Kid Icarus: Uprising

I wanted to like this game much more than I actually did. Pit is one of my favorite characters in the newest Super Smash Bros. game and the idea of a Kid Icarus revival after something like twenty years on the shelf for the franchise had me at least moderately excited. Alas, this game simply did not deliver. In addition to being physically uncomfortable to play, the mechanics themselves were confusing, haphazard, and overall just a great big clusterfuck. Gameplay felt very repetitive, and yet at the same time I could never really get into any sort of rhythm at all. It wasn't clear to me which weapons were best suited for which levels or enemies and the story itself, though irrelevant to my ability to play the game, was tough to comprehend. Maybe this'll sound xenophobic, but it just felt like such a Japanese game to me, all hodgepodge and chaotic with a wisecracking hero at its center. I don't regret playing this and I actually kind of like that it's part of my fledgling 3DS game collection, but this just wasn't one of the better gaming experiences I've had.

The Devil's Backbone

Happy Halloween, folks. 

As is only appropriate for day like today (er... or late last night) I watched a horror movie. A Guillermo del Toro horror movie, The Devil's Backbone. I've been seeing this film on a number of internet top horror movie lists and finally got around to seeing it for myself. General impression: it's a good story with strong characters, but nothing really to write home about... plus it's not scary at all. 

The film is center around a Spanish orphanage sometime between the early- to mid-1900's (I'm just going off the models of the cars shown in the movie). There's some sort of war going, but I really don't know anything about Spanish or European history so that's as much as I'll go into on that. Regardless, a new boy shows up at the orphanage and is reluctantly taken in considering the dangerous predicament the orphanage is in during these war times. Soon after being taken in, this boy, Carlos, starts seeing signs of a strange ghost lurking around the grounds. Without ruining anymore of the story, I'll leave it there. A boy in an orphanage tries to track down a ghost harmlessly roaming the ground. 

The story is actually far more involved than just ghost story, but the main narrative does end up pivoting about this strange ghost child and the mystery behind his demise. However, I'm going to leave it up to the rest of you to watch it for yourself. 

As with most of Guillermo del Toro's work, I like this movie. Well shot, well acted, interesting story. All that aside, it's far beneath what I witnessed in Pan's Labyrinth (what I think most would consider his best movie), but definitely still worth a watch if you find yourself attracted to del Toro's style. 

One thing that bothers after watching this whole movie is what exactly the Devil's Backbone is. Now, if no one has seen this film, then I'm basically just going to be rambling to myself. Still, I have to get this off my chest. In the middle of the movie, Carlos is having a conversation with the doctor of the orphanage. He reveals all these jars in his office where it looks like dead fetuses are being contained and preserved in a rum-like substance. These fetuses also all have exposed vertebrae; the deformity that the doctor refers to as the Devil's Backbone. He then proceeds to pour himself a shot of rum from this tank that the fetuses are marinating in and explains that they sell these libations to the public as a miracle healing tonic. All that aside, I fucking don't know what to make of it? Without trying to explain the whole movie, this rum product doesn't have a whole lot to do with the plot. Although there are elements of the supernatural, there's no direct correlation to this dead baby-rum drink. 

I don't know. The movie was in subtitles. Maybe something got lost in translation, or maybe I'm just too dense to pick up on something obvious. Whatever... The movie seems to be titled around this dead baby-rum drink, yet it has practically nothing to do with the plot. 

Speaking of being dense, there's also an old bomb jutting out of the ground in the middle of the orphanage's courtyard. It was dropped sometime before the start of the film during a failed attempt to blow the joint in the middle of a bombing raid. People talk about it from time to time explaining it's just a dud, but no one has the strength to move it from the ground. People also explain they can hear ticking and that it has the potential to blow one day. Once again, serves no point in the plot of the story. Is it for symbolism only? That this whole orphanage is just a ticking time bomb waiting to go up in flames? And since when is symbolism pointed out directly in dialogue... on more than one occasion? Apologies for ranting. I can't figure this shit out and it's beginning to bug me.

For that reason, I encourage others to go out and see this film and return to me to help answer my questions/frustrations. 

Thanks... and happy Halloween. 

South Park: Season 16

As Back-Blogged grows older, through the years I've been able to post multiple times about many different TV shows. And for a lot of shows - particularly comedies - I'm often left without much to say by the second, third, or fourth time around. South Park has been around for 16 years, and I've posted at length already many thoughts on both recent seasons and older seasons in general. I'm left with very little to say, I guess, especially with Game 5 of the World Series on right now. So be it! Maybe Season 17 will inspire more from me around this time next year.

