Scribblenauts

When this game came out a few months ago, I raced off to the store to buy it. I think I even skipped classes for a day just to play it. The premise of the game was simple. Solve very quick puzzles by conjuring up objects. Literally, just type in an object, and it would appear. The game contains a library of 10,000 objects, and as long as your word isn't too dirty or adult-themed (drug and alcohol references count), it'll almost definitely be in there. At first, the game was a blast. I wasn't even attempting puzzles as much as dicking around. Who would win in a fight, a kraken or a megalodon? Could I attach enough helium balloons to myself to cause me to begin to float away? Who can cut down more trees - this lumberjack, or these beavers? You get the picture. But before long, innovation and imagination gave way to the grueling task of clearing out my backlog. While I had enjoyed wise-assing my way through the first thirty levels or so (there are 220 in total) I soon became bored with imagination and innovation. And that's kind of the key flaw with Scribblenauts - sure, in theory, there are dozens of ways, if not hundreds, to solve each and every puzzle. But before long, you start to develop a starting rotation of go-to objects. As it turns out, there really aren't that many tasks to perform in the game. You can fly, swim, dig, and operate vehicles. You can attack enemies or bad creatures with weapons. You can use explosives to remove hazards. And really, there's not much else. So I found myself settling into a rut where I was completing four out of every five levels with the same palate of ten objects or so. I even read online about one guy claiming to have beaten the entire game with six objects. So, yeah, there may be 10,000 nouns to choose from, but Scribblenauts is a game with very few verbs. Two additional factors also negatively affect this game, and they go beyond mere repetition. One is the control scheme. You control a guy named Maxwell with the DS stylus, and when you click anywhere on the screen, he'll go there. But you also need to click on objects to open up little interaction menus. I must have sent Maxwell off a cliff or into a pack of monsters a hundred times while trying to click on objects. You use the D-pad to scroll the screen around and view the level, but the game automatically and obnoxiously scrolls your view back to Maxwell after a second or two. So you can't really survey the landscape. And there's no preventing this either. More than half of my Maxwell suicides came when I'd go to tap on an object only to have the screen scroll back toward Maxwell just before my tap, allowing me to click on empty space, sending Maxwell into a headlong beeline. Worst of all was the jumping. There is no jump button, and Maxwell automatically leaps to cross gaps or ascend small steps. But he never seems able to jump when you want him to, and he's always jumping around like a giddy little asshole when you just want him to stand still. At least, that's how it seems. And even when you attach wings to him - fly, Maxwell, fly! - he still has trouble getting airborne more often than not. All of this is especially annoying when you're trying to flee from a ninja or some kind of hellspawn. Finally, there's tons of lag in this game. There's a maximum amount of items allowed on screen at once, and that's understandable, as a tiny little DS and its game card can only have so much RAM. What's not understandable is why the game slows to half speed when more than three items are moving at once. Games shouldn't ever lag that poorly, especially ones with cartoon graphics made for handheld systems. So what's the bottom line here? Scribblenauts is a unique and interesting game; that much can't be denied. It's also untrue to say it's dull or boring; this game, more than any other game ever, has an excitement level that completely depends on the gamer's innovation and imaginative efforts. But somewhere amid the 220 levels, everyone will lose interest. Before too long, you've written all the cool things you can think of and found out which ones work (at all) during missions and which ones don't (hint: nuclear bombs are never a good idea). Combine the inevitable loss of interest with the annoying lag and downright terrible controls, and this really isn't all that good a game. Which is a damn shame to admit, as I wanted to love it as much as anyone did. And the thing is, I did love it. But only for an hour or two, and it took me ten or twelve to beat it. I do think it's worth checking out if you've got a DS; there's nothing else like it. But be warned - if you're looking to complete the game, you've got a long and lifeless road ahead of you. Oh well. I guess not every "next big thing" game can live up to the hype.

Why Fish Fart

This was a modest little 250-pager that I got for Christmas from my sister. The subtitle is really only partially true; this book contains information that is both useless and gross, not one or the other. Some of the stuff in here was stuff I already knew about, but other stuff was new to me entirely. The book contained six sections, regarding the following: gross-sounding dishes from history and non-Western civilizations, peculiarities from the animal kingdom, historically disgusting cases of bodily functions, strange customs from history and non-Western civilizations, torture, and corpses. Yes, the last third of the book was all about brutal and savage forms of torture from throughout history and then all kinds of information on what happens once you die. How long does it take your bowels to release? For internal gasses to bloat up and seep out of your skin? For your eyes and brain to liquefy? For your skin to fall off? I'm sure you've always wanted to know these things, even if only for afterlife-planning purposes, and the good news is that you can find all the answers right here in this book. It was a quick and enjoyable read (even if the last 80 pages were particularly brutal and morbid), and the biggest problem I have with it is that it's just kind of a series of rapid-fire fun facts, so I'm not going to retain much of what I read about. Still, that only means it'll make for a great re-read someday. But not yet; the backlog is far from empty, and re-reads are out of the question for a while. Oh, and the titular answer? Communication. Fish fart to communicate with one another at night when its too dark to see one another. Interesting but useless, right? That's this book for you.

Band of Brothers

Now this was something worth watching. Wow. Recent HBO programs I've watched have left me partially impressed and slightly bored. But not this one. Band of Brothers is moving and captivating from start to finish. It's already eight or nine years old, but the production value is so impeccable that it could just as well be brand new. The ten-part miniseries tells the story of Easy Company, a group of some several dozen paratroopers who served in World War II. It's more or less entirely based on historical accounts and facts, so part of the wonder I felt when watching it was due to its being an entirely nonfictional account of several real men and their very real struggles and triumphs. Because it's about a group of men, and because men are constantly coming and going (well, dying) in war, there's an enormous ensemble cast. Some of the show's detractors like to point to this as a flaw, claiming that it was nearly impossible to feel for any one specific soldier at any given time. I, on the other hand, loved this. At first, yes, it was difficult to pick out and follow more than two or three key characters, but that was fine by me because he first few episodes were all about the men training as paratroopers, jumping into Normandy on D-Day, and partaking in some really fascinating missions in the Low Countries and Northern France. Only once winter set in, right around the midway point of the miniseries, did I really begin to connect with several characters, and I'm not sure this wasn't an intentional result by the showrunners. After all, I, like the men I was watching, was developing a sense of the camaraderie between the members of Easy Company as they fought tooth and nail for one another's backs. And by the end of the tenth and final episode, I was finally able to differentiate most of the characters, many of them even by name. So to the detractors who claimed to have been overwhelmed by the number of characters, I'd counter that every aspect of real life contains an ensemble cast, and connections are only made if you try to make them. To each his own, sure, but I'm shocked that some people are finding fault with the show for trying to be as all-encompassing and inclusive as possible. There were some breathtaking moments and powerful scenes throughout the series, from the terror of D-Day to the hopelessness of lying in a foxhole surrounded by screaming, dying friends during an artillery barrage to the morbidness of concentration camps to the beautiful serenity that accompanied victory. Part of what made so many special moments possible was the fact that each episode, for the most part, focused primarily on a different member of the company. A few were even narrated in the first person. We were with the group medic when the company was being barraged by German artillery in subzero conditions. We were with the alcoholic captain, who was losing his faith and morale for the war cause, when the company stumbled upon one of the many wretched concentration camps. We were with the shell-shocked and paranoid "new guy" who wasn't ready for the terror of war. We were with the noble soldier who kept everyone's morale up when all hope seemed lost. We were with all kinds of people filling all kinds of roles over the ten-hour miniseries, and as such, we really got a broad brushstroke of an experience. But above all else, we were always with the men of Easy Company, for better or for worse, and witnessed, truly, a band of brothers form from a group of total strangers. I give this collection a ten out of ten, hands down. It might even be my favorite HBO production to date. Never once did I feel bored or bogged down by the "task" of completing it to clear it from my backlog. In fact, every minute was a real treat. And that's an amazing feat. By all means, see Band of Brothers from beginning to end should the opportunity ever present itself. You won't regret it one bit.

