Infamous

Here's the third of three games I was playing at once that emphasized morality as gameplay- Catherine I went full-on evil; Mass Effect 3 was kinda neutral/however I felt at the moment, and finally to equal things out (as well as counter Stan's 'evil' play) I played through Infamous as a good guy- becoming 'famous' rather than 'infamous'. Infamous is a third-person action game that at times shoots for a comic book feel, but seems a lot more like Grand Theft Auto with superheroes. The results may vary for you- I prefered the over-the-top comic book aesthetic of say, MadWorld to Infamous' gritty Neon City. Protagonist Cole McGrath, a down on his luck delivery man just delivered a package containing some relic that blows up a section of the city yet for some reason gives him superpowers- at first, the ability to shoot electricity and survive big falls. The FBI attempts to use Cole as their inside man to gain access to the object- the 'ray sphere', and get it back, promising to help him escape from the now-quarantined city. Of course some gangs have taken over the streets and turned the city into a war-zone, so it's up to Cole whether along the way he wants to help the few innocent citizens that remain, or use them for his own benefit. Infamous is a game that should be played on one extreme or the other- the best powers are unlocked only by those who live completely evil or good; the neutral bystander gets little in rewards. A few times I accidentally picked the evil option (my fault!) but every time I did it would backfire in some way, which leads me to believe the game is trying to push you on the 'good' path for the most part- Stan, can you confirm this? Either way, as the game progresses and Cole gets more powerful, the fun increases as well- I was mostly bored as the game began but eventually when you're surfing on power lines and shooting exploding bursts of electricity, Infamous starts to pull you in. The game probably hits its highs on a few missions where Cole stands on electrically charged platforms (be they stationary, on top of a bus, or hanging from a helicopter) so he can just let loose a constant barrage of special powers against droves of enemies- the moments of mass carnage work greatly to Infamous' advantage. I haven't heard anything about Infamous 2 importing your character from the first game, so I'm worried that that one will also be a slow starter. Still though, I can't hate on the game too much- the story was kinda boring and you start off just too weak to have fun, but it all comes together well. We'll find out if Infamous 2 is better... sometime next year probably.

Predator

Well, it turns out work was in fact canceled for a third straight day today after all. And as much as I like the five-day staycation, I've got to admit, I'm really getting bored over here. There's only so much cleaning and tidying and chore-doing a man can do on a surprise day off, and here on my third consecutive one, I'm just running out of things to do. And while I'd never complain about a chance to bite into the backlog a bit, I have to admit, I'm a bit worn out on just about every front at the moment; I watched three full seasons of television in the past eight or nine days. I beat my last DS game, bought a new one, and have played that one for a few hours, too. I went to chip away at an Xbox 360 game only to find my system red-ringed. I played a Wii game for a few hours before growing too bored to continue. On the book front, I'm about a hundred pages deep into three separate books and generally saving those for bedtime and plane rides. The only place I had to turn to, then, was my dwindling movie backlog.

So I watched Predator, the most Halloween-appropriate movie I've got left in the backlog. I bought it two years ago with the intention of saving it for some sort of "man night" in which a bunch of dudes would hang out on an otherwise boring night and play cards and watch Predator or something. Such a night hasn't materialized in the past two years, and it's easy to see why; my closest friends have all kind of dispersed geographically over the past two years, to the point where whenever we do have the chance to get together, we want to do something better with our time than watch shitty 1897 action movies. C'est la vie!

I had seen bits and pieces of Predator before, but never the whole thing start-to-finish until today. And I've gotta say that I was underwhelmed. I wasn't expecting an incredible piece of filmmaking or anything, but I had at least hoped for something more exciting. For the most part, this was just Arnold, Carl Weathers, and Jesse Ventura quietly creeping around in the jungle simultaneously hunting and being hunted by the Predator. I think the movie and the titular antagonist have maintained popularity over the years because of their premise more than because of this movie's execution. An alien who can use active camouflage while hunting men with thermal sensors? That's a legitimately frightening monster. But if you search the Internet for initial reactions to Predator, you'll actually find a whole lot of non-plussed critics. Metacritic has the average film rating at a 36, which is pretty damn bad, and I can't even disagree with most of the sentiments. The movie picks up a bit toward the end, but not in a way that changed my overall opinion.

Hey, they can't all be winners. At least I've finished off the oldest movie in my backlog once again. The new claimant to that title? It's a tie between American History X and 25th Hour. Edward Norton, everybody!

The Big Bang Theory: Season 5

Weird day. I couldn't sleep at all last night, and by the time five in the morning came around and I was still awake, I decided just to head into work really early, load up on coffee, and try to escape with minimal contact with coworkers in the early afternoon. But when I arrived at the office, lo and behold, it was pitch black. Apparently the power was out, work was canceled, and I was free to go home and sleep the day away. Woo! Once I had napped sufficiently, I decided to beat Final Fantasy Tactics A2; but I am nothing if not logress-efficient, so I couldn't just sit there playing a handheld video game without some good background backlog fodder. And that's how I came to watch all eight hours of the fifth season of The Big Bang Theory over the course of the day. Turns out, it's also a great show to fold laundry and make dinner in front of. Real life production and backlog production coinciding? Hey, it can happen, and it did today with The Big Bang Theory. This wraps up my post, as I promise you my strange and uneventful day was more interesting to read about here than any particular take on the show itself. For old time's sake, feel free to click here and revisit my Season 4 take where Trev rips into the show and I offer a really half-assed "yeah, it's bad, but it's not absolutely terrible!" defense. Alright, time to attempt some sleepy time again. Something tells me the office won't be closed for a third day in a row tomorrow.

Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift

As a quick refresher, I absolutely loved Final Fantasy Tactics and was thoroughly disappointed by its follow-up, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. This is the third game in that loosely connected spin-off series and I'm happy to say that it was better than the previous one. Not fantastic or anything, and nothing close to the original, but still a solid and enjoyable experience. Once again, you control a small band of diverse fighters and healers, traversing isometric environments in a turn-based fashion and trying to defeat your enemies before they can defeat you. Outside from these battles, which compose the bulk of the gameplay, there's a world map you can traverse, accepting missions, crafting new weapons and armor, and training your various units up  sprawlingly diverse "job" ladder that includes healers, fighters, ninjas, archers, gunmen, wizards, and so many other roles. Too many, in fact. My biggest criticism of the game was just how wide open and sprawling the job fields were. The original Tactics game had 20 possible jobs to choose from; it'd be really hard to maintain a crew that included one of everything, but you still came to use and understand almost every single one of these jobs. Tactics Advance had 42 jobs, an amount that lent itself to some natural overlaps and redundancies. Here in Tactics A2, there were 60 jobs to choose from, which meant that even in a 35-hour run through I never really used the majority of the jobs available to me. The other pain in the ass was the way abilities were learned; those with even a fleeting familiarity with Square RPGs know, for instance, that a white mage (or priest, or healer, or whatever) is one of the most basic job classes there is, and that basic abilities of these characters include health restoration, removing negative status effects, and raising fallen allies from the dead. In my 35-hour play-through, however - in which I used a healer in just about every battle - I was never able to learn how the "raise" spell. The thing is, in this game you learn your spells and abilities from the weapons and items you equip. But you also have to create your own weapons and armor out of loot you've found on various missions. The whole thing feels needlessly complex, and it was pretty easy for me to reach the end of the game with, say, a thief who didn't know how to steal weapons, or a healer who knew two spells. It seems like there was way too big a focus on the breadth of classes available and not enough depth to any of those classes. Each of the sixty job classes uses its own weaponry and armor (with some overlap, admittedly) and I often found myself crafting new weapons only to find that they were of no use to any of the twenty-odd characters in my party. By game's end, I had all sorts of assorted crap I had never used, and yet my party knew way fewer skills and abilities than in any other Final Fantasy game I'd played. But I digress, apparently, and I don't want the main takeaway from this post to be that Final Fantasy Tactics A2 was far too convoluted and bulky for its own good. It was a decent little game that was just the right amount of challenging - that is to say, I failed several missions, but never did I fail the same one incessantly and frustratingly - and although its story was nothing to write home about, it was still far superior to the childish silliness of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. The game doesn't come close to the greatness of the original, but I never expected ti to do so; as such, it met my expectations quite well. If you're a huge fan of either the Final Fantasy series or turn-based strategy RPGs, this is probably right up your alley. Otherwise, don't bother. Thirty-five hours is a long time to spend playing something you don't like.

