End of Summer Report

As August concludes, so too does the summertime, for all intents and purposes; kids are going back to school, the daily temperature has begun a slow decline, and the local breweries have already pulled their summer seasonals in favor of autumn beers. I myself will be heading back to college in just a few days for what will (hopefully) be my final year of study. As I look back on the summer, I must admit, I'm both a bit impressed and a tad embarrassed by the amount of work I've already done on my backlog. But you see, dear readers, while the Back-Blog itself began in August, the actual quest has been going strong all summer long. In addition to the 13 books, 9 DVDs, and 11 video games listed in the annals of the Back-Blog, there were dozens of successful loggings that have as of yet been unmentioned here. For the sake of revealing the full summer's worth of progress, I'll list them here and now.

A triad of DS games that I had started, but never finished, were finally put to rest: Final Fantasy IV, Chrono Trigger, and Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time. The Xbox 360 saw plenty of action as well, with the first Halo, both Gears of War games, Burger King's Pocket Bike Racer and Big Bumpin', the Xbox Live Arcade version of Worms 2: Armageddon, and Trivial Pursuit all getting beaten. On the Wii, I made closure with both Wii Fit and North American Hunting Extravaganza; on the GameCube, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. That's 13 more games.

Perhaps even more impressive and pathetic was my DVD count. I finally got around to killing off two trilogies, the original Ninja Turtles and Terminator ones, while knocking off the first film from a third: Back to the Future. Additional films included Gone Baby Gone and the computer-animated TMNT. That right there is 9 DVDs. But wait until you see the list of TV seasons I knocked off: two Dexter seasons, two 30 Rock seasons, and a year's worth each of Weeds, Friday Night Lights, Entourage, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, and Family Guy. Baby... that's 10 more right there.

In terms of reading, there was Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and not much else; my booklogging quest was a late inspiration by my fellow Back-Blogger, Sweeney.

When my summer began, it was full of possibilities. Now, 14 books, 28 DVDs, and 24 video games later, the potential is gone. Some would call it a wasted summer. No doubt, my having a "life" to speak of certainly deserves to be called into question. But allow me to defend myself and my summer of logging, if only for one paragraph. Sixty-six completions is about two every three days. While this number seems high initially, let's consider what else I had time to do this summer. I had time to attend three Red Sox games. I had time to attend pick-up softball games almost every weekend. I had time for two rock concerts, half a dozen graduation parties, and scores of general social evenings with friends. I spent a long weekend in Maine with my grandparents. I spent another touring Niagara Falls and Toronto with my family. A third weekend was spent hiking and drinking at a friend's lake house. I had time to prepare for and take the GRE. And on top of it all, I worked 40 hours a week. In my eyes, this is as complete a summer as one could hope for. The logging and blogging were just occupants of my spare time, and dare I say it, constructive ones at that.

Like any good progress report, this reflection ends with a question for the future. Specifically, what's on tap? I've just bared the discard pile for all to see; perhaps it's only fitting that I show a sneak peak of my current hand as well. I'm currently reading American Lion, a biography of Andrew Jackson. It's a very interesting and intimate read, and as can be expected, it's a slow one. I want to take my time with it, so don't expect it to be the next book you see me make an entry for. Other likely targets on the horizon include the remaining two Narnia tales, a Joseph Heller book or two, and maybe, just maybe, a 700-page beast. Shitty children's books are on hold for the time being, as I can't quite bring myself to taking any of them to college with me. As far as DVDs are concerned, you can be sure to expect a number of TV shows coming up; we're in TV on DVD release season, and the purchases are bound to come in rapid fashion. I'm currently splitting time between Dexter's third season with my girlfriend and Deadwood's second without her. But plenty more abound. Video games are the hardest for me to predict, as I'm in the middle of at least a dozen at any given time. I tried playing Civilization IV: Colonization just the other day, but quickly found that I will need to wait for a better computer before that game becomes worth playing through. Worms Blast is a puzzle game for the GameCube that I played most of the way through the other night before getting hopelessly stuck on the penultimate puzzle. As of right now, my plan is to bring only my GameCube to school with me. This is where the bulk of my gaming backlog lies, largely due to my several compilations on the system. If I do indeed follow through with this plan, expect to see more Sonic games completed, in addition to the pair of Metroid Primes. I'm sure the DS will also find its way back to school with me, and I'll be sure to bring some Xbox games as well because my roommate will be sure to bring his 360 back as well.