How I Met Your Mother: Season 2

Hurrah! Another season of this old school comedy has been completed. About halfway through this season, I wasn't as big a fan of the show as I was last season. It had fallen into patterns and routines and several episodes were neither very funny nor relevant to the story of how Ted met his kids' mother. In fact, all season long, Ted dated Robin, who as I pointed out in the Season 1 recap, was confirmed to have not been his kids' mother. Their breakup was inevitable from the get-go. Perhaps that's part of why the second season felt like a step backward to me; the story wasn't progressing as much as it was standing still. But something great was happening throughout Season 2 that I was unaware of at the time. Seeds were being planted. And when those seeds finally sprouted in the final few episodes of the season, I was caught delightedly off guard. Allow me to explain. If you've seen Lost, for example, you know what it's like to see something seemingly irrelevant in one episode and then have it be explained several episodes later. Likewise, Arrested Development was notable for many reasons, but one of them was its commitment to "down the line" jokes. A seed is planted one episode, in a very subtle way, and later on in a completely different episode, it'll get brought back in a delayed joke. I love it. I guess its the comedy equivalent of foreshadowing. Anyway, toward the end of this season of How I Met Your Mother, the writers definitely started to dabble with these delayed pay-off jokes. And a big one even played a huge role in the season finale. The show is evolving, and I'm enjoying watching it do so. The characters, too, are showing some growth, and that's always important for an old school two-camera sitcom with a laugh track. At any rate, I'm impressed (even if not blown away) by this CBS sitcom so far, and I look forward to the next few seasons - spoiler alert! - especially now that Ted and Robin mutually and cleanly called their chemistry-less relationship off. Now, Ted can continue his quest to meet his eventual wife, using Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) as his wingman. There were some bumps in the road in Season 2, but all in all, it was at least as good as Season 1. Now, onward, to Season 3!

Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story

It's Christmas! A wonderful time of year, and a perfect lazy day for backlogging! This morning I received several games I'll be playing soon, but before I get to them I had one more purchase from November that needed finishing- the third installment in the Mario & Luigi RPG series, Bowser's Inside Story. Back-blog veterans may remember one of my first posts in which I reviewed the first game, Superstar Saga, which was quite fun but often had a level of difficulty reaching the just-plain-unfair: a 20 minute boss fight could be wasted if a single button press was mis-timed! Man was that frustrating. Bowser's Inside Story luckily does not run into this problem. Every time I died, I could look back at the fight and learn something to make it much easier on myself the next time, and rarely died on the same boss more than once or twice. Less frustration, more fun. There was a lot to like about the game: very clever platforming puzzles, An open-world feel without ever getting too big or confusing, and of course the undeniable charm of making a reluctant hero out of Bowser. The top screen of the DS shows Bowser, who is running around the Mushroom Kingdom with his own style of solo fighting, while the bottom touch screen displays Mario and Luigi, solving puzzles inside his body, with a more traditional style of fighting. Solving certain puzzles inside Bowser will affect his physical traits, the most memorable of which is easily the one that causes him to grow several stories tall and enter into sideways-style DS fights. These were a real treat to play, and it would have been nice to see these fights used a bit more. Overall though, the game was well worth a spin and I'll be sure to pick up the game I skipped, Partner's In Time, next time I see it.

Snatch

I did not care for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. So why would I go out and buy Guy Ritchie's follow-up, Snatch? Couldn't tell you. I probably just heard one too many people call it an awesome movie to ignore it any longer. And in my mini-quest to finish all of my '00s movies before the new decade begins, I decided to try watching this one a few nights ago. I fell fast asleep immediately. I tried again the next night, and again I fell fast asleep. I tried once more last night, and once more, I was snoring away barely five minutes into the movie. So I finally decided to just watch it during daylight. And you know what? I liked it. At first, I didn't. There appeared to be way too many characters and I couldn't quite comprehend the plot. This wasn't aided by the English accents every character had. But sooner or later I sort of met the movie halfway and finally started being entertained, at the least. Eventually, context clues filled me in on what plot points I had missed, and by the final half hour or so, I was completely on board. No, I didn't love it. But I did like it. And that's more than I could say about Lock, Stock. It won't make any of my "top films of the decade" lists, which is the whole reason I was so keen on checking it out before the new year hits, but it's not a movie I'll remember with contempt or disgust at all. Snatch was good, and that's good enough for me.

How I Met Your Mother: Season 1

I had a sudden realization a few weeks ago: none of the comedies I watch are traditional two-camera sitcoms with laugh tracks. At first, I assumed this was with good reason - after all, cookie-cutter laugh track sitcoms are a dime a dozen, right? Aside from Friends and Seinfeld, has there been an iconic one since 1990? The topic came up in a conversation with a friend, and he agreed with me. "Yeah, there really aren't any good sitcoms like that on TV anymore," he said. Then he abruptly added, "Except for How I Met Your Mother." I was intrigued. I'd heard nothing about the show at all, good or bad, and only knew that Neil Patrick Harris was in it. Then, just days later, my girlfriend brought up - out of nowhere - that a friend of hers had told her to start watching How I Met Your Mother. What were the odds? The show's been on since 2005, and it took four years for me to hear anyone recommend it, and then it takes just days for me to hear a second recommendation. Then, days later, I saw that Amazon.com was offering Seasons 1-4 for just $60. I asked my girlfriend if she'd watch them with me if I bought them. She said yes. And so I bought them. And so far, I don't regret it. I guess almost any traditional sitcom is enjoyable once you get to "know" the characters, but this one really does seem to be the best one out there today. (Trust me; I know that's not saying much.) Here's the concept. In 2030, a man (Bob Saget) sits his kids down to begin telling them the story of how he met their mother. Within a few episodes, it becomes clear to us that we are never going to meet said mother until the series finale. (At least, that's the way things have built up so far.) The show is centered around Young Saget (his character's name is Ted, and the actor's name is something I don't feel like looking up) and his quest to meet the love of his life. Living with Ted are his best friends Marshall and Lily (played by a pair of recognizable actors in Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan), an engaged couple. Rounding out the crew are "bro" extraordinaire Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and newcomer Robin (another no-namer). The crux of the first season is Ted 's complicated relationship with Robin. First he wants her, then they're just friends, then she wants him, then friends again, and so on. The whole thing felt very "Ross and Rachel" (I hate that I can even use that term). Uninspired, but tried and tested. The problem is, at the end of the very first episode, when Ted is head over heels for Robin, older Ted (Saget) pulls a fast one and tells his kids that Robin is not in fact their mother. So this leaves us with two options. Either we know that Ted and Robin will never work out, or, the show tries to get smart with us and somehow in the end Robin is in fact the love of his life but somehow the kids aren't hers. I'm not a fan of either solution to this dilemma. Oh well. I'm hoping they make it work. Now, let me discuss Season 1 and where I stand with the show as a whole. The first two episodes were pretty good, but then things hit a big lull around the third one. This lasts a third of the season or so, but fortunately, the show picks back up and long-ranging story arcs start to develop. Plus, the Ted-Robin relationship - abruptly cut off before the third episode, as the transition from "smitten" to "just friends" is apparently an instant one - starts getting revisited. Meanwhile, the show also starts to focus a bit more on the other three main characters, and 2030 Ted's kids are rarely seen or heard from after the first few episodes. In general, it seems like the focus broadens in scope and the show becomes less true to its name - "how I met your mother" - and a lot more "some of the fun times my friends and I had back when I was single." And that switch in focus was probably for the better. After all, it would get pretty stale just to focus on Ted's love life over and over again. Now, in any sitcom, you need to have likable characters for an audience to connect and enjoy. This is where I think How I Met Your Mother is at its best. Not since Friends has a cast of twenty-somethings come off (to me, at least) as so likable. Ted is always swooning and lamenting his love life, but never in an annoying way. In fact, he's pretty charming and funny. Segel and Hannigan play exactly the type of characters you'd expect them each to play; Marshall is a mellow, well-to-do law student and Lily is all optimism and cuteness all the time. Actually, at times I started to get slightly annoyed by Hannigan's incessant squirrel-like chipperness, but she toned it down by the end of the season enough to make her character tolerable again. Robin is dark and puts up a facade of coldness and disinterest, but in a very typical fashion, her heart of gold shines through her hardened exterior from time to time. And that leaves Neil Patrick Harris's Barney, a wild card of sorts who lives life in the fast lane and has no regrets. He's definitely the selling point of the show, but I don't personally find him to be its best feature or anything. Actually, I think if there's one character they didn't cast perfectly, it's him. But then, he works fine in that role, so I can't complain. At any rate, so far it's a good show with likable characters. It almost lost me early on, but Season 1 rallied and finished strong. And that's more than I can say about this rambling, God-awful post I'm making after five in the morning. Or, as female hip-hop artist Riskay would say, five in the mo'n. That's it; I'm going to bed now.

