All The Names

Early on while reading Jose Saramago's All The Names I was putting together a blog post in my head that fit it into Saramago's works as a sort of precursor to The Double, while finding All The Names okay but not nearly as good. They both explore similar ideas of stalking, with All The Names taking place in an era before the internet made it easy to find out everything about someone in a few seconds. The only character named in the book, Senhor Jose, is a meek middle aged man who works at the registry for a large city, and thus is one of the few people with access to basic information about everyone. As a hobby he collects information on celebrities, but through a clerical mistake he winds up reading about an unknown woman and becomes obsessed with her. Armed with nothing but her date and location of birth he sets out to find everything he can about the woman, feeling she deserves to be known and important to someone, anyone, even if the reasons are tenuous. About halfway through, the book takes an odd turn- the woman turns out to have died recently in a suicide, leading to a second half where we witness Senhor Jose try to help her family grieve, with some of Saramago's ideas about death and remembrance sprinkled in as well. It ended up being a bit different from the other works of his I've read- there's still the lack of punctuation and loads of conversations taking place is someone's head, but the abrupt change of theme was new to me. Actually now that I think of it he pulled something similar in Seeing, but that didn't work nearly as well. I did like that what started as a book that tried to crawl into the mind of a stalker ended up dealing with some very unexpected themes- hopefully the guy's got some more surprises in store in the other half of his translated works.

Gulliver's Travels

For a long time now I've been familiar with Gulliver's Travels. I first read a bowdlerized children's version of the satire back in fifth grade or so and I saw the Ted Danson 1996 miniseries on some random Friday in middle school. (Regretfully, I also saw the recent Jack Black movie on a plane.) You're probably at least partially familiar with this classic novel; its most iconic and recognizable scene is one of its very first, in which Gulliver awakens to find himself tied down by scores of tiny people called Lilliputians. Because of the fantastical elements of Gulliver's adventures, Swift's magnum opus has often been categorized as a fairy tale. In actuality, however, it's one of the deepest and most complex satires ever written. Unfortunately, the complicated themes are often ignored in translation - not too much depth to the Jack Black disgrace - and many of the jabs taken at eighteenth century European society are far too dated to register as specific criticisms nowadays. Subtle references to tension between the whigs and the tories, for instance, went about a hundred feet over my head. Luckily, enough of Gulliver's Travels is broad enough to serve as a timeless reflection on some of the sillier aspects of the human condition. When Gulliver walks among the Lilliputians, for example, it's easy to laugh away their petty strife and meaningless conflicts. In his next adventure, when he finds himself among giants, almost a Lilliputian himself now, it's easy to see said giants as simple and foul creatures. By the end of the book, Gulliver has visited a country ruled by intelligent horses where uncivilized human-like creatures with disgusting habits roam free in utter squalor. This is the deepest and most meaningful adventure yet for Gulliver, who becomes deeply depressed and pessimistic toward humanity in general after this episode. To this day, students of the novel argue over whether or not Gulliver's final attitude is meant to be a stand-in for Swift's, or if Swift has made Gulliver himself the final victim of his satire, a man who now believes horses to be superior creatures to human beings. I'm glad I finally read this book in its original form; I've been meaning to do so for like ten years now. I can't say it holds up today quite as well as Voltaire's Candide does, but it's a deeper and more famous novel than that contemporary example. It looks like that Ted Danson miniseries sells on Amazon for less than ten bucks, so many I'll give that a purchase and a re-watch. But not today. Not now. Not yet.

The Big Bang Theory: Season 4

I've got this friend who absolutely hates The Big Bang Theory. And that's fine; everyone is entitled to his opinion. The problem with my friend's opinion is that it isn't clear to me that he's ever seen a single episode of the show. "We get it," he'll scoff derisively. "They're nerds - that's so funny!" He seems to hate the idea of The Big Bang Theory rather than the show itself. The issue here is that you can take any comedy on television and point out that its raw central gimmick alone isn't actually a source of comedy. "Oh, hey, The Office. It's funny, because working in an office gets tedious." "Ah, now I see why people love Arrested Development - it's about a family full of idiots that hate each other. So funny!" The thing is, The Big Bang Theory didn't become the number one comedy on television and hasn't gone a hundred episodes deep just by being a show where the jokes are based on the idea that the main characters are nerds. This isn't to say that it's a fantastically clever or well-written show, or even one of my ten favorite comedies on TV, but it's absolutely more than my friend and many others like him seem to believe it is. This particular season actually made great progress in expanding the breadth and depth of the show. A previously minor recurring female character was upgraded to a series regular and a third girl was introduced to help bring balance to the cast's gender ratio. On a related note, several story arcs dealt with romantic tension and relationship issues. In particular, the addition of Mayim Bialik as Amy made for a fantastic and much-needed foil and counterpart to the increasingly over-the-top Sheldon character. I'll never claim that The Big Bang Theory is brilliant or underrated, but it's a guilty pleasure and a source of easy laughter, and Season 4 was its strongest season so far. I'm sure The Big Bang Theory will wear out its welcome eventually, as nearly every show that doesn't get prematurely canceled does, but for now I'm firmly on board.

Red Steel

Most of you have probably played the Wii beyond the simple staples that everyone's grandparents and five-year-old neighbors have played like Wii Sports. Therefore, I'm assuming most of you have dealt with the frustration of the Wii control scheme. For those who haven't, it sucks. The Wii's biggest shortcoming is its own imprecision. What was once seen as innovative, back in quaint old 2006, wore out its welcome pretty quickly when it became clear that "pointing and wagging" made for some pretty sloppy gameplay. Red Steel was a launch title for the Wii, so not only did it come out back in 2006, but it also came out before anyone even knew the Wii controls sucked so hard, and also back when the novelty of said shitty controls prevented anyone from even criticizing them. Here, in 2012, let me say it... this game had some of the shittiest and sloppiest controls I've ever seen. Like, even only compared to all other Wii games, this was terrible. The Wii's second-biggest shortcoming, by the way? Graphics. While the PS3 and Xbox 360 render their games in stunning HD, the Wii barely seems like an upgrade over the GameCube, if it's even an upgrade at all. And Red Steel has horribly blocky and shitty graphics, again, even for the Wii. And beyond all that, it was a glitchy game. Look, in case I haven't made it clear, Red Steel was a true turd of a game. The gameplay involves a mix of katana-based swordplay and first-person shooting - that doesn't even make sense if you think about it, beyond being an attempt to abuse the aforementioned "point and waggle" Wii control capabilities. If this game is memorable for anything, it's being one of the top three or five Wii titles available at launch. Any positive reviews Red Steel received, I guarantee you, were only positive amid the sea of shovelware it was released aside. To put it into honest context for you, I'd much sooner play five more hours of Too Human than five more minutes of Red Steel. Blech.

Fast Five

Kudos to the Fast and Furious franchise. After a successful first film, 2 Fast 2 Furious made the mistake of focusing on Paul Walker's character instead of Vin Diesel's. (Maybe Vin was busy doing xXx at the time.) Then Tokyo Drift happened and virtually everyone involved in the original movie was completely absent. The movie didn't make back its budget in the U.S. and no one really expected the franchise to live on any further. Then something must have happened to the respective careers of Vin Diesel and Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster, because all of a sudden there was going to be a fourth Fast and Furious movie with all the original actors. That movie lived up to (and exceeded) every expectation I could have had. And thus, Fast Five was green-lit. And now the Rock is in the fold. And now apparently Michelle Rodriguez may come back too? Look, these movies are fucking ridiculous. The people seeing them - myself and all my friends included - just want to see explosions and fast cars and super-jacked dudes and super-hot women. (Which begs the question - where are all the super-hot women?) If I even began to try to analyze the plot or the thematic content of Fast Five, my head would probably explode, so let me just wrap this post up. A sixth movie has been confirmed and a seventh is already heavily rumored. Who would have guessed five years ago, with this franchise dead in the water, that we'd be getting as many as four more movies with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker? I still can't fully fathom the renewed success of this franchise. My guess is that the teens who saw the first movie are now coming back in droves for these sequels for purposes that are at least partially nostalgic and ironic. Whatever - I'm cool with it either way.