Carnivàle: Season 2

Here's the second and thankfully final season of Carnivàle, the mid-2000s HBO show about mysticism and religious allegories in a 1930s traveling circus of sorts. I lamented about a year ago that I just wasn't in love with this show even though it had all kinds of great things going for it. In that post, I said that the plot was too vague for me to really get invested in. But Season 2 was supposed to have a much more straightforward plot, and so I was holding out hope that I could still enjoy it. Alas, when you give up on a show halfway through its first season and then take a year off from watching it, it turns out it's really, really hard to latch back on. As such, I was completely lost right out of the gate for this batch of ten episodes, and just kind of had them on in the background while browsing the web or playing my DS. So it goes. Let my utter disinterest in twenty-four episodes of Carnivàle serve as a warning not to buy entire series on DVD before watching them. Of course, I fully acknowledge that few people need to heed that warning more than me. Oh well. Progress is progress, and the quest goes on!

The Wire Season 2

Good news, this show was still enjoyable in season 2. But I am worried that I am mostly just an impressionable twenty something woman. Someone tells me, well this season isn't as good as the first. And I wind up thinking, "well this season wasn't as good as the first". Was it my own though? Or was it someone else's? I'm not quite sure, but this is how I may or may not have felt. It was great to catch up with some of the West Side dope slingers (yo what up String?), but that story takes a back seat in this season. Most of the characters are in prison or dead. Weebey's fake fish tank gets all messed up in prison and boy is it sad. (Maybe not the saddest thing to happen at that prison, you be the judge.) Most of the season focuses around a case that stems from the Baltimore harbor ports where a bunch of dead prostitutes were found. This spirals out into a large smuggling and drugs case. What I was impressed by was how the other storylines, East Side / West Side, were woven into this story. Enough to set us up for a possible drug show down next season. Who knows?! Anywho, I just didn't love the dock workers as much as I loved the drug workers last season. They were fun, but mostly a mess. The rag tag police working team got back together which was fun, but even they are somewhat less exciting when their case isn't as fun. I do really like that Prezbo has found his calling as a master cork board case organizer though. Anywho, good season. It may have suffered a bit from a busy schedule on my part which cut my viewing time down. But I still liked it. ONWARD!

The Evil Dead

Boy, has it been a rough logging week. I was a few hours into Fallout 3 before the game froze up on me, stopping all momentum in its tracks. I had resumed playing Final Fantasy Tactics A2 on my DS and was making good progress, but a sudden "game over" in a difficult battle undid hours of progress and really killed my desire to keep going for now. And on the TV front, I've decided it's time to revisit Carnivàle, a show I've been pretty disengaged from since the second or third episode of the first season;; needless to say, the going has been slow and pretty uninspired. There are good times and there are bad times when one is clearing out his backlog, and this has just been one of many inevitable nadirs in the roller coaster that this journey is. But when I learned earlier tonight that my workplace would be closed the next day, I figured it was the perfect excuse for a little late night movie-watching. I needed something quick enough to finish before I fell asleep, but good enough to lift my spirits out of my recent logging funk. What I needed was the acclaimed cult classic, and one of fellow blogger Trev's favorite movies of all time, The Evil Dead.

It delivered.

I hate to use hyperbole and say things along the lines of "this was a perfect horror movie," but quite frankly, this may have been a perfect horror movie. It was bloody and gore-ridden, but it was also masterfully creepy and suspenseful. This balance is hard enough to pull off, but what's more - and most important - is that The Evil Dead never stops being fun. I wouldn't call it campy or cheesy either; Sam Raimi knew just how far to take the violence and just how long to let ominous shots linger without letting anything breach the proverbial "top" that so many other movies strive to "go over." Even the film's biggest obvious weakness - its low budget and inexperienced actors - was used to an advantage. Instead of being distracting, things like bad makeup and jerky camera shots and billowing smokey mist all end up enhancing the atmosphere of the film. The premise couldn't be more simple. Five young adults rent a cabin in the woods and find something in the basement that releases ancient evil spirits. (This is literally the exact same starting point for Cabin in the Woods, a genre-changing movie from earlier this year, which is clearly a tribute more than a coincidence.) From there on out, demons possess the friends one-by-one over the course of one night until our last man standing finds a way to destroy the evil spirits once and for all in what is easily the most incredible use of "claymation as a means to animate horrific body decomposition" since Raiders of the Lost Ark. The movie's utter simplicity is another major component of its overall effectiveness as a milestone and a classic.

I've often expressed disappointment on this blog when it comes to older movies; for every 2001 or Dog Day Afternoon that I enjoy, there are a handful of letdowns in the vein of The Godfather, Alien, Lawrence of Arabia, and Caddyshack - movies that weren't necessarily terrible, but that had a great deal of trouble living up to their reputations. Chalk The Evil Dead up as one for that former group and consider me very interested in seeing its two sequels.

Deadly Premonition

Unlike nearly all video games I've had in my backlog, I knew going into Deadly Premonition that there was a strong chance that I'd hate it. I don't know if I've ever played a game with such a clear 'cult' status- sure, I've played my share of offbeat games like Braid, and poorly selling ones like Dead Space: Extraction, and then even some bad games simply for the sake of series completion like Final Fantasy III, but Deadly Premonition is a combination of all three of these things and yet it managed to gain some serious attention (Don't believe me? Apparently this was the #1 selling game on the 360 the week it came out on Amazon) for reasons I'm still trying to grasp. With terrible gameplay and graphics, it's clearly not for any technical achievement. The obvious pick here is the story and how it's told. Deadly Premonition is a survival horror game that starts off like any other, although with a strong Twin Peaks influence- a young girl in a small northwestern town is found murdered, and hotshot FBI agent Francis York Morgan is called in to investigate as the case quickly spreads to multiple homicides. It seems pretty basic enough, but at times the game can can get truly bizarre- not in a 'we spoke to focus groups and they decided this was scary' type way, but more of a 'a crazy person wrote the script for this game'. Why do animals all make the completely wrong sounds? Why does agent Morgan repeatedly talk to an imaginary friend, who might be the player himself, like right in front of other people, yet no one calls him out on it until halfway through the game? Why are the musical cues so jarring and innapropriate at all times? Why is there zero sense of panic when York is greeted by a horde of zombies when he first arrives in town? I have to admit, I was confused at a lot of parts of Deadly Premonition, more than most other games I've played. If you believe that for a game to be considered 'art' it needs to provoke a strong reaction, then Deadly Premonition is a strong argument for a bewildering piece of art. I only bring this up because apparently the game is indeed often used as an example of 'games as art', or at least so says the Wikipedia page. While most of the 'games as art' examples seem to be obvious indie/art-house pieces that get tons of critical attention, Deadly Premonition is a poorly designed game that some people believe hits so low that it becomes a 'beautiful trainwreck'. I'm not buying it. I've played games that can be fun despite also being awful in every way (remember Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing?) and I've found them way more fun than Deadly Premonition, whose greatest achievement is probably its creative unwillingness to stick to any specific tone for more than an hour at a time. If you've got time, I'd suggest taking a look at the game's Wikiepdia page, or reading a review or two of it to see some wildly different opinions, but reading about the game was a lot more fun than playing it.

Mass Effect 3

Mass Effect 3 felt a whole lot like Mass Effect 2, and given my reception of that game, this is definitely a good thing. The all-out war between organic and synthetic life has begun, and as Commander Shepard and his crew have found out, all previous battles have been won easily by the Reapers- machines that periodically eradicate nearly all forms of life in the universe for unknown reasons. Going in to Mass Effect 3 I knew that most players loved the entire game aside from the last 5 minutes- I on the other hand had nearly the opposite reaction. It took about 2 hours for the game to really draw me in, but once it did it didn't let go until the credits rolled. The gameplay feels virtually unchanged from ME2- apparently the cover system was improved, but I hardly noticed. Either way, it's hard to call the series' third installment an improvement on the second, but that's no knock- Mass Effect 2 is already firmly entrenched in the 'greatest games of all time' discussion, as it should be. Mass Effect 3 gives us a worthy successor that doesn't quite hit those same highs, but retains a lack of lows. When the series transitioned from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2, it became a more character-based story to the point where the bulk of the game is spent getting your friends to trust you. You still have the trust of whoever remains in your crew for the third installment, but Mass Effect 3 is still very character-driven, while each mission now seems to have greater importance than whatever vendetta your individual crew members have. There's noticably fewer options for party members here, but if anything ME2's nine party members was a bit too crowded- ME3 didn't suffer for its smaller crew. Finally, I have to mention the outcry of disappointment about the ending. I mean, this ending was universally reviled, causing fans to protest BioWare, forcing a post-game cinematic to be released a month later, and eventually leading to some employees at BioWare stepping down out of shame. Wow! I could understand if that was due to some just terrible ending, but I thought the ending to Mass Effect 3 made sense and was appropriate! As I mentioned in my Catherine review, I've been inundated with 'moral choice' video games- Mass Effect 3 I played however I felt, not pushing too far to either side of the good/evil duality, so when I got to the big choice that ends the game I picked the one that felt appropriate for my character, and the game ended how it should. Just because a different choice produces similar results doesn't make the ending terrible, or somehow negate the countless hours of user-created story! I swear, some people will never be satisfied. Anyway, I know Stan's got some interest and I believe Trev partially played Mass Effect, so let me give the whole trilogy a hearty recommendation.