How will the transition back to school affect my progress? My instinct is negatively. The fast pace and rigorous courseload of my senior year as an electrical engineer will certainly play a large role in this planned decrease, but so to will the different people and atmosphere on and around campus. I will apologize in advance for going weeks or even full months without logging a single thing. I can only hope that in my absence, dear old Sweeney will continue his unwavering pace of one or two loggings per week; I may have been far more active this summer, but once Labor Day hits, this will really become Sweeney's blog for quite some time. I can only promise that, slowed as I may be, I'll never lose sight of the ultimate goal: 100% completion across my bookshelves, DVD racks, and game catalogues.

34 books, 40 DVDs, and 72 video games remain backlogged. The battle is far from over. And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Well spank my ass and call me Charlie; I really enjoyed this Chronicle of Narnia. There was character variety, character development, and a wonderful absence of the black-and-white, wrong-and-right storytelling methods I've come to associate with C. S. Lewis. Set at sea and on several small islands, this book really felt like an adventure, which is what a fantasy book should feel like, in my humble opinion. I would dare to compare it to the Odyssey, as well as to both boat-themed Zelda games. Aslan, rather than serving his usual role as the in-your-face moral police, is much less of a presence this time around, despite appearing several times. Characters struggle with greed, vanity, and jealousy, and for the first time I can remember in a Narnia book, mature themes like self-sacrifice and civic duty are brought up. One character, a talking mouse, was probably my least favorite in Prince Caspian. Yet he fits perfectly into this high seas adventure tale, and his story concludes very appropriately. So does Prince Caspian's. In a way, you could call the tale a coming-of-age one for his character. Also, only two of the four Pevensie children return this time around, which really makes for addition by subtraction, as they were all essentially the same character. The addition of their cousin Eustace into the cast of characters was a solid one, as he provides a good amount of comic relief and also a decent little development arc of his own. This was my favorite Narnia book since the chronological first one, The Magician's Nephew, and I read that one almost a decade ago, so it's tough to say which one I actually liked more. Still, with just two Chronicles left, I think I'm finally starting to enjoy the series the way so many others do. Of course, the last two could be terrible. We'll see.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2

It wasn't long ago at all that I decided to play the first Sonic the Hedgehog game. Now, its sequel has been checked off the backlog. I must say, the playing experiences were nearly identical. There's still no password or game save system, but once again, a level select code enabled me to beat this one with no real hassle. The biggest change this time around is the debut of Tails, Sonic's trusted two-tailed fox of a partner. There's a 2-player option, but if you're lone wolfing the game like I did, Tails will be controlled by the AI, and will mostly just mimic Sonic's movements. This is an added bonus oftentimes, because during boss fights, sometimes Tails will add an extra whack to your opponent, decreasing fight times. While I thought Tails was only an extra on-screen distraction when I began to play this game, by the middle of the game I was glad to have him by my side. For the final three levels, Tails is absent, and Sonic must take on Dr. Robotnik alone. There's really not much to say about this game that I didn't cover in my recent entry on Sonic 1. The frustration levels were pretty low, and a few of the zones were really, really fun to play through. However, by the last quarter of the game or so, some of the enemies just got ridiculous, and I was glad to see it end. As of now, I'm planning to wait a little while before dealing with Sonic 3; I'm enjoying these games so far, and I wouldn't want to ruin that by pressing my luck with a third in under a week.

