Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward

Just over two years ago, I purchased and played through Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and absolutely loved it. I devoured that game, several-hour chunks at a time, right in the middle of the holiday season. (I want to say I began the game on 12/22 and finished it on 12/26.) Anyway, I gushed and gushed over it for one obscenely long paragraph here on the blog, and yet when I went back and reread that post just now, I realized just how much more I could have gushed.

I'll spare everyone that endless specific praise this time around and just say, holy shit guys, play these games. (Oh yeah - this game is that game's sequel, which I guess isn't clear based on their titles alone.) Once again, I played through the entire game in four or five days. This time though, I did it during a work week, racking up something obscene like six hours a night. I went to bed at midnight, playing this, with every intention of stopping in an hour or so, and I'd stay awake and alert right through four in the morning. It wasn't my wisest recurring decision. Honestly though, you should be prepared to do something similar when you play these games. And again, you really need to play these games. I recommend a lot of things here on the blog, but this Zero Escape series has the distinction of being something that no one else has experienced that I just absolutely loved. The last series of posts like that, for me, were 2012's A Song of Ice and Fire offerings. At the time of this writing, Nine Hours is available on Amazon for $17. Not bad, for a game that went out of print a year ago!

At this point, this post is nothing but a hard sales pitch with very little description of what the game is - actually, to this point, none whatsoever. So I'll do my best to give a brief five-sentence description. Ready?

It's a visual novel - a "choose your own adventure" type of story on a video game platform - interspersed with "escape the room" point-and-click puzzles that stay thematically relevant to the overall story at hand. It's got a fully fleshed out ensemble of easily distinguishable characters, each with slightly different circumstantial motivations. The whole thing plays out over multiple parallel timelines that you can jump between, seeing which decisions and outcomes affect things for better and worse in which ways. The central mystery is supported by a bevy of smaller bits of intrigue that you tend to forget about until they surface, and the game seems to find the right balance of obvious twists, red herrings, and subverting expectations. The story itself is full of pseudo-science, urban legends, philosophy, and science fiction, allowing almost every puzzle in it to be poignant beyond the context of the game itself.

Does that work for you?

Mad Men: Season 6

There weren't a ton of "big moments" in the sixth season of Mad Men, and the show spent what felt like a lot of time revisiting old grounds. There's a surprise company merge reminiscent of Season 3's finale's twist, Don's having a fairly standard affair with another married woman, and the characters continue to react to tragic news in the form of dead soldiers, violent riots, and the murders of public figures (though we only have history to blame for the tragic 1963/1968 parallel Kennedy assassinations, I guess). I'm sure there was an intention behind all of this - that the show wanted to show how even though the times may change, individuals don't. That's a great and powerful stance to take, but it just didn't make for as memorable a season of television as the previous two (and possibly three; I need to rewatch Seasons 2 and 3 to get a feel for those again, someday).

Of course, none of this means Mad Men was bad or boring TV in Season 6. It remained one of my favorite shows ever, full of sharp writing, stunning visuals, and impeccable acting. It just didn't feel as monumental this time around. Season 7 has been confirmed to be the show's last, albeit split into two parts, and maybe this sixth season will wind up being an essential bridge season between where we were in 4 and 5 and where we're going in 7. Time will tell.

Here are a few quick parting thoughts.

• Mad Men gets plenty of recognition for its era-appropriate costuming, but after reading a few of these posts I appreciate the importance of costuming on a whole new level. It's something I've never paid much attention to, but I find myself fascinated by the wardrobe theorizing going on out there on the Internet. Seriously, check it out. An excerpt: "Also worth noting is that in the Chevy scenes, Bob is wearing Pete's old power color blue suit. It's a nice visual cue that Bob is going to take Pete's spot on the account." Another excerpt: "We predicted right from the beginning of this season that not only would Peggy and Abe break up, but that they would break up over philosophical differences. And we did that solely by looking at the clothes they were wearing in their scenes together." Great stuff.
• Couple of F-bombs this season! I can't remember if they bleeped those out in the AMC broadcasts, but I feel like I'd have remembered them either way.
• I don't know how many of you guys have seen Freaks and Geeks, but I have, and it never once occurred to me that the elegant, stuffy housewife Don has an affair with this season was played by the same actress as the spunky high school girl who befriends a bunch of burnouts, but, well, wow:

Resident Evil: Extinction

Sorry for the lag in all these posts. Yes, I have watched all the movies in this franchise -- in fact, I finished them just before the holidays -- but I'm being lazy posting them. (And, according to Stan, I have an unfinished post on JFK? Eh, doesn't surprise me. I'll get to them all. Just get off my back! ) So... the third film in the Resident Evil franchise. Let's get to it!

Last we left off, Alice was rescued from another secret Umbrella research facility with her cronies that escaped Raccoon City along side her. Well that's kind of unnecessary information at this point. As the film starts off (just like every film in this franchise) Alice begins narrating the setup of this story that's occurring some undisclosed time after the last film -- let's say six months to a year. First thing she discusses is how the T-virus outbreak escaped from the confines of Raccoon City (even though it was nuked) and have spread across the entire world essentially creating the apocalypse. Wait... Stop...

In the previous film we focused on zombies confined to a city. Then this movie we flash-forward to see Alice, doing her best Mad Max impersonation, trekking through the desert wastelands of a post-apocalyptic world. The story to fight against the end of the world is completely overlooked. What the fuck? I WANT THAT STORY! Where's the tale of losing the planet to the T-virus? Humanity standing together to save the world but ultimately loses. Again, what the fuck?! Did the producers and writers hear that concept and just yawned? "Oh, you know what would be even better than making moving where we show the mankind fight a losing war with this horrifying zombie outbreak? A movie where we summarize this information in the intro with a mere 10-second CGI clip. Yeah, that's some captivating filmmaking. Let's do it." It's not as though I place this franchise high on a mantle or anything, but their decision to overlook that biggest battle of all times is perhaps the biggest letdown I've ever experienced in my cinephile life. 

In fact, I'm done with this post. There's really not much else to say. In terms of the big plot points, Umbrella has been trying to make clones of Alice as she is -- somehow -- the only human to successfully bind with the T-virus in a non-destructive way. Well, it essentially makes her into a superhuman. However, Umbrella has been unsuccessful duplicating Alice. Oh, but did I mention they actually have Alice programed as their solider (some computer chip in her eyeball will flicker when she's activated). So at a flip of a switch, Umbrella can activate her as their own personal slave/solider. Yet, the whole movie is spent with them trying to "find" her as if they never had this capability to begin with. Argh!!! The logic gaps in this story make me so angry! 

This is the most disappointing film the series... so far. However, much like the Fast & Furious franchise, it does get better as the films progress. Let's hope that the upcoming sixth film keeps that trend alive. 

A Storm of Swords

I love it when a plan comes together... early on when starting into the A Song of Ice and Fire series of books, I planned on spacing the first three out somewhat evenly between seasons 3 and 4 of Game of Thrones. I figured three books was the optimal amount to read as it would likely give me knowledge of the first half of the fourth season; I could get the best of both worlds by being a reader who knows when some big plots twists are coming, and then I could go back to being completely unaware how the season would end. And here I am near the end of January with book 3, A Storm of Swords, completed. And it was awesome. Most of the Back-Blog members are already aware of the huge events of Game of Thrones' third season- Jamie's redemption arc, Daenerys' attempts to free the slaves in Essos, and of course the brutal red wedding. But this only takes up about 60% of the book, and there are a ton of huge twists to come; if anything, there's far more action in the rest of the book than what we've seen already on tv. My only complaint is that for several spoiler-y reasons, the red wedding didn't feel nearly as bad this time around (and not just because I knew it was coming this time). Still though, I had heard that A Storm of Swords was the best book in the series so far, and it lived up to the hype. Now I wait a few months for season 4, then at some point this summer I'll return for the widely-derided fourth book, A Feast for Crows. Seriously though, read the books. It's not that they're better than the show, but the two forms of media just complement eachother perfectly.