Modern Family: Season 3

My opinion of this show has really wandered all over the place. I started out a year behind and caught the first season on DVD. I loved it enough to actually draw comparisons between it and the first season of Community. (Gah!) I cooled down a bit on the show in Season 2, noticing (and eventually noting in this blog) that the formerly sharp writing felt a little duller this time around. And then early on in Season 3 I began to actively dislike the majority of the main characters. I canceled the DVR series recording as part of my annual New Years TV rotation trimming and figured I'd see how the rest of the season turned out on DVD. In fact, here's a paragraph I wrote last December about the show and its slippery slide downward into mediocrity:

I greatly enjoyed the first season, and I think part of that enjoyment came from a certain freshness it had. There was a pleasant blend of simple plots, no laugh track, funny jokes, and relatable characters. Season 2 could be described in the same way, but somehow the whole production felt a little less inspired and a little more lazy in my eyes. And that perceived dip in quality has continued into Season 3, to the point where I can no longer find reasons to continue regularly watching Modern Family. The characters are all fairly well-defined, but they're also all fairly one-dimensional, and growing ever more flattened by the month it seems. Back in Season 1, for example, it was funny to explore how adultlike and dignified the portly Colombian kid was, and how much his personality clashed with that of his nephew/cousin, an archetypal ADD-ridden boy. But two years later, they just keep revisiting that well as a source of comedy and it's running fairly dry. Ditto on the contrasting "popular ditzy older sister and nerdy ambitious younger sister" rivalry. And ditto for so many other characters, be they the snippy gay couple or the lovable dolt of a husband and his uptight wife. The show has gotten too predictable and has lost all of its charm and appeal in my eyes. I can see why so many people enjoy it, but I can also no longer ignore that I'm not one of those people. I'm not swearing off the show entirely, but I think I'll catch the rest of the series in syndication or on DVD at this point.

And, true to my word, I've at least finished up the third season on DVD. And I didn't really dislike it at all! Maybe this is just one of those shows that's good enough to enjoy on DVD but not good enough to command half an hour of my time and DVR space every week. Maybe the second half of the season was just as tired as the first but a ten-month hiatus gave me new esteem for the same old song and dance. I'm really at a loss here. I thinK I can settle on calling this one overrated by the masses but under-appreciated by me for the past year or so. For me, the question still remains: do I catch up with Season 4 online and resume watching once a week? Or has that ship already sailed for me, and is Modern Family best off as a DVD-only show for me? Tough to say, but I'm definitely softening my stance on how low this show has sunk. After all, even at its worst, there have always been two huge reasons to watch it:

Stay classy, my friends.

Catherine

Much to the chagrin of my girlfriend, when fellow blogger Trev moved from L.A. to Chicago, he packed up a lot of the video games he owned (most of which were NOT posted here, mister!) and sent em off to a place where he knew they would all be treated right- to me! Seriously, thanks Trev. I've been hacking away at several games through October and even though this is the only one of yours I'll likely beat this month, the package has got me working on some older games so I can get to it soon. Either way, Catherine was game #1 from Trev. I had some slight interest before but likely wasn't going to purchase the game unless I found it very cheap, but I'm glad I eventually got to play it. Catherine is a bit of an odd one- technically a puzzle game, although I didn't even realize it until an hour in. You play as Vincent, a guy in his young thirties who is a bit of a slacker but managed to land himself a beautiful, intelligent girlfriend, Katherine, who is putting the pressure on Vincent to propose already. Vincent thinks he loves Katherine, but is hesitant to make a serious commitment and fears the changes that could come with it. One drunken night Vincent meets another beautiful girl, Catherine (this time with a 'C'!) and before he realizes what's going on he wakes up with Catherine in his bed and must come to grips with the fact that he's now a cheater. For the next eight days Vincent struggles to keeps his lies straight as he tries to figure out whether he truly wants to be with Katherine. Gameplay during the days is merely in an 'overworld' that consists entirely of a bar- Vincent chats with his friends about what to do, sends texts Katherine and Catherine, and gets drunk. When you decide to call it a night, Vincent retreats back to his house to sleep. He has a series of recurring nightmares, and these make up the bulk of the gameplay- Vincent must continuously climb up a crumbling tower of blocks, pushing and pulling the boxes around him to create a path to the top. It kinda feels like Q*Bert on steroids. I can see how nothing but box puzzles sounds like it could get old, but the game controls well in a way that gets pretty addicting. There's a few small attempts at combat, but it really boils down to trying to scale the towers as fast as possible. Finally, along Vincent's journey there's tons of those moral choices that are so popular in games these days. I decided to play the asshole in this game and go full-on cheater, sending mean texts to Katherine and begging to meet up with Catherine. The problem was, even though I commited to playing the evil side in Catherine, some of the questions were so morally ambiguous that I had no idea which option was good or bad. Sometimes it even seemed the exact opposite. Really though, that's my only criticism here. Aside from accidentally keeping myself from attaining a level of pure evil, everything else in Catherine was pretty fun and worth the time spent.

Downton Abbey: Seasons 1 & 2

I finally got around to seeing the first two seasons of Downton Abbey and can attest that the series lives up to the hype. These two seasons covered the goings on in a fictitious British estate from 1912 to 1920, covering the sinking of the Titanic, the outbreak and entirety of World War I, and the Spanish Flu pandemic. Each of these historic events sends ripples through the titular household, affecting the lives of the masters, the servants, and the heredity of the estate itself. While a few long-running story arcs exist, particularly concerning the romantic endeavors of the masters and servants alike, the show's primary purpose seems to be the exploration of the decline of the power of the British aristocracy in the early 20th century. This isn't so apparent in the first season, which essentially lays out the pre-war system and all of its pros and cons, but it's much more visible in the second season. Here, the war has taken its toll on everyone; the sprawling mansion has been converted into a hospital for the wounded, the noble family's daughters are taking up blue collar jobs like nursing and driving, and nobles and common folk alike are serving in the trenches in France, all of them equally likely to take a bullet or two. The series stops short of getting really provocative with some of tis themes. It never really finds a way to subvert any of the master-servant relationships, for example, and the character-specific stories it tells are fairly straightforward and often predictable. Still, this is an exceptional period drama loaded with great British acting and wonderful production value. My biggest criticism of the show is more of a nitpick; these first two seasons span eight years of story, and yet no character appears to have aged by more than the two years it took to shoot them. I understand the impracticality of putting five years' worth of aging make-up on twenty principle cast-members every episode, but the gradual effect of eight years of time passage across sixteen episodes - or lack thereof - is definitely noticed in the long run, especially on the youngest actors. Of course, if this is the series' biggest flaw, the series isn't all that flawed. At its best, Downton Abbey is an addicting and entertaining period piece. At its worst, its merely a melodramatic soap opera. I'll definitely be checking out Season 3 on PBS this upcoming winter and I'm glad to finally be caught up with one of the most talked about dramas on TV today. Next up in that department? Homeland. Holy shit, do people love Homeland.

CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

Here's a collection of several short stories and a novella by George Saunders, a guy I'd heard too much about to keep ignoring. It's been ages since I've posted about a collection of short stories. Actually, I'm not even sure I've ever done so. Regardless, I'll bang this post out story by story before attempting a take on the collection of work as a whole.

