'm on my way to Paradise Valley, Montana, to lick my wounds and figure out what's next in my life. I'm going to live with my childhood best friend, TJ Wyatt, on a ranch he bought. Ever since we were young, we had a pact that if one of us needed the other, we would be there for each other. Granted, TJ and I haven't seen each other since we were thirteen, and we stopped our barrage of letters and emails when we were eighteen. However, we still send Christmas cards yearly, and in one of them, he did say, "If you're ever in this part of the country, drop in." I don't think he meant it as literally as I took it. So, that's how I ended up living on a remote ranch, in a log cabin with a man who didn't seem quite as happy to see me as I thought he would be. But maybe it didn't help that I showed up in my wedding dress, and everyone in town thought I was his new bride. Oops! This may not have been my best decision, but I'm hoping that Paradise Valley can help to mend my broken heart.

Genre: Humor & Entertainment

Tempest: Geometries of Play (Landmark Video Games) by Judd Ethan Ruggill (University of Michigan Press) (6 Reviews)    Price verified 2 hours ago

Atari's 1981 arcade hit Tempest was a "tube shooter" built around glowing, vector-based geometric shapes. Among its many important contributions to both game and cultural history, Tempest was one of the first commercial titles to allow players to choose the game's initial play difficulty (a system Atari dubbed "SkillStep"), a feature that has since became standard for games of all types. Tempest was also one of the most aesthetically impactful games of the twentieth century, lending its crisp, vector aesthetic to many subsequent movies, television shows, and video games. In this book, Ruggill and McAllister enumerate and analyze Tempest's landmark qualities, exploring the game's aesthetics, development context, and connections to and impact on video game history and culture. By describing the game in technical, historical, and ludic detail, they unpack the game's latent and manifest audio-visual iconography and the ideological meanings this iconography evokes.

Genre: Humor & Entertainment

Silent Hill: The Terror Engine (Landmark Video Games) by Bernard Perron (University of Michigan Press) (130 Reviews)    Price verified 2 hours ago

Silent Hill: The Terror Engine, the second of the two inaugural studies in the Landmark Video Games series from series editors Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, is both a close analysis of the first three Silent Hill games and a general look at the whole series. Silent Hill, with its first title released in 1999, is one of the most influential of the horror video game series. Perron situates the games within the survival horror genre, both by looking at the history of the genre and by comparing Silent Hill with such important forerunners as Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil. Taking a transmedia approach and underlining the designer's cinematic and literary influences, he uses the narrative structure; the techniques of imagery, sound, and music employed; the game mechanics; and the fiction, artifact, and gameplay emotions elicited by the games to explore the specific fears survival horror games are designed to provoke and how the experience as a whole has made the Silent Hill series one of the major landmarks of video game history.

Genre: Humor & Entertainment

DOOM: SCARYDARKFAST (Landmark Video Games) by Dan Pinchbeck (University of Michigan Press) (8 Reviews)    Price verified one hour ago

In December 1993, gaming changed forever. id Software's seminal shooter DOOM was released, and it shook the foundations of the medium. Daniel Pinchbeck brings together the complete story of DOOM for the first time. This book takes a look at the early days of first-person gaming and the video game studio system. It discusses the prototypes and the groundbreaking technology that drove the game forward and offers a detailed analysis of gameplay and level design. Pinchbeck also examines DOOM's contributions to wider gaming culture, such as online multiplay and the modding community, and the first-person gaming genre, focusing on DOOM's status as a foundational title and the development of the genre since 1993. Pinchbeck draws extensively from primary data: from the game itself, from the massive fan culture surrounding the title, and from interviews with the developers who made it. This book is not only the definitive work on DOOM but a snapshot of a period of gaming history, a manifesto for a development ethos, and a celebration of game culture at its best.

Genre: Humor & Entertainment