Dungeons and Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara

And here's the sequel to Dungeons and Dragons: Tower of Doom. It's Shadow Over Mystara, a game that made a few improvements and certainly stands out as the better game, but still wasn't really any fun to play twenty years after its release. Two more classes have been added to the game, upping the total to six, and I felt like there was more balance here than in Tower of Doom between classes, allowing me between lives to switch to whichever class would work best in the current situation. This meant that even though the game was longer, I died far fewer times and enjoyed the experience more, but not much more. Maybe I was wrong about that "more challenge = better" theory. Either way, I'm glad to have this unnecessary shit out of my backlog.

Devil May Cry 3

It's been a while since I played the first two Devil May Cry games, so I figured now was a good time to finish off the trilogy (which is now up to five games anyway) by playing Devil May Cry 3. A quick recap- you play as Dante, a cocky human/demon hybrid who hunts demons for a living by stringing together sweet combos with his sword and guns. The first game was pretty good, and the second game wasn't any good. The trilogy ends on a high note though, as my experience with Devil May Cry 3 was the most fun of all. And yet it goes against all the laws of backlogging, the ones that make me just pick easy mode every time I start into a game that I'm not that interested in. I played the first two Devil May Cry games on easy and breezed through them in a couple days; I finally commited to playing Devil May Cry 3 on normal just to at least get some sense of how the game is really meant to be played. And while I wasn't in love with it, I liked it a whole lot more than either of the two first games. Was that a success on this specific game's part? Or should I just have upped the difficulty on everything a while ago? I suppose the game's biggest strength was throwing tons of boss fights in; there's one at the end of almost every one of Devil May Cry 3's twenty levels, each unique, requiring different weapons and strategies and multiple restarts. It was also nice to see Dante get his asshole swagger back after a mostly boring Devil May Cry 2- watching him get annoyed with super-powerful demons, make sarcastic remarks, and do ridiculous fighting stunts just because he can makes watching all the cutscenes he's in a must. Like the time he destroys the laws of physics to use his motorcycle as a shield, or his little friendly fight/handshakewith his own doppleganger, or even the time he converts a boss into a guitarand jumps up on stage wailing on it to an imaginary crowd. The games are fun, but I think just watching Dante act crazy is the best part of this series.

Dungeons and Dragons: Tower of Doom

I've had pretty good luck with my recent free games on my backlog; while nothing has been amazing, the games have mostly been pretty good. That comes to an end with the first of two Dungeons and Dragons branded arcade games, Tower of Doom. I mean 'arcade games' literally because Tower of Doom and its sequel Shadow Over Mystara (released on PSN as the combo-pack Chronicles of Mystara) were both meant to be played in arcades, only getting console ports years later. As far as arcade games go, Tower of Doom seems fine enough- not far off from the X-Men and Simpsons branded beat-em-ups that I remember wasting a lot of quarters on when I was much younger and arcades still existed. Not only do you get to choose a character class and go to town hacking and slashing your way through the game's few levels, but Tower of Doom also includes a loot-drop system and rpg-style leveling up as you go to differentiate itself from the arcade crowd and live up to its Dungeons and Dragons name. It's not enough unfortunately to keep the game from being a slog to play through in 2014. Characters only really have one attack, and since I had unlimited continues and didn't have to pop in any quarters ever, the game boiled down to slashing everything in sight with my sword the exact same way for two hours and dieing a bunch of times with no stakes to speak of. If I was playing the game on an arcade machine, it probably would have cost me $40 or so. No wonder arcades died out!

Kid Chameleon

I thought I was done posting games in 2014, but then I realized I had 63 posts and, hey, come on, 64 just felt like a much cooler number to end the year on. You know, for the sake of my year-end video game tournament.

So, get a load of this guy! Ain't he just the bee's fucking tits? Leather jacket, slicked back hair, big ass sneakers. And check out the fine print on the cover, advertising not just that there are over 100 levels, but also that there are over 1850 screens. That's 18.5 screens per level, and hot damn, those sound like huge levels!

Dated marketing aside, this was a fine game. Yet another platformer, of course, and in this one the central gameplay gimmick is that you can put on different masks and helmets and get different power-ups. The knight's helmet gives you more health. The samurai helmet gives you a long pointy sword. It keeps things interesting, at least. Oh, and here's the game's plot from Wikipedia, because I just can't get enough of these:

A new virtual reality arcade game called "WildSide" arrived in town and every kid played it. The arcade made holograms to create a world not their own. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until kids began to disappear. The game's boss, Heady Metal, had freed himself from his scripted AI. He was using his new freedom to kidnap every kid who could not beat the game, which was all of them, until now. A boy named Casey who calls himself "Kid Chameleon" enters the game and must defeat every level, every boss and Heady Metal himself if he wants to save the others.

That's right. In order to beat this video game, you need to beat the video game within the video game. How delightfully meta!

Ecco: The Tides of Time
Ecco the Dolphin
Arrow Flash
Golden Axe
Alien Storm
Virtua Fighter 2
Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master
Streets of Rage 3
Gain Ground
Streets of Rage 2
Golden Axe II
Kid Chameleon
DecapAttack
Comix Zone
Vectorman 2
Vectorman
Streets of Rage
Chakan: The Forever Man
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle
The Ooze
Columns III
Columns
Crack Down
Golden Axe III
Altered Beast
Bonanza Brothers

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season Five

I've been struggling to make my posts on Curb Your Enthusiasm interesting since its second season. Yet again, it's funny, but not that funny, so watch it if you've got a Seinfeld itch to scratch, but I won't force you. This fifth season had a few running storylines- Larry struggles with the idea that he might be adopted, and Larry tries to get out of giving his friends Lewis a kidney. The both come to a head in an excellent season finale. The season overall was very good. This post may have been a waste of time.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

For the second month I've played through a Grand Theft Auto that I got partway into many years ago; This time around was San Andreas. Just like the first two GTA games on the PS2, this was awesome and of course anyone who hasn't gotten around to playing it probably should, although I'm sure the recent GTA V, also set in San Andreas, probably beats it in every way. Still though, everyone knows the game is great, so I'll focus on what separates it from the games that come before it. For one, it's gigantic. I noted in my Vice City post that I was surprised how quickly I learned the layout of that game's entire city. In San Andreas you're constantly discovering new locations, and even after playing through the lengthy main campaign there are tons of places I'm sure I have yet to visit. Apparently this was five times the size of Liberty City in GTA III and four times the size of Vice City. It's a combination of West Coast cities- Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Las Vegas all have clear influences on the three cities of San Andreas. The game doesn't stop with cities though, as there's plenty of suburbs, farmland and desert separating them. Sure, that doesn't sound as interesting a setting as any city, but they're used sparingly enough that it works just fine. Another change is in the style of missions. One thing I mentioned in my Vice City post was how the game involved a lot more water-based missions; here in San Andreas, the game loves throwing new aerial missions in towards the end of the game. Seriously, the end-game missions each seem to give you a new plane or jet or helicopter, each more powerful than the last. Some were difficult to control, but after two games of hinting at in-game air travel it was nice to see some serious effort put in to make that really work. Another new aspect here was the rpg qualities, which may have been a little overdone. Completing missions and acquiring territory for your gang nets you "respect", going to the gym increases your strength, and taking long rides in bikes or cars increases your skill increases your driving skill, making them easier to handle. None of this was ever important; really there's only one mission halfway through the game that requires you to have a certain lung capacity, which means that if you haven't been swimming much, you need to go swim for like fifteen minutes to build up that skill. Still though, that unnecessary addition aside, the game in fantastic. Everyone loves GTA! I've now played through most of the beloved installments of the game, aside from the recent GTA V, which seems to have generated more praise than any game before it. There's also GTA IV, which I've dabbled in but didn't like much, waiting in my backlog; and of course, there are plenty of expansion games I could potentially get into as well. Time will tell.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

I rewatched the Lord of the Rings Trilogy in preparation of the first Hobbit movie. I forced Danielle to do it with me because she had never seen them before. She typically hates fantasy movies, but she loved LOTR. In fact, she told me that Return of the King is one of her favorite movies. Danielle and I saw the first Hobbit movie on opening night. She was so excited. She didn't even bother seeing this one in theaters. That should tell you how she felt The Hobbit compares to LOTR. I tend to agree. There are two factors working against The Hobbit:

1. There is only one Hobbit book, yet they chose to stretch it into three movies. There is far less content so there is a lot more action filler. Whereas in LOTR all the action served a purpose, in this movie it feels like window dressing.