"CivilWarLand in Bad Decline"

The book's first and eponymous story comes flying in at a fast pace and from all sorts of angles. In an unspecified location and time - but likely a slightly dystopian near future, which seems to be the case for most of the stories - there is a history museum-amusement park hybrid known as CivilWarLand, and as the title implies, it's seen better days. Most of the park has fallen into disrepair, staff are constantly being laid off or blackmailed into lower wages, and gangs of street youths vandalize the property and assault the dwindling number of paid guests that there are. What's more, the ghosts of an 1860s family done in by patriarchal murder-suicide pop in and out of the picture to recreate their own violent demise. Lawsuits are filed (and won) by guests who claim anxiety after being made to witness historical elements like slavery and the gallows, but there seems to be little law enforcement when it comes to all of the actual violence and danger associated with the park. One day a man who looks and acts the part of an old Western gunslinger shows up and offers to take up a job working park security. Despite admitting to being a convicted war criminal, he's hired on the spot. I won't spoil the story's climax, but it takes place on Halloween when the park is full of kids in costumes and, well, I'm sure you can fill in the blanks pretty well. At first, I was slightly underwhelmed by this story. Having lent its name to the collection, and batting lead-off, it already had a fairly high bar set. But in hindsight, I think I just spent a good chunk of this one growing accustomed to Saunders' writing style, an interesting blend of imaginative absurdity (a struggling Civil War-themed amusement park is haunted by ghosts) and starkly depressing realistic elements (a terrible economy has led to severe unemployment rates and a rise in violent juvenile delinquency). An interesting, if occasionally manic, read.

"Isabelle"

The shortest tale in the book and also the only one with an uplifting ending. The titular character is a hideously handicapped and disfigured girl who requires constant attention. The narrator, who starts off as a child and then witnesses some pretty terrible things, eventually grows into the role of her primary caretaker. This one was impressively economical, delivering a coherent and meaningful story; the narrator grows up, grows disillusioned by the lowlives he knows as his neighbors and family, and then ultimately finds happiness in caring for Isabelle full time, and all of this happens in just seven written pages.

"The Wavemaker Falters"

The narrator in this one is known simply as "Mr. Guilt," and for a reason. His own negligence while inspecting the grate covering a wave-generating contraption at a Basque-inspired water park has led directly to the gruesome death of a young boy. The boy's ghost haunts him most nights, which leaves him utterly incapable of sexually pleasing his wife, who instead begins to fuck his boss and biggest rival, a man who has saved a handful of people at the water park rather than indirectly killing one. The whole thing gets pretty depressing pretty quickly and hits a climax as the dead boy's father finally decides to kill the narrator. Mr. Guilt is done giving a shit and readily accepts his fate, but the story ends with a minor cliffhanger instead; Mr. Guilt decides he's already hit rock bottom, and determines to turn his life around. Interestingly, this is the second story out of three to deal with ghosts and obscure theme parks.

"The 400-Pound CEO"

In a book full of dark and depressing stories, this one is perhaps the darkest and most depressing. The narrator, Jeffrey, weighs 400 pounds and does paperwork for a company that traps raccoons for clients under the pretense of releasing them into the wild, only to kill them all out of sight and bury them in mass graves. Contrary to what the title would have you believe, Jeffrey is not the CEO; the CEO is a violent and demeaning asshole who makes Jeffrey's life a living hell - on top of the hell that it is to weigh 400 pounds, that is. About two thirds of the way through the story, an event occurs that leaves Jeffrey in a positive state of mind, but it all unravels pretty quickly and the story ends with Jeffrey in a situation that makes his initial one seem downright pleasant by comparison. So, yeah. Bleak.

"Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz"

The main character in this one is a guy who operates some virtual reality machinery that allows people to experience all kinds of fantasies, alternate lifestyles, and adrenaline rushes. Sheepish men come in and ask to be high school cheerleaders getting ravaged by the entire football team. Younger people ask to endure World War II combat in all of its grisly detail. Thrill-seekers request the experience of getting stalked by serial killers. An interesting concept already, but then comes the revelation: in order to "upload" these experiences to other people, the narrator first "offloads" them from the brains of others. This one is kind of all over the place thematically, exploring both positive and negative aspects of amnesia, Alzheimer's, and the idea of forgetting your troubles and worries for better or worse. One criticism; I just watched Total Recall, and as such, the ideas here seem far less original in my eyes.

"Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror"

Easily the most surreally depicted environment of all the stories, and also the one most lacking in any sort of plot. A 92-year old woman works at a grotesque biological museum of sorts, featuring exhibits like pickled fetuses in jars (one for every week of embryonic development) and living cows with plexiglass windows in their skin designed to let viewers see functioning organ systems. Enjoyable, but totally bizarre.

"Bounty"

At last we come to the novella, a story as long as all six others combined but not nearly as entertaining or powerful as that combination. This is essentially a brief adventure across a dystopian future America in which slavery is once again legal. These slaves are genetically mutated people known as "flaweds," and they've grown in abundance due to radiation levels or something similar. The main character has claws on his feet instead of toes, a relatively minor flaw and one that's easy to hide with shoes, and as such he is often able to pass for a "normal" when out and about in society. He undergoes a series of enslavements and escapes and then the story just ends completely abruptly, to the point where I'm still not convinced my book isn't just missing a final page. The author gets to use a lot more time doing world-building here than he does in his short stories, and I'll grant him that there are a few instances of really good social satire going on here, particularly with regard to disillusioned perceptions of morality. Still, I can't say that "Bounty" was either a great stand-alone story or a great component of this book in general.

In summation, then, what's my take? CivilWarLand in Bad Decline obviously had some recurring themes - guilt-induced depression, loneliness, the complete victory of capitalism over human virtue - and components - virtual or simulated realities, absurd corporations, murder through negligence - that give the entire collection a very specific feeling. At times, it's almost too specific, and I think there's a point of diminishing returns here where the value of each individual story is greater than the amount each piece contributes to the whole. George Saunders has earned plenty of comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut, and I can see similarities in both the frank-but-descriptive writing style and the humanist messages. However, I'd sooner draw comparisons to Joseph Heller, a slightly darker and more cynical writer than Vonnegut, who was just as capable of humor, but often came off as just a shade more angry and less sad. Regardless, I enjoyed George Saunders' debut collection and would readily read more of his stuff, but I'm in no rush to purchase his entire bibliography from Amazon or anything. Not yet, at least. Not yet.

Katamari Forever

In the beginning, there was Katamari Damacy, in which you rolled up everyday objects with an ever-growing ball. It was a huge hit. Those responsible for making it said, "Well, shit, let's do that again." And they did. They made We ♥ Katamari, a game with virtually identical gameplay to the first game. This "sequel" even featured all kinds of cheeky commentary in its narration, breaking the fourth wall and asking the player where all the enjoyment of rolling shit into balls came from. Third, they made Beautiful Katamari, an Xbox 360 exclusive that I have only briefly played; I don't know what loose excuse for a plot that game cobbled together, but I do know that the gameplay once again remained unchanged. Roll. Rinse. Repeat. But here, at long last, in the fourth game of the franchise, they've finally gotten innovative enough to change the gameplay. That's right, folks. This isn't your older brother's Katamari. Nay, for in this installment of Katamari, you are given the capability... to jump.

Okay, so my point is that nothing ever changes in the Katamari franchise. But really, nothing has to. There's that old saying that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and this silly little franchise, in which you just roll shit into gigantic balls that consume people, and then cars, and then buildings, and then continents... well, it ain't broke. It might be growing a bit stale. I beat the series' first two games in one sitting each, and this one took me a few sittings to get through. Was it boredom? Just a lengthier game? Tough to say. But one thing I do have to say is that in spite of finally adding a new element to the gameplay, this was the least original installment of Katamari yet; of the 32 levels in the game, 29 have been borrowed from previous games in the franchise. Wow! If the joke in the second game was, "hey, you'll all play the exact same game again," then the joke this time is, "no, literally, you've played these exact levels before." Whatever. The vast majority of the levels were still fun as hell, and although three or four had me cursing and furrowing my brow at the TV a good deal, I can't say I regret revisiting the world of Katamari yet again. Marissa owns the aforementioned third game in the series, so there's a good chance I'll get around to playing it someday. But not yet. Not yet.

Cat's Cradle

Vonnegut, you've done it again!