Ecco the Dolphin

Here's the first game thus far into the Genesis project that...

• I had heard of before this month.
• felt like a true full video game in its own right, and not just a port of an arcade game.
• took me more than one sitting to beat.
• felt like it mattered in some way.

So, yeah. Ecco the Dolphin is the cream of the shitty, shitty crop so far. It looked and played like something I'd have enjoyed when I was a child. You're a dolphin. Aliens have abducted your friends and it's up to you to save the day. And then the world. You can swim and attack things and send out sonar waves. That's really all there is to the game, but the levels were varied enough, and the game itself long enough - and the music and visuals pleasing enough - for me to see why this one is remembered so fondly by some people. Here's an abridged storyline summary from Wikipedia, because this game - like every Sega Genesis game - plays out like an Adult Swim cartoon.

Upon leaving the bay to search for his pod, he contacts several dolphins from other pods, who tell him the entire sea is in chaos, and that all marine creatures had felt the storm. An orca tells Ecco to travel to the Arctic to find a blue whale named the "Big Blue," who is revered among marine mammals for its age and wisdom. Once Ecco finds him, the Big Blue tells him such storms had been occurring every 500 years and directs him to the Asterite, the oldest creature on Earth. He leaves the Arctic and travels to a deep cavern where he finds the Asterite. Although it has the power to aid him, one of its globes is missing, and needs it returned. However, this can only be achieved by traveling back in time using a machine built by the ancient Atlanteans. Ecco travels to the sunken city of Atlantis, where he discovers the time machine and an ancient library. He learns the cause of the storm; it was a harvest of Earth's waters that was conducted every 500 years by an alien species known as the Vortex. Learning this, he activates the time machine and travels 55 million years into Earth's past. Ecco locates the Asterite in the past but is immediately attacked by it. Forced into battle, Ecco manages to dislodge a globe from it. This opens a time portal and he is sent back into the present. After receiving the globe, the Asterite grants him the power to turn his sonar into a deadly weapon against the Vortex. The Asterite instructs Ecco to use the time machine to travel back in time to the hour of the harvest. This time Ecco manages to be sucked into the waterspout along with his pod. Once inside the waterspout, Ecco makes his way towards the Vortex Queen, the leader of the Vortex race, and destroys her, rescuing his pod.

I can only imagine what happens in the two sequels!

Ecco the Dolphin
Arrow Flash
Alien Storm
DecapAttack
Comix Zone
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon

The Nintendo GameCube was one of my favorite game consoles of all time. Not just because of its hardiness or its excellent controller, but also because Nintendo just had some big old balls during that entire development cycle. A Mario Kart game with two people in each cart. A Star Fox game in the third-person adventure genre. A first-person Metroid game. A Zelda game rendered in cel-shaded cartoonish graphics, set on the open sea. A Super Mario game based almost entirely on spraying water. A Kirby racing game. A Donkey Kong rhythm game. These were all radical ideas, and they led to a wide array of results. Some of them fell flat, some were met with acclaim, some are mocked and ridiculed to this day, and some of them drastically altered the course of their respective franchises for the better. It was a hell of an era, and Nintendo wasted no time jumping into this high-risk mindset when they decided to launch their new console without a Super Mario game, banking instead on gamers' interest in Luigi. Luigi's Mansion was one of fourteen launch titles for the system and in the absence of a Super Mario game became the marquee title for the GameCube. I played it and liked it a lot. I wasn't alone. It was met with critical acclaim and wound up being the GameCube's fifth-best selling title of all time when all was said and done. (The top four? Super Smash Bros. Melee and three games I referenced above, in Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, Super Mario Sunshine, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.)

Anyway, the game was soon forgotten about, and left without a sequel or any plans for one. In the ultimate indignity, it soon became little more than a punchline for those who thought the GameCube was a failure due to Nintendo's poor decision-making. So it gave me great pleasure when Dark Moon was announced, and even greater pleasure when it was released to all sorts of acclaim. It bothers me a little bit that a lot of people seem to cite it as an all-around improvement to Luigi's Mansion, finally "getting it right" where that franchise had somehow screwed things up ten years ago, but maybe I'm in the minority who just remember the first game fondly.

For the uninitiated, both Luigi's Mansion games revolve around Luigi using a vacuum cleaner to suck up a punch of pesky ghosts that have invaded an old, run down building. In the first game, that was one sprawling mansion. Here, it's five smaller distinct buildings. That about sums up the difference between the two, and honestly, I prefer the sort of open-ended feel the first game had to the level-based system from this one. But I'm not complaining, because both games are great. Blog readers know I'm not the type of guy to take my time with a game unless I'm really enjoying it, and this was a perfect example of such an instance; I collected every Boo (one in every level) and gem (thirteen in each... "world," for lack of a better term) in the game, often looping back through previously-played levels just to get that 100% completion.

This was one of the best games I've played in a while. Like, easily a top ten or fifteen game from the past year or two, and narrowly able to edge out Super Mario 3D Land as my favorite 3DS title to date. Check it out. And check out the first Luigi's Mansion too.

DecapAttack

Somewhat shockingly, I'm already one third finished with the Genesis project. And while I definitely have some fatigue - hell, I started the project fatigued - I'm cautiously optimistic about what lies ahead. Even without the eight Sonic games included in this collection - games I'm starting to realize truly were, far and away, the cream of the Genesis crop - I've still got titles left like Ecco, Shinobi, Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, and Virtua Fighter. It's not that I'm banking on those games being good; it's just that I've at least heard of them, which is more than I can say for literally any game beaten in the Genesis project so far.

But in addition to setting myself up for disappointment, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's talk about DecapAttack. It's one of the better platformers I've played so far, in which you are a headless monster. You can find heads here and there, and you use them as projectile weapons, and I'm starting to realize just now as I'm typing this that that's where the game's name comes from. You decapitate yourself and attack enemies with your own head. How cool is that?

Arrow Flash
Alien Storm
DecapAttack
Comix Zone
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Crack Down

Last summer I played through the Xbox 360 game Crackdown, a satisfying blend of elements from Infamous and Grand Theft Auto. This game was nothing like that game. It's a top-down stealth shooter of sorts where you move at molasses-like speeds to plant bombs and not get shot.

It was dreck. I'm sure it would have been both easier and more fun with two players, like so many other Sega Genesis games that are essentially arcade ports, but I wouldn't wish the experience of playing through even two or three Sega Genesis games on anyone I care about.

No, this is my quest, my penance for something or other I must have done at some point, and I'm not about to force my wife or friends to help me bear this burden.

