There have been novels based on video games for as long as there have been video games. Thing is, you could probably count the number of good ones on one hand. Pity writer Richard Cobbett, then, who spent the last week reading some of the very worst of them.
He's recorded the torment on his blog, and let's just say it makes me glad I'm me and not him. Becsuse here's an excerpt from the novelization (not to be confused with the comic adaptation) of, yes, Doom. It's heavy on inner monologues:
That was all that kept racing through my head, screaming the word over and over again between my ears… zombie, zombie, zombie! What utter shit. Maybe Arlene could believe in all that crap and bullroar; she watched those damned, damned horror movies all the–I wasn't never going to watch anything like… a freakin' zombie? I was crazy, buggin', freaked like some hippie punk snot flying on belladonna.
And here are the horrors of a Baldur's Gate 2 sex scene:
When their tongues met there was no going back for Abdel. His eyes burned in his head and he surrendered to the strange woman's rhythms the same way he surrendered to the clanging-steel rhythms of an opponent. They came together in the same kind of hesitant, exploratory dance of two swordsmen parrying blows and searching for weaknesses and openings.
I can't go on, and that's just the excerpts. If you want to see what else Cobbett subjected himself to, check them out here. But be warned: one report involves a book called "Mirthful Kombat".
To get the taste of a strange woman's rhythms out of our mouths, let's instead list below some of the better gaming novels we've read. I know some of the Halo ones are OK. I also know I loved the Metal Gear adaptation as a kid, but that might mostly be because of the cover.
Book Week [Richard Cobbett]