What a brilliant fucking novel. I began writing this post about a week ago and literally stopped after the second sentence with no clue on how to continue reviewing this. To be honest, I still don't know. This story tackles such fascinating and complex concepts that I'm left pouring over it again and again wondering if there's some fundamental message to be taken from all of this. With what seems to be standard for Vonnegut, the story is very bleak resulting in what's pretty much the end of the world while while commenting on human nature and religion. I'm sure people have already developed theses on this - pages and pages of information unpacking maybe just one factor of this story. I have no desire or expectation to try and philosophize on anything groundbreaking here. Let me just give you some overall impressions and you can take it from there.

Oh, and for anyone who hasn't read this yet, I'll probably be ruining some major points of the story (previously mentioning the whole ending of the world thing might have been your first clue to this). If you really care about spoiling a 49-year-old book, then skip over this. 

The whole novel is basically a long-winded journal entry from a writer sent out to do a piece on Felix Hoenikker - a fictional co-creator of the atomic bomb - who is now deceased. While researching about this man, the writer is eventually lead to the fictional third-world country of San Lorenzo where he discovers Felix's eldest son Frank. Frank is now the head general, and second-in-command to the leader of the impoverished country, "Papa" Monzano. (Side note: I believe Monzano translates in Spanish to apple tree. Not that it's a big deal, but considering this story revolves around religion and man's own destruction of the world, this might be symbolic to the whole man eating the apple and falling from grace. Maybe a bit of a stretch... it just sticks out in my mind.) While on San Lorenzo a couple of facts are revealed: "Papa" is on his death bed; San Lorenzo is in need of a new ruler; everyone in town fears this fictional religion of Bokonon (based on the writing from a mysterious man of the same name); and Frank is in possession of his father's last deadly creation, Ice-Nine (a compound capable of turning all water into a solid, instantaneously). A lot to take in. But to sum things up quickly, Frank gives "Papa" his Ice-Nine who then ingests it in an act of suicide. Later, during a some military display in remembrance for a past tragedy, "Papa's" house is accidentally blown-up throwing his Ice-Nine corpse into the ocean which then freezes the whole planet within a moment. Our writer then heads into seclusion to wait out the worst of the impending storms where he begins to learn about this forbidden religion of Bokononism and starts this journal. 

A far over-simplified summary, but it gets the basic points across - or at least allows me the chance to run through everything in my head again. The most fascinating part of the story is the development of this religion Bokononism. It's a fairly crude and bleak look at humanity that doesn't seem to deal so much with supernatural notions, but more realistic in humanity's stupidity and unfortunately fate. Although this island of San Lorenzo has outlawed it, it's eventually revealed that nearly everyone practices it... even "Papa" Monzano who leads the charge to outlaw it. It's this idea that to spread the religion you have make it desirable. To do that, you make it something you can't have. A logic you would see easiest in children. There's a toy a kid doesn't want to play with. However, if you tell him he can't have it, he'll want it all the more. I'd like to think that there's much to take away from how this religion as it plays into the development of the characters and the story, but, frankly, I think I might need to read it again to truly grasp this. With all the terminology and quotes Vonnegut throws at you, it's hard for it all to stick in one pass. 

For now, this stands as my fourth Vonnegut novel I've gotten through (along with Breakfast for Champions, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Sirens of Titan). According to Vonnegut's self rating system on Wikipedia, he ranks this along with Slaughterhouse-Five as his two favorites. At this point in my limited review of his work, I would agree. Are either of these two better than the other? It's the apples and oranges debate. I would say I had an instant liking of Slaughterhouse-Five - enjoyed from beginning to end - but with Cat's Cradle, it wasn't until the very end that things started to come together for me. They're two very different stories that accomplish very different things. Both are recommended. 

One last thing is the book's title. What does it have to do with story? This is something that always sparks my curiosity with certain books. I remember being completely puzzled with  Catcher in the Rye's title before reading it; however, Salinger was fairly straightforward with this answer. Vonnegut - in this instance - not so much. Maybe I missed it, but I've only got three answers for this. One is straightforward. Felix Hoenikker is making a cat's cradle when his atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. The second is alluded by his youngest son Newt. He questions the reason behind the naming of a cat's cradle. With that cross stitching you do with your hands, it looks nothing like a cradle for a cat. Therefore that name is complete bogus. This might play out in a larger theme as there are several items in the story to revolve around the idea that things aren't always what they seem - maybe more to peoples' intentions. Then there's the last bit of symbolism that you get when looking at the book's old covers.

Maybe some sort of imprisonment? Your hands bound together by your own doing? Who knows. No clear definition is ever given. It's a strange title for an even stranger book. 

Now seeing as this and Slaughterhouse-Five stand as Vonnegut's two greatest books (at least from his perspective) are there any others in his collection that are worth a go? I'll leave this one up to you guys. 

Call of Duty: Black Ops

And with that, I'm all caught up on the Call of Duty franchise. You know just in time for this holiday season's Black Ops II release. I'm left without much new to say about the series, but I definitely enjoyed the hell out of this game. Too many other games in the series - and I'm talking about both the earlier ones and the Modern Warfare ones - don't spread the action out enough into different environments. Sure, in Modern Warfare 3 I got to play in New York City, London, Paris, Berlin - but those are all heavily urbanized cities. In Black Ops, I fought in the Arctic Circle, Vietnam, Cuba, the Gulf of Mexico, and Siberia... in addition to several generic compounds and stockyards, of course. Black Ops also told what was probably my favorite story of any Call of Duty to date, blending Cold War espionage paranoia with historical fiction to create in interesting and often-changing plot. There were references made to World at War, the previous game in the series made by Treyarch (and the first one I had ever played), that gave satisfying closure to some of the character arcs in that game. Black Ops even ends on a huge teaser for things to come, but I won't get into it for fear of spoilage. Since these games have been just fun as hell for several years now, what it takes to set an FPS apart from the pack is, in my mind, a good story and memorable characters. Black Ops has both, and as such, it just may be my favorite Call of Duty game ever.

Total Recall (1990)

With the lady out trying on wedding dresses or putting in some hours at work or something, the lonely bachelor's life continues for me right into Saturday. After spending a couple hours whipping this apartment into a respectably clean man cave - dishes, tidying, trash, laundry, A/C window unit removal, and throwing all sorts of shit we don't need away (don't tell her!) - I settled down with a beer and Total Recall. Did you guys know I'd never actually seen Total Recall until now? The recent remake's release made me realize that I'd never seen what is either the last great action movie of the '80s or the first great one of the '90s (depending on whether you're going by when it was made or when it was released). My hunch is that everyone else out there reading this has seen Total Recall, but just in case that's not true, allow me to chime in with some brief thoughts.

First of all, hey, that was a pretty interesting premise. A hundred years in the future, we've colonized Mars (but we're still using cathode ray TVs and monitors - oh, how I love dated visions of the future!) and we've also perfected the science of adjusting people's memories. What all of this leads to is Arnold Schwarzenegger abandoning his fake wife to head to Mars (for the first time? or has he been there before? who knows!?) for reasons that seem to be partially based on thrill-seeking, but also partially based on a sense of duty of some kind. When he gets there he meets a prostitute in a red light district full of mutants (including the famous three-boobed alien girl) and the prostitute turns out to be his old flame. So, yes. Yes, Arnold's been to Mars before, and he was brainwashed into thinking he hadn't been! The plot ramps up into a typical but still entertaining "stop the evil man from implementing his evil plan!" story where Arnold and his hooker flame blow bullet holes into the foreheads of like three dozen henchmen before finally confronting the big bad himself, atop some giant pyramid mine structure. The result? Death to the bad guy, love for Arnold and his whore, and... the terraformation of Mars? Hey, it was 1990. I'll let it slide.

I'll leave you with this ten-minute loop of the main villain's death scene, in which he gasps for air and undergoes instant decompression sickness on the surface of Mars. Look, I don't need to see the remake to know that nothing in it can live up to this:

(The video won't embed, so just click here. You won't regret it.)