#SegaMartyr

#SlowlyLosingMySanity

Arrow Flash
Alien Storm
Comix Zone
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Comix Zone

After a relatively lengthy hiatus from the Genesis project, Comix Zone is the ninth game to fall. It was hard, but it was short. And I have to admit, I kind of enjoyed it. Part of this has to be because the game was released in 1995, and is thus among the most modern - or just least ancient - games in the Genesis catalog. You're a comic book artist (seen above, looking every bit like a cross between Meat Loaf and Steven Seagal) - no, you know what? Let's allow Wikipedia to describe this one.

"One night, while Sketch is working on Comix Zone during a thunderstorm, a lightning bolt strikes a panel of his comic. In this instant, the main villain of Comix Zone - a powerful mutant named Mortus - manages to escape the comic book's pages, desiring to kill Sketch so he can become flesh and blood and take over the real world. Because he does not possess any power in reality, Mortus sends Sketch into the world of his own comic, freely drawing in enemies to try and kill him."

So, yeah. You're the comic book artist, trapped in your own comic book, and now your own creation is drawing enemies in to try to kill you. Why not just remodel the game entirely so that you're a comic book drawing trying to avoid the creations of an evil comic book artist? Like, why subvert what is already implausible on too many levels and also completely unheard of?

In the end this was another dumb beat-em-up, but it looked prettier than so many others from the Genesis era and the combat was satisfyingly bulky and clunky. Every encounter felt like a Street Fighter match, for better or worse.

Arrow Flash
Alien Storm
Comix Zone
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns III
Columns
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Super Smash Bros. Brawl

So if I'm being honest, I do not technically own a copy of this game. I finally the game to run from a flash drive. Moreover, I finally got it to run Project M, the version that we will be playing in our tournament on February 1st. It tooks me hours to get Project M to work on a pirated copy of the game. Anyway, first I'll take on Project M. From what I can tell, it's a version of Brawl that tweaks gameplay to more closely resemble Melee. AWESOME. I loved Melee. Not as much as some of you other people, but enough. But you guys love it so much that I think I've watched more Melee than I've played any other game in my life. Seriously. Anyway, back to Project M. They've added back Marth and Mewtwo as well as added additional stages and skins for all the characters. My skin of choice is Dry Bones Bowser. Bowser is back to his Melee self and he just brings the fucking pain. This guy is a KO machine. He also dies a lot because he is such a big target. Anyway, after playing a few matches against computer opponents, I jumped into story "Classic" mode in which you just fight some people and then fight the giant hand. That giant hand is a bitch when you are a big target like Bowser, but I just took the punishment and dealt out more of my own. Bottom line, Project M brings new life into this game while we wait for the new Smash Brothers. It does not, however, alter single player in any way other than gameplay and therefore I consider Brawl beaten.

Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court

So here's the deal with this book. I have three copies of it! My father has purchased it for me on two separate Christmases and I just got it last year from my uncle. Suffice to say, this is very popular among our parents' generation. John Wooden is one of the most beloved and respected coaches of all time. He led UCLA to 7 straight NCAA National Championships and quit after they won 10 Championships in 12 years after he realized he no longer wanted to deal with the press. Though this book is not particularly well written (like I can talk), it's a very pleasurable read. It's aptly named as it is just a bunch of observations. There's no real flow to the book. It reads the way my grandpa talks. He just jumps from topic to topic randomly. I guess that makes sense seeing as Coach Wooden was in his late 70s when he "wrote" it. Anyway, the real take away from this book is just that winning isn't everything (that's easy for a 10-time National Champion to say). He loved coaching because he spent every day trying to get each and every one of his players to be their very best. To him, that was winning. Now, it's very expiring, but this can come off as disingenuous if it weren't for the millions and millions of people that back this guy as being one of nicest people of all time. Anyway, my favorite story was one in which Bill Walton came to practice after a break with a beard. Coach Wooden asked him why he had a beard when the team policy was to not have a beard. Bill said that he thought he deserved to wear the beard and Coach Wooden told him that the team was surely gonna miss him. Anyway, I'm not doing the guy justice but he was a incredible coach. Interesting side note, he forced all of his players to put their socks on the same way because he said it taught them to follow directions. This should count as three posts.

Nintendo Land

Frankly, for me there's no telling when you've really "beaten" this game. For the unfamiliar, it's a collection of twelve minigames based on existing Nintendo franchises, ostensibly set at a carnival-like place, and designed to show off different features of the Wii U's controllers and overall potential. It's a giant marketing gimmick, plain and simple. But it's also a lot of fun, particularly in these early stages of the Wii U's lifetime when the multiplayer games are quite limited. Some minigames are meant to be played with friends cooperatively, others against friends competitively, and all the rest entirely solo - though these still provide plenty of competition fodder in the form of high score battles. Anyway, I've played all twelve of the games multiple times and I've unlocked several modes and I've mastered a few of the minigames (two, I think?) and I've shown the game off to family members the way you'd show off Wii Sports to family members in 2007. In essence, I'd say I've experienced the vast bulk of this one, and while plenty of individual challenges remain, I've done enough to comfortably call this one "beaten." Not 100% finished or completed or anything, but certainly "beaten." I don't want to drone on and describe each of the twelve games in detail, so instead I'll offer a superlative for each one.

Least enjoyable game I am most skilled at: Yoshi's Fruit Cart

Most enjoyable game I am least skilled at: Donkey Kong's Crash Course

Best solo adventure: Pikmin Adventure

Best cooperative adventure: The Legend of Zelda: Battle Quest

Most intuitive control scheme: Mario Chase

Clumsiest control scheme: Metroid Blast

Most replay value: Captain Falcon's Twister Race

Least replay value: Takamaru's Ninja Castle

Most stressful game: Animal Crossing: Sweet Day

Most relaxing game: Balloon Trip Breeze

Overall most essential game: Luigi's Ghost Mansion

Overall least essential game: Octopus Dance

Fight me on these superlatives. No, really. I'm dying to give Nintendo Land some kind of meaningful place in the Back-Blogged zeitgeist.

English Country Tune

This one was added to the indie Humble Bundle I bought several months ago, several weeks after I purchased it- I swear, once you sign up for Steam it's like they just start throwing more games at you than you can handle. I had never heard anything about English Country Tune, which is a shame because it might be my favorite of all the games in that bundle that I've played. It's really just a no-bullshit series of logic puzzles where you control a flat square that move around on big 3-D platforms by flipping itself over repeatedly. The first set of puzzles may seem familiar at first, in which you attempt to push a marble into a designated hole, but the twist comes up fast- gravity is completely different in this world and depends entirely on the orientation of your little square. For instance, pushing the marble around from the 'ground' may do just that- move the marble where you expect it to, but pushing it in the exact same direction except while attached to the wall, and it'll go flying. This may be tough to visualize, so take a look at this clip to get a better idea of what a mindfuck this is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61YQybRVNPk

 This wouldn't be so tough if you could set the camera exactly how you want it (it's much easier when you can just constantly re-orient gravity as simply "down") but the game insists on snapping back to its designated view before you can move your square, forcing you to think critically about every move you make. It's difficult, and I couldn't even make it past the second set of levels (out of like 15 sets) without a walkthrough, but it's fun just messing around with gravity and seeing what works and what doesn't. New puzzle types show up the further you go, such as "whales" or "gardens". Whales are blocks that you can't touch directly, but have beams of light shooting out in all directions which you can push to move the whale. "Gardens" were easily my favorite kind of logic puzzle, where a new unmovable cube sprouts up on every tile your square lands on, and the level won't finish until you've sprouted every possible cube. My explanation might be shitty here too so check out these gameplay clips:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef85oibJv0w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WekbRP6KPaw

So yeah, if you're looking for some straight physics puzzles with no extra trappings to distract from the puzzle at hand, English Country Tune certainly fills that need. My only real complaint is the pacing- early on I ran into a puzzle that felt impossible, and wasn't sure if I wanted a whole game to be ball-bustingly hard. But the level of difficulty is seemingly random; sometimes I would waste a half hour on a puzzle, give up and resort to a walkthrough, and then breeze through the next puzzle on my first try. Other than that and the game's non-sensical name (I have no idea what it's supposed to mean), I enjoyed my time with English Country Tune.