Bully

When Grand Theft Auto III came out back in 2001, it was seen as a groundbreaking (albeit controversial) video game. "Open world" games had existed beforehand, but in GTA3 it truly felt like an entire city was your sandbox (hence the genre term) full of playthings, be they fast cars, rocket launchers, or even other people's lives. I was hooked immediately, and while I enjoyed the main "story" of the game, I think I spent even more time just dicking around with fire trucks and sniper rifles and prostitutes. Having said all of this, I have to admit that after Rockstar released two more GTA games in the three years that followed, I was a bit burnt out on the concept. I never even owned 2004's San Andreas version, which many cite as being the best GTA game of all time. Whatever - Vice City was long enough, and I still haven't ever felt the need to play what essentially amounts to GTA3 III. But Rockstar finally moved on from GTA3... kind of, by making games like Red Dead Redemption (GTA in the Old West!) and L.A. Noire (GTA in 1930s Hollywood with a mystery twist!) in addition to, well, GTA4. Bully, to the best of my knowledge, was the first of Rockstar's non-GTA sandbox games. Released in 2006, at the tail end of the PS2's lifespan, it takes place in a boarding school. It's exactly what you'd expect it to be: GTA in a schoolyard. I finished playing Bully last night, and I'll now weigh in briefly with some thoughts. First of all, the completeness of the game was impressive. You go to class. You can pick fights with classmates. You get detention if you get caught making trouble enough times. The student body is divided into several typical cliques, including the nerds, the jocks, the greasers, and the preppies. You make friends and enemies. The game is divided into five chapters that collectively encompass a school year. Halloween takes place near the end of the first chapter, for example, and Christmas occurs during Chapter 3. The missions all seem to come straight from high school tropes. Defend the nerd from hecklers while he makes his student government speech! Plant a stink bomb in the fat girl's locker! Fight a greaser in a junkyard for the love of his girlfriend! The characters rarely amount to more than enormous stereotypes - a major jock can't read, a social outcast has bladder control problems, and the English teacher is a hopeless alcoholic who gets drunk behind the library - but in a game called Bully where you can throw eggs at girls and get into fist fights with tough guys, you can't really expect a deep ensemble cast of three-dimensional characters. No, the entire world in Bully revolves around high school politics and nothing more. Even when the game ventures into absurdly over-the-top territory - someone has lit the gym on fire, and now you're being framed for it! - it never seems to forget its light-hearted undertone. At the end of the day, Jimmy (that's your name) hasn't united the student body or brought an end to clique warfare; the jocks are still meatheads, the nerds are still pissing themselves, and the only real triumph isn't one of good over evil, but instead of Jimmy over the rest of the student body and faculty. I guess that lines up pretty well to most GTA games where you're a morally corrupt lawbreaker and cop-killer, but you're fighting for your own survival and success in the world. That's kind of the thing though; as much as I enjoyed Bully for being something different than GTA, and as much as I praise it for feeling as complete as any GTA game, the flip side of that dual coin is that it also grew as long and tedious as many GTA games without actually feeling as high-stakes or openly epic as a GTA game. No matter how well they nailed "GTA: High School," the game suffers exactly because it is a watered down GTA game. For this reason, its biggest strengths were also its weaknesses when it came to its overall legacy. Bully was a fine and enjoyable enough game, but it already feels aged and dated thanks to those PS2 graphics (not to mention the recent nationwide focus on anti-bullying campaigns). My biggest regret with this game may be not buying the Xbox 360 port, which looks much better, especially on an HD TV. Oh well. Huge fans of the sandbox genre would do well to give this game a try, but of course, those that want to have probably already done so.

Franny and Zooey

And so ends my reading of J.D. Salinger. The man wrote one very noteworthy and laudable book, Catcher in the Rye, and a lot of other stuff that I didn't like at all. Franny and Zooey manages to be better than the rest of the crap, but not by so much as to be memorable in any way. The short story Franny was alright- college student Franny shows up at her boyfriend's college for a weekend and they mostly bicker, but they did manage to stumble into a few poignant thoughts in all the fighting. The next story, Zooey, started off pretty terribly with a lot of bickering that really went nowhere. But then Franny from the first story shows up, and the story picks up a bit- Zooey and Franny argue a bit about religion, and Zooey just absolutely rips into Christianity. It's probably the most memorable part of the whole book, but it ends fairly quickly and the story wraps up in a boring way. Oh well. So long, J.D.

Fight Club

Have you seen Fight Club? Guess what- you've also already read Fight Club! Seriously, this might be a great book, but I'll never know because the movie and the book are almost exactly the same and it's impossible for me to judge. There's also haikus and Marla Singer's family, neither of which felt like they added much to the story at all. Fight Club the movie to me always felt like its parts were greater than its sum- it's full of great moments and an unforgettable twist, but whatever the message was got completely muddled because it seems to make such a strong argument against itself. And the exact same can be said here. The message, the twist, the scenes, all those snappy lines from the movie, it's almost entirely lifted directly from the book, so unless you're a hardcore Fight Club fan (and if you are, you've probably already read the book) there's really zero reason to read Fight Club.

The Hunger Games

Why stop at four, let's make it five. My girlfriend urged me to join the fray and read the recent mega-series that starts with The Hunger Games, and here I am done with book one. And now I can see that this book certainly lives up to the hype. This really does have all the trappings of a mega-seller. It's a survival story in an Orwellian society focused on teens force to kill or be killed in the "Hunger Games." There's plenty of action and suspense, but all light enough for a middle school student to handle- the first I heard of this series was Webber mentioning its middle school fandom. And of course to really hook the young readers they give it a teen romance that actually had a bit of originality to it, where neither character is at all sure about their feelings but they have to play up the romance to gain a competitive advantage. Despite the bleak setting and some harsh moments, I actually found it a pretty fun book- unlike 1984 or Fahrenheit 451, this fits the 'beach book' mold. I've heard conflicting views on the next two books, and I've managed to avoid most spoilers, so I'll probably get to them soon so I can talk about the series with everyone I know who has read them, which is approaching nearly everyone I know.

Slaughterhouse-Five

I was talking Vonnegut to Sween recently (someone who seems to have digested a bit of his work) and explained that this was his favorite book in the bunch. Having only ever read Breakfast for Champions, it seemed about to time to down another of Kurt's satirically pleasing novels. Here it goes...

Sween, you're right. This book is awesome. Although lacking any major character arcs, which is typically a huge issue for me, I couldn't put this guy down. I'm pretty sure Slaughterhouse-Five was on Stan's list of the most frequently reviewed items on the blog, so maybe I can save the spiel of the plot. Well, I guess I couldn't attempt to explain the story even if I wanted to - it's entirely disjointed! Our main character, Billy Pilgrim, sort of lives in the fourth dimension and has the capability to jump around to different times in his life, without any control. So, while this book is - I think - technically classified as a war story, it's that plus everything in between (time-travel, space & aliens, family drama, ect.). Focusing on just the war for a second, the bombing of Dresden, Vonnegut recounts some amazing visual images about the war and, in particular, a bit of POW's life under the German rule in WW2. It was also fascinating that Billy, while living through some fairly traumatic moments (all at once mind you - he has lived every second of his life at once, more-or-less) remains stoic and unemotional through them all. Bullets blazing by his head, surviving a plane crash, losing his wife - the guy never breaks once. Then the story returns to his war days. The bombing of Dresden is over and the freed POWs begin scavenging through the ruins of the small German town. Billy is shown how malnourished and overworked his horses are (hooves cracked, bleeding gums) and immediately begins to break down in tears. Only time in the whole damn book we see Billy exhibit emotion, and it's over a couple of weary, beaten horses.

The most fascinating aspect of this whole novel have to be the aliens, the Tralfamadorians. Wait, I should correct myself. It's not so much them, but whole concept of them viewing the universe in the fourth dimension. Time exists as a plane of reality for them. They can see their birth and death in one singular moment - I think? Anywho, it's all very cool to try and imagine. What gets me even more are the moral ramifications of this ability. Billy (who has this power to a very limited, uncontrolled sense) knows how he will die, about WWII; he basically knows everything bad thing that will ever happen to him and those he loves before they actually happen... or maybe they've already happened...