Dead Space

A fairly recent purchase, Dead Space is a survival horror third person shooter that I couldn't wait to play once I saw it for cheap. I had heard the game described as "pants-shittingly scary" but also very fun. It was indeed very fun, and although there was an overall feeling of unease while playing, there weren't that many big scares. I can attest to the fact that someone who watched me play a large portion of the game, who happens to be a wuss, was indeed quite scared and was yelling at the t.v, so results may vary I guess. The essential idea here is Resident Evil in space. You've landed with a small crew on a spaceship for a routine communications repair mission, only to find the place abandoned. You (Isaac Clarke, the protagonist) are quickly separated from your group and are forced to fend for yourself, learning quickly that you're not alone- most of the crew has been killed by aliens, or maybe they were all genetically engineered humans. It doesn't matter much either way. While the gameplay is very similar to the Resident Evil series (third person shooter, limited inventory system, strategic dismembering), the exploration felt more like Bioshock. Each level takes between 40-60 minutes, and just running around the halls of the USG Ishamura conjured up the feeling of wonder I had while running around Rapture. The non-combat portions of the game are also similar to Bioshock, for better or worse. Puzzles are scattered around and were mostly pleasing enough, but sometimes the game felt like a series of fetch quests with a huge number of enemies in between point A and point B. Luckily it never felt that way too long, and the game was overall a very enjoyable experience. Dead Space also did a few new things that I haven't seen before and loved. First, there is no HUD at all. Isaac's stats are displayed non-intrusively on the back of his suit; same with the ammo for his guns. Isaac's inventory and maps are displayed in a hologram in front of him, and thus the game does not pause for this and he can still take damage. This all led to a greater sense of immersion, for me at least. Also, Dead Space introduced a mechanic I haven't seen before in a shooter- zero gravity levels. At some points Isaac will enter a room where he usually has to solve a giant puzzle, at which point zero gravity will kick in allowing Isaac to jump from the floor to a wall or ceiling. The camera follows Isaac and the wall becomes the new floor, allowing a whole new perspective on the room. This interesting mechanic was fun and felt flawlessly integrated. While these two things aren't huge elements of gameplay, they did at least innovate slightly. Basically what Dead Space seems to be is a combination of the great things in Bioshock and Resident Evil, with a few added extras. It's not going to change the world of gaming, but I guess it doesn't matter when the campaign is incredibly fun.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

I started this one last night and finished it this morning. It couldn't have taken more than six hours to complete. I won't go on and on about how awesome and realistic it was, as it's two years old and nearly everyone beat me to playing it; you've heard (or even seen firsthand) how great Modern Warfare is. I guess I'll finish up this entry by talking about some of my favorite levels. I'd say "spoiler alert," but, again, everyone's already heard all about this game. Anyway, I really loved the level where you provide air support in Eastern Europe at night with an infrared camera. The whole concept was really cool and the lax style with which the guys in the plane converse and joke about their kills was surprisingly enjoyable. Another totally enjoyable level was the one set in Chernobyl in 1996 when you're a sniper in a ghillie suit. I usually dislike stealth missions where you need to sneak around, but this one was totally cool. I credit a lot of that to the Scottish superior who accompanies you throughout the level. That guy was the man, huh? When he got pinned by the helicopter in the following level and broke both his legs and I needed to carry his ass around, I thought I'd be upset. Instead, I was happy to aid such a noble video game character. And damn, could that guy snipe! Usually in video games, if you have to lug somebody around, they're a burden. (Specifically, think of that blue bitch in Ocarina of Time - right?) But not this Scottish guy. He was a blessing! Other levels were fun too, or at the very least, interesting. The nuclear warhead explosion caught me totally off guard, as did the ending of the very brief "level" that followed. The last level was pretty cool too - a very epic and movie-like conclusion to an epic and movie-like game. And I'm not talking about the epilogue where you rescue a VIP from a hijacked plane - although that was pretty awesome as well. I suppose my favorite levels were the unique ones. This was the case with World at War as well. The Call of Duty games aren't afraid to reshape the FPS mold, but I wish they'd just take the extra step and break it altogether. Why bore (or at least not excite) me with mundane "shoot 'em up on the way from point A to point B" levels? Hopefully, Modern Warfare 2 will do just the opposite: blow me away with every level in a unique and innovative way. We'll see, but not until after Christmas.

Call of Duty: World at War

Here it is: my very first Call of Duty game. I own Modern Warfare but I opted to play this one first because I heard it wasn't as good and, well, why not save the best for last? (Or at least, for later.) I only started playing this game last night, so you could definitely call it a short one. There are fifteen missions that range from fifteen to forty-five minutes in length, mostly depending on how often you die, so I'd estimate the total time requirement to be eight hours (on the normal difficulty setting). It was often frustrating, but more often, fun. I actually can't think of another World War II shooter that I've played through, so it's tough for me to draw comparisons, but I'll still call this a "generic" WWII shooter. At times it was innovative, and there were certainly different levels meant to cater to different skillsets and gametypes. For example, one level consists almost entirely of sniping Germans. Another can be beaten using nothing but a flamethrower. A third unique level is mostly rail-shooter, putting you in the gunner seat of an airplane. Another mission takes place from start to finish inside a tank. I'm glad there was such a constant shake-up, because otherwise the game would have gotten very stale very fast. Another key to keeping things fresh was alternating theatres and characters; half the game is spent as an American in the Pacific and the other half is spent as a Soviet on the European front. I actually much preferred the Russian half of the game - the characters were more memorable, the levels more interesting, and the enemies less frustrating. Far too much of the American campaign was spent hiding in tall grass and chasing suicidal Japanese soldiers through tunnels and flushing them out of bunkers with explosives. I guess that's pretty realistic, and I give kudos to the game makers for the historical accuracy I saw in a lot of places. Still, it was just so much more fun gunning down Nazi tanks for the Motherland than it was radioing in air strike coordinates on obscure Japanese islands. Especially since the Russian guy's commander was hilariously over-the-top - always rambling on with his Russian accent about how awesome it was to annihilate the Nazis with no mercy - while the American commander was voiced by Kiefer Sutherland and, as such, got pretty annoying after a while. You can only hear so many orders given in a Jack Bauer voice before you start to feel a little bit like a useless CTU scrub. At any rate, the game was at least alright, and probably worthy of more praise than I've allowed it here. Whatever; I'm tired. Good night.