The Office: Season 9

Oh boy. Time for another post on the final season of a long-running show. You all know my takes by now; a solid final season can save the legacy of a floundering series, and a solid final episode can make up for a shaky final season. So, how did The Office manage in its ninth and final season? Let's break it down.

The Final Season

It had its share of rough spots, no question. Andy, ostensibly the main character in Season 8, was turned into a full-on villain for no apparent reason. That character has always been hard to pin down, but why they decided to make him an all-out dick in the final season escapes me. Fortunately, he was absent for nearly half of the episodes, all right in the middle of the season. While developments like this only pushed the overall idea of Dunder Mifflin's day-to-day functioning further and further into absurdity - the branch manager is gone for three months, the CEO has no idea, the workers openly abandon any pretense of doing work, and somehow they have their best quarter in years? - it was nice not to have to deal with Andy for a while. That's how terrible he became. Elsewhere, Jim and Pam finally began to experience their first troubled waters in an otherwise storybook-perfect six-year relationship. This was a welcome development, but its execution was iffy at best. That Jim would hide a career-changing decision from Pam seems asinine, given the character. And that Pam would fight Jim on moving away to Philadelphia from Scranton - which had long been established on the show as kind of a place where dreams went to die - doesn't jibe with her eight-year arc of dreaming about doing something more with her life than being a receptionist (and later salesperson) at a failing paper company. The season's worst decision of all was introducing Brian the boom mic guy as a potential wrinkle in the Jim-Pam romance. This is a guy who has worked on the documentary crew covering the office for nine years, who we've never seen nor heard about, who could have made his move on Pam back when she was single, but who instead waits until now that Pam is a married mother of two in order to reach out in some way. Just awful stuff. Why even have this character? Why couldn't someone like Dwight or Toby or one of the new guys filled that role for the four episodes it lasted? It just felt so sloppy and terrible. Overall, though, the final season wasn't sloppy and terrible. It was rough, for sure, and not nearly as funny or emotionally resonant as it once was, but it did all feel more relevant to the overall story of these coworkers and their lives than some of the middle-to-late seasons did - Sabre, DeAngelo Vickers, Robert California, and so on. This was a tired horse, and one that needed to be put down, no question, but it was also a horse that deserved one last lap in the sun. This season was that lap. The horse was hobbling and stumbling sometimes and you had to squint really hard to convince yourself this was the same horse that once ran those laps so beautifully and effortlessly, but the effort was passable enough. And that's my terrible metaphor for Season 9.

The Finale

Almost flawless. The finale was an epilogue, picking up one year after the documentary had finally aired. A few main characters - most of them, really - have retired, left, or otherwise been fired from Dunder Mifflin since then, but they're all back in Scranton on the same weekend for two reasons - a wedding and a "where are they now" style panel where they field questions from the audience about a number of aspects from the show. This latter concept was a great way to shoehorn in a bunch of answers to unresolved questions. And at the wedding, former castmembers Mindy Kaling, B. J. Novak, and Steve Carell returned after year-plus absences from the show. My biggest problem with the finale was the way Michael was used. The show seemed to treat his return far more like the return of the intelligent and kindhearted Steve Carell than the return of the juvenile and often petulant Michael Scott. The character got a few good lines in, but was overall far more dignified and classy than Michael Scott was ever capable of being. I'm sure that's a testament to how his life with Holly and their children has changed him in two or three years, but I mean, we spent seven years watching this guy struggle with basic social cues, making terrible jokes at every opportunity. It was great to have Carell back - truly, the finale wouldn't have felt complete without him - but that was only a faint facsimile of Michael Scott. Oh well. The finale ended with a series of talking heads, with different characters reflecting on their lives and their pasts and futures, and although it was a bit self-congratulatory, the whole thing was rather sentimentally poignant. Especially for Jim and Pam, whose story finally got a satisfying ending after being one of the more frustrating aspects of the ninth season.

The Legacy of The Office

Time will tell how history treats this show, but it has a number of things going for it. For one, it was the last true "hit" of NBC's once vaunted Thursday night comedy lineup. Shows like 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation, and Community are arguably of a higher average quality, but none of them ever sniffed the ratings The Office pulled in. Paradoxically, the initial delayed success of The Office represents a significant shift in the way networks judged the value of their shows back in 2005 or so. Back in those early days of online streaming and DVR viewership, The Office was struggling in raw ratings, but was one of the most popular shows on iTunes. NBC nearly canceled it after one season, and then nearly axed it again after a second. Instead, they gambled on these new and nontraditional metrics to gauge a show's popularity and reaped the rewards for years and years. So many years that by the time the show hit its peak in popularity it had already begun its slow but very apparent decline in quality. For my money, the show rebounded from a terrible pilot to lay some key character groundwork in its first season, then started getting pretty consistently good somewhere in the middle of the second season. The third season was perfect, and the fourth was solid but suffered from pacing problems, made worse by the fact that it kicked off with four hour-long episodes and was shortly thereafter interrupted by the writers' strike. The fifth season was full of good moments, and it breathed new life into the series with the additions of Holy and Erin, but things also felt a bit sillier and more absurd than in previous years, in which The Office had been grounded in some semblance of semi-reality. Season 6 was just completely boring, with far too much emphasis on Jim and Pam's lifetime achievements and a company merger that brought on too much Kathy Bates. Season 7 bounced back nicely with the Michael Scott farewell tour, and then Seasons 8 and 9 were just aimless and strange. They had no real reason to exist, since Michael's fulfillment at the end of Season 7 was the emotional climactic moment of the entire series. At least Season 9 ended on a good note. I guess if pressed to rank the seasons from best to worst, I'd go 3-2-5-4-7-1-9-8-6. Granted, this is having seen Seasons 2, 3, 8, and 9 just once each. I look forward to watching the series again one day, probably soon, likely with Marissa. She's seen bits and pieces from the show's entire run, but only earlier this year decided to watch it all in order. We'll jump back into Season 2 at some point soon, I hope.

Anyway, farewell to The Office. It was a memorable nine-year run.

Tron: Legacy

As a sequel to a movie that came out thirty years ago that I have never seen, I did not have high hopes for this to be a great movie. I acquired it because it was $10 and if I bought it I would get another movie for free. Still, I'm not sure there is any point in me owning it. Anyway, this movie looks damn impressive. I'd probably argue that it has better 3D than Avatar. Interestingly, this game is only in 3D IMAX when they are in the video game, but is 2D and not IMAX when they are not in the video game. It's an interesting choice that really works. Still, all the bells and whistles don't make up for a silly story. Sam Flynn, the son of the founder of Encom, Mr. Flynn aka Jeff Bridges (who has been missing for 20 years) is busy doing nothing with his life. He then finds himself physically pulled into the video game his dad invented. Soon after, he's in a fight to save the world in Tron and the world as we know it. His dad created a program to help him save the world, but that program, known as "Clue" decides to destroy the world instead. Did I mention Clue looks like Jeff Bridges from 20 years ago? They used CGI to create this look and the results are impressive, yet pretty unnerving. Anyway, this movie was entertaining, but nothing more than that. Moving on.