2. There is far more CGI in The Hobbit. I'm not sure why there isn't more practical effects (LOTR felt real because they used the right amount of practical effects). I find myself constantly pulled out of The Hobbit movies because it looks so sterile and lifeless.

Anyway, if you look past that, you have a very fun movie. It's just not one that lives up to the lofty expectations. This movie was over 2.5 hours, but the real meat of it is the interactions between Martin Freeman as Bilbo and Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug. I think it made up like 45 minutes of the movie and it was clearly the highlight for me.

This movie ends on a great cliffhanger and I can't wait to see the third one in theaters (that's really the only way to experience these movies). Still, I'll go in knowing that it won't measure up to LOTR.

Almost Famous

I wanted to dislike this movie. I'm not sure why. It's probably because of Ben Dorenfeld. He couldn't sing the praises of this movie enough and because of that I went a LONG time without seeing it. I'm a big fan of spite and I'm an even bigger fan of spiting Ben. So when this was under my tree I wasn't sure what to feel. And then I decided to let 14 years of spite go and watch it with an open mind. What a treat! Though I cannot really relate to the time period (1973) or to the music (I don't consider myself a huge fan of music), I could really relate to Will Miller's struggles as an adolescent. My mom wasn't as strict and I wasn't so smart that I skipped a few grades, but I did (like everyone else) have my struggles.

Will had a few main struggles. He struggled to appear cool, he struggled to appear older and he struggled with his first real crush. He went from being a sheltered kid to seeing things that most people will never see (Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll!!!). It was some pretty riveting stuff. All in all, this is an amazing movie. I found a few of the scenes to be a little bit hard to believe and unnecessary (the scene in the plane mostly), but I can forgive it. Some of it was a bit hokey, but it fit the film. Anyway, Ben was right and I was wrong.

Muppets: Most Wanted

I was a huge fan of "The Muppets" with Jason Segel. However, I went into that movie with very few expectations. That was not the case with this movie and because of that I was a bit disappointed. I found Ty Burrell and Tina Fey pretty annoying. They were both a tad too over-the-top for me. Yes, this is a Muppet movie, but part of the charm of the previous movie was the earnestness with which Segel played the co-lead. I had never seen a Muppet movie like it before so it felt very fresh. This feels anything but. Still, I love the Muppets and was able to thoroughly enjoy this movie. I just wanted more. Also, there are a ton of Muppets that don't get enough attention (Rizzo, Pepe, etc). If you're a fan, this will deliver. Just temper your expectations.

Stan's Unblogged Movies from 2014

As many of you know, the ostensible purpose of this blog is and always has been for us authors to finally watch, read, and play all the movies, books, and games sitting unfinished on our shelves. But early on in its lifetime, the blog quickly became a place to just kind of talk about the movies, books, and games we'd consumed, regardless of whether or not we owned them. This is absolutely fine, and I love that people chime in when they've streamed a movie or rented a game or borrowed a book. It leads to more posts, and posts with any thought at all put into them are always welcome and encouraged.

All the same, I personally don't make any posts unless I'm truly checking something off my own backlog - call me a purist! This doesn't usually affect anything, as I usually only see ten or fifteen movies a year of which I don't physically own copies, but this year I think I saw more movies on Netflix and On Demand and in theaters than I saw on DVD or Blu-ray. Because I enjoy the discussions this blog spawns, I want to weigh in on each of those movies that I saw this year that didn't already receive a full post. What follow are my brief thoughts on all those I could remember seeing for the first time in 2014. It's an eclectic mix to say the least. Enjoy!

The Lego Movie - Decent movie, great voice cast, cute premise, awful ending. The last fifteen minutes or so made me sour on the entire movie.

Frozen - Was briefly obsessed with this one and unable to shake some of the earworms from creeping into my head at inopportune times. Not just the overexposed "Let It Go," either! I loved this movie. It was the first great Disney movie since the '90s and it was also totally self aware and willing to play with Disney tropes without being a farce or spoof at all. Legitimately one of my favorite movies of the year.

300: Rise of an Empire - Who was calling for this to be made? Not bad, but it felt completely unnecessary even as I watched it. Eva Green steals the entire movie and makes it her own.

21 Jump Street - Hey, I laughed several times. Not a particularly clever or well-executed comedy, but one I enjoyed from start to finish.

Her - This one was right up my alley as I love Spike Jonze and was totally on board with his vision of the not-distant future. I also allowed myself to buy into the romance between Joaquin Phoenix and his phone's operating system, which made all the difference in the world. If you're expecting a quirky comedy about a sad lonely loser addicted to technology or something, this won't resonate as strongly. Absolutely not for everyone, but, again, I enjoyed it a lot.

Silver Linings Playbook - This one on the other hand I just couldn't love. Two emotionally unstable people manipulating each other and winding up in love - I dunno, it just made me more nervous for the two of them than happy.

The To-Do List - Early previews had me so excited for this movie - Aubrey Plaza! Bill Hader! Jason Street! Maeby Fünke! Rachel Bilson! Donald Glover! Andy Samberg! Connie Britton! McLovin! And all that glorious 1993 tongue-in-cheek nostalgia! - but it turned out to be sloppy and nothing memorable. Funny enough, just nothing special.

Rush - The wife had been dying to see this one as she loves fast cars and Chris Hemsworth. I'm pretty apathetic toward both of those things, and as such, I did not love this. Solid biopic from Ron Howard, for what it's worth.

The Wolf of Wall Street - An often hilarious and seriously informative look at the Wall Street lifestyle in the '80s and '90s. It's Scorcese and DiCaprio, so no need for me to sell it. It's also three hours long, which, hey, maybe that's not for you. I really enjoyed this one.

Pitch Perfect - It probably helps that I had low expectations, but I genuinely liked this Anna Kendrick a cappella competition comedy. Like, enough that I will probably see the sequel in theaters.

Step Up Revolution - I think I've seen all four of these movies while browsing the web or playing DS games. They're terrible, loaded with plot continuity errors and production gaffes. My wife acknowledges all of this and considers the whole franchise a guilty pleasure.

Snowpiercer - Lots to unpack here. It's a dystopian future in which all of humanity is forced to ride on a gigantic life-sustaining train on a world-spanning track; leaving the train means freezing to death instantly. The back of the train lives in shitty squalor while the front of the train houses first class passengers living in luxury. The movie follows a group from the back determined to make it all the way to the front and kill the conductor. The whole thing is rife with not-so-subtle class commentary, but it's a fantastic production and a really good action movie to boot. One of my favorites of the year.