Dogsong

Yet another Newbery winner, yet another disappointment. I had moderate expectations for this book; it's by Gary Paulsen (the dude who wrote Hatchet) and it's about Eskimos (an interesting people underrepresented in literature). But no. This book started out mediocre and literally never got better. To put it mathematically, the derivative of "how good the book is" with respect to page number never exceeded zero. But what should I have expected? A white American dude tries to write from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old Inuit kid, and it's supposed to work? I got the feeling that Paulsen kind of quit a third of the way through this one when the Inuit kid just starts being haunted by dreams or visions or some other pseudo-Amerindian bullshit. And in the end, he writes a song about it, because apparently the Inuit are all about songs even though a quick Wikipedia search on Inuit culture comes up showing no important significance given to songs. Did Gary Paulsen really just make shit up for 150 pages after a dragged out mediocre introduction? Seems like it. Just stick with Hatchet.

City of God (2002)

This past summer, a friend and I were preparing and comparing early drafts of our "top 10 movies of the decade" list. He was fine with my list, but was stunned by one omission in particular. "Have you seen City of God?" he asked me. When I told him, no, I hadn't, he told me to do so. He also promised that I would love it and put it on my top 10 of the decade list. And he was right. No list has been finalized yet, but I can certainly vouch for City of God, just like nearly everyone who has ever seen it. It's a great film. It's foreign (bonus points!), based on a true story (bonus points!), and loaded with gang war violence (tons of bonus points!). Most importantly, it's structured and narrated perfectly and paced brilliantly. I liked Slumdog Millionaire when I saw it, but this movie makes Slumdog look like a heavily commercialized textbook piece of shit by comparison. Think of this movie as Slumdog with violence and without the love story or gameshow storyline. And if you're thinking, "but Slumdog did have a lot of violence," then imagine what City of God is like. The film isn't perfect - a couple things were left a little too unresolved for me by the end - but it comes damn close. I've only got two movies from this decade in my backlog now - Snatch and Black Hawk Down - and while I expect both of them to be good, I doubt either will match City of God and end up on my "best of the decade" list. But I won't know until I see them, so... onward I press!

The Cricket in Times Square

Home for the holidays, I decided tonight was a night for logging. The problem was, I decided this at 2 in the morning. Fortunately, back here at home, I have a slight abundance of short children's books that can typically be banged out in a couple of hours. This one took less than one to finish. It was really nothing special. A talking cricket befriends a talking mouse and a talking cat in a subway station newsstand. They have a few adventures and before long the cricket gets homesick and tired of city life and so he leaves for rural Connecticut. The only thing of note was that a Chinese man in the book spoke with a severe printed accent; the author replaced most of his R's with L's, a move that couldn't possibly have flown today. (The book was written in 1960, back when it was still kosher to call black people "colored." Hell, this was when Eisenhower was still president - it was probably still kosher to call them "niggers." I mean, they still had their own bathrooms and drinking fountains. Yikes.) Anyway, I think you can see what I'm getting at: nothing at all. And that fittingly sums up my reaction to another Newbery-nominated book.

End of Semester Report

In less than twelve hours, I will have completed my last final exam for the fall semester. Rather than study for it, I have opted to recap the progress I've made in cleaning out my backlog over the past three and a half months. All said and done, I have completed 9 books, 12 video games, and 37 DVDs (9 TV seasons and 28 films). Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

Alas, to make healthy progress on any goal in life, one must take more steps forward than one does backward; I cannot be foolish or vain enough to measure my successes merely by the work I've done, and must also consider new work I have created for myself. In moments of weakness this semester, I obtained 2 new books, 8 new video games, and 14 DVDs (10 films and 4 TV seasons). My net gains, then, are as follows: 7 books, 4 video games, and 23 DVDs (18 films and 5 TV seasons). Allow me to comment on the triumphs and follies in each category.

Regarding books, I fared about as well as I could have hoped to. The lack of new additions is encouraging, and so is the average heft of the books I completed; three children's books came to about 230 pages each, but the other six books averaged well over 550 pages in length. There are 28 books left in my backlog, but only three exceed 500 pages; the going should get quicker.

My video game progress, or lack thereof, is far more discouraging. The 8 purchases nearly eradicate the 12 completions, especially when it's considered that many of the completions were quick and easy games; at least four of them took less than three hours to complete, and no more than four lasted for more than ten hours. I'll blame part of this on my workload as a senior electrical engineer, but it's still discouraging to see that so little progress was made. Worse still, I've spent much of finals week spending time playing multiplayer Halo 3, a very non-productive waste of valuable logging time. What can I say? Old habits are tough to break, I suppose. Still, shame on me. This mountain of video games will be a tough one to move; 66 games still remain unbeaten.

The DVD front is my finest region, but let's be honest - DVDs are the easiest of the three media to plow through. Aside from TV seasons, they average just over two hours in length. I was always finding time, then, to squeeze in a DVD here or there. An interesting caveat occurred with the DVDs as well. Ten of the purchases (all of the films) came during the month of November. Why? It's tough to say, but my theory is that I was subconsciously very pleased with my logging performance in October (11 DVD completions in that month alone, with 6 in the final 6 days), that I splurged a bit and bought far too many new ones to compensate. As of this moment, 17 DVDs (9 films and 8 TV seasons) remain; had I just not purchased any more films, I'd be completely done with that subregion of my backlog. Incredible.

Now, let's look forward. Christmas is coming, and I expect anywhere from ten to twenty new books, video games, and DVDs. That's over a month's worth of logging setback! Fortunately, with the holidays comes a holiday break from school, and my free time should increase threefold or more. My school has scaled back the length of winter break by at least a full week this year, but I will still be left with just about exactly one month to hit the backlog with everything I've got. I can make no promises, either to myself or any potential readers out there, but just for the sake of comparison, let's look back to the month of August. During that month, I completed 13 books, 11 video games, and 9 DVDs (7 films and 2 TV seasons). Sure, this was at the onset of my quest, when my passion and energy were at their peak, but mind you, this progress came in the dog days of summer - who's to say the same can't happen during the doldrums of winter?

Back-Blogged isn't about setting short term goals - there is one goal, and it is to eventually complete everything - but I suppose it'd be nice to try to counteract the Christmas gifts (and then some) by the end of my break. As of this moment, I have 28 books, 68 games, and 17 DVDs to go. Thus, I need to come back to school for my second semester with each of these numbers slightly smaller. This is reasonable, I think.

Finally, I'll crunch some numbers. In three and a half months, I was capable of netting 7 books, 4 video games, and 23 DVDs. At this pace, I will be done with my 28 books in a little over a year, my 66 games in four and a half years, and my 17 DVDs in under three months. Of course, these are the crudest and roughest of estimation models. Who knows what will really happen? Well, I do: everything will get finished! I suppose the better question to ask is, who knows when this will really happen? And that, I do not know. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a final in eight and a half hours that I need to start studying for.

Milk

Finals week is movies week, plain and simple. Last night and this morning, I watched Milk, a movie that's only been backlogged for a month or so. It was very good, and I was somewhat surprised by this. All too often, it seems, too much critical acclaim is thrown around during Academy Award season; I've seen just a few too many "Best Picture" nominees and "Best Actor" performances lately that just don't live up to the hype, at all. This biopic did. It was masterfully crafted, flowing beautifully from year to year while retelling the political career of Harvey Milk. Now, obviously every historical film takes at least some liberties in depicting different characters, but Sean Penn made Harvey Milk seem like a really good guy. And that, too, was surprising for me to see - not because I doubt Harvey Milk was a good guy, but because Sean Penn always seems to play such assholes. Mystic River, 21 Grams - I just don't know if I've ever seen Sean Penn play a likable guy before. Even the actor himself seems like a giant douche that oozes smugness. But hey, I have to give credit where credit is due, and credit is due to Sean Penn here for his performance. He certainly had to kiss a lot of dudes a lot of times. Yeah, this movie was probably gayer than Brokeback Mountain. But unless you can't handle two men affectionately kissing, I definitely think you should check this movie out. Sad, moving, and inspiring.

