Alt-Hist RPG Masquerading as YA Spy Thiller: Blades of Winter
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Author: G. T. Almasi
Title: Blades of Winter Genre: young adult / thriller Meet Alix "Scarlet" Nico, second-generation Level for the USA's clandestine Extreme Operations Group. Her world was pretty much like ours up until the assassination of Adolf Hitler in the early 1940s. In the ensuing "peace" between the USA and Germany, the bad guys got Europe and the Middle East and kept six million Jews alive as slaves. These two blocs are joined by Russia and China in superpowerdom; an uneasy peace that is in fact little more than an ongoing war fought by the four countries' agents: the Levels. Augmented by chemical and mechanical aids, the Levels of all four countries are rendered capable of superhuman feats of strength and speed and berserker-like killing rage. At the tender age of 19, Alix - a graduate of the supersecret spy academy "Camp A-Go-Go" - is already a Level Four. No, make that a Six... errr, an Eight. She is rapidly gaining on her father, Philip "Big Bertha" Nico, one of the only three agents of ExOps ("Extreme Operations") ever to reach Level Twenty. That was before he disappeared, presumed dead - though not before eleven-year-old Alix snagged his customized weapon, "Li'l Bertha." Eight years after Philip Nico disappeared on an infiltration job in the German-controlled Middle East, the good(?) guys are hearing rumblings of great success in the German project BB had been trying to crack when he was captured, "Carbon" - the aptly-named human cloning program. When Alix catches the scent of "The Blades of Persia," a shadowy organization intimately attached to her father's disappearance, she kicks her formidable self into overdrive in the hunt for "Winter," the uber-shadowy boss of the Blades. Hampered only a tad by a high-level mole deep within ExOps and the gaggle of enhanced Levels from the opposition powers swarming around her, Alix and her partner-lover, Patrick ("Solomon") set out to crack open The Blades, Carbon, and any hapless skull that gets in her way. The Blades of Winter are in for a heapin' helpin' of hurt if Alix has her way - and she usually does. While I'm not a gamer, it doesn't take much pondering to figure out that G. T. Almasi (author of this little volume, the first of three [duh]) spent most of his formative years wearing out his thumbs on game consoles. Never mind the alternative universe stuff, that's just ordinary space filler to set a stage: games are what count here, in a comic-booky sort of way. I mean, think about it: you got your different "species" of operatives, each of which grows in power (goes up a Level) as s/he wins more hardware and chemical implants. Add to that the comic-book-style battles with a 5'-4" nineteen-year-old punching entirely through a full-grown bad guy's head and the weapons that can morph to shoot any kind of ammo from rat shot to .50-caliber rounds, and you've truly left reality for the land of make-believe. Oh, and Alix pulls off a nighttime HALO in there over Baghdad, too. How hackneyed can you get? Okay... it's a book that might just interest a few teenaged boys (meaning up to about age 35), and maybe a couple of gamer-girls, enough to get their mugs away from their consoles for a while. Fine by me; they probably need the mental stimulation. But there's a problem, what with the ridiculous level of violence. Not only do we have punches through faces, but after her most recent augmentation - a bionic hand worth not one but two Levels - Alix gleefully practices a newfound skill, that of grabbing hold of people's bones... through their skin. Gross. Though physically (and bio-chemically and -mechanically) an adult, Alix is a classic case of arrested emotional development. Like many her age, she lacks the impulse control that would come with experience. Starring an stunted emotional character like this little girl in a comic-book world of black and white might draw in the Cheetos® and cheap beer crowd, but it's not going to help them grow. That's a problem: most non-gamers look on the gaming world as mindlessly violent and unrealistic. The Blades of Winter is never going to disabuse them of that notion. One star: utter rubbish. copyright © 2001 to present by scmrak
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