Nebraska - Black and white road trip comedy of sorts. Great performances from Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, and Bob Odenkirk. Not particularly funny or memorable, but a movie that left me with a vague but definite positive vibe.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles - Finally saw this one for the first time this holiday season. I wasn't impressed! It wasn't all that funny and it wasn't particularly memorable. John Candy and Steve Martin have both been in far better movies.

Video Games: The Movie - Blech. This was awful. A ninety-minute long pat on the back from gamers to video games. I watched this seeking some new information on the history of video games and all I saw were celebrity talking heads about how awesome different games and systems were. Not worth your time!

Restrepo - This is an acclaimed documentary about a particular portion of the War in Afghanistan. You get all up close and personal with a few soldiers from an Army platoon defending an outpost in the Korangal Valley. Gripping stuff, this first hand account of some of the firefights they got into over there.

Battle Royale - It's the original controversial Japanese movie that The Hunger Games absolutely ripped off. Darker than its wildly popular imitator but honestly not much deeper. I wanted gritty introspection as kids were forced to kill each other, and I didn't get much more of it here than I did in The Hunger Games. Solid, but not amazing.

Guardians of the Galaxy - Superhero movies just aren't my cup of tea. This one was well-made and hit all the right notes, but the plot was the same as it is in any other PG-13 action movie.

Waking Life - Not even a movie as much as a series of animated vignettes in which people engage in philosophical discussions about dreaming and reality. Bizarre as hell, and yet, it worked for me.

All Is Lost - Really liked this one. An old man on a sailboat runs into an adrift shipping container. Boat springs a leak. Man needs to weather an oncoming storm. There's no backstory here, and there are only three spoken lines. There are also no supporting characters. It's like a stripped down Cast Away without the beginning or end, and also no conversations with volleyballs.

Bad Santa - Just watched this one due to the holidays and all. Not really what I expected! Billy Bob Thornton was great, but the movie was much more dark and less funny than the advertisements from a decade ago had me believing. Earned its very belabored warmth and happy-ish ending.

Nymphomaniac - All kinds of deranged and fucked up and very NC-17, but still very much art and not pornography. The four-hour two-volume movie loses steam as it drags on and doesn't end without inducing some groans, but it was full of some very interesting scenes and moments, to say the least.

Into the Woods - I'd never seen the musical before seeing the movie. Liked it, but didn't love it. Catchy songs and decent performances, but an ultimately forgettable fairy tale mash-up of a story prevents this one from rising to greatness.
12 Angry Men - I don't always love the classics, but damn, this felt like a nearly perfect screenplay. One location, twelve unnamed characters with distinct personalities, and a one-evening timeframe. I wasn't surprised to learn that the movie was based on a stage play. Worth the hype!

Please, fire away with any thoughts or questions. And enjoy the rest of 2014!

Metroid II: Return of Samus

I remember Sweeney playing through this one a while back, but apparently that came even before the days of the blog; this is our first collective post on Metroid II. Here's how it all unfolded for me.

You start out disembarking from your gunship with no directions or backstory whatsoever. A little counter in the bottom right reveals that there are 39 Metroids remaining, and only through deductive reasoning do you figure out that the point of this game is to kill all these Metroids. Or maybe not - maybe the instruction manual and box art provided that much instruction. I won't pretend I wasn't aware that this was the general concept behind the gameplay before I began. Still, it was a bit jarring to press start on the menu and immediately jump right into a game with no explanation whatsoever.

Now, Metroid titles have always been nonlinear, and it was probably only three or four scrolling screens before I had to choose between going right or going left; many paths are blocked off until you've got the right equipment, but you can still get incredibly lost incredibly quickly. I dicked around for maybe forty minutes or so, and in that time I bagged myself two Metroids and a bunch of power-ups like the ice beam and the spider ball. But I was several dozen "screens" into the caverns of the game by this point and had left all kinds of corridors unexplored. I knew I was never going to find all 37 remaining Metroids just by bumbling around, and the game offers absolutely no clues to where the remaining Metroids are hiding. In fact there's no in-game map at all, which is just such an artifact of 1990 with zero appeal to modern gamers. I can just imagine people 25 years ago making intricate maps on graph paper and plotting out every save station and power up. Today, of course, a simple Google image search for "metroid 2 map" gives us in half a second what it must have taken countless hours to produce back then. Amazing! And also game-changing. Once I made the decision, forty minutes and 2/39 Metroids into the game, to use maps and walkthroughs from the Internet, the game ceased being a wide open exploration and instead became a lengthy series of recipe-like instructions. Wonder was replaced with focus and curiosity was replaced with monotony. I'm very confident I made the right decision here - I wound up finishing in six hours or so what would have surely taken me twenty otherwise - but I can't shake the nagging feeling that I went about this game all wrong and played it without any regard to how I was supposed to play it. It's crazy; just give me an in-game map and I'd have been all the more likely to explore this one further. I love the 2D Metroid games, but up until this one I'd never had literally no idea where I was or how to get back to where I'd been.

Oh well! This isn't the first time the Internet has held my hand all the way through an old game and it certainly won't be the last. Onward and upward!

Far Cry 4

I'll start with the story. You play as Ajay Ghale who has been asked by his late mother to spread her ashes in Kyrat. As you approach your destination your bus is stopped by a few soldiers. They capture you and take you to Pagan Min's palace (he's the one in the Pink Suit). Min, who was romantically involved with your mother a long time ago, is nothing but cordial. Your quickly faced with a decision to play nice or to fight your way out of the palace. Fight your way out of the palace and you're looking at 14 hours of shooting bliss. Stay seated and the game literally ends in 15 minutes total. Anyway, if you fight out of the palace you then encounter the Golden Path, a rebel group fighting to take down the evil dictator. The rest of the game revolves around you making decisions on who to follow, Sabal or Amita (both of whom would like to run the Golden Path). They send you on various missions to further their cause. If you side with Sabal you will most likely be murdering Pagan men while if you side with Amita you focus more on stealth. Anyway, based on these decisions, you impact the ending. Turns out I got the "bad ending," but I was able to find the other endings on YouTube so now I don't have to play this game like four more times (although I wouldn't mind at least one more play through). Anyway, the story was pretty good, but there's just so much else to do in Kyrat.

I've never played a Far Cry before so I really didn't quite know what to expect or even what to do. Unfortunately, I think that hurt my enjoyment of the game in its early stages. Unlike most shooters, there is a robust upgrade system, both for your abilities and for your guns. Moreover, this game doesn't do the best job of helping you learn what you need to do in order to be effective in the campaign missions. While I should have spent the first couple hours just roaming the vast world of Kyrat (this place is huge) and upgrading my character so I wasn't so underpowered, I instead went straight into the campaign and brute forced my way through the first half of the game. It was not fun. I died a ton and was frustrated the whole time. However, in that time, I was slowly improving my character. While I started with two bars of health and the ability to hold just one gun, through in-game experience and a decent amount of hunting, I ended with four gun slots and six bars of health. Don't ask me why I need four Honey Badger skins to hold another gun. Those goddamn Honey Badgers weren't easy to kill with my machete.

With my newfound abilities and a better understanding of how to actually play the game, I took on sixteen missions that were incredibly fun. In fact, the back half of this game was some of the most fun I've ever had with a shooter. I had better guns, more ammo and a much better chance at not dying.