Animal Crossing New Leaf 3DS

This game was hard to decide when to post. Its a game without an ending. I decided that the right time to post was when the novelty wore off. My mansion was as big as it was going to get and collecting things all day was starting to seem very pointless.

You start by being named the mayor of a town and its your responsibility to build the town. It starts off seemingly simply enough. You move into town and find out you have accidentally been named the mayor of the town. A tent is provided for you to start off in and you build both your own personal fortune and the towns as you progress. Initially you have to catch bugs and fish, collect fruit,  and find fossils to get money. You use this money to build public works projects, buy clothes for yourself, gifts and notes for your townspeople and many other things. As you hit more and more milestones you can get badges for the things you have done like catching 200 fish or returning 50 lost items to their rightful owner. The shops in town get bigger as you spend more and more Bells (money) in them. There is an island you can travel to and there you can find rare fruits, bugs and fish. There are period tournaments you can participate in to win medals, holidays with special items and shows (like the fourth of July fire works). The game even changes with the seasons. As of September first my tree's leaves started to turn brown and orange. I am sure that when December hits I will find a fresh layer of snow on the ground. Its highly addictive and I am sure that I got my full $39.99 out of this game. The beauty is that I put a beautiful town ordinance in place and I can come and go at my leisure without the fear of my town deteriorating on me ( which it would naturally do think weeds and eventually cockroaches). This game is truly addictive.

Coraline - Neil Gaiman

Simply said, watch the movie. I have never seen a movie and a book so perfectly similar.

Coraline tells the story of a girl who finds a small door in her house that leads to another world. The other world is very similar to hers except not quite. People have buttons for eyes and her other mother is trying to take her soul. Its a good read but I still think you can get the exact same experience from watching the movie which is quite good.

American Gods

Still catching up on all my posts. 

Got a little sidetracked when digesting all of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics for another piece of Gaiman's work, American Gods. Heard a lot about this novel long before embarking on it - a lot of positive things - and the book definitely stood up to the hype. First off, let me just say that even though this is the first book by Gaiman that I've read, I can tell we're going to get along just fine. Something about his dark, macabre tone, fascinating characters struggling in a truly original premises... oh, I just love it. If you're not familiar with this book in particular, let me just give you a little taste.

For a moment imagine that gods are real. And not just the one almighty Christian God, but thousands and thousands of gods. Gods for basically ever important element in people's lives. If you're a farmer, maybe you have a rain god and a crop god. As long as there's someone praying to the god, giving it attention, then the god exists and gains power. Alright, now in the present day there are basically two sets of these deities. New gods and the old gods. The old gods are all these figures from old folklore and the new gods are entities of television and the internet - things people care about nowadays. Also, gods exist in the world along side humans. Only the old ones live in poverty while the new basically pop in and out of the story like some secret service agency. Men in black shit. (Clearly they have the power and money.) Well, with that very clever setting, Gaiman introduces the story's protagonist, Shadow - a recently released convict who on his trip home discovers his wife has died in a car accident... while she was giving fellatio to Shadow's best friend. Tough break if there ever was one. Well Shadow gets picked up by a strange fellow (an old god) who essentially gets him involved in a series of events that will eventually lead to a giant war between the gods of new and old. 

It's one hell of an epic premise. The thing I like the most is Gaiman's representation of death. It's basically the idea that just because someone dies they're not actually dead. Life isn't just classified by a heart beat. His world is magical, strange, dangerous, and sometimes strangely sexy. It's definitely a great read.

One things that is a little strange and hard to grasp is that every now and then Gaiman introduces little vignettes between chapters. He splices up the main narrative with these short stories on the history of some of these old gods. No backstories on any of the old gods involved in the main narrative. Just figures from the past. At first I thought it was pretty confusing. You hear a story about some British woman turned fugitive who escapes to the still developing America and accidentally brings pixies and fairies with her as these gods had to follow her because they could only stay in existence with her faith. By the end of the novel, I was able to understand when I was reading a vignette compared to the main story. Still, it threw me off for a bit and doesn't really contribute to much. It just makes this world a little more expansive and colorful.

I see Webber has already got some Gaiman under his best. Anansi Boys is a bit down on my list of Gaiman books to read, but if you (Webber) haven't already check out this title, do so. 

Grand Theft Auto III

Grand Theft Auto V hit stores not too long ago. Like most people out there, I was extremely tempted to get out and pick up a copy for myself. One afternoon I almost gave into this urge, but while en route to the store one important thing occurred to me: why should I buy the newest installment in the GTA series when I've never beaten any of the other games? Now, that's not to say that I don't own any of the other games... in fact, I own all of them (well, GTA:IV got lost in the move). So basic Back-Blogging logic prevailed on my trip to the store and encouraged me to head home instead and finish these prequels before embarking on the fifth title of the series. 