Blast Chamber

That's right boys and girls; it's a two-post Friday at Melrose Place. Awww yeahh. Not a whole lot to say about this one. Allow me to start from the beginning. Remember years and years ago how Game Informer or PlayStation Magazine or whatever periodicals were around at the time would release demo discs every month along with the magazine? I only ever bought like two or three such demo-inclusive magazines, but one of those included a brief multiplayer demo of the above game: Blast Chamber. In Blast Chamber, up to four people would compete to gather life-extending crystals in a rotatable cubic room. When you claimed a crystal you would gain an extra thirty seconds or so on a perpetually downward-counting timer. When said timer reached zero, you would explode. Last man standing wins! Or maybe it was the man who had exploded the fewest times over the course of five minutes or so. Or maybe both options existed. At any rate, it was a demo I enjoyed enough to play multiple times back when I was ten or so, even though I never had even the slightest urge to purchase it. (Wait, purchase? Back then, game acquisition was all about Christmas and birthday gifts; no wonder I never wasted a gift request on this thing.) So for whatever reason, after never having thought about this game whatsoever for at least ten years, the other month I was overcome by the sudden urge to, at the very least, look into it. I couldn't even remember what it was called. I might have stumbled upon the title purely by accident. At any rate, I gave it an Amazon search and, lo and behold, it was available, new, for dirt cheap. Sure, why not? Flash forward to earlier tonight. The fiancée is out drinking with coworkers, it's cold and rainy enough for me not to have any desire to go anywhere, and after a late Friday at the office it isn't even worth it to see if any friends feel like hanging out. That left me with basically one option: the lone wolf logging night! So after watching Teeth, I popped this old CD into the PS3 tray to give it a whirl. Less than an hour later I was done with the solo mode, which consisted of time trials rather than multiple-player deathmatches. I'd say I was underwhelmed, but honestly, I only even bought this game on a total whim based on some fun I had with a multi-player demo back in the late 1990s. I'm still holding out hope that someone will entertain me and play a round or two at my place someday. And if not? Hey, whatever. There's always more to cross off the backlog!

Teeth

So five years ago (wow!), my friends and I briefly contemplated renting this indie horror comedy flick. Previews and word of mouth had us giggling about the concept, which was basically that an innocent high school girl has sharp teeth in her vagina and chomps people's dicks off. Hilariously gruesome, right? To the best of my knowledge, none of us ever did see it (Sween? Trev?) but when I found the movie on Amazon for five bucks the other month I decided to give it a whirl.

The thing is, I pretty much had the movie figured out from the very beginning. Our heroine is a naive-beyond-naive Christian girl whose hobbies include quilting and abstinence. And, you know, she has teeth in her vagina. It's probably part of the reason she's never attempted to pleasure herself and struggles to even so much as imagine the appeal of sexual intercourse. Her high school's religious right policy against sexual education leaves her unaware that normal vaginas don't actually have teeth, and some very blatant recurring motifs suggest to the rest of us that this mutation she was born with gives her an "evolutionary advantage for survival."

(Time out! Bullshit! Having a toothed vagina - or vagina dentata, if you prefer the classy term - cannot possibly be an evolutionary advantage. Yes, the ability to ward off rapists is a survival advantage, but it comes with a much heavier sexual reproduction disadvantage. Those with toothed vaginas will undoubtedly have a tougher time reproducing and thus transmitting the condition down to the next generation. Come on, now! If you're gonna make a movie loaded snuff porn levels of genital gore, at least don't try to tack on subtext that has no right to exist! Okay, time in.)

At any rate, the movie unfolds exactly as you'd expect it to, as I've already said. In a nutshell, the innocent and terrified young woman learns how to use her mutation as a weapon with which to fend off rapists and other terrible guys.

Now, let's unfold that nutshell, so that none of you ever have to watch this thing. First the girl gets date raped by a boyfriend she had trusted as a fellow abstinent Christian. During her panic, she, umm, snaps those jaws shut, so to speak, and our assailant is suddenly out of penises. Terrified, she flees. She sees a gynecologist. She ends up biting his fingers off. Terrifed, she flees. She seeks out this other guy who has always respected her and been all kinds of pleasant to her when the other kids made fun of her for being a Jesus freak. He gets her drunk and romanced enough to have sex with her - so, also kind of a rape, but whatever - and then, in a twist, our girl is suddenly in control of her vagina teeth, and she lets her new guy finish unwounded. The next morning, she's checking out her naked body in the mirror, all pleased with herself, and it's like, "Whoa, wow! We sure have come a long way from that super innocent Christian girl who had no idea what her own body was doing just two days ago or so!" This, movie rookies, is the obvious moment where our heroine has come of age, gained empowerment, taken control of her situation, and however many other clichés you want to throw on top of all those. It should come as no surprise then, that when she hops back aboard the guy for a second go-round, and he starts being a total ass, talking to his friend on the phone about how he's banging her right now and everything, that she gives him the old wiener-ender right then and there. Yikes! Then she goes home and seduces her evil stepbrother and bites his dong off as well, and then she hitchhikes to another town and gives a terrifyingly knowing smirk to the old man who gave her the ride after he begins to make suggestive mouth gestures at her. The end!

I'll give Teeth credit where credit is due, which is merely to say that I appreciated the lead actress's performance and the brief running time. Now I want to air some grievances.

First, it was rather slow-moving and bland, as far as genital mutilation horror comedies go. I mean, by the time you're making a movie full of severed penises and graphic rape scenes, you've pretty much crossed all the lines worth crossing. Why not get clever from there? Where was the scene where a guy goes down on the girl and comes up babbling incoherently with blood dripping out of his mouth? Why wasn't there ever a reference made to her propensity for turning tampons into shredded cotton messes? When one guy tried to have anal sex with her - see, the movie even went there - why didn't the movie force its heroine to find a clever way to make him come through the front door? (All that happened was she shook her head. Given all the rape in the rest of the movie, why did "no" mean "no" just this once?) The movie was certainly already going for shock value, so why did it suffice for the same old trick several times over?

For that matter, aside from shock value, just what was the movie trying for? I already mentioned the repeated references to evolutionary defense mechanisms, so it'd be easy to think of the movie as a cautionary tale for men. Or was it a cautionary tale for women? Or a revenge fantasy for rape victims? When the protagonist went from being a victim who bit dicks off accidentally to a seductress actively hunting penises instead, was it a sign that she'd undergone an emotional maturity and a sense of empowerment? Or had she become another femme fatale trope, snagging vulnerable men inside her own little bear trap? By staying away from committing to any of these, the movie kind of failed to be anything but, well, shock-laden snuff.

And that's really what Teeth was at the end of the day. I shouldn't be surprised; five years ago, when we'd all half-jokingly bring up seeing the movie, it's all I expected it to be. For whatever reason, somewhere along the way - perhaps when I saw all the critical acclaim? - I decided that the movie was going to be clever or meaningful in some way. Nope. Just a standard cautionary tale of sorts with an ambiguous moral message and a handful of dismembered (or dis-membered!) young men.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Well hey now, that's three video games in five days for me. (Four if you count Carcassonne. Let's not.) I don't have a ton to say about this particular game that Sweeney didn't mention two and a half months ago in his post, and it's not because I'm too tired to come up with my own opinions. I just agree with everything he's already said about the game, and how it was exciting and fun as hell but was probably ultimately the most forgettable and least impactful installment of the Modern Warfare trilogy. This isn't to say it was a bad game or even a disappointing game; it's just that when the first Modern Warfare game came out in 2007, the things it was doing were almost entirely unprecedented, whereas this 2011 game doing some of the same old stuff for the third time in five years just doesn't make the same mark. The rule of the sequel, both in video games and action movies, is that each successive installment needs to be bigger, bolder, and more over-the-top than the previous one, and since Modern Warfare 3 is both a video game and an action movie, you better believe it does everything it can to raise the bar. In a nutshell, the plot is that World War III has broken out. The game begins in the smoldering war zone once known as Manhattan, and within twenty minutes of gameplay you've lit up the NYSE building, attached mines to a Russian submarine in a submerged tunnel, and experienced a high speed Zodiac raft chase in the Hudson Bay weaving around a sinking Russian carrier group. Wow! The Team America-esque world tour of destruction has only just begun, though, as you'll also try to stop chemical attacks in London, call in an airstrike on the Eiffel Tower, and soak the streets of Berlin in the blood of your enemies. (It wouldn't be a World War without mass death in Germany!) Jesus. Remember in the first game when having a nuke go off in the Middle East felt like a huge deal? And then how the second game was controversial because of that airport massacre?

I liked this game as much as I could have expected to. I also beat it in less than five hours. It was what it was - simple, straightforward, over-the-top, and loaded with cutscenes. If that sounds like something you might be interested in, try this game on for size. Better yet, just play the whole trilogy. It might only take you twenty hours. Coming up shortly for me will be Black Ops, the only Call of Duty game I have yet to beat.