Our Living Multiverse

This was one heavy book. And at 250 pages and bound in paperback, I don't mean that physically. Fred Adams has spent seven chapters bringing us from the beginning of time through the development of intelligent life. Never before have I seen astrophysics, atomic physics, and biochemistry so beautifully intertwined. Adams does his best to make his material understandable for the common man, but he doesn't go as far as dumbing down the information enough to put it in layman's terms. Because of this, I often found myself having to reread passages or at least taking them very, very slowly. I've actually been reading this book for a couple of weeks, interspersing a few of the chapters with the children's books you've seen peppering my late August reading list. Without daring to even try to explain any of what Our Living Multiverse has taught me, I'll give a few highlights in a nutshell. Here it goes. There are ten or eleven possible spatial dimensions. Our particular universe includes only three of them. Outside of our universe are many others. This entire network of space-time is called the Multiverse. The average lifespan of a universe is 10^-47 seconds, an unfathomably small amount of time. In fact, outside of our own universe, and before it was created, the concept of "time" is irrelevant. Still, while "time" began along with our universe 14 billion years ago in the big bang event, the raw mess of space-time from which it emerged has been extant forever, and always will be. While our sun and galaxy are by no means "special," our universe is; it has survived for 10⁶⁰ times as long as the average one, and is expected to expand forever, thus lasting forever. This infinite expansion is thanks to the presence of dark energy, which acts as a negative pressure. While gravity alone would eventually pull every piece of matter in our universe back together in a collapse of proportions as epic as the big bang itself, dark energy will instead always continue to stretch the universe. The universe itself will thus never die, but everything in it has a definitive lifespan. Protons themselves will decay into energy eventually, some trillions of trillions of trillions of years from now. Our sun will flicker out (after a brief stint as a red giant) in just 4 or 5 billion years. Our galaxy itself will collide and combine with the nearby Andromeda galaxy in just 3 billion years. In just 1.1 billion years, our sun will grow too bright and powerful for water to exist in its liquid form on Earth. Within the next million years, a red dwarf star may or may not come close enough to our solar system to severely alter our planet's orbit, destroying the delicate balance of seasonal change that most ecosystems thrive on. The planet could be ejected from its orbit altogether, careening off into empty space where all life on the surface would freeze over and die. Does this sound grim? It shouldn't. Human civilization spans back about 10,000 years at most. While our sun and planet may be middle-aged, we as a species are still in our infancy, much like the universe itself. Part of what made this book so great was that in addition to answering a lot of questions, it creates new ones, most of them unanswerable. Is there other life out there? Can we survive the end of the earth? Most importantly, while Adams never alludes to God or religion at all - something I commend him for doing - it was impossible for me, and I would think most people, to read the book without wondering about such concepts and their role in all of this. I think that atheists and the faithful alike can enjoy this book, so long as they can get over the whole creation story and be willing to accept a new one as, well, factually true. It's the most engrossing scientific book I've ever read, as well as the most epic in scope. I recommend it for any interested party, but be warned: it's not for those who don't want to put in the effort to understand what's being said. I'm not saying you need a PhD to comprehend what's going on, but I mean, even the most elementary understanding of quantum mechanics - quarks, wavefunctions, particle-wave duality - would be helpful. I don't know if this book changed my outlook on life in any meaningful or permanent way, but it certainly was engrossing to read and will be worth remembering. If you've got what it takes to handle it, give it a try. If not, you can always try a special on the Discovery Channel.

Hocus Pocus

I've sort of lost count, but I believe that this is the seventh Vonnegut book I've read, and unfortunately Hocus Pocus joins Welcome to the Monkey House in the short list of ones I didn't like. Like many Vonnegut novels, Hocus Pocus is written as a fictional autobiography, this time about Vietnam vet Eugene Debs Hartke. The primary focus of the novel is the period of his homecoming from Vietnam through the present, where he finds himself a hostage in a prison riot in upstate New York. Vonnegut's sarcastic wit is still here, as well as his ability to develop a plot covering a wide range of topics. What's missing here is the glue to keep it all together- I kept waiting for a conclusion that would tie together all the plots; plots that on their own would be interesting enough to carry their own seperate books- Eugene's family's spiral into insanity, his sudden questioning of his atheism, his loss of faith in America after the mess that was Vietnam- all of these stories individually felt worth reading about but never were fully developed enough to make a good enough impression. I'm torn- I feel like this book could have been improved upon either by making it longer to expand on some of these themes, or shorter by cutting some of them out entirely.

The final sentence of Hocus Pocus is one I've heard quoted a few times before, I'll share it here as it's not much of a spoiler: "Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe." While an interesting idea, this line did not feel like a fitting ending to the book- in fact, the only place I can apply it is that Hartke (and Vonnegut) think that America's intrusion in Vietnam was a mistake. First, that's something that's generally agreed upon by society, so Vonnegut wasn't saying much new. Second, that only applies to the Vietnam parts of the book- if this was the conclusion, what was the point of including the rest of Hartke's story? I guess it's just a bit frustrating, as the writing is still good in Hocus Pocus, and it's clear Vonnegut had a message to take away from it, I just couldn't figure it out.