Oh, man. I just blew my own mind.

Alright, I'll reel it in here. For all intensive purposes, if you knew the outcome of the future would - or could - you do anything to alter it for the better? By Billy and the Tralfamadorians' accepting attitude toward this indicates that Vonnegut believes in fate. We don't ever have a choice in any of our actions. It just is what it is. I think one of the aliens explains to Billy at one point that they all know how the universe will end - it will be by their own hand while developing some new spacecraft. Yet, the Tralfamadorians do nothing to stop this. They end of the fucking universe and their only response is a shoulder shrug! Whatever. I guess they just hold onto that message they tell Billy which is to just hold onto those good memories you have and forget the bad ones.

Fucking Tralfamadorians... Good book, though.

South Park: Season 14

It's difficult to adequately review a season of South Park. The show is as episodic as any other animated comedy, so seasonal arcs are absent and character development doesn't exist. Furthermore, each season is split into two separate runs of seven episodes each, broadcast farther apart than the typical gap between seasons. Let's call them Seasons 14A and 14B going forward. Yeah? Good. So, I loved Season 14A. Four solid episodes kicked off the run, but the highlight of the season was the two-part 200th episode, a double feature laden with callbacks to thirteen years of South Park highlights that managed to stir up a shit storm of controversy by kind of sort of depicting the prophet Muhammad. I was actually very disappointed that the version of "201" included on this DVD set was the same incredibly over-censored one that originally aired. Come on, Comedy Central. Bad enough that you pussed out and didn't air the episode uncensored in the first place, but now I can't even watch the original cut of the episode despite being a paying customer? Regardless, "200" and "201" marked the apex of the season and were very excellent episodes. Unfortunately, Season 14B was pretty terrible. Even the seventh and final episode of 14A felt like a real throw-away episode; its two primary plot lines focused on Towelie and a summer camp for retarded kids. Next came a string of lazy-feeling and uninspired episodes with easy targets. NASCAR. Jersey Shore. Hoarders. Inception. There was no real bite or wit in any of these episodes. In the Inception episode, the writers even ripped off a CollegeHumor parody (and to their credit, confessed to doing so, with an apology, in the DVD commentary track). The season hit its nadir with a three-part episode about the kids' superhero identities that aimlessly wandered around between the BP oil spill, Cthulhu, a parody of that LeBron James commercial, Totoro, and most startlingly, Kenny's propensity and ability to regenerate after dying. This last aspect really left me torn. It felt like a real shark jumper, in a way, to suddenly acknowledge and even attempt to explain why Kenny is always dying and then returning an episode later with no one the wiser about it. It almost felt like Matt Stone and Trey Parker had absolutely nothing left in the idea tank, and needed to betray the unspokenness of a principal character's key trait just to get themselves through seven episodes. Oh well. Lastly, the season ended on, of all things, an elaborate Shake Weight joke. Oof. So as I said from the beginning, it's hard to judge Season 14 as a whole. It featured some of the best South Park had to offer as well as some of the worst. And unfortunately, the dip in quality seen in 14A definitely continued and bled through into 15A. I guess I can't blame Matt and Trey; they spent a lot of 2010 (and 2011) working on The Book of Mormon, which I've yet to see but which is apparently fantastic. So, good for them. Also, Season 15B felt like a marked return to form. But now I'm getting a full season ahead of myself.

Too Human

Travel back in time with me, dear readers, to the final day of the fourth month of the 2010th year of our Lord. It's a Friday night at the tail end of my final semester in college and I'm living it up in the event room of some hotel at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department's Spring Banquet. My senior design project group has just won the award for best senior design project, and it's nice to know that a hundred evenings of desperately trying to figure out coding and circuitry I was never taught have not gone to complete waste. I mean, look at this certificate! And listen to that mild applause! And... what's this? Microsoft has decided to sponsor our class by rewarding the top three project teams with Xbox 360 games? There'll be time to question this later. For now, I have to decide between Halo 3 (which I and every other 360-owning SDP winner already own) or some obscure game called Too Human. I've got no interest whatsoever, but a prize is a prize and I can't refuse a free video game. Wait - it's the final day of the month. That means this surprise acquisition will leave me without net progress on the month in the video games department! No! Logging progress foiled yet again by this fucking senior design project... Alright. Present day again. That was fun, right? Reliving my college days? Anyway, I've spent the last week or so actually playing through this random acquisition of a game, Too Human, and I've got a lot to say about it. Since we're already running long, I'll let Wikipedia give you the overview:

As part of a planned game trilogy, the story is a science-fictional futuristic retelling of Norse mythology that portrays the Æsir, the Norse Gods, as cybernetic-enhanced humans, tasked with protecting mankind from the onslaught of Loki's army of machines. The player takes the role of the Norse God Baldur, who is less cybernetic than the other Gods, thus being "too human". The game incorporates elements of hack and slash and action-adventure with heavy emphasis on role-playing gameplay elements such as gathering items, upgrading equipment and choosing character classes and alignments. The game is noted for remaining in development hell for almost ten years, originally planned as a four-disc release for the Sony PlayStation in 1999.

The nicest thing I can say about Too Human is that it featured a lot of interesting elements. Futuristic cyborgs stand in for Norse gods? I can dig that. RPG elements such as leveling up and upgrading weapons and armor? Cool; sounds like BioShock. Dungeon-crawling gameplay featuring endless hordes of enemies? Eh, a bit of a trope, but it's cool that I can deal with them in either a hack-and-slash or shoot-em-up manner. Sadly, the game was far worse as a whole than the sum of its interesting parts. From the get-go, you're asked to choose a character class. There's an attack-heavy guy, a defensive-oriented one - you know the drill. I went for the "bio-engineer," who has the ability to heal himself. I'm glad I chose this guy arbitrarily, because there's no way in hell I'd have beaten the game without absolutely spamming those healing abilities. The thing is, once you've chosen your class, you're locked in. Yet, you'll still find weapons and armor throughout the game that are meant for other classes, and you can't use them. Why include them at all? The game begins with a confusing and lengthy multiple-part cinematic that doesn't so much serve as an introduction to the game as it does as an introduction to the first of four missions that constitute the story. These videos looked absolutely terrible, which is likely a result of the game spending ten years in development hell. After all, how can an Xbox 630 game take advantage of the Xbox 360 engine when it was originally intended to come out for a console two generations old? Anyway, from the start, you're locked into a character class that you picked more or less blindly (unless you've played the game before) in a world that hasn't been explained to you in the least. Are you ready to go hunt down a robot monster codenamed "Grendel?" (I'm pretty sure Beowulf was an Anglo-Saxon poem which had nothing to do with Norse mythology and the likes of Odin, Thor, and Baldur, but whatever.) So here comes the first of only four missions in a game that took ten years to make. And boy, does this combat system suck. You swing your axe or sword or staff or hammer around by pointing the right analog stick in the direction you wish to swing it. This works fairly well when you're surrounded on all sides by enemies (and you spend half of the game in that exact situation) but at no point in time does it buy you any kind of advantage over, say, just mashing an attack button. In fact, with the left stick reserved for movement and the right stick taken up by attacks, you're left with no control over the free-wheeling third person camera, which obnoxiously swings around and disorients you in the middle of combat. This makes maneuvering and fleeing from enemies nearly impossible. (Did I mention that every enemy is much faster than you? Every enemy is much faster than you.) And if you had planned on sitting back and shooting at the enemies instead of charging them for close combat, plan again; by the second mission, gunfire can't chip away one enemy's health before eighteen of them are swarming you. The game's difficulty curve also swerves all over the place like a roller coaster. While playing through the middle of the second mission, I was dying every thirty seconds or so. This wouldn't have been the most frustrating video game I've played in years were it not for an unskippable cinematic that occurs every single time you die, in which a valkyrie nonchalantly flies down to retrieve your corpse and bring it to Valhalla. This takes twenty-seven seconds, and as I said, there were stretches during the game where I was dying multiple times a minute. Fortunately, the game got a whole lot easier in the third mission (how? why?) and although it took me eight hours to finish the first two missions, it took a scant four or five to do the final two. Perhaps this is because halfway through the game I lost the will to do optional exploration of some sort of parallel cyberspace world full of weapons and armor. The game doesn't even end with much closure, since it was meant to be the first part of a trilogy which now seems unlikely to ever come out with a second installment. Hey, fine by me - no way was I interested in a continuation of this experience anyway. That said, a hypothetical Too Human 2 could actually be a very fun game. After all, most of the flaws in Too Human - and there are many severe ones - could be fixed just by revamping the gameplay. Hell, just two easy changes - allowing me to skip the valkyrie sequence and re-mapping the right stick to do camera work - would have made this a fairly enjoyable gaming experience. And that's the real shame here, I guess; for a game that took ten years to make, Too Human feels an awful lot like a title that was rushed out for release before it could be properly tested. Its biggest flaws are so easily amendable and it probably should have been a simple and enjoyable game, if memorable for nothing more than a creative retelling of Norse mythology. Instead, it's an early nominee for "worst game I played in 2012." Great concepts for games don't amount to much when the metaphorical glue that binds them all together happens to be metaphorical wet shit.