Fable II

There's actually a whole lot I want to say about Fable II. I want to touch on my own experience with the game, on the game's triumphs and shortcomings in general, on Trev's very controversial Fable II post from two years ago, and on the quest through my video game backlog in general. Without any regard for natural transitions, and in no particular order, here we go.

Trev's post

In what can only be described as a key event in Back-Blogged history, Trev made a post in 2010 about Fable II, and specifically about how he would never beat the game. I did a double take or two at my computer screen and went off on an intentionally over-the-top tirade in the comments, condemning the post with whatever authority I had as the blog's creator, co-administrator, and most frequent contributor. I want to clear the air, two years later, not because I think it needs clearing but because here's the best place to do so. I was never opposed to the contents of the post itself; it's just that, having specifically set up a blog with which to document my own so-called quest through my own backlog, I was taken aback by the concept of somebody posting about a game they were never going to beat, right there alongside a bunch of posts about games I and others had put in the time and effort to beat. It immediately set a precedent I had never considered, really, and I worried about copycat posts coming from others and about the blog turning into a place for everyone to shit on games, books, and movies they never planned on finishing. Having said all of that, I liked the post itself; it was descriptive, lengthy, and interesting, like the best of these blog posts are. Having re-read Trev's post, it even sounds like the game itself simply failed on him, crashing multiple times and leaving him abandoned in certain save states with no way out. And that's shitty. That sucks. That's a failure on Fable II's part, and not a failure on Trev's. My only issue at the time was that I didn't think failures of any sort had any place on the blog. In hindsight, I think they do. I think Trev's post was perfectly reasonable. But I am glad I made a few edits, like greying out the cover art, adding a big "FAILED" stamp to it, and removing the post's "video game" tag. I actually encourage more posts like this. Tentatively, I mean. Like, I would never want to give up on a game or use one or two bugs as an excuse to put a game away for good, but at the same time I acknowledge that not everyone contributing to this blog has the same silly ideas about cleaning out their backlogs. To most, this is really more of a place to share thoughts on the movies, books, and games we're all consuming, and sharing stories about failures is just as important as sharing thoughts on successfully completed stuff.

The game

So what exactly is Fable II? It's an open-ended sandbox-style action (or Western) RPG. You control an almost completely customizable hero and your actions throughout the game dictate all sorts of things about the hero, right down to his appearance, weight, and reputation. This isn't Infamous or BioShock, with a simple "good vs. evil" karma bar that you're more or less meant to push to one extreme or the other; no, this is a game with a fully multi-dimensional feel to its characters. There are plenty of side quests and mini-games and collectable items - up to and including the ability to raise children and flip houses - but the main story is a pretty simple one. Basically, you've got to find and unite three heroes in order to stop an elderly prince who is hellbent on obtaining godlike powers. The ordeal takes you through an enormous world akin to those in Final Fantasy or newer Zelda games and you encounter a diverse array of characters. Oh, and you have a dog sidekick.

My experience

I began the game with no real idea of who I wanted my character to be, and early on I went through several different phases. The bearded wood-cutting lumberjack, the mace-swinging hotshot decked out in colonial America garb, the masked assassin with precision shooting - I went through all of these before ultimately settling on a do-good monk dressed in what looked exactly like Assassin's Creed robes. For the sake of gathering some Xbox Live achievements, I did some not-so-morally-sound things like marrying two women, killing bunnies, and kicking chickens; ultimately though, I was able to raise my "goodness" and "purity" (no alcohol or hookers, basically) to their maximum levels. I also got really fat at one point from eating too many pies; I solved this by eating a ton of celery (seriously). My weapon of choice was some sort of holy sparkling serrated axe that I got by donating a ridiculous amount of money to a temple. I spent a fair share of time on sidequests and mini-games, all the while fighting the urge to return to the main story for the sake of backlog reduction timeliness. Ultimately the game took me about ten to twelve hours to beat, and I'm confident I could have done it in six to eight without exploring and dicking around so much - which isn't to say I did the majority of what the game had to offer me. Far from it.

Two criticisms

This game lagged worse than any I'd ever played on a PS3, Wii, or Xox 360. It wasn't quite laggy enough to be completely broken, but it was choppy and sluggish enough to be annoying for sure. That's the easy and obvious criticism. The other deals with the game's slight case of schizophrenia. I've mentioned that this was a game where in addition to a fairly straightforward main quest, you could do all sorts of things, like engage in bigamy or grow morbidly obese. The all-inclusiveness was probably the game's biggest strength. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the game's tone, which varied from super-serious to comical and silly to everywhere in between, all with no regard for the story at hand. The game opens with a bird shitting on your head, and shortly thereafter you're making fart noises at citizens and wreaking little kid havoc. Then, minutes later, on a mandatory tiny sidequest you must either obtain a bottle of booze for a drunk or let his wife know he's been drinking too much. Alright, alcoholism treated as a serious problem rather than just for laughs. Interesting place for a game to go. Then just minutes later, the only character aside from your own that you've come to know so far gets murdered in cold blood and an attempt is made on your life. Yikes! You fall out a window and then the game cuts to a series of hand-painted still images that zoom in and out in a story intercut while a woman who sounds like the God of War narrator explains how you, the hero, have gone away for ten years and become a man. (Ocarina anyone?) So all within half an hour or so, this has become a game where birds shit on you, a game with a set code of conduct and morals, a game about vengeance, and, more than anything else, a game that really has no idea exactly what it wants to be. The multiple personality disorder continues throughout the game. There were times when the atmosphere grew creepy as hell and a shadowy monster scared the shit out of me, and there were times when NPCs engaged in witty banter that made me laugh. A decent chunk of the game took place in a gruesome prison camp of sorts filled with slave labor. This multitude of tonal ability should have been a strength for the game but if anything I found it to be a detriment. My hunch is that this is because of a weak overall story at the core of the game. That powerful scene in which your childhood companion is murdered out of the blue in front of you? That should have lasting and meaningful implications. Instead it's rarely mentioned again until coming back in a big way at the very end of the game, and I'm left wondering how seriously the game wants me to take it. I can bang hookers like in GTA - hell, I can even get STDs if I don't wear condoms - but one of the options the game gives me for social interactions is to do this weird dance while I spread my asshole open and fart loudly. It's as if, in its mission to be everything it can, the game has forgotten the need to be something specific first and foremost at the end of the day. Oh well. There are worse ways for games to disappoint.

My video game backlog

Not tonight. This post has grown absurdly long and rather than edit it down into something decent I'm just going to hit the hay. Ongoing logging thoughts can wait for another post.

Overall, a decent little game. Flawed. Not perfect. Glad I spent some time exploring and doing mini-games and side quests, but also glad that the main story was as short and simple as it was. Enjoyed the game enough to at least consider buying its predecessor and direct sequel. But not yet. Not yet.

Good night!

The Wire - Season 1

Hello world-

I am here to regale you with my stories and adventures watching the Wire Season 1. It's an epic tale.* For quite some time now, people have been all like "hey, gurlllll, the Wire is the best show on the teeveez. You should totes watch it". People are all like, it's better than the Soprano's. And I'm thinking,  well I saw the Soprano's and it was good but not the best ever. And then they say, "it's even better than your boy Jesse in Breaking Bad". And I'm like "nuh uh son, that show is the hardest hitting show the league". Anywho, my domestic partner recently (sorta?) watched the show and confirmed everyone's opinion. It's just the bomb diggity. So I decided to give it a try. I was pretty worried that it wouldn't live up to the hype because MAN was it hyped. Steve tried to warn me that it was slow and I may not like it at first. And I'm all like, c'mon man, the best show on TV shouldn't get a warning. But it did. And I watched it anyways!

I watched the first Season with Steve and he helped me remember character's names. And boy are they a lot of them. The good news? All the characters are super fun! Stringer Bell is the man. Bubbles is the man. Keema is the woman. They all rule! I think it helped that Steve was watching with me, but I really liked it. Super good. Super interesting. Loved it. Gonna go watch more. (Steve won't let me watch more without posting. So here ya go, dude)

ON TO SEASON 2!

*Disclaimer: It's not actually an epic tale.

Phoenix Wright- Ace Attorney

I loved the Professor Layton series and when I heard that they were planning a cross over game with the Phoenix Wright series I figured that I should check it out. I was interested to find out what kind of game they could cross with Layton so I borrowed the whole series from B-Town. After many months and a few setbacks, including a broken DS I had to send back to Nintendo for repairs and a lot of time spent training for a Marathon, I finally finished the first game in the series.