There are a few things I wish Far Cry 4 did better, but this is an awesome open world to explore. Traveling is annoying thanks mostly to the Himalayan Mountains. My path was constantly cut off. There wasn't an easy way to climb the mountains so I had to drive all the way around some mountains over and over again. That resulted in me having to take about 5-10 mins to travel to the next campaign mission. There weren't a ton of vehicles to choose from so it got old fast. The health system is terrible. You have bars of health. You can hold triangle to regain a bar of health at a time. However, when you are being shot at it becomes very difficult. On the surface it's intriguing, but as you do it over and over again, it becomes super repetitive. Granted, if I had just beefed up my character before going into the missions this probably wouldn't have been an issue. The bigger issue here, however, involves full-health-restoring syringes. If you try to heal at all when you have syringes you use them no matter what. If I have 5/6 health bars there is no way for me to heal just one. I have to use the entire syringe. I wasted so many because of that.

Overall, this is a great game. I recommend to everyone. I just wish I didn't have so many other games to play. I could see myself putting 40+ hours into this. There is so much more content to explore, but I have to move on. My backlog is too big.

Pride and Prejudice

Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Haruki Murakami, Jose Saramago. All popular authors and Back-Blogged mainstays for sure, but lately I felt like I have been focusing a bit too much on those guys and need to branch out with my book-logging. To my surprise, I actually have only posted books by those four authors since mid-February of last year. That's terrible! I still have loads more King books to read, a novel and a short story by Saramago, and one novel by Murakami; I likely won't post any more GRRM until The Winds of Winter comes out, whenever that is. But still though, I need to break from tradition and try something a little out of my wheelhouse. For this reason I've been browsing guterberg.org and Amazon, adding plenty of free books to my backlog, and I intend to add many more. Some are children's classics, some are lengthy beasts, but they're in my backlog and I intend to read them all and provide my poorly articulated views. First up, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Pride and Prejudice is a window into a society that doesn't really exist anymore, at least not in the same form, the rich British landed gentry. The closest I've come to experiencing entertainment concerning this class of society is the not-so-good Downton Abbey, which focuses on the end of its era; in Pride and Prejudice this social class is alive and well, and it comes with its own set of rules for how to generally live your life. And if you were a woman, even being rich wasn't a very pleasant experience. I knew the gist of the plot here- a young woman trying to find love and feeling pressure from her family to marry eventually falls for a guy who's kind of a dick; but I didn't know the reason why there was so much pressure for her to marry in the first place. Apparently a system called 'entailment' existed as a form of inheritance. Our protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, is the second of five daughters in the Bennet clan, and she has no brothers. As such, once her father dies, their lavish property will immediately belong to his nearest male heir, a distant cousin. So rather than let her daughters potentially face homelessness, Elizabeth's mother makes it her goal to marry off all of her daughters to rich men as soon as possible, which makes up the bulk of the story- different suitors show up to the Bennet's estate and they all seem to have their faults and strengths, and it's a mess trying to figure out who cares for whom and who will irreparably cut ties with whom based on arrogance and misinformation- "Pride" and "Prejudice" if you will. I was surprised at how easy a read this was- I was ready for some dense, boring prose, and there was a little bit of that here, but I can see why Jane Austen is still widely beloved today. Her satire shines through in some memorable caricatures of the stuffy aristocracy, like the suck-up idiot Mr. Collins or the overly demanding Lady Catherine. So yeah, so far a good start reaching back to the classics. I'll probably post one or two more before the year is out. If anything, this will keep me from making 10 Stephen King posts in a row next year.

The Maltese Falcon

I really don't have that much to say about this one. It was very similar to Red Harvest, also by Dashiell Hammett, also published in 1929. The dude was the godfather of the hard-boiled detective trope and I've enjoyed his work very much. Still, I'm in no rush to run back to the same well a third time; although he has a few other books, I've now read his most famous two, and already in this one it kind of felt like I'd hit a point of diminishing returns. So it goes!

Anyway, this is my 25th book post on the year, and with this I've hit my 2014 goal and more than doubled last year's output. Can I do twenty-five more in 2015? Time will tell.

Intrusion 2

I played the first Intrusion game in an internet browser and controlling with a keyboard solely because I also had a copy of its sequel and figured I should play the first game first. For those who don't remember, I hated it and used some cheat codes to move past it quickly. Intrusion 2 however was playable on Steam and allowed for the use of a wired Xbox controller. With that one change, the series got much more playable and I found myself happily hopping around and shooting in the snowy environments of a sequel that improved on the original in a few big ways. In addition to the customizable controls, Intrusion 2 simply flows much better as a game, offering six levels and three lengthy boss fights, all of which were memorable in some way- a level in which you're sliding down a huge mountain the entire time, another where fish are constantly jumping out of the water to attack, another full of powerful mech-suits. There was just much more to enjoy here and it shows a level of polish that Intrusion just didn't have. A review I found claimed that while the original Intrusion was a major accomplishment, with one guy handling literally every part of the game aside from its sound, Intrusion 2 rendered it obsolete, a claim I have to agree with. The second game is worth a play if you're hungry for a retro-style shooter, and at that point you can safely ignore the first.

Flow

"I'm using tilt controls!"

Here's a quick and simple game from way back when the PS3 launched in 2006. I would actually even hesitate to call it a game, as it seems much more like a pretty demonstration of the PS3's Sixaxis controllers. It's kind of weird how that gyroscopic feature never really caught on. I've now beaten 28 games on the PS3, including those beaten on PSN like this one, and in 27 of them I cannot remember having to tilt my controller forward or backward or sideways in order to accomplish anything. Here, in Flow, that's all you can do. You're navigating a little creature around in a sea-like environment trying to eat food and grow bigger while avoiding predators. There are only five or six different levels, but in each one you play as a different creature who moves around differently in some way. The whole thing couldn't have taken me more than an hour to "beat" - though it did take me two nights set weeks apart - but there's so little to the gameplay that it did grow tedious after a little while. Flow was nice enough to look at and unique among PS3 games for actually incorporating the system's motion controls, but there's just not much here.

Game of Thrones: Chapter 1

Wow. Just wow. There really isn't a more perfect pairing than Game of Thrones and Telltale. Lots and lots of talking! I haven't really enjoyed other Telltale games (The Walking Dead). In previous games I made the mistake of expecting action. Thankfully, going into this game, I knew to expect 95% dialogue and decision making. For instance, I might have to decide whether to kill a deserter or whether to fight or run. In two hours, I probably made 50 of those decisions. The greatest thing this game does is make each of those decisions seem important. Though I'm sure only a handful have any significant impact, I'm not entirely sure which ones those are so it really does feel like a story entirely shaped by my decisions. Moreover, I felt tons of anxiety over those decisions. I knew if I made the wrong decision I could screw myself over. There was a scenario in which my character had to have a one-on-one conversation with Cersei. I was sweating bullets. Lena Headey fucking nails it.

Anyway, you play as three separate characters, all of whom are part of House Forrester.  Though I've only played through one chapter (they're released about every month or so), there are a total of six. The game flows much like the show in the fact that we jump between characters multiple times. Thankfully, each of these brief periods with the characters has some weight to it. It never feels like time wasted. The game starts at the Red Wedding and it's my understanding that the sixth chapter will end at the end of season five. Though characters from the show appear, this story happens in parallel with the show. All of this stuff will be new to veterans to both the show and the books.

All in all this was a great first chapter. It feels so much like Game of Thrones. But if you decide to play, realize that there isn't much gameplay here. It's all about the story and how your decisions impact it. I'm happy to say that the story is worth your time.