Darkness, Take My Hand

Ok, that took less time to get to than I thought. I just read the second book of Dennis Lehane's two-parter, Darkness, Take My Hand. It seems to be the sophomore slump, because I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as the two other Lehane books I've read. For two-hundred pages Darkness is a mostly okay hunt for a serial killer that feels a bit too disjointed and doesn't flesh out characters well enough. Lehane makes up for it with a powerful ending that tied things together somewhat neatly, but the deeper themes of racism and gentrification that pervaded A Drink Before the War and Mystic River were replaced with a generic corrupt cop story. Clearly there's much more story to be mined from the Kenzie-Genarro private eye pairing, seeing as how there's four more books in the series so far, including the much lauded Gone Baby, Gone. Unfortunately book #2 just didn't live up to book #1.

The Informers

Bret Easton Ellis does not care much for rich people. The Informers is the third book of his I've read, and each one deals with terrible rich people who did nothing to earn their money but instead live out their lives as assholes unworthy of any respect. American Psycho featured the infamous Patrick Bateman and skewered (literally and metaphorically) Wall Street investors; Less Than Zero dealt with similarly terrible college students who end the book trying to make a snuff film. Unfortunately, in going over the top with his ridiculous characters, I thought those two books had significantly less impact than they could have- while we all might harbor a special hatred for rich assholes, no one thinks that they're actually going around murdering people, and the two books ended up veering towards comedy more than any scathing indictment. This, however, is where The Informers succeeds. Set up as a series of inter-connected short stories, we get inside the head of a dozen Los Angeles citizens and discover how depraved one can be with too much money and time. It's not nearly as entertaining as Patrick Bateman talking about Genesis and then torturing whatever prostitute was unlucky enough to get in his limo, but at least it feels like there's a point to it.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I haven't posted a video game for a while because I got Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for Christmas, which has certainly eaten up a lot of my time. The Elder Scrolls series ranks just below World of Warcraft in timesink factor- it's a game that's just so easy to get lost in. It's a western RPG that takes place in the northern province of Tamriel known as Skyrim- one thing I appreciate about the series is that the folklore and geography was all set up with the first few games, so with each game you get to explore a different section of the huge island of Tamriel. 2006's Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion took place in the central hub of the country, Cyrodiil, but moving just to the North to Skyrim feels like a world away- the temperate climate and various environments are done away with, replaced almost entirely by huge, snowy mountains. This gives the whole game a particularly epic feel to it- I battled so many dragons on the top of mountains that it became commonplace, just another part of the game. And that's the main campaign in a nutshell- dragons have returned to the land after hundreds of years, signaling the impending end of the world, and it's up to the prophesied 'dragon-born' (me) to drive them out. This campaign, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. It consists of about 20 missions, each of which last between 5 and 30 minutes or so. But then there's other lengthy campaigns with their own storylines, each consisting of about 10-15 missions- entering the mage's college and harnessing the power of a huge ancient artifact; stopping a civil war that threatens to tear Skyrim apart; join ranks with the murderous Dark Brotherhood, and several others. And then of course there's tons of one-off missions of all shapes and sizes. And nearly every one of these missions felt worth playing through, cause they are just that fun. And of course there's plenty of fun to be had even when you aren't pushing towards a specific goal- heading off the beaten path might lead you to a new cave to explore, a pack of travelers looking for a fight, or one of the several small things that serve no purpose other than to immerse the player and make Skyrim truly feel like a living world. They put salmon in the rivers and you can watch them jump out of the water as they swim upstream! Late at night in the northernmost locations, you might catch a glimpse of aurora borealis! And there's plenty of other 'small stories' that are so easy to miss but a close look reveals- at one point I stumbled upon the charred remains of a cabin with a burnt corpse inside. Looting the corpse gives a 'summon flame' spell. Put two and two together, and you get the implications that this guy just fucked up a spell majorly. And if you read the notes people write, or pay a little attention to the situation, stuff like that pops up all the time. Put this all together and it's a blast of a game, however it comes with one major problem- it's glitchy as all hell. Most of the time this is a beloved aspect of the Elder Scrolls games- watch the physics mess up and that bear your fighting suddenly becomes the size of a house, shit like that. But I did run into several game freezes. A well implemented autosave system makes this less of a hassle, but it's a hassle nonetheless. Aside from that though, Skyrim is an incredible game whose visuals left me in awe and had the gameplay to back it up.

Mockingjay

SO! Third book! I finished both Catching Fire and Mockingjay yesterday. All of these books are quick quick reads. There will probably be some SPOILERS! so don't read on if you don't wanna know. Anyway, this book follows Catnip and the gang in their rebellion against the Capitol. Because you know it's always smart to have teenagers lead your battles. In all honestly though, I heard this book was awful, but I didn't think it was. I even think I prefer it to the second book. At least it is a new plot line. The pacing of the book wasn't the best, but I thought it was interesting. Having to get all the districts on the rebels side, Katniss trying to figure out how to be the "mockingjay", peeta being brainwashed. There were some fun to read about plot lines. The end though was not the best. I understand Prim has grown into a woman and Catnip doesn't spend all of her time protecting her, but having her die so pointlessly seems stupid. Catnip kills the rebel president which is justified but random. Also, the whole love triangle is completely negated because one of the guys just leaves with no goodbye or conversation. It was just a sloppy ending for a book that could have ended with a pretty dramatic finish.

So I liked the beginning and the middle. Didn't love the end. 'Nuff said.

Catching Fire

A little weird that I just read a series with the second book called The Girl Who Played With Fire. Anywho, this was the second book in The Hunger Games series. Honestly, I'm not sure how I feel about this book. Catnip is all whiny and angsty about Peeta. Apparently there are rebellions going on. And (SPOILER) surprise! they have to go back in to the games. Like, I think this is crap. The Hunger Games were really interesting in the first book, but I was hoping for something different in the second. The ray of hope in this Quarter Quell Hunger Games is the new characters. The Quarter Quell is filled with past victors. So we get to meet Finnick, Beetee, Mags, Johanna, and some others. The actual Hunger Games are pretty inventive with a clock like island with different terrors at each hour. The ending is a bit of a cliffhanger, and I am looking forward to the third book for that reason. The book was still a quick read, but not quite as unique or exciting as the first.