Ah, GTA:III... you bring back such memories. I never actually owned this game when it first came out, but just about all my friends did. So, I got a fair amount of playtime in. It was mostly just toying around in the cars, though. Exploring the city, shooting up innocent civilians, seeing how long you could survive when you earned a full wanted level. Good times. Even experiencing all this, I never had the opportunity to beat the game until I got the GTA:III and GTA: Vice City combo pack for Xbox a few years later. (Can't even remember how I came into possession of these games anyways? Something tells me Luke Scanlon, but I really have no idea.). Long after acquiring the games, I finally beat the first one. 

Even as dated as the graphics are, it was still a lot of fun. Solid driving mechanics, fun gameplay, but there's not much in terms of character development. You're just some degenerate criminal recently sprung from the clinker who gets passed around from crime family to crime family until the game has nowhere else to go. It's not a big problem, but it's definitely something the future games in the franchise have improved upon. The game is also fairly challenging. I would be lying if I said I didn't use any cheats... but I did use them quite a bit, in fact. In the end, I think that's something really endearing about the game. It has cheat codes! Can't remember the last time I played a game where I could punch in some random combination of buttons and all of a sudden a tank would appear in front of me. Miss stupid shit like that.

The one thing out of the whole game I enjoyed the most - and the one thing that I still remembered clearly after all these years from when I first played the game - are the radio stations. All those songs and wacky ads. I don't know how or why, but I could instantly recite along with all the radio shows even though it's been at least seven years since I've last played this game. Crazy.

Anyways, I'm sure reviewing this game any farther would just be an exercise in futility as I bet I'm the only one on the planet who's never beaten it... Well, until now. 

Next up, Vice City. 

The Dark Tower: The Drawing of Three - Stephen King

I think this book has been comfortably reviewed on this blog so I wont go into any detail on the plot or a summary here. I picked up this series because someone in my fantasy baseball league named their division the Ka-tet and I was told that I could find out what that was in the book the Gunslinger. I have no read the Gunslinger and the Drawing of three and I have yet to find out what a Ka-tet is. Unfortunately, I have moved well beyond just needed to know what a Ka-tet is and I am truly interested in the fate of our three main characters. When I feel up to it I will pick up the third book in this series and not a moment before. All I really have to say about this book is that it is a great improvement from The Gunslinger. The beginning of this book is action packed and suspenseful. The middle drags a bit as you wonder whether King will kill Eddy Roland and Odetta/Detta off before they reach the final door. The ending really made the book worth while. From the final door on the story gets fun and exciting. Now that Roland and company seem to be getting back their strength it leaves you to wonder what is in store for them next.

World War Z

So I was over at Kara's place the other night and we were looking for a movie to watch on demand. As we passed by World War Z Kara mentioned that she had wanted to see it. I told her it was about zombies and it might be kinda scary. She assured me that it would be fine. Within five minutes she was screaming and jumping a mile out of her skin every other scene. That should be a pretty good summary for this movie. It was good a couple of good make you jump scenes with a little tiny bit of plot thrown in. The zombies were the best part. 

Most Zombies are slow and methodical. Not these ones. These zombies were as Jillian would describe them Usain Bolt fast. They moved fast and they also transformed you fast once you were bitten. But like most zombies in films they have a tragic flaw. Watch the movie to find out that flaw.

Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman

My vacation from posting has gone on far too long. I have been working on many many items but I haven't been able to finish any. I'm glad to say that my drought has come to an end. I have managed to finish an item, a book, and it was really quite good. The book i'm talking about is Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. This is the second book I have read by him and I am growing quite fond of his writing style. He writing has a different feel than his other mediums, namely movies (Coraline), comics (The Sandman), and TV episodes (Dr. Who).

 It is said that all the stories once belonged to Tiger but Anansi tricked him and now all stories belong to Spider. Anansi boys is a story about Anansi, well about his children to be specific. The main character of the story is a man named Charlie but due to an embarrassing father has been nicknamed Fat Charlie. Fat Charlie discovers that his father is actually Anansi the spider of folk tales. In his special and creative way Gaiman takes Fat Charlie from being a boring  accountant to being the true son of a folk legend.

Anansi Boys is similar in many ways to American Gods. There is a very neat blend of every day life and myth or folk lore. In both books the main characters discover that there is more to them than they thought. Both stories deal with ghosts or as they call them in this book Duppies.