Gremlins

How did I decide to watch this movie? Well it was the only Christmas movie left on my backlog and it also happens to be the only Christmas movie I own that Danielle hasn't seen. Not sure why I love this so much. It has a ton of charm and it's a joy to watch. For some reason, I love the way the human characters are played so straight and the gremlins are ridiculous. They smoke, they drink and they flash their naughty parts to anyone that will look. They have perfect pitch when they sing and they're just interested in causing chaos. Just remember: they hate bright lights, don't get 'em wet and whatever you do, don't feed 'em after midnight!

Blankets

I originally received this as a gift from Danielle for Christmas 2011. It's a love story, after all. I think she thought it was a romantic gesture, though I'm not sure it is quite like she imagined. Anyway, I've been putting this one off for a long time mostly due to its size. It's 577 pages! Because I never opened it up, I was unaware of how few words there really were on each page. This graphic novel focuses heavily on the graphic part. I was shocked when I was able to finish it in about 2 hours. Surprisingly, it was a pretty great two hours!

The main character/narrator is Craig (I'm pretty sure there are a lot of autobiographical elements in here). We follow him (mostly chronologically) as he recounts his relationships with his brother, parents and eventually Raina, his love interest. All these relationships are portrayed in a very realistic, earnest way (probably because there are elements of truth in all of them). To Danielle's dismay, I probably am more drawn to the brother-brother relationship. It really hit home seeing Craig grow up and grow apart from his brother, only to recapture the relationship after some soul searching. Still, the meat of this book is Craig's high school romance with Raina. It doesn't disappoint. I was rooting for them the whole way. I was genuinely touched! This is any easy recommend to anyone. It was really, really good. Oh yeah and the drawings are pretty awesome to boot.

Polar Express

Having never read this book before, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Danielle, however, grew up on it. With that in mind, we watched it on the night of her birthday. It was an overall decent Christmas story, but some of it was a bit off-putting. For starters, every male adult is voiced by Tom Hanks. What's weirder is the fact that it seemed like all of them were modeled after Hanks. If you've ever wanted to see Tom Hanks as a CGI Santa or homeless man than this is your movie. It doesn't help that the CGI isn't amazing. It went for realism and because of it all the people just seem dead behind the eyes. I was underwhelmed and will probably not be going out of my way to make sure my kids see it.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call

I'll say this much - Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call was everything the first game was and then so much more. I mean, literally, every single song and character from the first game returns in this one. There were more characters to use and more songs to tap out and more modes to play and everything. They even pulled in all kinds of spin-off games like Tactics and Crystal Chronicles and even Mystic Quest. My gripe from my post on the first game, that Square had an unfortunate tendency to treat all of the Final Fantasy titles equally, no longer stands; fan favorites like VI and VII are very well-represented here, and that was just nice to see. Unfortunately, even though they threw tons more content into this game, the three specific songs I called out for being absent in the first game are in fact still absent here. It can't be a licensing issue, since Square must own all of their own Final Fantasy music, and it can't be that they're withholding these great songs for DLC, because they're nowhere to be seen among the DLC.

There's not much else to say here, except that the ten hours I spent on this game got me all worked up to play some more Final Fantasy games. The music and characters and moments in that series are just so damn good and memorable, by and large. Here's a link to an essay - or rather, one part of a several-page essay - that  takes a close look at all the characters in Final Fantasy VI and how their theme music fits them so well. The whole essay is worth a read, as it uses Final Fantasy VI as a case study for how to design a great game; even if you haven't played the game, the essay is full of interesting points and stats and charts and such. The whole website is worth exploring, as there are some great essays on other game design concepts featuring other games as examples.

Anyway, this little tapping game threw me into such a Final Fantasy kick that, in addition to jumping right into Final Fantasy XIII-2 this weekend, I also convinced Marissa to try her hand at Final Fantasy VII. Those of you who recall her Ocarina of Time post can probably only imagine what she has in store for her if she actually rides this forty-hour game out. I'm just glad I can experience one of my all time favorite games vicariously through her. I don't think I've touched the game in thirteen years. Imagine that!

Super Mario 3D World

Once again, so much to get through. And why don’t I post on everything that I’m finishing? Who knows... At least I have something to commit to for my New Year’s resolutions. 

Bought a Wii U recently pretty much just for Smash (now I could do a post for Smash Bros., which has definitely been completed -- at least by Stan’s terms -- but let’s be honest, I consider it more of a competitive sport than a game that can be marked for completion), but I found myself strangely attract to one of the games that came bundled with the system. Super Mario 3D Word. Or was it land? Galaxy? I swear, the titling of the Mario franchise has become so fucking frustrating. There seems to be a handful of Mario-type games available for the Wii U right now and I can’t tell the difference between any of them. I guess this just goes to show how old I’m becoming. But, to the game... It’s fun as a guilty pleasure, but there are no last memories built around this experience. 

Mario has been and is the staple for solid platforming fun. It always delivers on that jumping goodness that I still remember fondly from my childhood. I think the pinnacle of Mario’s achievement so far would either be Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Galaxy. Both were highly inventive for their time and has given me hours upon hours of joy playing. (On a side-note: we’ve at least received one sequel to the Galaxy franchise, but why no follow-up to Mario 64. Perhaps that’s what Galaxy was intended to be? Whatever, I digress...) This game, though. This 3D world. It served its purpose. It’s purpose being some mindless entertainment as I try and lull myself to sleep at night. 

The game kind of took the reigns of their old classic, Super Mario Bros. 3. Similar in staging layout where you progress through a layout of several maps each containing a dozen or so levels, this new game really builds off the old. Some new innovations are that you must collect green stars from every level in order to pass through certain checkmarks (e.t., opening a castle might require you to have a horde of stars before unlocking the content). There’s also a cat-suit (beyond our familiar tanooki-suit) that allows you to take the form of a cat and, most notably, allow you to climb up walls for a short distance. I think those two factors are the only two major changes, except, of course, for the “3D” aesthetic element of the game... which I’m not that crazy about. 

Now, I’m not against Mario leaving his 2D platformers for the great big 3D world -- hell, my favorite Mario games are designed that way -- but with the camera in a locked perspective (as it is in this game) the 3D becomes more of a hindrance than an asset. Although I found the game to be remarkably easy (I’ll touch more on its difficulty in a second), there were a lot of stupid mistakes stemming from my inability to determine where my character was going to land in this three-dimensional world of his. In the other Mario “3D” games, the camera typically remains at the third-person view following Mario. Or, at least, I could move the camera-guy, Lakitu, about so that I might be able to study my surroundings before making a jump to a tricky moving platform or something. Here, it just doesn’t work as well and ended up frustrating me a bunch as I began meticulously following my shadow in hopes I could accurately predict where I would land on the more difficult levels. 

Then there’s the game’s difficulty. Nintendo has really taken it upon themselves to become the family-friendly console. I think they’re really trying to be the Disney of video games. And why not? It’s a market that has to be filled and their invention of the gamepad that allows the kids to continue playing games while the family might be using the TV for something else is just genius. My complaint is to just not dumb down the games to accommodate to more inexperience players. How are they “dumbing” down the games. Well, if you are ever in a bind playing 3D World and die a few times in a row, you’ll spawn on your new life with a special cat-suit that is also invincible. It’s a super powered item that I believe I only actually found when I was sucking really, really bad. So, the game rewards poor playing just so you can get to the end. And this I am not cool with. 