Ryse: Son of Rome

Well this is what Crytek has been doing instead of Timesplitters 4. Ryse: Son of Rome has been divisive among critics. Some deem this game garbage because of the repetitive nature of the combat. Others deem it great due to its graphics and high production values. I tend to agree with the latter, but understand why some people are bothered by this game's repetitive nature. First, let's focus on the good. The graphics are incredible. Based on what I've seen, this is the best game on either new system when it comes to showing what these systems can really do. All cut scenes are done with the in-game engine and it's damn impressive. For the first time, I've seen a game in which the characters don't look completely dead behind the eyes. Moreover, the voice acting is good enough to live up to the high bar set by the graphics. But, that's only one part of why I was so impressed by this game. The environments are better than anything I have ever seen. They vary a lot more than I would have expected considering how much this game was slammed. The lighting effects are just crazy good. But, I was expecting great graphics. That's why I got this game. What I wasn't expecting was such an engaging story. The game starts with an aged Marius in a room with the Emperor Nero. Marius explains how he had to watch as Barbarians murdered his entire family 10 years prior. We then follow him through his conquests as Soldier in the Roman Army and his eventual RYSE to General. I won't say too much more in case someone else plays this game at some point, but it was a very satisfying narrative. I loved it for the most part, but I could have used less involvement of the Gods. That story has been done and takes away from the realism that this game brings.

Ok, now the bad. The combat is very, very repetitive and the game is as linear as they come. If this game had combat as satisfying as God of War, it could have gone down as Game of the Year. However, games need to have satisfying gameplay. And this one is not always that satisfying. Each fight feels relatively the same because you can pretty much fight them in the exact same way. Evade, parry, strike, repeat. However, as the opponents become more difficult, the game becomes more satisfying as it is all about timing that combination correctly. Other than being repetitive, the gameplay also suffers from an abundance of quick time events. And all these events are pretty much taken from a pool of 6 or so. Moreover, even if you hit the wrong button, the quick time event goes the same way. You just score more or less points based on what buttons you hit/miss. I found myself wanting to avoid these events entirely, but they were too advantageous as other opponents could not hit you while you were performing them.

Overall, I am glad I played it. It had an engaging story, it was fun at times and it showed me what my Xbox One could do. I just wish the gameplay could be on the level of everything else (which was all top notch). If you find yourself with an Xbox One, I'd give it a recommend. But do not spend $60 on it.

Company Men

David Denby of The New Yorker called this "ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST FILMS." That's a ridiculous claim. I watched this movie for one reason: the cast. Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, Craig T. Nelson, Kevin Costner and Tommy Lee Jones. The premise is simple enough: Men who had been working for GTX, a company that has its roots in ship building (like Cruise Ships and such), are fired and subsequently struggle to get their lives back together. The problem I had was that everything in this movie felt so contrived. The CEO Craig T. Nelson is busy building a bigger and better office building with all that money he saved with the firings.  Ben Affleck drives a Porsche and has an $850K house. His wife doesn't work and he has three kids. He belongs to a very expensive country club. He didn't save any money and then immediately moves in with his parents after losing his job. But, it gets worse! "The Best Salesman in Massachusetts" can't find a job he is willing to work. He gets offered a few jobs with salaries around $80K but he says he won't work for that low of a wage. However, 10 minutes later he is forced to work for his brother-in-law (Costner) who happens to hate corporations and has a construction company. But we learn to love Costner after he gives Affleck an extra $100 in his paycheck. Meanwhile, Chris Cooper offs himself because he instantly becomes a drunk after losing his job. Tommy Lee Jones gets a divorce. There's not much point to any of this and the ending is telegraphed 10 minutes into the movie. It's pretty boring. Don't bother. It's all nonsense.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

This game has been posted several times over the past few weeks, so it'd be easy for me to say "check those other posts as I mostly agree with them." But someone else already did that, so I guess I'll put some effort in. First off, I played The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and posted it on the Blog way back in 2009, and while I liked it, I certainly didn't love it. So when I found out the next Zelda game would be a direct sequel taking place in the same location, I wasn't enthused about the whole thing. But now that I've played A Link Between Worlds, I can see those fears were unfounded- the game is excellent. Yes, the game takes place in almost the exact same environment as Link to the Past, and much like that game had its Dark Hyrule, Link Between Worlds has a reverse Hyrule called Lorule (Har, har). But while locations like the desert and Death Mountain are still in the same places; and the game follows the three dungeons, then master sword, then six more dungeons in the dark world format as the previous game, everything here feels fresh. I chalk that up to two major changes. First, one that was heavily advertised as the gimmick to sell the game, Link can flatten himself onto walls to cross over chasms or squeeze into tight cracks. This may seem like a cheap gimmick for a few puzzles, but it's integrated into the game incredibly well. You will spend a lot of time plastering yourself to walls to solve puzzles and get around both in dungeons and out in the overworld. The game really feels like it wouldn't have worked at all without this gameplay feature, which to me was a huge success. The other big change here was the completely revamped item system, which really sets the game apart from every other previous Zelda game and removes almost all of the game's linearity. Basically after you get the master sword and first venture into Lorule, you are given the option to start renting items. They're fairly cheap, but you need to rent them again each time you die. So right from the start you can acquire every item you'll need to get through the rest of the game. This means you can tackle the remaining levels in any order you want- all are roughly the same level of difficulty, and each one begins with a little puzzle letting you know which specific weapon will be needed to finish it. So not only can you play through the dungeons in any order, you can also skip them entirely and focus only on exploring the overworld, which is packed with secrets and great mini-games. These were the biggest complaints about the direction recent Zelda games had taken- boring overworlds and too much linearity, but A Link Between Worlds does away with both of them. The complaints here are few- the game finishes up a little too quickly to feel like an epic adventure, and since most levels were similar in difficulty, the later ones felt much easier as I had gained more and more upgrades throughout the game. Still though, A Link Between Worlds feels like the game that has finally shaken up Zelda's formula and I'm excited to see where the series goes from here.

Election

A few months back I made a brief post on the film Election, basically damning it with faint praise. I've just read the novel on which it was based and, as is so often the case, the book was better than the movie. Not worlds better or anything, but it further fleshed out the various characters and their motivations and mindsets. If anything, the book felt brief and underdeveloped. Again, I always love a short read (and a quick game and a brief movie) for logging purposes, but when this one ended after 200 pages it seemed like there was easily room for about a hundred more. At the very least, I was impressed enough to look into more of Tom Perrotta's stuff, and this will not be the author's last appearance on this blog.

Columns III

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," you must be saying. "Hold the phone. What happened to Columns II?" It's a great question, and one Wikipedia answered for me; Columns II never got ported from the arcade to the Sega Genesis. It's that simple!

"Whew," you manage to utter, while sighing one of those deep relieving sighs. But then something catches your eye. "So let me ask you this. Why does this game's cover art feature a middle-aged guy with a receding hairline in a yellow T-shirt, acid-washed jeans, and running sneakers sitting on a bounty of gem-like things atop one column between two others?" That's also a great question, but sadly, one that cannot be answered. By anyone. Since 1993, at least.