Modern Family: Season 2

More than a year ago, I watched the first seasons of Modern Family and Community and weighed in, on the post of the latter, on how I'd compare the two new comedies to one another. I said I had no preference, and admitted that both shows had their strengths but lamented that Community probably wouldn't last very long because of its quirkiness and clever meta references. Now, I look back on that comparison and shake my head in embarrassment and disbelief. While Community spent its second season pushing the envelope and going to all kinds of places sitcom television just doesn't go, Modern Family seemed to pull in the reins a little bit, content with its recognition and ratings or something. At this point in time, I'm watching neither series regularly; Modern Family is no longer something I consider good enough to DVR consistently, and Community has been placed on indefinite hiatus after becoming my favorite show on television. But enough about Community. Let's talk about why Modern Family had such a disappointing second season. At least, I'll try to; I can't quite place my finger on it. The acting was still pretty great (not good enough such that all six adult co-leads deserved Emmy nominations, but whatever) and the overall tone of the show didn't really change much from the first season, which I enjoyed very much (but which I'm strongly considering re-watching in order to figure out what made this show so stale so fast afterward). I guess in the absence of any noticeable gaffes, I'll just chalk the lackluster season up to weaker writing. Plenty of jokes were still plenty funny, but the whole season the show just seemed content to typecast their own characters into different roles as they pertained to the dilemma of the week. Phil is a charming idiot. Claire is a shrill stress ball. Their kids are a ditzy high schooler, an angsty nerd, and an ADHD-riddled idiot. The gay men just snipe at each other. Al Bundy is a grumpy old man. His trophy wife has a great body and speaks with a hilarious accent. Her kid has an old soul trapped in a fat child's body. The whole lot of them just aren't that likable at the end of the day, I guess. Maybe that's the biggest thing with Modern Family. Its characters spend every week fighting with their spouses and dealing with proverbial "white girl problems." There's still humor to be had here, but at the end of the day, I think we want to be laughing with and at people we enjoy, even if they're fictitious and televised. I hope that taking the back half of Season 3 off from Modern Family will allow me to view ten or twelve episodes on DVD a long time from now with a fresh set of eyes and at least some optimism. Until then, though, I'll consider this show to be just another comedy out there that I'm not watching. Too bad, really.

The Hunger Games

My January has mostly been spent rereading The Millennium Trilogy (aka The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc.) , but I told myself I would read the Hunger Games series when I was finished with those. Three people on the blog have read them. I'm sure 75% of middle schoolers have read them. And I know plenty of people my age comparing them to the HP series and the Millennium Trilogy. So ya know, I wanted to read them! I like reading!

They are what everyone else said they were. Page turning middle school level books. I started The Hunger Games, and I finished it four hours later. When I am enjoying a book, I have trouble putting it down. But this one really is a page turner because you want to know who's gonna die.

Spoiler Alerts!

Firstly, I didn't think the ending was completely predictable. Until the game changing announcement in the middle, I honestly thought the that either Peeta, Rue, or Katniss would live. I could see a scenario in which any of those happened. To tell you the truth though, I'm happy that both Peeta and Katniss lived. I think it would have been a shame to kill them both off. I understand it was predictable in that matter, but I don't generally like seeing characters I enjoy being killed off. The writing was simplistic, but hey, that's what made it such a simple quick read.

I really did enjoy it. I look forward to seeing the movie. I'm particularly excited to how much like flames they can make Peeta and Katniss look in the entrance ceremonies. But a lot of Cinna's charm is long gone knowing that he was cast as Lenny Kravitz.

Oh well! Good book! On to the second! Dreading the third!

A Drink Before the War

In the continuing series I call 'Gallagan's bookshelf', next up was a Dennis Lehane two-parter. I only read A Drink Before the War here- Darkness, Take My Hand will have to wait for another day. Drink is Lehane's first overall book and also first in the Kenzie-Gennaro series. If those names sounds familiar, they were also the protagonists of his later book Gone, Baby, Gone which of course eventually became that Ben Affleck movie. But back to Lehane. Frankly, the guy can just flat-out write a great crime novel (he co-wrote some episodes of The Wire, which should earn him some cred on this blog). What starts out as a routine missing persons case for private investigators Kenzie and Gennaro quickly leads them into the midst of a gang war in our very own Roxbury Massachusetts. Most of the action takes place in the seedier neighborhoods outside Boston proper- Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester, Southie- and it's no coincidence, as Lehane really wanted to nail down the disconnect between these poorer neighborhoods and the more affluent streets of Boston. There's physical violence in the streets, but the true villains here are the politicians- their class and racial warfare in turn keep gang warfare going. Towards the end there was a rather startling reveal that seemed a bit too over-the-top by this book's standards, but other than that A Drink Before the War remained a tight book that never wasted my time- much like ol' 52 Pickup, the action starts on page 1 and really doesn't let up til the last page (er, middle page in a 2-parter I guess).

Call of Duty 2

The problem with playing a game like Call of Duty 2 is that I've already played four other Call of Duty games, three of them newer (and better) than this one. You can only fight so many virtual Battles of Stalingrad before they lose all appeal, and you can only clear out so many German bunkers and trenches and war-torn villages before doing so loses all appeal. In a way, playing this game was like folding laundry or mowing the lawn; it had to be done, but I just went into auto-pilot mode for half of it, zoning out and thinking about other stuff in the meantime. The shame of it all is that I'm sure Call of Duty 2 was a fine World War II FPS when it came out just six years ago. The graphics are nothing to scoff at and the game never glitched out or broke on me in any way. In both of these regards, it was miles ahead of Call of Duty: Classic, the Xbox Live Arcade port of the original PC game that I played over a year ago. That game felt clunky and slow and it looked shitty to boot. So at the very least, Call of Duty 2 was a big improvement over its predecessor. Unfortunately, that didn't make playing it a particularly enjoyable experience.

Catch

You may remember Will Leitch, the Deadspin blogger whose scathing anti-everyone-involved-with-sports set of essays, God Save the Fan I reviewed just a few months ago. Not content with opinion pieces, Leitch decided to move into fiction, his first foray being Catch. Catch is... basically what I thought it would be. I imagine if one of my friends decided to write the great American novel and worked really hard at it, it would end up being something like Catch. It's the story of a young man in the summer after graduation from high school who struggles to figure out where he belongs in the world. He's smart-alecky, womanizing, and talks a lot about Cardinals baseball and other pop culture. You can't blame Leitch; for his first book he certainly stuck to what he knew. Who didn't feel a bit conflicted before heading off to college? Everyone's had the dueling arguments of But all my friends are in my hometown vs. This place is boring as shit, so it's easy to relate. The problem is, in the end Leitch doesn't really say anything too noteworthy, he's simply interested in pulling on nostalgic heartstrings. The characters reminisce about all their random funny times, they realize how much they will miss their families, they start up relationships that they know are doomed to fail because of college's looming presence. And in the end they come to the same conclusion that most everyone else does, that it's time to move on and see what else the world has for them. At times this made me reflect on my last few months of high school (I never really spent many summers in Westford), but it's hard to call that an accomplishment on Leitch's part- I'll bet this half-assed post has gotten its readers to think back on "simpler times" as well. So hey, he didn't quite knock it out of the park, but Leitch at least has set a decent bar with his first piece of fiction and could maybe create something really interesting if he just set his sights a little higher.

God of War

I finally got around to playing God of War, a PS2 game from 2005 that received nearly universal acclaim and praise. And while I know this particular ship has sailed, I'll still do my best to jump aboard. Very few games manage to do so many things so well, but God of War was both one of the best hack-and-slash combat games I've ever played and also one of the games with the best level design. The plot is simple enough, as is the characterization; you are Kratos, a Spartan chieftain serving a life debt to Ares, the god of war. But Ares has wronged you, and now you seek to kill him. To do so you'll need to power up and receive aid from the other gods, which allows for a rudimentary sense of level progression. The game plays out fairly linearly - it's no sandbox and no open world Metroid or Zelda - but you still do just enough backtracking, and your path converges with a previously used path just often enough for the environment to feel wholly and totally realized. The fierce and powerful musical score really underlines the epic feel of the game as you slay mythical Greek creature after mythical Greek creature. From the Hydra to the Minotaur to Medusa to Ares himself, I racked up quite an impressive list of kills. The game was worthy of all its praise and I'm looking forward to playing both of its sequels (particularly God of War III, the HD offering on PS3). That said, I don't know if I want to just rush right into those games. My video game backlog remains large and filled with games of varying quality; if I blaze through all the great ones first, I'll be all the less motivated to finish off the rest of them. Still, if I want to maintain the pace on beating fifty video games this year, I shouldn't wait very long to move forward.