What ever happened to the challenge and reward of beating something hard. To know when you completed a level or game, it’s something you earned. Now the game holds your hand as you waddle through it. This goes against everything we learned growing up with NES and SNES. The early Mario games always challenged us and never gave us a high-five for sucking. You kept playing till you got better. That’s the essential principle of gaming (besides having fun, of course). I just can’t wrap my head around this new development. I’m not sure what market testing gave them the insight for this. “Oh, little Timmy threw a temper tantrum when he couldn’t beat this level. So because this kid is a little shit who doesn’t have the patience or concentration to perfect his game, let’s give him this bullshit handicap to carry him to the end of the game.” Argh! It’s an infuriating addition to a game. What it ultimately does is ruin any lingering memories I’ll have of this game. I’ll never persevere a challenge which is, ultimately, what I take away from a game -- especially those games like Mario that really don’t depend on stories or art direction when trying to impress their audience. 

I have many fond memories of my video game experiences (as I stated before with Mario 64 and Galaxy), but this -- although enjoyable to play in parts -- will ultimately be forgotten in due time like a fart in the wind because the game allowed me to win. I didn’t earn it. At this point my only lasting memory will be this ranting post. 

It’s a fun fuck-around game that will leave you with no lasting impressions. And that’s disappointing for something in the Mario franchise. Here’s to hoping there’s another Galaxy (or should I say something entirely new?) lurking around the corner. At least something to make my purchase of this new system worthwhile. Seriously, there’s no fucking games other than Smash right now and it’s been out for TWO YEARS!!!

I’m signing off before I get caught digging down another rabbit hole.

Then, there's this...

A Room with a View

This was just a snoozer from start to finish. It was written and set during the Edwardian Era of England (the period of time just prior to the Titanic and Downton Abbey) and it's ostensibly a very progressive book about emerging women's rights and freedoms, but it all just felt so bland to me. An English girl goes on a vacation to Italy with her stuffy older lady cousin. There, they run into some socially awkward men from England and the stuffy older lady cousin is immediately turned off by their ungentlemanly behavior - why, they're even so bold as to offer the ladies their superior hotel room when the ladies are overheard complaining about how their room has no view. (Title alert!) What nerve! Sure enough, the young lady hits it off with the younger of the two free-spirited blokes and by the midpoint of the book she kisses him in an open field. The stuffy chaperone cousin finds them and it's back to England at once! Except, of course, again, the kissing man whore himself is from England, so of course he shows up again in the second half of the book, and of course the young lady is begrudgingly betrothed to a pompous asshole she can't stand, and so of course the wedding is called off at the last minute after she spends some more time with her Italian (not Italian) crush.

But here's where the book gets interesting - not even that interesting, but at least where it briefly had a chance to make a strong statement about women and their growing self-determination in turn-of-the-century Britain. The young lady decides not to marry her Italian (not Italian) crush, either, and opts to spend some time vacationing in Greece with two old spinsters she'd met in Italy. Hey, cool - this girl doesn't need a man at all, and imagine how forward that was in nineteen-oh- wait, what? Oh, look at that. The uncouth gentleman's father has convinced our heroine that she's in love with him and so of course they should get married and who really wants to be without a man all the way in Greece? So our girl settles down into marriage after all, the only difference being that she's chosen a weirdo instead of an asshole.

I was willing to forget how bored I'd been reading the entire book if it had managed to stick that landing with a bold ending. Instead, it wound up feeling pretty anti-feminist and largely irrelevant. Incidentally, I felt very similarly about an American contemporary of this book: Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Perhaps I'm just spoiled by "2014 privilege" but A Room With a View just didn't do anything for me.

Luftrausers

At this point I think my backlog of video games has nearly as many free toss-in titles from Xbox Gold and PlayStation Plus as it does games I spent money on; they've piled up quickly, and with a lot of vacation days off from work coming up to close out the year it's time to put in some series work to clear a huge chunk of them out. Here's one of the many free ones, a game I had never heard of called Luftrausers which was pretty obviously from its name and logo some kind of World War II-era flying simulator. This is much more like a little flash game than a serious flight sim; you fly around in a two dimensional airspace shooting down enemies to earn points and complete challenges, earning upgrades for your plane, allowing you to beat more challenges. The controls feel insane at first- it probably took me an hour to really get a handle on flying my plane, but after that steep learning curve the game does get pretty fun. Some challenges are pretty basic (blow up a boat, shoot down ten enemy planes in one life...) but the further you get they can become pretty creative. How, for example, could you take out ten planes without firing any weapons? Or blow up that boat by turning its own allies against it? For a game with a very small number of elements to it (there are really only like 4 or 5 different enemies and there's only one level) Luftrausers actually had a lot of depth to it; it also benefitted from lightning-quick gameplay in which you might die, choose a new upgrade, and have already started your next attempt in like three seconds. Still though after a few hours I had seen enough; as far as I can tell there is no final boss or anything, or any boss, just a whole lot of challenges, and I've never held myself to the standard of completing them all to call something 'finished', so I'll lazily call this 'beaten'.

Super Smash Bros.

So I purchased this game with every intention of trading it in to Best Buy a week later. With that in mind, I did what I could to “beat” it as fast as I could. I finished every mode at least once using my main man Bowser. I must say that I’m impressed by how well they were able to bring Smash to the 3ds, but at the same time, I will never play this game again. Smash is meant for the big screen and the Wii U version all but makes this version obsolete. On a side note, I don’t love the changes to Bowser. I need his head butt back.

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

I love Home Alone. It’s my favorite Christmas movie of all time. It’s timeless and it has something for everyone. Home Alone 2 is uninspired. It was a rush job in which they do the exact same thing but this time in NYC. Most of it is contrived and none of it makes a lot of sense. The Wet Bandits escape prison near Chicago and coincidently decide to go to NYC. Instead of a scary neighbor who turns out to have a great heart, there’s a scary homeless women who loves pigeons. And if you’ve seen the first Home Alone you know that the scary neighbor saves the day. The exact same thing happens here. To make matters worse, Kevin conveniently has an uncle with a big house in NYC. Even more conveniently is the fact that his uncle is out of town. To save the toy store, Kevin lures the Wet Bandits to the house and nearly identical mischief takes place. Literally everything that happens in this movie has a direct corollary in the first film. The biggest sin, however, is the complete lack of Kevin’s family. One of the best parts of the first movie is the interaction between Kevin and his family members before they leave him home alone. Buzz is great, but I Love Fuller and the French-speaking sister. What about big Pete Wrigley!? He needs more screen time! This was clearly a rushed sequel on a tighter budget that does nothing but tarnish the reputation of the first film.

Nightmares & Dreamscapes

Here's a lengthy collection of Stephen King short stories I've been working my way through for a few months- let's take a look at them on an individual level with a 1-10 relative scale- 10 being the best of the stories, 1 being the worst.

Dolan's Cadillac- 10. That's right, the first story in the whole thing may have been the peak. There's not really any supernatural forces at work here- just a simple man waiting for years to get his overly complicated and incredibly grim revenge on his wife's killer while possibly going insane. I loved it.

The End of the Whole Mess- 8. Things continue with a strong story about an attempt to save the world which of course causes its destruction. There are subtle hints at an unreliable narrator throughout with a great payoff.

Suffer the Little Children- 6. Nothing too special here- a schoolteacher's students may be demons. Good enough.

The Night Flier- 5. This story of a tabloid reporter finally finding out a monster actually exists was slow and boring until the excellent final scene.

Popsy- 7. This was appropriate right after The Night Flier as they could possibly be connected. A man in a great deal of debt to a drug lord has worked out a deal where he can work it off by abducting children; unfortunately his current mark seems to be good friends with a monster who may have been "The Night Flier".