Sonic the Hedgehog (1991)

At 18 years of age, this game was the oldest one in my backlog aside from a few Mega Man games. I just finished it up on a lazy Sunday morning, and I can say that I'm impressed. It came out in North America a month or so prior to Nintendo's Super Mario World, the definitive platformer of my childhood, but I feel as though its graphics engine is superior. That doesn't mean this is a better game, however; no 2D platformer is superior to Super Mario World, and there's nothing more to it. In fact, in many ways, Sonic the Hedgehog can't even measure up to it. Super Mario World had over 100 playable levels. Sonic has 18. Super Mario World had a save feature that is noticeably lacking in Sonic. When I first died in Sonic and had to start all over from the very beginning, I thought I was in for a long and frustrating experience. After all, who wants to pound through 18 levels in one sitting without dying more than twice? There aren't even passwords; you're literally given three lives and told, hey, go beat this game. Extra lives are few and far between as well. However, lo and behold, the Internet provided me with a solution. No, I'm not speaking of an emulator or a flash version of Sonic. We're talking cheat codes. A simple pressing of up, down, left, and then right while on the title screen brings up a level selection screen. Beautiful. Using this, I was able to beat the game without the nerve-wracking experience of seldom being allowed to die. Whenever I did, I could easily just start the game again from whatever level I had just been on. Now, a purist would tell me that I have not truly beaten the game, for to do so, I would need not to use a cheat code. But you know what? Fuck that guy. I've got a list of games 70-deep that need beating. Is it worth it for me to play the game for a week straight worrying about every single chasm that needs jumping? Of course not. I'd much rather have fun with a game than get pissed at it. That's why I rarely play things on the hardest difficulty setting when prizes aren't involved, unless I'm really good at said game. Look, beating 70 games is enough of a challenge; I don't need to impress anyone, least of all myself, by never taking the easier way out of a few of them. As far as the game itself goes, I must say, it was a lot of fun. It felt great to finally play through a true classic that I'd only ever really seen bits and pieces of before. If you've never tried the old-school Sonic games, I do heartily recommend them. There's nothing like them out there: a fast-paced platformer with semi-linear levels. It may have taken me 18 years, but I'm glad I finally got around to playing through this game.

Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine

Way out of left field, I decided to crack into my Sonic Mega Collection compilation for the GameCube, and started things off with this 1993 puzzle game. First things first: this is a total Dr. Mario knock-off, and Dr. Mario was somewhat of a Tetris knock-off itself. Yes, the Mean Bean Machine is a second-tier knock-off. The game consists of 13 stages (opponents, really) and, unless one was included in the original instruction manual, zero story whatsoever. The object of each stage is to make your enemy's board fill up before yours does. To clear pieces from your board, you must connect four or more of the same color. The foursome will vanish, allowing gravity to pull down other blocks (beans?) into the vacant spaces left behind. Now, the only way to beat the game is to get combos. To do this, you have to set up your beans such that when one foursome is made, another one is made in the aftermath. Getting a combo will send a black unclearable bean into each slot on your opponent's board. If you're able to string together a two-fold combo, three such beans will hit each spot. And should you be able to get a combo of a higher order than that, well, you pretty much instantly win the game. I beat Dr. Robotnik himself with one such four-combo. In one fell swoop, he was gone. It was really sort of anticlimactic. The thing is, while making big combos results in a quick win, not making big combos results in a loss. Your success at this game is completely contingent upon your ability to set up such dastardly chain reactions. Before realizing this, I could get no farther than the 2nd level on the normal difficulty setting or the 3rd level on the easiest one. I would spend five minutes neatly cleaning up my board, laughing at my opponent and his two-thirds-full mess, when suddenly, an avalanche of black beans would tumble all over my orderly grid. It was infuriating. So, yeah. This is a one-trick game. But then, what would you expect from a knock-off's knock-off? Don't play this game until and unless you have already played yourself bored with Tetris and Dr. Mario, in that order.