The Futurological Congress

Stanislaw Lem was a 20th century Polish author whose works were a combination of science fiction, philosophy, and dark satirical humor. He has been called both "the most important science fiction author of the 20th century" and also "a cross between Kafka and Vonnegut." These phrases describe an author who, in theory, would be right up my alley. Yet until receiving this book in a Secret Santa swap (thanks, Dee!) I had never heard of the guy. So, what's my take on my first Stanislaw Lem experience, The Futurological Congress? It's mixed. Buckle up and allow me to sort through my opinions in an aimless review that promises both to wander and to stall. The book is only 150 pages long, and promised to be a quick read right from the start. That said, the first 30 pages took me several "reading sessions" to get through. The story begins in a speculative near future in which the world is quickly becoming overpopulated, and the protagonist is sitting in on a meeting in which world-renowend experts are debating what to do about the overpopulation crisis. At the same time, there's a biochemical terrorist attack on the hotel they're meeting in, and hallucinogenic gases cause the protagonist to perceive a whole lot of fictitious things. This comprises the aforementioned first 30 pages or so, and everything about these 30 pages made them difficult to get through. A combination of things - a frenetic pace, an unreliable narrator, an over-the-top satirical setting full of unbelievable characters, and perhaps even some translation-induced awkward grammar - rendered me unable to follow the plot and initially disappointed in Lem. Fortunately, the remaining 120 pages featured the bulk of the story. In a nutshell, our boy gets so conked on hallucinogens that the doctors treating him decide to cryogenically freeze him until a cure for his ailment can be found. When the story resumes several decades later in a utopian future, a calmer pace and more structure accompany it. What remains is a series of events in which our protagonist explores this well-imagined but typically dystopian future. The gist is that thanks to overpopulation, living conditions are terrible, and everyone is sick and mutated and living in squalor. Luckily, the masses have been subdued by hallucinogenic drugs that create an illusion of health, wealth, and happiness; gruel is eaten out of buckets in concrete bunkers, but the diner's tainted brain perceives a succulent meal at an expensive and fancy restaurant, for example. I'm a sucker for well-made dystopian speculative fiction to the extent that I like to see how many wildly different (yet equally bleak) outcomes different authors have in store for humanity. This one showed some similarities to both Brave New World ("soma" being a less ubiquitous but more general mind control agent than the stuff used in The Futurological Congress) and The Giver (using an "ignorance is bliss" policy to placate the masses by hiding reality) but still felt unique overall. I wound up enjoying this book a lot more than I enjoyed its first 30 pages, and I'd be willing to bet I'll revisit Lem's bibliography before all is said and done. But not yet. Not yet.

The Office: Season 7

It's no secret that The Office simply ain't as good as it once was. That said, I was surprised - pleasantly - when I re-watched Season 7 over the past week or so. There were some missteps made in Steve Carell's final season, to be sure. Notably, why bring Will Ferrell in for a four-episode arc during which we'd be saying goodbye to Carell's Michael Scott? Ferrell's character had a personality and presence that varied from episode to episode, and although the guy is a very funny individual, he kind of served as a distraction by showing up when he did. Still, all in all this was a season comprised of funny episodes, each of which contained several funny moments. So what if The Office isn't the funniest show on TV anymore? Even after seven years, the Carell-led show was a very consistent source of humor. I'd definitely say that Season 7 was better than the shaky and formless Season 6, which marks the first time since Season 2 that The Office has had a better year than the one preceding it. Of course, the show is currently on its eighth season, and first without Carell. I watched the first half of the current season and unfortunately I can't say his absence isn't felt. When I first learned Carell was leaving after seven seasons, I got excited and thought about the potential a Scott-less Office would have, and wondered how they'd dare to mix things up. The thing is, they haven't mixed things up. Simply replacing Carell with Ed Helms (promoting from within) and using James Spader as a quirky wild card CEO character doesn't quite do it for me, especially since it almost feels like the show is still writing stories intended to have Michael Scott at the center. A post-Carell Office could have worked well while showcasing the talents of the deep ensemble cast they've accrued. Instead, I've seen The Office get content enough to live out its stretch as a generic workplace comedy. There's nothing wrong with that, and the show has certainly "earned" this graceful fade into mediocrity, but as a former fan I still find myself wishing for something more. Oh well! I watch plenty of shit worse than this show.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

What a letdown. Come on, Guillermo! You’re better than this. I had a slight desire to see this one back in the fall when it was in theaters, however, the lukewarm reviews couldn’t motivate me to leave my couch and venture out of the apartment. I’m glad for that. As you can probably already guess, I wasn’t a big fan of this film. Before I get ahead of myself, let me just bring everyone up to speed on Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark – not to be confused with Nickelodeon show that encourages just the opposite.

Premise time. A family moves into an old mansion (hoping to flip it and make a quick profit) when the young daughter of the family finds a secret room with a sealed grate that she removes and accidentally releases these little creatures into the house to cause havoc and whatnot. Oh, and apparently these creatures can’t be in the light. “Does it burn them like vampires, or turn them into stone?” you ask. No. They just hiss and scamper off into the dark whenever a flash of light hits their face.

Terrifying little buggers, no?

So, I’m already leading into what is probably my biggest gripe with this film: the monsters. The movie gives very little back-story on these guys other than they live deep in the ground (the house was somehow built right over a giant fissure in Earth that they live in or some shit), feed on bone, and whenever they come up to the surface they need to bring a human back down with them. Who knows why? I don’t make these rules. These critters actually serve as the source material to the tooth fairy folklore as the movie opens to the apparent author of the myth trying to bring back his son from creatures before being pulled into their lair as well – it’s the first two minutes of the movie; I haven’t ruined anything for you. But enough with their back-story. I’ll suspend my disbelief and just try to have fun with it. Initially, the creatures first whisper to the little girl to get her to do things. “Join us.” “Be our friend.” “Turn out the lights.” Creepy shit like that. It’s effective in setting the tone. Then we get to the point where we have to see these things in action. Understand why they’re really so dangerous and need to be feared. This is where I lose all respect for this film.

I tried looking for an accurate photo that truly represents the monsters’ stature, but failed to find one. Instead, here’s my best analogy. Take an ugly-ass hamster and give it opposable thumps and the ability to walk on two legs. Yes, they’re only about 10 inches tall. Now, while they do travel in packs of a dozen or so, I still fail to buy that they could kill/capture a full-grown human. More importantly, they’re just not scary. The film tries to freak you out a bit as these guys create mischief cutting the power, locking you in your room while stealing the key… I still don’t buy it. Get a big-ass boot on your foot and squash those little fuckers – a child could punt on of those things further than a Nerf football! For such small, pathetic creature, it’s outrageous what these guys get away with. They attack the groundskeeper (a burly, behemoth of a man) and bring him within an inch of his life, stabbing him spare scissors and screwdrivers, and he can’t even take one down with him. Yet when the little girl is attacked by a mob of them, she squashes one in between a sliding bookcase. Go figure? Very little suspense with – what I consider to be – no threat placed on the characters.

I will say this one positive critique (SPOILER), Katie Holmes gets killed at the end. Well, actually she just gets pulled into their lair (she sacrifices herself for the girl – I won’t go on another rant on how one good tug on the rope that’s dragging her down could have pulled the entire Fraggle Rock cast to the surface – and somehow goes on to becomes the rodents’ leader. There’s an epilogue where the family returns to the abandoned home to leave colored drawing of her, then we hear whisper through vents after they leave telling the rest of the creatures to be patient. One day and new victim will release them. Why the Hell did she suddenly become evil. And what more… if you join their little clan after being pulled down, what happened to the first guy that got sucked down in the beginning.

Ah, the whole movie is garbage. Although I’ve never seen it, the original made-for-TV version has to be better. It just has to.

The Shack

I am going to start this review by saying that this book was a Book Club assignment and in no way my choice. I was led to believe that the book was about a serial killer, and the father of the victim of said serial killer going back to the scene of the crime. Murder! Serial Killers! Sign me up.