It Grows on You- 2. I read King's novella The Sun Dog, a prologue to the novel Needful Things and found it to be pretty slow. The epilogue, It Grows on You, was much worse. This does not have me excited to eventually read Needful Things.

Chattery Teeth- 4. I have no problem with a story about an inanimate object seemingly working on its own in some frightening way, but this story about chattery teeth (the wind-up gag ones with little walking shoes?) saving a man's life was too ridiculous for the series tone King employed here.

Dedication- 3. This finishes up a string of poor stories- something about a maid in a hotel using voodoo to give her son musical talent? I dunno, I checked out on this one pretty quickly.

The Moving Finger- 10. Much better. The question of what's lurking down your drain got a great answer in It, but an even better one here. This is classic King nightmare-fuel.

Sneakers- 7. Continuing with horror in the bathroom, this one's about seeing a pair of legs and shoes in the stall next to you at the restroom at work... and then seeing them there again and again day after day. This started creepy but ended kinda lame.

You Know They Got a Hell of a Band- 4. I can usually handle King's baby boomer nostalgia trips- I loved 11/22/63, but this one wasn't great. What if your waitress was Janis Joplin's ghost? OOOoooOOOooohhhh...

Home Delivery- 7. A novel twist on the zombie genre- what happens on a remote island with few corpses and fewer living inhabitants during the zombie apocalypse? The survivors actually have a chance given that the living dead aren't seemingly infinite in numbers. Maybe this is well-worn territory though, I think others on the Blog have more zombie knowledge than me.

Rainy Season- 6. A little bit Biblical, a little bit The Lottery. One of the times where King could have eased off of the supernatural and let reality be horrifying on its own.

My Pretty Pony- 1. No idea what King was going for here, and this story about a family and their pony just dragged on and on...

Sorry, Right Number- 6. Written as a screen-play, this one looked into who is on the other line of wrong number calls. A bit of a predictable ending, but this was fine.

The Ten O'Clock People- 7. This is apparently being made into a movie set for release next year; it concerns a chemical imbalance among people who are quitting smoking that allows them to see the true form of monsters living among us. It was nice and tense and took place in Boston, so that's fun. Apparently They Live starring Roddy Piper was written around the same time so the two stories often get accused of being rip-offs of eachother.

Crouch End- 9. King takes London! No seriously this was great- an American couple gets lost in a suburb of London and stumbles into a Lovecraftian nightmare. Awesome!

The House on Maple Street- 8. This felt like King was trying to write a children's story- a group of brothers and sisters work together to get rid of their mean step-father in a very surreal way. Not really going for scares, but this was fun.

The Fifth Quarter- 8. Four guys manage to steal and hide a fortune and agree to wait for the heat to die down before retrieving it, but of course they start turning on each other quickly. Who wins out?

The Doctor's Case- 7. King tries his hand at a Sherlock Holmes short story, and although it was written well I found the key to solving the case a bit too unbelievable.

Umney's Last Case- 6. This was a decent read and all, but the story of a character who starts to realize he's in a book is something I've seen before plenty of times and this didn't add much to the idea.

Head Down- 2. Technically this was an essay; King goes into the minute details of his son's little league baseball season. I suppose it's a bit noteworthy because his coach was named the national amateur coach of the year, but other than that I didn't see any point in revisiting this season, especially in such excrutating detail, often including pitch-by-pitch recaps.

Brooklyn August- No Score. Appropriate right after Head Down, this was a short poem about the old Brooklyn Dodgers. It seemed fine enough but no way am I going to give it a ranking compared to the actual stories.

The Beggar and the Diamond- No Score. This... didn't exist in my copy. Normally I'd blame the online download, where even paid-for books have had low levels of care put into them, but we stopped at Brooklyn August and went straight into the afterword.

 

So yeah, all in all, pretty good. I think if King had cut out the stories I gave a four or less, and then left in You Know They Got a Hell of a Band which a lot of people did seem to like, this would be much better remembered. Instead Nightmares & Dreamscapes has a reputation as one of his lesser short story collections. We've got many more coming, but not any time soon. I do highly recommend Dolan's Cadillac and The Moving Finger at the very least.

Kid Icarus

Here's one I got for free on the 3DS. At first it was as hard as any NES game I'd ever played. I couldn't even beat the first level. Frustrated and bewildered, I turned to a Let's Play video on YouTube - not the first time I've done it, and it won't be the last - and immediately it was clear that I'd been misunderstanding two or three different game dynamics. Say what you want about modern day tutorials taking the "learning" aspects out of video games, but it's amazing how wide open to interpretation it is that, say, hearts in this game represent currency and not health.

Kid Icarus felt a lot like a good Sega Genesis game, which makes it one of the less impressive NES titles I've experienced.

A Dance With Dragons

Finally! After a year and a half or so, I'm completely caught up with the A Song of Ice and Fire series. As has been mentioned many times before, George R R Martin managed to crank out three fantastic books in the first 4 years and since then the series has completely slowed down and people have argued over the quality of what has come since then. Book four, A Feast For Crows, is everyone's least favorite just because so little is happening and so few of the main characters were fan favorites. A Storm of Swords ended with complete chaos in King's Landing, and yet when the next book picked up focusing almost entirely on King's Landing, not all that much happened, although I though GRRM pulled off some great cliffhangers to end it on. A Dance With Dragons focused nearly entirely on characters who didn't show up in A Feast for Crows, so let's take an in-depth look at each of them, shall we? Minus the prologue and epilogue one-offs, of course. Some spoilers are ahead but nothing story-ruining.

 

Tyrion Lannister- Tyrion is the one who caused so much chaos in King's Landing, and the last we heard of him Varys was sneaking him off to Essos on a boat. At this point Tyrion is probably most people's favorite character and his biting, sarcastic wit is as strong as ever; unfortunately Tyrion rarely ever meets up with anyone who can keep up with him in that regard so it feels a little wasted. I thought I had some idea as to what Tyrion would be up to in A Dance with Dragons, but I was very wrong.

 

Jaime Lannister- Jaime returns for one quick chapter in the Riverlands which then ends with the same cliffhanger we saw in Brienne's chapters in A Feast For Crows. Still though I thought it made sense to save this chapter for Dance rather than tack it on to the end of Feast.

 

Cersei Lannister- Feast's main character returns for a few more chapters here and both were much more interesting than anything that happened to her in Feast.

 

Jon Snow- Great chapters! For a guy whose character has been criticized for being a little bit boring compared with the more three-dimensional characters we've seen elsewhere, Jon really managed to carry all of the action at the Wall, and I liked watching him grow into his role as Lord Commander of the Night's Watch. His story ended with a few cliffhangers, but no one's really buying either of them.

 

Bran Stark- Bran only got three chapters in Dance, and two of them have already made it to the show; still though I thought they worked much better in writing than on television, and I get the feeling Bran will be a much more important part in the story moving forward.

 

Arya Stark- She's long since stopped going by "Arya", but still. Arya gets a couple chapters here after her three or four in Feast, but she made them count. We're still just watching her in training but the world of the faceless men is one that I want to read more about.

 

Daenerys Targaryen- If any story suffered in Dance, it was that of the Khaleesi. We've seen her mature so fast from a scared young girl into a brutal but just conqueror. So to see her regress back to a teen girl, unable to make tough decisions and wanting to throw it all away for "love", was pretty disappointing. Her story picked up towards the end, and she's in an interesting place by the end of the book, even though you could say it's just more regression.

