This story was great! Ferrett is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors, between this story, "As Below, So Above", "Devour", and others. He has the imagination to come up with new ideas or to put new twists on old ideas, add some patented Steinmetz flavor, add some interesting philosophy and emotional depth, and make it into something really brilliant. At this point, I'm watching for his name in publications like I watch for Tim Pratt's (with anticipation of a riproaring tale).
This one I especially enjoyed because of its tie-in to video games, but there was plenty of food for thought even without it being related to one of my favorite pastimes. I thought her change from trying not to kill anyone to ruthless killer was in-character and made complete and total sense. If you see these guards making the same reactions every single time it would be very hard not to think of them as robots, or a science experiment (stimulus A prompts reaction B).
Sometimes I wonder about the stuff that I find funny, but I laughed loudly when she first shot Bakri, and then continued to shoot him for target practice. What's even better, it totally made practical sense--she has had no weapons training, and has never killed a person before. Especially with a trained sniper involved, doing your gun training in an active combat zone is foolhardy--even with automatic re-spawns it's not very productive.
The discussion that came up earlier about how 3-5 retries may make for a satisfying conclusion, but 10-20 becomes too frustrating, I can agree with that. It brings a few games to mind:
--Ghouls and Ghosts and other games from a similar time period. There are no saves. You are a lone knight, with just a couple lives and a suit of armor. If you get hit once, you lose your armor and run around in your undies. If you get hit again before regaining your armor you lose a life. If you lose all your lives you go all the way back to the beginning of the game and have to play through every damned level all over again. Argh! You thought the constant loading from save from frustrating! I find that I just can't play this kind of game like I used to, partially because I don't have daily slots of many many hours to kill and no money to buy new games like I did in my teenage years. And modern games have spoiled me, because they're never designed this way anymore.
--Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I played this game a few months ago, and generally liked it. The game overall let you take the mission with a variety of tactics, blasting in the front door and killing everyone, incorporating hacking, stealth, to incapacitate your enemies quietly or to just sneak around them. You could save anywhere at anytime, so generally the game wasn't too bad along the lines of saves. And then you hit the first boss. The making of the boss characters was outsourced, and it's pretty obvious that the makers didn't know what kind of game they were working with, because it's built as a fight more suited for Doom, wherein you must out-tank a tank character. Unfortunately, at this point, I'd made inventory and augmentation choices to support my strategy of going through the game as a non-lethal stealth character (I had killed no one up to that point, just leaving heaps of unconscious guards wherever I went). Even worse, the boss fight starts with a cut scene that leaves your character stupidly stranded without cover in front of this tank character. It took me probably 50 tries over the course of an hour, most of those lasting only 30 seconds or so as I tried a weapon on him to judge its effectiveness and then got ripped to shreds. Eventually I did beat him, but I was just relieved at that point to have the stupid thing over.
--Bio Shock. I'm playing this game now. I like the way that this one is set up. If you die, you are just re-spawned elsewhere, whatever you had done before you died is still in effect including the enemies that you've killed and the items you've picked up. I still try not to die, but this lets me be a bit more bold, a bit more daring, if I know I won't lose everything in it, and I find that I'm enjoying that.