Jesus? God? The Holy Spirit? Coming to terms with your faith and coming back to God?

I was scammed.

The book itself is an easy read. Mack, the father of a murdered girl, is introduced to us in a strange opening letter written by his friend Willie. Willie tells us all of Mack’s family history and prior issues in what I consider lazy storytelling- lots of tell and no show. When we get to Mack’s point of view, he promptly receives a letter that reads, “Meet me at The Shack -Papa”. Papa is his wife’s name for God, because they have such a close relationship. Wiki informs me that The Shack is a metaphor for “the house you build out of your own pain”.

We learn how his daughter died, how this affected his family, etc. Mack of course goes to the murder scene, The Shack, on the behest of some sketchy letter without telling his wife and then things get weird. He meets “Papa” who is a big black woman, Jesus who is a not good looking Jewish man and an Asian Lady who is the Holy Spirit. They all talk to him as separate entities, but they are the same, and explain faith in ways that made me bristle and scoff. It worked for Mack. It did not work for me. So I may be more biased than normal is explaining this book, but if you love the Lord this might be the book for you. Otherwise, save yourself the eye-rolling.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Well, call me "everyone and their grandmother," because I just read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Or, as the original Swedish title translates to, "Men Who Hate Women." I mention the original title because I think it actually tells you something about the book and what it's about. Yes, one character in the novel is a girl with a dragon tattoo, but using that as the English title for the book just seems like a marketing ploy because it gives the cover some kind of edgy vibe or an exotic mystique at the very least. Men Who Hate Women isn't a sexy title, but at least its an honest one. So out of respect for the late Stieg Larsson and for the book itself, I'll try to refer to this book with the title he bestowed upon it in the first place: Men Who Hate Women. Men Who Hate Women is a novel about - no, not a dragon tattoo, but about a murder mystery involving a serial killer who rapes and brutally tortures women. (Who'd have thunk it?) I'd hesitate to call it a page-turner, but it was interesting and entertaining enough for me to finish its 460 pages over the course of three nights. It was a good read. That said, I'm not so sure why this book became an international best-seller or why it's already on its second movie adaptation trilogy in three years. Like so many other books, this was a murder mystery. That it takes place in Sweden and includes one quirky and interesting character is enough to set it apart from most Stuart Woods books, sure, but at the end of the day what you have is a well-written but not-so-unique story about the case of a missing person and a string of biblical-style rapes and killings. Please don't misunderstand me; I liked the book and fully intend to read the next two in the trilogy, and I'll probably see the movie adaptation within the next week or so. But if there had been no hype preceding this novel for me - if I had just happened upon Men Who Hate Women at Hudson News in the airport and taken a blind chance on it - I wouldn't have figured it to be an international best-selling super hit at all. A good read with a memorable character, yes, but not the biggest literary hit among adults since The Da Vinci Code. (That said, this book was a lot better than The Da Vinci Code.) I want to be proven wrong about Men Who Hate Women not really "mattering" to the Western canon in any way, and I want this Millennium Trilogy to end up being more than just three very popular murder mysteries. Of course, even if the next two books don't combine with this one to become something more than three well-written murder mysteries, I'll still get to enjoy reading two more decent murder mysteries. Things could be worse!

WWE Allstars 3DS

This game was gifted to me in a swap. I enjoyed this game more than I thought I would. The graphics were great and the 3d effect was cool but rarely did I use it because it drains the battery. There were tons of player options including more than a dozen unlockable characters, of which I have unlocked only a few. I made a custom player, whom I named Trogdor and yes he is unbeatable and will burnanate you. The coolest part about this game was the ability to set up new vs old matches. Hulk hogan battles Cena for the title of greatest superstar and it comes complete with a video preview and brief history of both characters. This is one of those games with no clear cut ending, the credits being an available option on the main screen from the start. I beat all the superstar match ups, traveled to 3 marquee summer slam match ups and completed a custom character so in all I would say I beat this game.

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

The third piece in a franchise is often when the franchise begins to feel a little strained for ideas and innovation. Part 1 should serve as a satisfying introductory piece to the characters and their general conflict, and a satisfactory Part 2 often raises the stakes and expands upon the conflict in meaningful ways. But that leaves Part 3 to do one of two things, and sometimes both. One is to wrap up a story, because for some reason the "trilogy" has become the de facto standard model of multi-volume storytelling. The other is to raise the stakes even higher and harder than they were raised in Part 2. But the issue is that because Part 2 typically already raised the stakes to the maximum level of belief and verisimilitude, Part 3 often either needs to go over-the-top entirely, "jumping the shark" in that regard, or allow itself not to be bigger and better than Part 2, which can be read by cynics as a lack of effort. It's a lose-lose situation for the most part, and maybe that's why it's so rare to see a second sequel be a better all-around piece of work than either of its two predecessors. Last Spring, I played through both Uncharted and Uncharted 2. I was thoroughly impressed by the gameplay, particularly that of the second game, and I swore I'd buy and play Uncharted 3 as soon as it came out. (Eh, so I'm a couple months late. No biggie.) And I'm happy to say that this third game was every bit as impressive as the second one in terms of level design and action-cinematics, which are really the bread and butter of the Uncharted series. Now that I've finished this game, I will never forget escaping from a burning wooden mansion, escaping from a sinking cruise ship, or escaping from a crashing airplane. (There were plenty of non-escape-based parts of the game, I assure you, but these three stick out the most.) In this respect, Uncharted 3 did not disappoint. Aside from being a tiny bit glitchy - I got "stuck" in two or three walls at times - the gameplay was no worse than that of the second game, which had expanded and improved upon that of the first. So purely from a "fun to play" perspective, Uncharted 3 was just as good as Uncharted 2 was. Not better, mind you, but just as good. And that's high praise. Now, let me revisit the role of "Part 3" that I brought up earlier. If Part 3 won't go farther over the top than Part 2, and won't raise the stakes anymore, then it needs to embrace the task of being a proper point of closure for the characters and conflicts involved. And that's where Uncharted 3 comes up a bit short, I guess. It wouldn't be fair to judge the game for its plot and character development. After all, that's not the way I've judged the previous two games in this series, and it seems unfair to ask Uncharted to suddenly become something it's never been, which is a game that can tell a memorable story with memorable characters. But the thing is, for a little while it seemed as though that's exactly what Uncharted 3 was trying to do. When the third level took place twenty years ago and depicted the day Drake met his wise-cracking mentor and sidekick, Sully, I was suddenly intrigued about their shared history in a way I'd never wondered about before. Just who is Nathan Drake, and what makes him tick? For the previous two games, I'd been content ignoring his history and letting him be a generic but charismatic 21st century hero. But suddenly, I wanted to know more about him, and that's thanks to Uncharted 3 willing to "go there" for lack of a better phrase. But just as soon as I thought this would be Drake's story, it wasn't; aside from a moment where the game's antagonist addresses Drake, "or whatever your real name is," implying that our hero has made up his own alias and is not in fact a descendant of the legendary explorer Francis Drake, we never hear about our boy's past again. This was only one of several issues I had with the writing in Uncharted 3. The whole thing felt like it lacked a focus or a presence; if I didn't know there were 22 chapters in the game before reaching the 21st one, I'd have had no idea the game was about to end, as I'd only just reached the forbidden city that had been discussed all game long. Half-way through the game, Drake's ex-girlfriend appears. How many times are these two going to break up off-camera and between Uncharted installments before they either fix things for good or learn to accept that it's never going to work? Their reunion in Uncharted 2 was forced, for sure, but at least their relationship was revisited and rekindled in a believable (or at least movie-script-acceptable) way. THis time around, it's just kind of like, "oh, you again?" (And yes, you better believe the pair is happily reunited before the closing cinematic.) Or how about the part of the game where Drake escapes from a sinking cruise ship? I've already called it one of the most memorable moments of the game, but in order to get there we had to spend four (of 22) chapters on a rescue mission of sorts that ended up being a false alarm anyway. Of course, Drake washes back up on the beach right next to the very village he set out from, so the entire cruise ship saga is completely cut off and irrelevant to the rest of the story. The thing is, they easily could have made this a relevant part of the game's story just by changing a few lines of dialogue or the location of one or two characters during the quest; the cruise ship level was awesome and I'm glad it was part of Uncharted 3, but it didn't have to be as pointless as it ultimately was if the writers had taken the time to properly connect and tie together the various parts of the story. Again, story is secondary to gameplay here, and the gameplay was fantastic. But several issues in the writing - maybe pacing is a better and more accurate word - prevented Uncharted 3 from being quite as memorable as Uncharted 2 was for me. That doesn't make it a bust and it doesn't mean I regret playing it in the least. This isn't the first game not to live up to a predecessor and it won't be the last. If anything, I'm hoping for Uncharted 4 to happen more than ever, not necessarily to "redeem" Uncharted 3 but more to provide closure that Uncharted 3 didn't. Actually, maybe "closure" itself isn't what I'm seeking here. After all, each game contains a self-contained plot with all-new antagonists. I guess all I'm looking for is another great game. The possibilities seem endless. Drake in China! Drake in Europe! Drake in outer space! Seriously, bring on three more Uncharted games, because I'd gladly play all of those. Better writing would just be a bonus. Oh, and for what it's worth, I played most of this game in 3D and didn't notice many substantial instances where my experience was cooler because of it, but I also didn't notice any instances where the quality of the visuals was diminished. Now that's a ringing endorsement!