Alright, anyway, Columns III was - surprise! - exactly like Columns . Almost. The major difference was that it was competitive; you had to do your Tetris-like shape-dropping faster than your AI opponents in this one, and those AI opponents increased in difficulty until the game's brief "story mode" was finished.

Oh yeah - on the title screen, this game's full name was revealed to be Columns III: Revenge of Columns. Yeesh.

Arrow Flash

Alien Storm

Chakan: The Forever Man

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle

Columns III

Columns

Altered Beast

Bonanza Brothers

Columns

You've got this grid. At an increasing frequency, columns of three shapes will begin to descend into the grid. You can rotate the order of the shapes as you see fit as the column is falling down. Line up three shapes of the same color, and they'll disappear.

Sound familiar?

This is Tetris, but with some minor quirks. Just like Dr. Mario and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. Except it isn't even named after a doctor.

There's also nothing more to the game than playing it until you die and then seeing what your high score was. I played it once on easy mode and lasted about ten minutes, setting a score of 9,000 or so. I then played it on hard mode and was done within a minute. (Seriously. The columns fell at a clip of like one per second right off the bat.) My score that time? Fifty thousand.

No, really.

Fifty fucking thousand.

Arrow Flash
Alien Storm
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Columns
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Chakan: The Forever Man

Problem:

Chakan is a notoriously difficult game. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Solution:

Cheat codes, baby. Cheat codes.

Conclusion:

I can't even blame this game's age for its shortcomings; it came out in 1992, well after plenty of other enjoyable classic titles. I've bemoaned "clunky controls" like two dozen times on this blog, easily. But Chakan just might take the cake for the most sluggish controller input reaction I've ever seen. The tragic irony here is that Chakan is far and away the lengthiest and most expansive game yet in my Genesis backlog. Don't get me wrong - I want these things to come and go as quickly as possible - but I still respect any old game for having an adequate length as long as it's designed well. This one wasn't. Even with all those cheat codes it still took me several cautious hours to end this one, and I can't say I respect it any more for my troubles.

Arrow Flash
Alien Storm
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Catch As Catch Can

Other than Kurt Vonnegut, there's no author whose works I've posted here more than Joseph Heller, the author of my all time favorite novel, Catch-22. This book is a collection of his writings, ranging from short stories to reflections on life and his career, with a heavy emphasis on Catch-22. What's funny - or maybe kind of disappointing, I guess - is that my absolute favorite portions of this book were the ones that dealt with Catch-22. Whether Heller was reflecting on the film version of Catch-22, or describing some of the real life events in World War II that led him to write Catch-22, or even just creating a one-act play out of a memorably absurd scene from Catch-22, I was eating it all up. The rest of the book I could take or leave. Most of the short stories were too tame and generic to recall with any details even now, and although the collection was some 330 pages long, I guess the bulk of it had no real impact on me. But that's fine; because I'm such a fan of Catch-22 I think this read was worth it. By no mean should anyone go out of their way to read this one until and unless (so, just until) they have read Catch-22.

Seriously.

Go read Catch-22.

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies

Ever since the very inception of Back-Blogged, my white whale has been Dragon Quest VIII, a notoriously long RPG on PS2 into which I've already dumped something like thirty hours and only managed to scratch the surface. About a year ago, I resolved to beat the game once and for all in 2013. I never touched it. I did, however, purchase and play through most of Dragon Quest IX in an attempt to whet my appetite for the slow-paced series. The results? Mostly a mixed bag, with one absolute certainty - I am not more motivated now to play Dragon Quest VIII than I was two months ago.

We'll start with the good. Dragon Quest IX follows the story of a Celestial (basically a guardian angel) who goes down to the world below and must collect golden fruits that fell from a tree in the heavens. It sounds lamer than it is. Think of it as being heavily influenced by the story of the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Knowledge. From there, it's an incredibly standard Japanese RPG with turn-based combat. Grab a band of warriors and mages and go around from town to town and dungeon to dungeon killing monsters and solving problems to collect golden fruit and advance the story. And honestly, for the first forty hours or so, this was a great game. It felt dated in a way that no 2009 DS title should, but also in a way I could tell was intentional and charming. The in-game message speed was way slower than it needed to be - a personal pet peeve of mine - but the game itself, while slow, churned along at a very deliberate pace. I didn't mind spending half an hour here or there just grinding for experience or collecting rare loot. The game wasn't perfect, by any stretch, but it had a memorable story and nailed the distinct "old school RPG" flavor I sometimes crave. As a benchmark, I enjoyed it more than any of the first three Final Fantasy games, and probably as much as the fifth.

And then, of course, the game got hard. More specifically, one boss was hard. Hard enough that any and all flow the story had settled into ground right to a halt as I spent five hours across three nights just running around leveling up my party in the most mundane manner. I checked online for some leveling up strategies, and there weren't even any specific enemies that would make the process go faster. I must have attempted the boss of the penultimate dungeon six or seven times - and the entire dungeon beforehand each time - before he finally fell. And then it was twice as much of the same just to finally get to a point where I could beat the final boss. Look, I appreciate a little bit of level grinding now and again. There's something to be said about the progress you feel in any game where your character is too weak to win a certain battle, so then you go out and collect power-ups or otherwise make him stronger, only to come back and destroy what was once challenging with ease. But its damn near tortuous to spend five hours fighting the same old bad guys with the same old strategies just to get from "Level 38" to "Level 42." I know there are some gamers out there that crave this kind of shit. All due respect, but I have a life! Or at least I try to, and padding a great forty hour game with bullshit difficulty until it takes sixty hours to beat doesn't make the game better!

I had a few other issues with the gameplay. Changing jobs (ie, "soldier" to "wizard" reset your levels entirely, for instance, making it a pointless exercise after the third hour or so of playtime. And money felt just as hard to come by as experience, which meant whenever I found a shop with new weapons and armor, I was rarely able to buy ore than two items of the nine or ten I'd have wanted. But these quirks are forgivable. Absurd levels of boss difficulty padding are not.

I know Sween had a similar experience with Final Fantasy IX a few years ago - thirty hours to get to the end, fifteen more to finish it - but I also know that was at least a little bit self-imposed since he'd spent the majority of the game avoiding combat; when I played Final Fantasy IX, I was able to finish the final dungeon and boss in my first go-round (barely - Steiner was the lone survivor, with 4 HP) without ever really specifically grinding at all. Anyway, I know now how he must have felt then, souring on an otherwise solid story because the game didn't really ramp up in difficulty as much as it shot immediately upward very late. Oh well. Dragon Quest IX should have been a solid gem of a game. Instead, I'm left with a flawed aftertaste and less than wonderful memories. Too bad!

The Dead Zone

Okay, another King book, here's another list of things I knew about The Dead Zone before reading it: psychics, it got turned into a semi-successful tv series, and it's generally well-regarded among King fans. This one was a bit shaky for me, with parts I loved and parts that kinda bored me. A young teacher in Maine goes out on a date with a colleague, and on his way home later that night he gets into a car accident and goes into a coma for five years. When he wakes up he struggles with the fact that five years of his life have just passed him by; not only that, but some very latent psychic powers he had got turned way up over the course of the coma- merely touching people will often result in a psychic premonition. First thing, this book probably would have still been pretty great without the psychic angle. It was heartbreaking watching his girlfriend wait for years before moving on, and seeing him eventually deal with the fact that she has. The coma basically turned his mother into a religious nut, and combined with five years of hospital bills he now has to pay it's easy to feel for the guy. It's interesting just watching him try to put his life together in unexpected ways after a horrible accident. But King also throws in the whole "he's a psychic" thing and for the most part that's pretty great too- another unwanted change in his life that he's forced to deal with. But the whole thing ended with a kinda weird subplot that King had alluded to throughout the book but never really caught on for me. I mean, this book was great when it focused on a guy trying to push forward after his life is changed in big ways, so ending it with a political plot didn't make much sense to me. The last third of the book probably would have worked better as a sequel. Still though, I liked The Dead Zone.