I both loved and hated this game. I enjoyed the game play thoroughly as it is quite unique. In the game you are a defense attorney and you have to solve the case and acquire a not guilty verdict for your client. The court has its own set of rules that you are restricted by. The case can not exceed three trial days, which are split up by spans of time in which you are required to investigate and discover the clues you need to use in your clients defense. In court you are required to break down the arguments of the witnesses and either discredit them or prove that they are outright lying. This gets a bit hectic because if you present the wrong piece of evidence, or at the wrong time, too many times the judge declares your client guilty and you are forced to restart the chapter from the beginning. This can be wearisome because that means you need to sit through all the same dialogue that took an eternity to go through the first time. The other thing that drove me crazy about this game is that you have to search a bunch of locations for clues or evidence and often times you have no idea what you are looking for or where to start. I spent hours clicking on random stuff hoping I would accidentally stumble upon something relevant. In one case I was forced to use a walk through only to discover that the item I was looking for was in a remote area in a safe in a corner that I could barely discern.

After skimming back over my post I feel that I have focused more on the things I hated about the game and glossed quickly over the things I truly enjoyed. Let me remedy that situation now. This game is as I said "truly unique." It's one of those games that somebody probably threw the idea out there in a brainstorming session and everyone sat back and said "that sounds amazing but how do we pull it off." The processes of questioning everything the witness says trying to find faults and using evidence to discredit them is actually quite fun when you aren't trying to present evidence at random and hoping to get lucky. When you know what the misstep is and how to prove it you just want to yell "objection," and because of the on board microphone and the awesomeness of the game you actually can and it works. Like wise when you want more information from a witness you can scream "hold it" at your DS and they will give you more information.

The best part of the game is the cases and the wacky characters that you encounter.  The cases are well thought out and get longer and more thorough as the game progresses (five cases in total). The last case took me a long time to beat but in the end after all the plot twists and turns it was easily my favorite of the group. The characters are amazing because they are clearly a Japanese twist on Americans. Its like an odd version of Anime but dumbed down for an American audience.

After finishing the game I am still very curious to see how they go about mashing this game up with the Professor Layton style. Both are very unique and it will be fun to see how they shave the edges of each game to get them to work together. Having played at least one game from both series now I doubt there will be a cool balance of familiar with another truly unique game play experience.

Carcassonne

Real quick entry here. I've been getting into strategy board games over the past year or so, thanks in large part to some coworkers. This is a very simple and popular example of that European strategy genre of games, and I'd never played it, so when I found a version of it sitting there on Xbox Live Arcade for five bucks, I jumped on it. (The actual board game retails for something like $25 or $30, so this was, in a way, a real steal.) I learned the rules of the game and beat an AI opponent twice in the course of an hour, so I think I can safely call this one "beaten." And I definitely enjoyed it. The gist is that players take turns placing tiles next to each other that constitute a landscape of sorts with villages, roads, and fields. You score points based on a few simple metrics, like how long the roads are, how big the villages are, and how many towns each field is adjacent to. Simple enough rules, but the create-the-board-as-you-go element makes for a practically limitless variety of ways for the games to play themselves out. I'm glad I bought this for $5 on Xbox, because I think I can now safely pass on buying the full thing for $25 or $30. It's not that I don't like it; it's just that more than anything I was curious to play the game, and now that I've done so, I'll likely buy an entirely different board game the next time I'm in the mood for one.

Call of Duty 3

I never had any real desire to play this game aside from the fact that I've played so many other Call of Duty games. But I managed to beat the entire thing in one Friday night and one Saturday morning, so at least I didn't have to devote a ton of time to it. I've said this before, and so has fellow Call of Duty enthusiast Sweeney, but when you play so many of these games they all kind of start to blur together in memory. The reason for that is that they're all so damn identical to one another. Enter the trenches; clear out three buildings; snipe the mortar teams; navigate the tank through the villages. So many of these World War II combat staples have just worn out their welcome for me, I guess. They were at least somewhat "new" in the first Call of Duty game, and in World at War they were done with an excellent sort of fervor and excitement. Here? Meh. I'd actually go as far as to say that this was the least fun I've ever had with a Call of Duty game to date. The aforementioned original one was certainly clunkier and shittier overall, but that at least had the charm of being the first of many, like the Zelda and Mario and Mega Man games from the 1980s. When this 2006 game got slow or buggy, I just felt kind of frustrated. There's no reason for an NPC to be standing in the center of the doorway I need to go through while yelling at me that we need to go through the doorway. There's no reason I should have to backtrack a hundred yards to run through the general area that will toggle my teammates to realize that we need to advance a hundred yards... to where I had been waiting for them in the first place. There were a few new aspects introduced here, like driving a Jeep around under heavy fire, or QTE hand-to-hand combat gimmicks, but the game ultimately felt much more poorly and clumsily made than it should have. I didn't hate Call of Duty 3, but after playing its excellent sequels and its non-terrible predecessors, I was definitely disappointed by the offering overall.

Swamp Thing

Another notch in the B-Grade horror movie belt. This is Wes Craven's third major motion picture in his career (I consider Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes to be the first two - there are some others on his resume, but they seem extremely obscure). While Swamp Thing is technically a comic book/superhero film, I think this still bares some resemblance to your standard horror flick. Now, I know practically know nothing about the Swamp Thing comic books, so cannot not attest to how close this adaptation is to the canon storyline, but this is how things breakdown in the film.

In the swamps of Louisiana, Dr. Alec Holland is working at a secret government laboratory studying the plants and wildlife of the area. With some evidence of violent extremists sabotaging the scientific-monitoring equipments scattered throughout the marshes, FBI agent Alice Cable arrives to provide some tactical support. Before you know it, the extremists break into the laboratory compound led by one of the FBI agents in disguise and root through all of the Holland's experiments to learn what he has been working on - a new plant/animal-hybrid organism that can survive in the most inhospitable environments known to man. During a fight, Holland is covered with this strange new substance, which explodes, covering him in flames. He runs through the area (actually a fairly cool scene) and dives into the swamp where he presumably dies.

As you can guess, Holland is not dead. Instead the organism makes him half-man, half-plant - Swamp Thing. 

The rest of the movie is extremely formulaic and uninteresting. Alice has escaped the extremists and made away with Holland's notebook containing the priceless information on his research. Our villain, Dr. Anton Arcane, is forced into trying to chase her down. Everytime his goons get close, Swamp Thing appears and stops him with his superhuman strength and the ability to regenerate his limbs if wounded. 

The story culminates with Arcane finally capturing Alice and Swamp Thing, imprisoning them both in his medieval-looking dungeon beneath his giant, elegant mansion situated in the middle of fucking hicks-ville USA. Sort of like Superman, when Swamp Thing is concealed from the Sun's rays he weakens. Trapped in the basement, his powers shrink. And with Arcane finally in possession of Holland's notebook is able to recreate the serum that made Holland into Swamp Thing. Once ingested, Arcane takes on quite a different look...

WTF?!

Swamp Thing makes note of what you turn into after taking the serum resembles something of your inner-self - I wasn't really paying much attention at this point. Regardless, I think Arcane turns into a large version of some swamp-rat that Holland points out early in the film. He grabs a sword and chases after Swamp Thing and Alice (as they've just escaped Arcane's Dungeon) and have a final battle out in the swamps. Of course Arcane is slain, Swamp Thing wins, and Alice is finally saves. The last scene is Swamp Thing returning to the marshes telling Alice to head back to D.C. to "tell their story." It's a bullshit ending to a bullshit movie.

I understand that this is a cult film that is great to poke fun of, but when viewed alone on a Thursday evening it can get pretty boring. Reading up on the film's background, apparently this was Wes Craven's attempt to show Hollywood that he's ready to take on some larger projects. There are stunts, action, some more serious acting (I suppose). Frankly, I still enjoy his other two previous movies more than this, but it's still a little time before he makes A Nightmare on Elm Street and redefines the horror movie genre - then doing it again with Scream. 

In case I haven't made it clear yet, I would avoid this. I don't image anyone was chomping at the bit to see it - or even knew it existed - but it's low-budget and campy acting can make it fairly painful to watch... and not in a good-MST3000 way. 

Regardless, there's been some buzz for the past few years regarding a remake (or reboot?) to this franchise to be led by The Matrix Trilogy producer Joel Silver. Still don't know what's going on with it, but seeing as how comic book films are continuously on the rise, I imagine it won't be long till with see our green friend back on the big screen.