Deadwood: Season 3

It's done. I've now finished all three seasons of HBO's Deadwood, and I still don't know what to think. I won't bore readers by repeating what I already said in Season 2's post, but suffice it to say that I still feel almost the exact same way about the show in general. It's got a really high production value and phenomenal acting, casting, and writing, but it's just too damn slow-paced. There are times, of course, when it's capable of sucking me right in, but for the most part I was very, very bored while watching the majority of Deadwood, often only paying partial attention to the plots and events, and as such, missing certain details altogether. This is of course a vicious cycle, as the less you know about a given character or storyline, the less attention you'll have for it. I often found myself (again) reading brief episode recaps in order to put certain pieces together. So, in hindsight, yeah, Deadwood was a great show. But for the most part, I did not love the time I spent actually watching it. This series is ripe for an eventual re-watch on my part. I'm sure Ill pick up on plenty more the next time through, as it unfolds rather than afterward. But, sad as it makes me to say it, I did not love Deadwood. It didn't suck; it just wasn't consistently entertaining and interesting. For me, at least. Oh well. So be it. Another TV series is completed, and the backlog grows ever smaller.

Hotel Rwanda

It's been called an African Schindler's List, and despite being eager to see such a highly-regarded film, I've owned this one for more than two years and still it remained unseen until tonight. Tonight, finally, I decided to man up and deal with watching a depressing movie. It's finals week, after all, and what could be more depressing than that? Well, this. What an excellent movie. Now, I've seen both Blood Diamond and The Last King of Scotland recently, and neither movie was capable of truly moving me. They were sad, yes, and both certainly left me thinking, "it is fucked up that this genocide shit still goes on in Africa in this day and age," but neither movie made me feel the terror, hopelessness, and urgency that should be associated with a plight such as genocide. This film did. Don Cheadle was absolutely amazing here, and so was the character he played. Like Schindler did for the Jews, Paul (Cheadle) takes in a bunch of refugees who would face certain execution were it not for his protection, and he sacrifices his entire business and fortune in the process. Now, I keep bringing up Schindler's List; a fair question is, how does Hotel Rwanda compare to that classic? I'll be honest: it doesn't. Schindler's List was longer, more epic in scope, more graphic and gruesome, and - I'm just gonna come out and say this - was about the genocide of Western people by other Western people. It's a sad fact, but it's still a fact: we Westerners just don't care about the shit that goes on in the third world. It's not necessarily a racial issue - we tend not to give a shit about the whites in Eastern Europe, for example. It's more of a wealth issue, I think. We rich nations only care about each other. Let's be honest - we're hit way harder as a nation by a few hundred people dying in a regional plane crash than we are by thousands of people in China getting buried by an earthquake. Again, it's not racial - consider the Hurricane Katrina plight in which we watched with bated breath as tens of thousands of people (mostly black ones) survived while waiting too long (a few days) for help to arrive. Now, how many non-American blacks are there in Africa getting slaughtered, dying of AIDS, or simply starving to death. Help typically doesn't arrive for them, and when it does, it takes a lot more than a few days. We're not racists; we're elitists. Not sure if that's necessarily better, but, well, it's true. Even this movie had the balls to come right out and say it. In one of the most startlingly accurate and direct quotes I've ever heard in a movie that was based on a contemporary true story, one UN worker tells Paul, "No one is coming to save you. You're black. And you're not even niggers. You're Africans." Bone-chillingly true, that statement right there. But facts are facts: we glorify the agony of the Holocaust to such an extreme degree, but hardly care to be bothered by the shit happening at this exact moment in the Congo, Sudan, and sub-Saharan Africa in general. But not because we're racist. We just have a heavy Western World bias. And don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to take anything away from the Holocaust. That genocide sucked too. Big time. I'm just saying that Hotel Rwanda will never be the classic that Schindler's List was because we feel less horrible about African people killing African people today than we still do about European people killing European people sixty years ago. It is what it is. Regardless, Hotel Rwanda is still a fantastic film and it certainly makes my list of "best films of the decade." You know, once I get around to making that list.

Sam and Max: Season One

About a year ago I was in the midst of playing the Phoenix Wright series on my DS and completely enjoying the point-and-click mystery genre that was somewhat new to me. I was vaguely aware of the old Sam and Max games at this time (although I was a big fan of the Saturday morning cartoon), and when I found out that the series had not only recently been rebooted, but was being ported to the Wii for cheap, I saw no reason why I shouldn't give Sam and Max: Season One a shot. Billed as "Gaming's first sitcom", the game features six different mysteries to be solved by our freelance crime fighting duo: Sam, a level-headed dog, and Max, a deranged rabbit-thing. The gameplay is fairly simple: click on different objects strewn about a few locales to hear a constant barrage of one-liners, or interview a recurring cast of memorable characters, or solve a few puzzles to save the world. For instance, one episode involves Sam accidentally beheading a robot president, forcing Max to run for office against the reanimated statue of Abe Lincoln, who after losing cuts a swath of destruction across the D.C. area, leaving it an uninhabitable wasteland. "Some things never change" quips Max. While that may sounds like Robot Chicken-esque randomness instead of humor, I can assure you that the zingers here are rapid-fire and work most of the time: it's a genuinely funny game. Unfortunately, the one thing that hurts comedy is a lack of delivery, and oftentimes that was the case here tech-wise. It really feels like a game that could have come out in the early PS2 days. The graphics are pretty simple and cartoonish, but that's forgivable. Rough frame-rate issues, long loading times, poor animation and clumsy controls however, are not. These really brought the game down, which is a shame. Perhaps with a little more effort, this could be a true comedy gem. I guess I'll see if these issues were fixed in the sequel, as Sam and Max Season Two is coming out in early 2010, and for completion's sake you better believe I'll be getting it.

Megaman 9

Originally an impulse purchase shortly after buying my Wii, Megaman 9 has become one of the longest-tenured of games on my backlog. There hasn't been a Megaman in the original franchise since the PS1 days, I believe, so this one intrigued me. It stays true to its retro roots, such as the 8-bit graphics, the overly cheesy fake box-art (I mean look at it!), and the way it doesn't bog a player down with extras like charged shots or sliding. Nothing but running, jumping and shooting. Classic Megaman. I slowly progressed through the game for about a month, eventually beating the 8th level sometime in October of 2008. After this comes Wily's Castle, a series of levels throughout which you cannot save or buy items. I tried it a few times and gave up pretty quick, up until last Friday when I decided to pick it up again. I played through it a few times but kept getting stuck on the finale- re-fight the original 8 bosses, then take on a 3-part Dr. Wily. After a few shots at Wily, I came to realize that there was no way I could beat Wily without any energy tanks, which meant I would have to buy items before starting any of the levels and get through them all somewhat unscathed, rather than stumble into the final level and use as many continues as I wanted but fighting without items. As it turns out, this wasn't so hard as it was time consuming. After switching methods to this, I realized that I knew these levels pretty well and was able to beat the game on my third attempt. What a relief. It was a little disappointing to see that I took just under 6 hours to complete the game, but I guess that doesn't count any of the times I tried playing the game for a few hours without making any progress. It was also disappointing to see Stan able to jump through the first two Megamans in a few nights. I mean, am I just terrible at this, or did they really up the difficulty on this one? A quick search on google for "relative difficulty Megaman" has produced nothing. I guess it's no big deal though, after all, Megaman 9 is done. I've got a feeling I can squeeze out a few more games in December, which is nice considering I just bought 3 big ones in Metroid Prime Hunters, Dead Space, and Mass Effect. Also a Wii title which should be finished within the next few days. The backlogging shall continue!