 

Barristan Selmy- Dany's chapters in Meereen were mostly frustrating, so it was nice to take a break for a bit and get some point-of-view chapters from her trusted advisor and new point-of-view character, Barristan Selmy. There were only a few, but I enjoyed them.

 

Quentyn- The title "A Dance with Dragons" feels like the most appropriate in the series, as a reoccurring theme here is that lots of families in Westeros are starting to take Dany and her dragons seriously and realizing what a useful ally she could be in whatever plans they have. Quentyn (last name omitted) is one such character, on his way to Dany and her dragons with hopes that he can convince her to leave Meereen and come back to Westeros. He's not alone though, because...

 

Griff- is another character on his way with a small group of his own. What's their story? No info here!

 

Victarion Greyjoy- is a third Westerosi seeking Dany's favor. As we all know, the Iron Islands have thrown their hat in the ring in the War of the Five Kings, and they could certainly benefit from Dany's dragons and huge army.

 

Asha Greyjoy- We've seen her before, and I like that the tv show is really giving her a lot more material than the books have- I feel like Asha is the best window into the Greyjoy family- a little like a younger Brienne who isn't quite as freakish. Her story in this book gets her involved with some of the other major players, so I liked them.

 

Theon Greyjoy- Book-wise it's been assumed that Theon is dead for two books now, so I'm curious if it was a big surprise for Theon to suddenly show up out of nowhere as the fourth 'main character' in Dance. This was ignored in the show, which kept Theon around and showed him getting tortured for the entirety of season three and even introduced a failed rescue attempt. Theon has been a chore to watch lately on the show, so it was nice to see his chapters actually picked up a lot as he becomes an important player again and struggles to regain his sanity.

 

Areo Hotah- Maybe the least personality of any recurring character, Hotah is really just a window into what's happening in Dorne, getting one chapter here after his one chapter in Feast. The chapters are good at least even if I don't have much of a feel for the character.

 

Davos Seaworth- Like Bran, Davos hasn't been heard from since halfway through Storm, and also like Bran, Davos yet again disappears halfway through the book. His chapters were great, though.

 

Lady Melisandre- Melisandre got her own chapter this time around too! Even if it wasn't too important, it was nice to see how much Melisandre mixes actual magic with cheap illusions to keep up her mysterious aura.

 

So yeah, lots of new faces getting focused on- it's no wonder Martin had such a hard time balancing the story and making it all work. It still doesn't quite feel like the series can wrap up any time soon- there are so, so many loose ends, but I'm hopeful that finishing off the complicated plot of the "Meereenese Knot" and the fact that GRRM already had a lot of chapters for Winds of Winter already written at the time of Dance with Dragons' publication means that the wait won't be too much longer before the next book arrives. Maybe I'm just being optimistic, which this series has proven over and over again is usually a mistake. For now though, if I need a Game of Thrones fix to hold me over until March, there is a new video game...

Super Time Force

I played the game Braid just before the Back-Blog started up, and I was a huge fan of it not because of its controversial storyline, but simply because its central gimmick, requiring the player to rewind time repeatedly to solve puzzles felt so fresh and exciting. Sure, the time-rewind had been done before in the Prince of Persia series, but that was just a bit of a modified "extra life", allowing the player to back up and retry failed platforming stunts. Braid on the other hand forced the player to rewind and think critically about their actions, and how the environment would change as you guide your character back and forth through time, rather than just using it to correct mistakes. Super Time Force, while not as elegantly simple as Braid, uses that rewind gimmick in yet another interesting way, forcing you to complete each one of its levels and boss fights in under "sixty seconds". Even you played this bullet-hell game perfectly this is seemingly impossible; there's just too much to do to stay under the sixty second mark. So Super Time Force allows you to rewind time, a total of thirty times per level, and each time you rewind time you're allowed to play as a different character with different special abilities while the last guy you played as still does the same thing you did before. The most obvious example of the rewind ability at work would be a breakable door in the middle of the level that must be passed through. For one character it may take ten second to shoot down. A long time! After that time is up though, you can rewind those ten seconds, gaining them back, and then start blasting away again- your original guy is still there firing ten second's worth of bullets, and now you're working double-time and the door will come down in five seconds. Another rewind would have the wall down in a mere 3.3 seconds, but is it worth it to use one of the thirty rewinds to gain another two seconds? The rewind mechanic also lets you explore the levels and try to find all of the collectibles- if you see something that might take some time to grab, you can really use whatever time is remaining to get it, then rewind all the way back to when you started again. That's pretty neat! Still though, Super Time Force never ended up getting too difficult with its challenges, which is a shame. Most boss fights, while fun, can really be brute forced- just throw as many guys firing at the boss as possible and they'll go down quickly. There's a learning curve here where I had to go from clueless to good at the game, but I never really needed to take a next step and it felt like the game never built off of these interesting gameplay tactics it had taught me. Still though, while there are tons of lazy 16-bit retro shooters out these days, Super Time Force definitely surprised me with a bit of depth.

The Plague

A bit more than a year ago, I read Camus's first novel, The Stranger, and was deeply affected by it. I referred to it as both existentialistic and nihilistic in my post, a bit unclear back then that Camus was considered more of an absurdist than an existentialist or a nihilist - though granted, all three schools of thought are related and in many ways derived from one another. (Just click here.) Anyway, what affected me most about The Stranger wasn't its philosophical messages or morals, but the emotional apathy of its protagonist. The man seems utterly unfazed whether he attends his mother's funeral, becomes engaged to his girlfriend, or murders a man in cold blood. Only once his fate has been sealed does any sense of self-awareness or introspection kick in, and the dark and deeply philosophical final chapter essentially ends with the protagonist embracing the idea that his death is coming soon because, hey, it's going to come one day anyway, so why bother fighting it? The book is many things, but hopeless - nay, even "anti-hope" - is chief among them.

How strange, then, that The Plague - a story where a resurgent bubonic plague epidemic blows up in a quarantined city - ends with its narrator reflecting that there is more to praise than despise in humanity. This is a decidedly optimistic and cheerful approach to life, which at first glance runs counter to the big takeaway from The Stranger. And yet, it isn't. You can hold both opinions at once, and they don't really contradict one another. That death comes for us all and that there's no point in hoping otherwise is a stark and depressing reality, but it need not contradict the idea that people are fundamentally decent. In fact, Camus's own personal philosophy has often been described succinctly as "optimism without hope." It sounds like a paradox, but it really isn't. If you just accept that life is meaningless and temporary and that the universe is indifferent to humanity entirely, you're not just atheistic; you're nihilistic. But then if you can construct meaning in life for yourself, the indifference of the cold and unfeeling universe be damned, then you're existentialistic. That's how I understand it, at least. Camus was an absurdist, which is to say a mixture of these things, sort of like how an agnostic sits on the fence between believing and doubting. The nihilist says that life has no meaning and the existentialist says that you must create your own meaning in life. The absurdist recognizes both points and notes the contradiction between man's desire to have meaning and the universe's utter apparent meaninglessness.

At any rate, digging into these philosophies and several essays on the subject has been great, and I'm glad The Plague inspired me to further explore Camus and his world view. Still, I can't say that I loved reading The Plague. I liked it, and it told a neat little story about the human condition with lots of thematic heft, but it just never pulled me in like The Stranger did. That's fine and all, but if you want to give Camus a shot I'd absolutely insist you start out with the shorter and earlier book, The Stranger. I've got Camus's third novel - his last, before dying in a car accident at forty-seven - waiting in my backlog, and it seems like his shortest one by far. Time will tell.