There is a noticeable progression in Gaiman's storytelling ability between his first and second book. Anansi boys is a much more full and complete book than American gods. I'm excited to delve into some of his other works. Maybe I will read Coraline next as it fits in with the spooky Halloween season.

Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut

I have now read three of Kurt's novels and two of his short stories and I am starting to get a feel for how he writes. This third book, Galapagos, is probably my least favorite so far but I still enjoyed it thoroughly. The story tells the tale of a small group of people who find themselves by a strange series of events stranded on one of the Galapagos islands. The story is told by a man from a million years in the future who has the capability to know the back story and emotions of all the players in the tale. The story ends, like some of Vonnegut's other books, with the destruction of the human race. The people on the island are fortunate to have avoided world war three and a virus that destroys women's ovaries that has decimated the rest of the world.

I really like the disjointed way that Vonnegut writes. He lets you know what is going to happen before it happens and manages to make it work. The story takes place from so many different angles at once that you really get a feel for the way things play out. I almost feel that the plot is second to the character development. Its all about the ride not the destination.

Heroes of Ruin

The guys bought me this one as a small component of my bachelor party road trip weekend (thanks again guys!) and two and a half months later I've beaten it. I'm pretty sure they all bought themselves a copy too, so in theory this won't be the last Heroes of Ruin post on the blog. We'll see though.

The multiplayer aspect is by far the game's greatest strength, and I never had more fun wit this game than when four - or even two - of us were playing it together, each with a different generic stock character. It's a pretty run-of-the-mill dungeon crawler with light RPG elements. You level up, you acquire new skills, and you find or purchase new weapons and armor. The story was bland but not latter day Final Fantasy nonsensical, which was nice. And while there were numerous side quests, I was able to complete every single one of them without feeling like I was going that far out of my way to do so. There's a fetch quest or two thrown in at the end and the game only really got challenging at the final boss, but overall I'm glad I spent the fifteen hours playing this that I did. Most of those hours came in a van or hotel room with friends or at home in front of my TV; rarely did this game require or merit my undivided attention.

I've only got one game left on the 3DS for now, and it's that whacky Kid Icarus rail shooter that's not quite a rail shooter. I can't really say with any accuracy when that'll get beaten, or even if I'll jump back into it soon. Oh well!

The Stranger

This was a very ill-fitting book to read on my honeymoon. Nonetheless, I loved it. It's a piece of existentialist fiction from the early 1940s, perhaps influenced directly by all the inhumanity of World War II. Its protagonist and title character is a man utterly devoid of what you and I would recognize as human emotions. He is entirely indifferent to the death of his mother, to his impending marriage to a woman, and - minor spoiler - to both a murder he commits and the ensuing trial and punishment he earns. But he is not robotic and unfeeling; he is bothered and soothed by physical situations - days at the beach, sexual gratification, tiredness - the same way you or I would be. It's not that he has no feelings, then, but simply no desire to connect with other people in any way. Nowadays we would probably call him autistic, but I'm pretty sure that kind of condition - or at least the awareness of it - wasn't really in vogue seventy years ago when this book was written.

I've often heard of some stories, and I'm sure you have too, where "it's not what's said, but what isn't said that matters." This usually feels like bullshit to me, a tidy-sounding way to dismiss apathy or shortcomings on the writer's part, but here, it's entirely true by design. At his mother's funeral, for instance, the narrator never once describes himself as sad, mournful, or upset that his mother has died. Instead he is bothered by the hot sun and the long bus ride out to his mother's nursing home. Even when the woman he's casually been seeing proposes marriage, he accepts it without any sort of expression of love for her. At work, he neither shows nor feels any ambition to do his job well or win his boss over. In many ways, the narrator is just kind of "along for the ride" in life.

His situation deteriorates drastically and absurdly in the second half of the book, and in the final chapter he bears out his world view plainly and openly for the first time, and that view is, unsurprisingly, incredibly bleak and depressing. It's atheistic and nihilistic in every sense and the book ends with - spoilers, again - the narrator just completely ready to accept the death he has been condemned to simply because he is aware that everyone dies sooner or later, and really, what's the difference between doing so at thirty or at eighty?

It's all incredibly bleak and it probably wasn't the best book to bring along on my honeymoon, but hey, I had no idea how dark it would end up being. What I found interesting, if a bit off-putting, was how I recognized some of the main character's apathies and indifferences in myself. I mean, I love my wife, and I'd be devastated if my mother died, and I usually care enough about my job to do it to the best of my abilities and all, but still. I've been at funerals or weddings before and felt like I just don't care as much as I should. I've stopped and asked myself what the "point" of all this really is more than once or twice in my life. I've put my own physical comfort and pursuit of simple pleasures over meaningful human connections and small social courtesies plenty of times. But I think we all have. I think that's what makes this book so powerful, in some ways. As people - hell, I'll even narrow that down and say "as men" - I think we're all faced occasionally with the struggle to give a shit, even when we know we should.

