Watch the THESEUS monster truck face-off, bumper-to-bumper, against his meanest mechanical foe - BULLISTIC! Will he crush the competition or be bulled over? With short, action-packed chapters and high-powered art, the world's mightiest monster trucks - the ThunderTrucks - will have little motorheads and Greek mythology fans alike shifting their reading habits into high gear.
Two friends decide to sneak into an abandoned science laboratory. When they try to leave, they realize the place is more like a labyrinth, and this maze has a monster waiting at the finish line...
Watch the THESEUS monster truck face-off, bumper-to-bumper, against his meanest mechanical foe - BULLISTIC! Will he crush the competition or be bulled over? With short, action-packed chapters and high-powered art, the world's mightiest monster trucks - the ThunderTrucks - will have little motorheads and Greek mythology fans alike shifting their reading habits into high gear.
Part thriller, part love story, Mazes and Monsters is a spellbinding novel about a group of college students in the 1980s who use a fantasy game as refuge from their personal, emotional, and social problems. Based loosely on the “steam tunnel incidents” of the 1970s, the four friends—Kate, Jay Jay, Daniel, and Robbie—eventually take their game too far when they decide to live-action role-play in the caverns near their college campus. What follows is terrifying and unexpected, as each character dives deep into the darkest part of their mind, those forbidden places where our most menacing truths lie.
A dashing prince and a brave princess must join forces to defeat the monster in the maze and save the children of Athens. This exciting Greek legend comes to life in this easy-to-read version of the ancient legend. Full-color illustrations.
A study of the gruesome game characters we love to beat—and what they tell us about ourselves. Since the early days of video games, monsters have played pivotal roles as dangers to be avoided, level bosses to be defeated, or targets to be destroyed for extra points. But why is the figure of the monster so important in gaming, and how have video games come to shape our culture’s conceptions of monstrosity? To answer these questions, Player vs. Monster explores the past half-century of monsters in games, from the dragons of early tabletop role-playing games and the pixelated aliens of Space Invaders to the malformed mutants of The Last of Us and the bizarre beasts of Bloodborne, and reveals the common threads among them. Covering examples from aliens to zombies, Jaroslav Švelch explores the art of monster design and traces its influences from mythology, visual arts, popular culture, and tabletop role-playing games. At the same time, he shows that video games follow the Cold War–era notion of clearly defined, calculable enemies, portraying monsters as figures that are irredeemably evil yet invariably vulnerable to defeat. He explains the appeal of such simplistic video game monsters, but also explores how the medium could evolve to present more nuanced depictions of monstrosity.
