User: Eloquence

Spirits tend to have unfinished business. That’s how it is in Cozy Grove, where your job is to wander a haunted island as a “spirit scout” and to help one ghostly bear after another to move on.

In the process, you get to place decorations, raise animals, go fish, cook meals, earn achievements, throw stones, expand your wardrobe, buy and sell, and perform more fetch quests than you’ve ever wanted to.

While you can keep grinding for hours, the story only progresses a little bit every day. This is one of those games that wants you to keep coming back in small doses.

If you enjoyed Animal Crossing, you’ll almost certainly get a kick out of Cozy Grove. The game’s variety, atmosphere and story moments make the grind of fetch quest after fetch quest palatable. Personally, I put more than 90 hours into it, so I’m rounding up a 4.5 star rating.

How you want to decorate your camp site is up to you, but it influences what kind of plants and animals will thrive there. (Credit: Spry Fox LLC. Fair use.)

If you talk to me about computers for more than a few minutes, I’ll inevitably bring up the C64. A key machine from my childhood, it opened up an entire a world for me. Together with my sibling and my father, it’s where I played games for countless hours, typed in BASIC programs, and discovered the world of bulletin board systems.

In the 1980s, print magazines were vitally important as a guide. I was not in the UK, so I did not hear of Zzap!64 until much later. But in the British C64 community, it was legendary for its unvarnished and honest reviews, written by gamers for gamers. And with it, Julian “Jaz” Rignall started his own legend as a games journalist.

Before landing his poorly paid dream job, teenage Jaz made a name for himself by winning arcade tournaments in the early 1980s, racking up unthinkable scores that required absurdly fast reflexes and exploits of a machine’s weaknesses. The three letter nickname is from the high-score tables.

Games journalism at that time was often still a stuffy business: impeccable prose by writers who had no idea what made games fun. When Chris Anderson (who later founded IGN) looked for gamers who could help him launch a C64 magazine that would do things differently, Jaz made the list.

The years Jaz worked at Zzap!64 and, later, Mean Machines are the heart of his games-centric memoir “Games of a Lifetime”. The book inspired me to make my way through old editions of Zzap!64 on my tablet. It’s a fun read—full of wacky illustrations of reviewer reactions to the games, a dedicated section for interactive fiction and RPGs, all in a casual writing style reflecting the young audience.

In addition to many beautiful screenshots, “The Games of a Lifetime” also features a few select photos from the author’s life that relate to the history of games or the magazines he wrote for. (Own photo. License: CC-BY-SA.)

But Jaz is a lifetime gamer, and the book extends all the way into the 2020s. Jaz shares his multi-year love affair with World of Warcraft, his passion for racing games like the Gran Turismo series, and his admiration for indie walking sims like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.

This is interspersed with stories from his life: work beyond gaming for corporate giants like Bank of America and Walmart; friendships and relationships; hobbies and accidents. Not all of that is page turner material, but the author refocuses quickly on games he associates with a particular period in his life.

As is typical for Bitmap Books titles, the book has large, gorgeous screenshots of the games it covers, making it a fun coffee table addition. If you’re a huge Nintendo fan, be advised that Jaz doesn’t cover many Nintendo titles after the N64 era — it’s just not his thing. They’re the games of his lifetime, after all.

If we lived forever, I wouldn’t mind dedicating a small percentage of forever to playing every old game for the C64, for the Amiga, for the SNES, and comparing notes. But in the absence of immortality, for any old gamer, books and magazines feel like a pinball racing through your brain, bouncing off old memories, and creating new ones. If you’re one of us, consider taking the plunge.

Catherine Nixey’s first book, The Darkening Age (review), told the sobering story of how Christianity’s rise required the persecution of all opposing beliefs: the destruction of pagan temples and statues, the burning of books, the prohibition of worship.

Her second work, Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, focuses on Jesus himself. Nixey observes that, whatever the historicity of Jesus, what we are left with are stories that don’t describe one Jesus Christ, but many.

The bizarre Infancy Gospel of Thomas tells of a son of God who, as a child, kills other children out of spite—reminiscent of Anthony Fremont in “It’s a Good Life” wishing his victims into the cornfield. In the Gospel of Basilides, it’s not Jesus who was crucified, but Simon of Cyrene, while Jesus laughed at him.

Nixey vividly describes the ancient world as a place where the kinds of miracles the New Testament attributes to Jesus were commonplace claims by many self-anointed prophets and miracle workers. Raising the dead, healing the sick? Not a one-time deal.

It’s no surprise, then, that the Acts of Peter describe a magic duel between Simon Magus and Apostle Peter, or that Jesus was sometimes depicted as a wand-carrying wizard by his own followers.

Despite brutal attempts to suppress “heretical” Christian beliefs, Nixey traces the legacy of these sacred texts in literature, art, and surviving Christian traditions like Mandaeism and Ethiopian Christianity. All, of course, view theirs as the orthodox truth.

You’re a wizard, Jesus: In this 4th century depiction, Jesus multiplies loaves and and fishes with a wand.

Like the stories of Jesus, the concept of monotheism itself can be traced to precursor beliefs. Nixey points out that the Bible retains traces of polytheism or henotheism (the worship of one supreme God among many).

One common example is Psalm 82:

“God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.”

But even Genesis, the very foundation of monotheistic belief, refers to other entities alongside God:

“Let us make humankind in our image” (1:26)

“Behold, the man is become as one of us” (3:22)

“Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language” (11:7)

These are extant references to the Canaanite pantheon; before there was one God, there were many.

Catherine Nixey’s Heretic, despite its sometimes acerbic tone, is not an anti-religious book. It simply documents how religious ideas blend and evolve over time. Any one belief, no matter how fervently held, has its (often contradictory) antecedents and descendents.

Looking at this tapestry of belief, anyone can appreciate that there is beauty in it—but also that those who point at one specific sacred text and say “That’s the one, that’s the one worth killing for!” should make heretics out of us all.