Bonanza Brothers

Well, this sucked. You're a burglar. In two-player mode, I presume you and a buddy would each be a burglar. And you go around stealing shit from malls, mansions, museums, and the like. Each venue is outfitted with a host of security guards, policemen, you name it. Some are in full on riot gear. You can shoot, but your bullets aren't lethal. They just kind of stun the guards for a while. Why the hell wouldn't armed robbers be shooting to kill?

Since I already know I'll get to the end of the year and have no idea at all which of these games I liked and which I hated, I'm going to start a running ranked list for all these one-hour Genesis games. Bonanza Brothers kicks things off at the bottom.

Arrow Flash

Alien Storm

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle

Altered Beast

Bonanza Brothers

Arrow Flash

Here's the best game yet from the Genesis project - a side-scrolling space shooter that felt like an undercooked R-Type. You're a spaceship. But you're also sort of a Transformer I guess, because you can turn into a Mega Man-like robot creature (see the cover art for a specific idea) who shoots the same guns as the spaceship. There was really very little difference whether you played as the spaceship or the autobot. You travel at the same speed either way, and one hit from an enemy always kills you. The only difference was your special weapon, which in robot-form was some sort of invincibility (think of Sonic's final smash in Super Smash Bros. Brawl if that's a helpful reference) and in ship form was just a giant barrage of bullets. I had some actual fun with this one, so, you know. Here's the new bar.

Altered Beast

The year is 1988. This came comes out and apparently makes enough of an impact on popular culture that references are made to it for years on end and its Wikipedia page is actually a fairly lengthy one.

The year is 2014. I play this game and fail to be even remotely enthused. It's just another side-scrolling beat-em-up, this one with way shittier and clunkier controls than the last one I played, Alien Storm. I know I'm only three games deep into "Carmen Sandiego and the Genesis 32" but so far it looks like it'll mostly be an uninspiring waste of time. Most of these games are arcade ports, making their runtimes something like an hour or two at a maximum, their only lengthening coming from how difficult it can be to beat them. This was actually a fairly tough one - again, the controls were clunky shit here - but with five total stages that lasted five minutes at most, I was able to finish up in an hour or two even with all the restarts. Like I said, this project seems like a largely uninspiring waste of time. Still, I'm glad to have a Sega Genesis, and who knows which random game I play will be a lot of fun?

Monsters University

 

Keith bought me this movie for Christmas because I really liked Monsters Inc. (which can you believe came out THIRTEEN yes THIRTEEN years ago??) I feel old. I told him I must have missed the second one and he said..."this is the second one". Why did it take them so long to make another? Anyway, I think I liked this sequel at 26 as much as I liked the first at 13. It was a whole other movie basically showing how Mike and Sully came to work as "scarers". It was a cute movie about two guys who everyone told they could never make it and how with perseverance and some luck they made it. I would recommend it as a good Sunday night, light watch. I mean... who doesn't still love Pixar as an adult? The stories always have things both kids and adults can relate to. This movie stayed true to that, gave me some laughs and kept me entertained for an hour and a half.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

 As for right now I am just going to say. "Read Trevors Post." I will more than likely come back and edit this.

Downton Abbey Season 1

This is my post for the first season of Downton Abbey. Kara was insistent that I watch this show as we had watched several of my shows together. I figured it was fair that I gave it a shot to even the score. We watched the first season over 2 days. As there aren't many episodes this was fairly easy to accomplish. Heavy Spoilers to follow:

The show tells the fictitious story of the British family that runs Downton Abbey in a semi historically correct setting. The first episode features the family learning that the ship The Titanic has sunk. This news is especially important to the Crawley family because the heir to their Abbey, and ultimately their fortune was on the Titanic when it sank. The family then learns that there is a new heir, Matthew, and that their fortune is permanently linked to the Abbey. The rest of the season depicts the every day happenings of the house from dinner parties, to their daughters courtships and general upkeep.

The house and the story is divided into two factions. There are the family that "owns" the house and this includes the mother, father and three daughters. Notice there are no sons, therefore no heir in the immediate family. The other half of the house and the show is made up of the staff that runs the house. The staff includes the Butler, the female equivelant of the butler for the wife, the ladys maids that take care of the daughters, the footmen, cooks for cooking and the chauffeur to drive the, relatively new, car.

The season ends with some news that may change the scope of the family and the country as war is declared with Germany.

P.S. I am getting into the show. Please nobody tell Kara that she was right. I will never hear the end of it!

Sons of Anarchy: Season 4

So - Steve just posted about this because we watched it together. They're officially his DVDs but we're married so what's his is also mine. Sharing is caring, people. So these are my DVDs too and I've never seen Sons Season 4 before so this counts more for me than it does for Steve, damnit!

Observation 1: Jax looks a ton like Paul Walker with short hair.
Observation 2: Gemma is a dirty gross crude woman. However, she does a lot for this club without getting any thanks. She's real bad ass a lot of the time. She and Tara have been fun to watch throughout Sons Seasons 1-4. They are an important part of this TV show.
Observation 3: Episodes 1-13A were fantastic. There was a ton going on in this season, and Seasons 1-3 have set the tone for all the conflict. There were new characters introduced but it felt natural and I didn't struggle to remember who they were which did happen in previous seasons. I knew most people's motivations the entire season. The conflict helped build the characters who we already knew a lot about.

Steve made a good analogy. Season 4 puts pots of water on the stove all season to boil. Instead of boiling over in the finale, multiple pots are just taken off the stove. I have an inkling where Season 7 will go based on Steve's post, and I think I will continue to enjoy Sons over the next three seasons even if they decline in quality.

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor

About a year ago I played the recently-brought-to-America port of Sin and Punishment, a very short rails shooter on the Nintendo 64 that felt a little like StarFox 64 on acid. Now I have completed the series by playing its second installment, the Wii sequel Sin and Punishment: Star Successor, and while the Wii is obviously a perfect fit for any rails shooter, it felt like only a marginal step up from the first game. Controlling a reticle with a Wii-mote feels a bit more natural, sure, but the addition of defensive play that's not usually found in rails shooters means controls mostly felt the same as its predecessor, and as such Star Successor was really that- more of the same. For most games that would be a strike against it. But for Sin and Punishment, a series that prides itself on being basically insane (one boss is made up of robotic whales; another is defeated by kicking giant bison in his direction), it kinda works. Rails shooters are fun in short amounts but can get stale pretty fast, so to compensate they need to get gimmicky- Dead Space: Extraction found this in hallucinations and its survival-horror focus on ammo conservation; Sin and Punishment: Star Successor mostly just throws as much shit on screen as the Wii can handle and wants you to shoot almost everything. The one major improvement here was getting rid of the dated Continues system from the first game which required you to restart the game several times before you got good enough to beat it, and combined with its longer length Star Successor is probably the better game. It's worth a play if you're in the mood for an on-rails shooter, but there's a reason why that genre has for the most part died out completely and Star Successor is no sign that it should come back.