A Thousand Splendid Suns

What does it say about a 400-page book when you're capable of reading straight through it in a span of less than ten waking hours? Good things, and plenty of them. I read The Kite Runner one year ago, and liked it enough to purchase this less-known but more-acclaimed follow-up. It was depressing as hell; it was fantastic. While Kite Runner certainly dabbled with the terrors of war-torn Afghanistan, it focused primarily on a rich boy who flees the country with his father in 1980 or so. He becomes a working class American, returns twenty years later to his Taliban-run homeland, and is appalled by what it has become. But this time around, Khaled Hosseini doesn't remove the reader from Afghanistan as war breaks out. Instead, we're dragged right through the gruesome despair as the Soviets, then feuding warlord factions, then Taliban, then finally Americans rain bombs down over the city of Kabul. And there's another key difference - this time around, we see everything through the eyes of two women. Women in the fanatically religious parts of the Middle East are infinitely more interesting than men, because the men there just take a lot of them as wives and never let them show their faces or leave the house. They're mysterious figures by default. And here, we're given a lot more than a glimpse of how much it sucks to be an Afghan woman in the Taliban era. There's an interesting trade-off, too; between the Soviets and warlords in the '80s and early '90s, Afghanistan was always at war, and innocent men, women, and children fell victim to landmines and rockets. The Taliban finally took over in the mid-'90s, and peace was finally here. Except, the Taliban brought any semblance of women's suffrage back to the first millennium. So while the country was finally at "peace," the quality of life for everyone - and women especially - was far worse than it ever had been during wartime. I didn't "learn" a lot from this book in the sense of being made aware of these wars or conflicts for the first time. But, it was certainly eye-opening and jarring to see Taliban Afghanistan through the eyes of two women, fictional though they were. This is definitely a book I recommend to everyone. But I do recommend reading The Kite Runner first, if only because that's the way I did it, and I'm not sure if Kite Runner can be appreciated as much once Splendid Suns is read. Anyway, you make the call, dear readers.

Molloy

On a recent trip to the bookstore I decided to broaden my horizons a bit and try out some authors who I've heard good things about but had never really given a shot. The first of these is Samuel Beckett (no, not the protagonist from Quantum Leap), an Irish novelist. Molloy was the book I had heard a recommendation about on the somethingawful.com forums, so I decided to check it out. It turns out that Molloy was the first in a loosely-connected trilogy along with Malone Dies and The Unnameable, so I kind of hoped I would like Molloy since I had to buy all three in one book. At first I was hesitant. After one paragraph, the novel is an insane, rambling single-paragraph wall of text for the next 100 or so pages. At brief times it moved along well enough, but then you're treated to essay-length nuggets about how to effectively suck on sixteen different rocks in the correct order. Wow. Anyway, during this first half you hear the story of Molloy from the main character himself, and he's either going to or leaving his mother's house. I'm not even sure if the character knew what was going on. Molloy seems to be reaching old age and really just doesn't care much for public appearances anymore, so he sort of stumbles around Ireland before reaching his final resting place out in the woods. At this point, the book shifts completely to the much more sensible narrator, detective Jacques Moran, who has been assigned to find Molloy. Moran's half of the novel reads much easier, but during his year-long journey to find his man, he also struggles with his advanced age similarly to Molloy. This second half was a joy to read as there was indeed a bit more plot and characterization. This leaves me with some hope for part 2 of the trilogy- Malone Dies, will be less of a meandering mess and possibly touch upon the theme of aging in a similar way. We'll see.

Metroid: Zero Mission

Since my purchase of Metroid Prime 3 last year, I've been slowly logging my way through the Metroid series completely out of order: Corruption, Fusion, Return of Samus, Prime, Echoes, and now Zero Mission. I can safely say that although this is a remake of the first game of the series, Metroid for the NES, Zero Mission has really just failed to leave an impression on me like all the others have. The gameplay is exactly the same as Fusion, which was great. Unfortunately, the source material was a rather short NES game, and so Zero Mission suffers this same fate- it's over way too fast! I got the first few items, and before I knew it, at about the 3 hour mark I already had the wave beam and screw attack- two of the final items in most Metroid games! I thought that this couldn't be right, but pressed on. After a few minutes of dealing with Metroid enemies, I stumbled upon Mother Brain, the infamous final boss of NES Metroid. After a few tries, Mother Brain was toast and I was in for the new addition to the game: the epilogue on the Space Pirate ship. This was apparently met with mixed reactions, and personally I was unimpressed. It's almost entirely stealth missions, which worked in Fusion because they were few and far between; also the tension was really there being chased by a boss much stronger than you. Zero Mission's stealth missions were just kind of boring and, still under the 4 hour mark, I just wanted the game to end. Not really par for the course considering how highly I regard all of the other games in the Metroid franchise. Oh well, I've still got what's likely the most critically acclaimed Metroid in Super Metroid left for the Virtual Console, as well as the intriguing Metroid Prime Hunters. Hopefully I can finish them both up in time for the poorly named Metroid: Other M.

WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Party Games!

Have I really gone stagnant on the gaming backlog since October? Damn. Blame schoolwork, I suppose. This game's a GameCube remake of a GBA game that got decent reviews for is uniqueness. And, yeah, it's certainly unique. We've all played video games before that seem to be collections of minigames (the Mario Party and Wii Sports series come to mind here), but WarioWare takes it to a whole new level: microgames. Games that last five seconds maximum, and sometimes less than one. Games with an extremely simple objective that almost always involves either avoiding hazards for three seconds or pressing the "A" button with good timing. And the games just keep on coming, one after another, at a frantic, head-hurting pace. My apartmentmates watched me play this game for about twenty minutes earlier, and even they were complaining about being slightly dizzy and physically confused by the game. Imagine how I felt after playing it for two hours! All in all, it was an alright game. Its single-player brevity was nice for the sake of the Back-Blogged project, but it certainly doesn't seem like a classic that I'll ever be dying to pick up and play again. Still, it's nice to get back into the game-logging scene. My cohort has been kicking my ass at logging lately, outputting a few true marathons in the past month or so. Here's hoping this game kick-starts me into a higher gear. But then, that likely won't happen until Christmas break in two weeks. Sigh.