Slapstick

I started into Slapstick about month ago, got about halfway in, and then sort of got derailed. The book begins with an extended prologue where Kurt talks about some major events in his own life and how they affected this book, which is interesting because I stopped reading Slapstick to read And So It Goes- a full on biography of the guy. I finally got back to it today, finishing it off while half-heartedly watching the Bruins/Canucks game. And with the book completed, I can finally say that this is definitely not Kurt's best work. Actually I'd rank it among his worst. What started out as a heartbreaking tale of two twins who really need each-other more than anything else in their lives, turns into a ridiculous story about one of those twins becoming president of the United States, enacted some bizarre changes, and causing mass civil war. Apparently Kurt agrees with my assertion, as he graded Slapstick a D. But this review isn't all doom and gloom. After all, as one of my favorite authors, it's nice to see that even when Kurt Vonnegut misses the mark, he's still immensely funny, readable, and full of interesting ideas. I guess in the end, Slapstick reminded me of one of the first books I ever logged here, Hocus Pocus, in that it's Vonnegut at his worst, but still worth the time spent.

Into the Wild

This book I picked up on Jill's desk two days ago and said "I'm gonna read this." I did it on a whim and I was heavily rewarded. Wow! Just wow. I have so much I want to say about this book. I hope that some of the readers have also read this book because I would love to talk about it (maybe I will even suggest it as my first book when I convince the rest of the bloggers to join me in a blog book club).

The book Into the Wild tells the real story of a young man names Chris McCandless. The book begins with his death in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wildness. The book traces the path from when Chris finished colleges, dropped out of his families lives , began a nomadic life and ultimately perishes shortly after. This is all stuff that you would learn in the first couple of pages. In the first couple pages I needed to know how Chris died and by the middle of the book I wanted to know why Chris. After the finishing the book I have an idea of both but I can't be certain. The evidence suggests some things but the facts aren't conclusive.

What we do know is that Chris abandoned his family because of issues that he had with his father. We know that Chris was an avid reader and that he particularly enjoyed authors like Thoreau and Jack London and this added to his affinity of nature. Christ spent the better part of two years wandering the country staying in places just long enough to get by. He worked crappy jobs, slept amongst the homeless and the lowlives, and generally lived on as little as possible. Chris' lack of need for money is made even more apparent by the fact that he abandoned his car and set his money ablaze before the took off on his adventure. He traveled through the US, slipping, on several occasions, across the borders into Canada and Mexico but his big aventure was into the Alaskan wilderness.

Chris traveled to Alaska with 5 pounds of rice, a rifle, some knives and general gear in the spring of 1992. He was found dead by some hunters in september of that same year. In all Chris survived over a hundred days living off the Alaskan wilderness, hunting animals and picking edible roots and berries.

The book isn't really about what he did but why he did it. The story on the surface is simple. Stupid kid runs away from main stream life and tries to live in nature and nature wins. Alaskans after the fact were quick to lambast him for being stupid, for not understanding nature and being ill prepared. I agree he didn't have to die but this story is good because he died. If Chris had survived this would be a mildly anecdotal story and I would have said "cool" and moved on but his death makes this story so much bigger. He did what I think a lot of people would like to do. He picked up his life and just left. Chris did what he wanted when he wanted and how he wanted. He lived in nature off the land, eating only what mother nature provided him with. Overall I think that is really cool. Shit if I could do this right now I would but the reality is that I am chicken shit and I wouldn't last two or three weeks in the wild never mind over a hundred days and the truth is he would have survived if circumstances hadn't happened exactly the way they had. If you aren't interested in learning these circumstances dont read this book if like me you are intrigued and slightly curious to find out what motivation drove a man to do this then pick this up and read it. Its a short but good read

Jurassic Park: Ultimate Trilogy

I usually avoid same-packaged movie sets and prefer to buy my individual films as individual DVDs or Blu-rays, but a Christmas gift is a Christmas gift and you can't always be so anal about the way you like your movie packs when you receive a Christmas gift. Plus they don't even sell these three films as individual Blu-rays anyway. Thus, as with that Shrek collection that somehow gets so many page views, I'll now spend some time reviewing each individual film after the jump. But first, a quick background on my history and familiarity with this series heading into this triple feature. I've seen Jurassic Park, or more accurately, parts of Jurassic Park at least a dozen times. I've seen the beginning and the ending and every scene in between, most of them at least twice and some of them as often as five or six times I'm sure. But I'd never seen the entire movie from start to finish in one sitting before doing so with this Blu-ray. I'd seen The Lost World once before, but it was at least a dozen years ago and my grandfather fast-forwarded through all the exposition just to get to the dinosaur attack scenes, leaving me without any real semblance of what the plot was. And I'd never seen Jurassic Park III. That was the situation heading in. Now, here's what I've got on each individual movie.

The Legend of Zelda : Skyward Sword

Wow! Another year has passed and I have yet to fulfill, what I believe to be, a reasonable amount of posts. Last year I decided my resolution would be to post once per week for an entire year. This year I have decided to renew that goal but make it a little more reasonable, 50 posts in a year. This way I can do several posts in a week to make up for those weeks I don't complete anything. I have all ready given myself a jump start. I have a half dozen or so items that are nearly complete and ready to post I just have to get my act together and finish them. Starting with Skyward Sword.

I had put more than a standard work week into this game before the new year had begun and had not yet completed this game. I decided that I must be nearly done and dedicated a good portion of my day off today to this task. That being said, this is by far the longest Zelda game I have ever played. It make similar titles, such as Twilight Princess and Ocarina of Time, seem short in comparison.

Being one in a series this game was destined to rely on it's predecessors for its game play style and story line. It was up to the creators to make it more different than any other game in the series while remaining fluid to the story line and familiar to the player. In this task they succeeded.

The game added new elements such as the stamina bar that limits the amount of time Link may run before he gets tired, the upgrades to items, potions, and tools are all new additions. The designers also went so far as to redesign the type of puzzles the game uses ( you wont find many block puzzles or any light the torch puzzles in this game thank goodness). The biggest change however lies in the map itself, instead of being divided between overworld and dungeon this game blends the line between the two better than ever before. Overall I would say this is a very great game that reinvents the series in a familiar yet new way.

Some have gone as far as saying that this is the greatest Zelda game ever made. While I enjoyed it thoroughly, I would not agree with them. This game was fun, long, and challenging but it lacked the charm that the Ocarina of Time had. The world in this new game felt to unattached to the people I was supposed to be saving. I felt like I had accomplished something in the end but not that I had saved a people, the people of Hyrule or in this case Skyloft.