Mad Men: Season 5

Two years ago I made an absurdly long post about the fourth season of Mad Men. It was the best season of one of the best shows ever made, and I did it no favors by rambling on and on and on about it, so I'll keep this one brief.

As I said, Season 4 was Mad Men's best season, and Season 5 was better than Season 6, which means the show has technically been in a qualitative slide for a few years now. But I'd forgotten just how good Season 5 was until re-watching it these last few days. There's an awful lot of meat here, from Pete's dissatisfaction with living the American Dream - married with a kid in the suburbs - to Don's honeymoon period with his new wife to Roger's LSD-induced reawakening and new-found happiness. Peggy and Joan each make some bold decisions, Lane winds up in a financial pickle that turns tragic, and Sally continues to grow up. This season introduces us to the great character that is Michael Ginsberg and even revisits Paul Kinsey for kicks. And Betty got fat.

The season takes place between the summer of 1966 and the spring of 1967, and "the '60s" are very much in full swing. SCDP hires both a black woman and a Jew and even makes a woman a junior partner. Casual drug use is up, even for these Madison Avenue suits, and it's hard to believe sometimes that this is the same group of people doing the same job from the first season, which took place in the shadow of the dour and restrained 1950s. At any rate, it was a pleasure to revisit Season 5, and the episodes in general were stronger on average than I'd remembered. Here's hoping Season 6 can pleasantly surprise me too on the second time around.

Sons of Anarchy: Season 4

It's been a long time since I've posted about Sons of Anarchy, and in the interim I've seen Seasons 4-6 in real time and then gone back to watch Seasons 1-4 again with the wife. I went back and read some of my posts from Seasons 1-3, and while it's always cringe-inducing to read old writing, some of my glowing praise for this show back then was particularly hard to stomach: "It's certainly one of the best dramas I've seen and warrants consideration for placement in that elite tier that includes Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and perhaps Boardwalk Empire." Blech. It's safe to say that at this point I have a much better understanding of just what this show is, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. "An elite drama" it ain't, and we'll leave it at that.

But Sons of Anarchy is still a very solid show, and one I've probably soured on too much. This very fourth season is when I recall turning on the show; after raising stakes on half a dozen different fronts all season long and building toward an inevitable explosive showdown, the show coasted into hibernation mode for Season 5 without really resolving anything, and it did so in the form of a cop out of sorts, when some of the major players involved in this season's biggest arc turned out to be working for the CIA undercover. Elsewhere, hatchets were buried and a few key characters were left dangling between various rocks and hard places, unable to bring long-brewing conflicts to their conclusions in favor of maintaining the status quo. The ending cheapened the otherwise fantastic season that had come before it, and the show's inability to kill off or otherwise write out some of its favorite characters felt like a fatal flaw.

That's what it felt like at the time, at least, to the extent where I found it hard to get excited for Season 5 at all and don't honestly remember much of what happened in that one. But, with the benefit of hindsight, knowing how this season would end - or maybe it was the foresight of what Season 5 and 6 look like - I was much happier this time around with Season 4. Yeah, it was a clumsy landing with more than one cop-out, but it also sets in motion - or maybe just keeps in motion - some more compelling stuff that comes in Seasons 5 and 6, and that I anticipate will come in Season 7. I look forward to re-watching Season 5 next, and hopefully walking away from that one with an improved opinion, too.

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Before I get to the movie, I'd like to start with a question about something that has bothered me for a long time. Does anyone like Ed Helms? At all? The guy just annoys me. He annoyed me in the Office, but man was he unlikeable in this movie. And I don't want to hear that his characters are supposed to be unlikeable. Because I hate him in everything. I don't find him funny.

Anyway, this movie tried too hard. It had very little plot, and although it thought that was a positive, it most certainly was not. I could care less about Jeff or his brother or his mom. And don't expect to laugh. Ever.

Recapping 2013

This is already the fifth post of the new year, but let's take a minute to reflect on the year that was: 2013. First, a personal take. Then, a blog-wide look.

I'll own up to it - 2013 was a pretty big failure with regard to my overall goal of trimming my backlog down to nothing. No specific category carries the brunt of the blame; I read just a dozen books, but also acquired only eleven. Meanwhile my movie-watching was up, but so was my movie-acquiring. And as much as I'd like to blame some big milestones this year for my underwhelming progress - planning a wedding, moving, going on a honeymoon, and so forth - I really can't blame my life events for the bad year on the blog. Yeah, my logging was at an all time low, but I could have easily countered that by not getting anymore books, movies, or games. Instead I went on a few too many acquisition splurges, and what could easily have been a successful year turned instead into a bust. Here are two interesting year-ending trends. First, sixteen straight video game loggings from me were either handheld games or downloadable games. The last console game I played on an actual disc (or cartridge) was Donkey Kong Country Returns back in late May. Wow! Second, fifteen straight movie posts were actually TV season posts; I've watched fifteen straight TV seasons since I last watched a movie. Both of these trends seem weird, as does my completely apparent lack of reading.

Enough about me, though. Let's look at what everyone did collectively.

Books

No series or author really stood out in 2013, although it warrants mentioning that both Webber and Dee were heavy on the Brandon Mull posts early on in the year. Elsewhere, Marissa and Keith both read The Giver and its sequels and both Webber and I dabbled in The Dark Tower just a bit. Sweeney posted a couple of Song of Ice and Fire books and I pitched in a third from George R. R. Martin. Tack on a couple of Kurt Vonnegut, Neil Gaiman, and Stephen King books, and you've more or less got the year covered, aside from a late diverse run by Marissa. Nothing really "trended" in 2013, I guess, but it was nice to see a bunch of people looking into stuff that had previously been blogged by others.

Video Games

We had another eight Final Fantasy games posted, again avoiding repeating the same one twice. This time four of us - Webber and Trevor in addition to Sween and me - combined for Theatrhythm, Tactics, IV, IX, Crystal Chronicles, VI, X, and XIII. There were four more Zelda games as well, along with three Sonic the Hedgehog postings. Strangely, no other franchise registered more than a pair of games on the year. One trend I did notice, though, was the emergence of shorter indie titles, whether those were PC downloads or console-based content. Titles like Dear Esther, Little Inferno, Starship Defense, Pushmo, Proteus, Hotline Miami, and Thomas Was Alone appeared on the blog this year, in addition to many others like them.

Television

To my great delight, The Wire really blew up in 2013, with Keith, Marissa, and Sween making ten posts about that show. Keith and Sween also made ten posts on The Sopranos and Keith and I did the same for Dexter. Not far behind was Game of Thrones, which racked up eight. Friday Night Lights and Sons of Anarchy each received four posts, and if you want to count it as its own show, WWE was responsible for five posts in 2013. That each of those posts was made by Keith should surprise no one. As always, I was our biggest TV contributor, so a lot of shows that I watched - Six Feet Under, Big Love, The IT Crowd - were also posted several times.

Movies

World War Z and Looper each got posted twice. It looks like JFK almost did, but the second post - Trevor's - is still in "draft" form. There was a decent amount of Kubrick from Trevor and me, and then a large amount of Wes Anderson for which I must take full responsibility.

And of course, a job well done by all to clear 400 posts on the year. Let's shoot for 500 this time around. I think we can do it!