The Book of Basketball

Bill Simmons is a man who needs no introduction. So instead, here's a personal take on the guy. I read Simmons' stuff all the time. Literally, everything he writes, I read, and recently I've even taken to listening to his podcasts. Having said all of this, I don't think he's a talented writer. He's funny, sure, but some of his jokes and pop culture references fall flatter than pancakes, and he all too often rambles on and on for far too long (admittedly, I am guilty of this myself). And that's the biggest problem with this book. It's 700 pages long. It took me a month to read it, and again, I read Bill Simmons' work all the time. If I could read an equally long Richard Dawkins book in half that amount of time, then clearly, Simmons wrote a real snoozer. Sorry Bill, but somewhere around the 500th page, I just stopped giving a shit. This may have had something to do with you spending eight (8!) pages debating both sides of the argument, "Karl Malone and Charles Barkley: which one was the 18th best player of all time, and who was merely 19th?" No one cares! Not even Chuck and the Mailman themselves. (Oh no, I'm starting to write like Bill Simmons - addressing him in the second person like that. And, shit, the parenthetical citation of my mistake is also eerily similar to his style. Wait, no it's not - I use parentheses all the time to second guess myself.) The Book of Basketball was interesting and insightful enough for the first 250 pages, and the final 80 weren't so bad either. But here's the problem: smack dab in the middle, Simmons spends nearly 400 pages ranking the top 96 basketball players of all time. (Not 100 - Bill's defense for this was something like, "I'm reserving four spots for young guys like Kevin Durant." Why bother? When it's time for Kevin Durant to break into the "Pyramid" - more on this later - won't there be newer, younger guys who also deserve future spots?) Now, about that "Pyramid." Simmons thinks the NBA Hall of Fame is flawed, and wants to blow it up and start a new one, called the "Pyramid," in Indiana. In a nutshell, his Pyramid has five tiers (1, 2, 3, 4, and Pantheon) that rank the players into distinct levels of greatness. He spends a good eighteen pages explaining the idea and another three or four congratulating himself for coming up with it. (No, I'm not kidding). Here's something he overlooked though: it doesn't make sense. Here are the number of guys he places in each tier, respectively: 35, 25, 12, 12, and 12. Does that sound like a Pyramid to you? Because I'm picturing a vertical tower with a wide base. Man, he really pisses me off sometimes. Why get all excited over your own dumb flawed idea? What a fucking idiot. It's fine if he wants to break players down into strangely-assorted tiers, but man, don't call a tower a pyramid. Furthermore, why group players into tiers at all if you're going to rank them numerically from 1-96? So, #12 and #1 are on the same level, but #12 is a whole tier better than #13? It makes no sense. Nothing about his fucking pyramid makes any sense. Man, I am really going off on him, I know, but come on. Don't spend three years writing a book and calling it the best thing you've ever written when more than half of it - half! - is devoted to an awful concept that you never even worked the kinks out of. The best part about his 400-page "pyramid" tower is that, by the end of it, there are like two typos per page. Yes, in the pages describing Michael Jordan (spoiler alert: he's #1!), it's clear that even Simmons and his editor didn't feel like reading on. I'm not making this up, either - in describing the best player of all-time (presumably the most important park of his book), Simmons shits the bed with grammar mistakes, refers to players by the wrong names, and uses the word "to" twice in a row. Look, I may be nitpicking, but I'm not the one who wrote a 700-page book and didn't bother to check the most important section for mistakes. Come on. The last 20 pages of the book are entertaining, as Simmons puts together the best 12-man team of all time. We're allowed to take 12 NBA players from any point in history. The twist is, Martians are invading the Earth and we need to beat them in a basketball game or else we get annihilated. By the way, he never once admits that he's hijacking the central conflict in Space Jam. Not once. Now, one of Simmons' recurring themes of the book to this point has been, "don't forget about the great players and teams of yesteryear." He then proceeds to use '09 players - not just active players, but '09 players - for three of his twelve picks. He similarly contradicts his "never forget history" cause in the "most invincible teams of all time" chapter in which he says, right off the bat, that no pre-1976 team can qualify. (He also tosses away all post-Jordan teams for an even vaguer reason.) The whole book just left a sour taste in my mouth. And honestly, that's what I've come to expect from Simmons. (Remember, in my own introduction to this recap, I stated that I didn't think he was a great writer.) His gimmick is getting old for me, I guess. (That gimmick: Boston-area frat guy loves sports and pop culture, forms opinions and theories largely for the sake of forming outlandish opinions and theories, gets beaten by his wife at betting on NFL lines yet routinely offers gambling advice on the subject, and has lived in L.A. for several years but still thinks he's a genuine Bostonian.) Whatever. If you're in the mood for a highly-opinionated (which is okay; it's his book, after all) and way-too-long (not okay; keep it simple, stupid) book, give this one a shot. Just don't expect to learn anything new or insightful about the history of the game itself. Just which players and teams mattered in the eyes of its author.

The World Ends With You

The World Ends With You was a purchase from last summer that I've been dreading for a while. It got great reviews from all over the place, but a few attempts to get into the game, each spread out by a few months, always proved futile. Apparently I'm not alone- the one biggest complaint about the game according to Wikipedia appears to be the steep learning curve. Anyway, this was the first time I've attempted the game since the start of the backblog, and I guess that gives a man just enough reason to persevere when times are tough. What a great blog. Anyway, TWEWY is an action rpg in which you play as Neku, a misanthropic teen forced into a dangerous game where the object is to complete seven missions in seven days. Win, and he gets to go back to his normal life, and of course death if he loses. The twist here is that during battles, the touch screen is used for controlling Neku, and the top screen of the DS shows one of your partners fighting as well. The partner can be controlled with the D-pad, but if you just worry about Neku on the bottom screen then your partner will auto fight. I was a bit skeptical of this game mechanic, but it turned out to not get in the way very much. Usually I just fought as Neku on the bottom screen unless a battle specifically called for using the partner. Sometimes it did feel that I had to work pretty hard to compensate for a weak teammate (kind of goes against the game's message of trusting in your partner) but you can change the difficulty of the game whenever you want, so it wasn't a big deal. The combat in theory seemed way to simple- I mostly just slashed enemies upwards over and over again, but surprisingly this didn't really get stale until the end of the game. The plot here was pretty ridiculous and anime as fuck, but there was something like 15 different characters with some great story arcs, backed mostly by plenty of well-written dialog. I guess my big problem with the game was the huge amount of extra stuff that was all completely unnecessary. I got new abilities all the time but had no reason to switch- my current abilities were always more powerful and the game never got hard enough to make me reconsider. There were all sorts of mini-games that supposedly added depth, but none of them seemed worth more than one or two tries. The game bombarded me with info on extra things to make me more powerful, and I got through just fine ignoring most of them completely. I guess it all just seemed like forced "depth" that was more like needless padding. Anyway, I still enjoyed The World Ends With You, but not enough that I'd recommend it or pick it back up again. I guess that makes it more "tolerable" than "enjoyable", but hey, who cares. Christmas is almost here, and with that comes a flood of new things to backlog. I've got 23 days to clear out some space. Bring it on, I say.

My Cousin Vinny

There are three kinds of purchases one can make: intentional, impulsive, and irrational. The other day, I went to Best Buy with the intent of purchasing the Always Sunny Christmas special; this was an intentional purchase. While at Best Buy, I saw The Fountain, Snatch, and Black Hawk Down on sale for $4.99 each. These were all movies that I had always had some interest in buying or seeing, but did not intend to purchase when I had walked into Best Buy. These purchases, thus, were impulsive. And then I bought one more $4.99 DVD: My Cousin Vinny. This cannot be called anything but irrational. As my friend (who was with me at the time of the purchase) said, this movie is on Comedy Central all the time and, well, isn't even that good. But I had never seen it, had only vaguely heard of it, and "justified" the buy by saying, "but it's got Joe Pesci and the Karate Kid, and Marisa Tomei won an Oscar for her performance in it!" Fine. But, having never previously known much of anything about the movie at all, this was still an irrational buy. Now, the movie itself was alright. But only alright. Aside from two tiring miscommunication shticks at the beginning, 100% of the humor was derived from the "Yankee down in Dixie" cliche. Two Italian New Yorkers are falsely accused of a crime in Alabama and then two more Italian New Yorkers come down to try to bail them out of trouble. Culture clash! You get the picture. As far as the acting goes, Joe Pesci was funny, but mainly because of his over-the-top guinea-ness. Marisa Tomei was cute and all, but an Academy Award? I know the "best supporting actor" awards are kind of thrown about with little rhyme or reason, but this might be one of my all-time "really?" reactions to an Oscar-winning performance. She was way better in The Wrestler, which at least saw her nominated for the award. This movie was a six in my book - not "bad" by any measure, but very forgettable and average at best. Not bad for an irrational purchase, but then again, it's always bad when you make an irrational purchase.