Madworld

A puchase in June, Madworld is one of the most recent and anticipated additions to my backlog. When I first heard about the concept for this game, people were hailing it as the most violent game to come out for the Wii. Having played some of the recent over-the-top violent Wii games such as Resident Evil 4 and No More Heroes already, I felt I had been jaded and wanted to see if the game would really quench my thirst for blood and gore. I'm happy to say, Madworld delivers and is really, really fun. The plot is that you're a guy named Jack who has stumbled onto an island full of crazies all taking part in a game show where everyone kills eachother to win. People hold some secrets and I think there was a government conspiracy in there, but none of that really matters, it just serves as an excuse to murder everyone in sight. The standard way of killing a guy is to chop him in half. This is something I've seen before in No More Heroes, but NMH never moved far beyond that- Madworld pushes creativity in your killings. Instead of just taking a chainsaw to a guy, why not first trap him in a barrel? Then with him unable to fight back, ram a pole through his skull, and then finish him off by throwing him into another enemy and have them both land on a bed of spikes. Stuff like this keeps the gameplay fresh all the way to the end. In addition to the fun gameplay, the overall atmosphere of the game is great. The entire world is black and white, except for red blood splatters. Combining this lack of color with onomatopoeia words displayed everytime a sound effect is made ("CLANK!" "SNAP!") and the whole thing feels like playing in a comic book. It's important to note that these gimmicks never really got in the way of the game or distracted me; this is a game first and foremost. Also adding to the experience are the two announcers- Greg Proops and John Dimaggio do some spectacular voicework and have a hilarious dynamic together. They made the credits worth watching, which I can't say about any other game I've played. Overall, the game may have been a little short, but I can't fault it for that, because that kept it from ever getting frustrating- the game never wore out it's welcome. While it won't got down as one of the top games I've played, I'll certainly remember Madworld as a fun but extremely violent experience.

Letters From Iwo Jima

After watching The Last Samurai two nights ago, last night I decided that it was time for another Japanese war movie. This one's often described as a "companion piece" to Clint Eastwood's other 2006 flick, Flags of Our Fathers. Having seen both, I can attest like the majority of people who have seen both that Letters is the better film. It was very moving and powerful in addition to offering plenty of insight as far as what it was like on the Japanese side of the conflict. However, it wasn't a perfect film. Sadly, it seems Eastwood couldn't bring himself to depict his country and their forces as the brute savages that the Japanese considered them to be. While there is one very strong scene depicting an American soldier acting without morals or kindness at all, you're never really left thinking that the Americans are evil, even as you see Japanese soldiers getting gunned down by them. Perhaps that's because you naturally empathize much more with the Americans, but in my mind, a fantastic movie can make you start to question what you thought you knew about human nature. A few of the Japanese generals are sympathetic to their American POWs and even their own men, but we learn via flashbacks that these officers spent time, prior to the war, in America. So what you take home is that all of the Japanese higher-ups are brutal death-lovers except for those who have been to the more modern country of their enemies. As I said, the movie is flawed in this regard; Eastwood has managed to lead me to believe that the Japanese are the good guys, but he really hasn't gotten me to view the Americans with the same fear and hatred that the Japanese did. Thus, I'm not completely sharing their point of view. A small part of the problem is that when we hear Americans shouting or talking to each other, we fully comprehend what they're saying. Here's a thought. What if Eastwood had made it such that, instead of comprehensible English, the Americans spoke in some sort of garbled pseudo-language? You know, like the one in The Sims. There was a scene in Lost once where we finally come to see things through the Korean foreigner Jin's eyes, and when the other characters speak, the audio is played backwards, achieving the garbled gibberish effect I'm talking about. That could have done wonders here. Still, despite all of my suggestions, I'm only saying that a film that's already an 8 could have been a 9. It's definitely better than Flags if you're only looking to watch one of the two, and I'd recommend it to anyone, especially fans of grenade-based suicide.

Super Mario Land

Released in 1989 for the original Game Boy, Super Mario Land is now 20 years old- just three years younger than me. Being by far the oldest game currently in my backlog, the question I wondered as I popped the cartridge into my GBC was "will it hold up?" I've recently replayed some old Mario games and some are just as good as ever (Mario Bros 3) while some feel unplayable by today's standards (Super Mario Bros). Unfortunately, it seems Super Mario Land falls into the latter category. Okay, "unplayable" is a little harsh, especially considering I not only played it but finished it, but it certainly hasn't stood the test of time. The game is divided into 12 levels, none of which are notably long, but many of which are notably short. Seriously, I think some of them were completed in under a minute, and the whole game took about half an hour to play through. Add to this the little replay value, and it seems like the whole game is very lacking. In addition, the boss fights were either mindlessly easy or frustratingly difficult. The first three are bosses who you can literally run right through if you have a mushroom; the last two take a lot of damage to finish off and require precise controlling- something you won't find in a several-generation old system. Luckily, I managed to finish the game off with a few lives left, only to see Mario and Princess Daisy take off in a rocket ship. How the hell does that fit in with the Mario canon? Oh well, at least I can put away my Game Boy Color now, comforted by the fact that I am done with all of the games I had for it.