The Fountain

Pretentious. That's one word you may have heard describing Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain. And the people who label it as such are not without merit. The plot is wide open at best and completely nonsensical at worst. There's a very in-your-face religious combination of Judeo-Christianity, Mayan lore, and Buddhism at the core of the film. Symbolism, imagery, and quirky transitions run rampant. So, yeah, I suppose this is one of the more pretentious films around. But it's certainly not a bad one. I didn't love this flick, but I did enjoy its graceful ninety minute run. It's shot and scored beautifully, and the acting is nothing to complain about either. In trying to describe (defend?) the film's lack of a coherent plot, Aronofsky likens his project to a Rubik's cube; there's no right way to solve it, but there is definitely one solution. The solution here? Something about death. (There's no real plot to spoil, so read on with no fear of having the movie ruined.) There's a man who loves a woman, and she's dying from brain cancer. The man (a scientist) tries very hard to find a cure for her cancer, and while he's at it, he finds an anti-aging device (my guess is that this is symbolic of the titular "Fountain" of Youth; yeah, I know, I'm not really going out on a limb with that one). But this woman has written a book that takes place in Inquisition-era Spain, and as the man reads the book, he pictures himself as the chief conquistador and his dying wife as the Queen of Spain. And eventually there's a future-version of the man who is riding through space with the (dead) biblical Tree of Life in a giant bubble toward a supernova. Yep, it gets pretty weird pretty fast. But the imagery is cool and the message manages to be somewhat straightforward (don't fear the reaper, is what I took from it - along with some various stuff about self-sacrifice and the danger of seeking eternal life and such). So was the movie "pretentious?" Yeah, probably at least a little bit. But did it suck? Not at all! I'd watch it again in a heartbeat, even if mostly just to see if I could pick up on some subtle shit (you know, the bread and butter of pretentious films) that I didn't catch the first time through. It certainly beats the hell out of Pi. Pi sucked.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: A Very Sunny Christmas

The much-anticipated Sunny Christmas special was something I knew I needed to buy this Thanksgiving break and watch with all of my friends. I didn't expect it to cost $20 (for something only 43 minutes long? yikes!) but cost wasn't really a constraint here. Anyway, earlier tonight I did indeed bring it to a friend's house, and it was enjoyed by all present. My biggest fear going into the double-length episode was that, being a Christmas special, this episode would have some kind of "very special" bullshit twist to it, like "the gang learns that the true meaning of Christmas is giving" or "love and friendship are the greatest gift of all" or something similarly feel-good and tacky. And it almost did employ such a twist. No thank you. I like my Sunny the way it's typically served: relentlessly amoral. Fortunately, there was just enough of that good old me-first Sunny spirit to save the episode. But it was not without its weird moments. At times, it really seemed to drag. In fact, the Dennis and Dee half of the story was downright boring, save for a ridiculous off-the-wall scene that ends with a sweaty, naked Danny DeVito escaping from the interior of a leather couch. But the Mac and Charlie half was very solid; they were able to carry the story pretty well for the first half hour or so. Then, in the final dozen minutes, things got kind of weird. There was a musical Rudolph-style claymation sequence (Frank's dream) that would have made for a great DVD extra but felt very out of place in the episode itself. The ensuing ending was also a little weird. It lingered around the "feel good" cliche that I had been so desperately hoping the special would avoid before ultimately ending in a way-too-expectable-to-actually-expect twist that kind of undoes what the "feel good" ending had done. The episode finally ends with the gang embracing one of Mac and Charlie's favorite Christmas traditions: throwing rocks at trains. The whole thing just felt a little too weird by the end; what had started as a solid (if sometimes slow) Sunny episode became something entirely different about a half hour in. So, in rating and reviewing the DVD, I'd call it 75% decent Sunny episode, 25% fucked up (different) Sunny Christmas special. In that order. I'm not disappointed by it as much as I am confused, I guess. Oh well. What matters most is that I have no regrets. And that says a lot, because I paid $20 for this 43-minute "movie" of an episode.

Deadwood: Season 2

Last Christmas, I got a few hefty gift cards to Best Buy as well as some kind of camera thing that I had no use for and returned, for store credit, to Best Buy. With a couple hundred dollars to spend there, I opted to expand my HBO on DVD collection, buying both seasons of Rome, all five of The Wire, and all three of Deadwood. Each episode of each of these 10 seasons is between fifty and sixty minutes long; the going, so to speak, is slow. This morning, I finally finished the second season of Deadwood. It took me four sittings (over the course of several months) just to make it through the first episode, but once I had, I watched the remaining eleven in under a week. And that's kind of fitting; Deadwood is not the easiest show to just jump into. There are dozens of characters and plot points going on at any different time. Differentiating between thirty different bearded white men in hats, and committing each of these characters to memory, is a difficult task indeed. But, once you get enough of a gist of what's going on, every episode is a real treat. In a way then, Deadwood is all about delayed gratification; if you struggle through the first few episodes - even if you don't like them much at all - you're going to reap the rewards down the line. Of course, I wouldn't be able to fault anyone for watching any random episode and saying, "this show is boring as hell." To be honest, that's a somewhat justified statement to make. But, I promise, if you keep chugging through the episodes (and reading recaps or plot summaries for clarification when necessary), you will appreciate this show. Because that's exactly how I came to appreciate it. A friend of mine calls Deadwood one of his favorite shows of all time, but I won't go that far; having now seen two thirds of it, I can't call it amazing or awesome in any way. Certain characters and story arcs are great, sure, but as a whole the show just doesn't blow me away. I guess that's exactly what can be expected from any HBO series though; you know you're going to get excellent production value and acting (well, save from Entourage), and you know the show will have a promising concept with plenty of depth. But that doesn't mean you'll love it or find it extremely memorable in any way. Look, if you haven't been able to figure it out by now, I'm torn on how to rate Deadwood. Twice now, I've started a season and been bored to hell by it, struggled through the early episodes, and thought "this is not a great show," only to really enjoy the latter half of each season and think each time at the closing credits of the season finale, "this is a great show!" I definitely think it's worth checking out, but only if you're going to give it an honest investment of time and attention; this isn't a half-hour comedy series that you can see once or twice and gage accordingly. If possible, find a week where you can spend two hours a night on the first season. If you like it, great; check out seasons two and three. If you don't like it, that's fine too. But please, fight your instinct to jump to judgment on it after three or four episodes. That's all I ask of you, and I'm sure the show would ask the same.

Metroid Prime 2: Echoes

The last time I posted this picture, I had completed part 1 of the Metroid Prime trilogy. The game was great, and I wondered how part 2, Echoes could live up to the first. Most reviews seemed to say that Prime 2 was a very good game, but not at the level of Prime 1. I disagree- Prime 2 to me was even better. The few flaws from the first were corrected and the whole game had a much better flow to it. First off, I never felt limited like I did in Prime 1. In that game, it seemed like everywhere I turned I needed a new upgrade to get anywhere, and didn't feel very powerful until the end of the game. In Prime 2 the first few upgrades are given rapid fire and before you know it, you're kicking bosses' asses. Don't get me wrong, I love a good challenge, but Metroid is typically challenging due to it's puzzles. No one wants to spend a good portion of the game thinking "I could be doing so much better if I only had the double jump." Anyway, second, the whole game just seems so much better organized. Where Prime 1 has Samus jumping around from level to level with no rhyme or reason, Prime 2 actually has a pattern to it and emphasizes beating one level at a time before going back to explore old ones for powerups. This helped me keep track of where I had and hadn't explored, making a much more enjoyable final powerup search before the final boss. This leads me to the third improvement- incredible boss fights. While the first few bosses in the game are nothing special, later boss fights were especially memorably due to some innovative techniques- I'll remember a late boss fight where Samus boost jumps back and forth on a circular magnetic track, whacking pieces of debris off of a robot boss for a long time. There were some great ones here that were more puzzles than fights, exactly what a Metroid boss should be. The game made a few more changes, to varying degrees of success, such as a decent plot and a dark world based off of the normal environment. Overall while Echoes may not have reinvented the wheel, I feel like it was the best of the trio. But of course if you have time, just go play the whole trilogy.