Anyway, consider reading this one yourself. My copy was just 120 small-ish pages long and the book was published in 1942 and is thus probably digitally obtainable for free.

A Farewell to Arms

Yeah, bitch! Hemingway!

All in all, it's been a pretty active vacation for my new wife and me, but between all the hiking, diving, sightseeing, and eating - no, gorging - we've had some downtime to read books on the beach and by the pool and such. I'm halfway through a second book now, and feel like I should make my post about this one before thoughts on the two cloud together at all.

I liked it, and I liked it a lot. I've read Hemingway before, just prior to the Back-Blogged era, in The Old Man and the Sea. I'm inclined to say that this book was better than that one, but comparing a World War I romance novel to a novella about the epic struggle between an old fisherman and a giant marlin feels a bit misguided. A Farewell to Arms was probably more flawed, but also far more complex. And God, was it sad. Hemingway wrote in a simple prose and so far it seems like he stuck to writing about simple themes. Here, those themes are basically that war sucks and that love opens up the door for loss and pain. Nothing you don't already know. There isn't even much of an internal conflict going on anywhere, and the external one is just World War I itself. The book spends nearly equal amounts of time depicting the shittiness of war and the passion and happiness of young lovers, and it all just really worked for me.

My biggest praise for the book and its author, though, goes to Hemingway's short, frank, and abrupt prose. Blog readers may recall the wrath I've had in the past for the overly eloquent verbiage found throughout classic works from the nineteenth century. Here are the first two sentence's of the book's famous opening paragraph:

"In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels."

Two sentences, simply structured, and without a single word of more than two syllables. A kindergartner could form a mental understanding of the scene depicted here. Compare this to an equally famous opening passage in literary history, that of A Tale of Two Cities:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was great the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Holy hell. That's just one sentence! I like that sentence and I liked that book, but what the fuck is "the superlative degree of comparison only?" Was there really no easier way to say that "[the period's] noisiest authorities insisted on its being received?" It's all beautifully written and not beyond comprehension by any stretch, but I will always be grateful to men like Hemingway for reversing the once-popular trend of inflated sentences filled with whimsy and showing that you can paint a very clear picture of the story you're telling with simple language and well-paced structure.

Tangent over. Good book. See you guys later.

Sam and Max: The Devil's Playhouse

Graphic adventure games haven't received much attention at all on the BackBlog- aside from the first two Sam and Max games I posted years ago, and Trevor's post of the surreal The Neverhood (which may or may not be added to my backlog at some point, as he gave that game to me), there's not a lot of interest in this type of game. I myself was hesitant to return for the third Sam and Max installment- while the series does have some great puzzles and snappy dialog, the level of polish on the two Wii ports I played was just so low that it got embarassing at times. Messy graphics and awful controls distracted from the clever gags. But when I found a recent cheap bundle of PC games including the third "season" of gameplay- Sam and Max: The Devil's Playhouse, I decided to give the series one last shot. After all, even a low-end PC should be able to easily best the Wii's graphics, and playing a game on the system it was designed for meant there was a good chance the controls would actually make sense. And I'm glad I played it! Playing Sam and Max: The Devil's Playhouse on the PC is much easier than my stupid Wii, and I was able to appreciate the game for what it was rather than fumble with controls. You take control of the freelance police: dog Sam and rabbit-thing Max, as they solve puzzles to crack five wacky episodic cases. The plots are very intricate and full of recurring gags and characters but it all builds upon the previous two games in the rebooted series- going in blind would likely confuse most new players, and the big finale requires specific knowledge of a case in the second game to make any sense. Of course it also helps that I played the games with heaps of nostalgia for the old Saturday morning cartoons based on the series, so that helped. Still though, whenever I check around online for other's impressions of the game, people can't help but get nostalgic and compare this to the golden days of adventure gaming in the late eighties and early nineties, with classics like Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max Hit the Road, and the King's Quest series. I'd like to try out the re-release of Monkey Island soon enough, but there's just too many games on my plate for now.

Avengers

This will be the third time I've seen the movie. It's hard to take this movie as seriously as I did the first time, but it's still one of the funnest movies experiences of all time. The hour long climax is crazy entertaining. The few minutes we get with Hulk are just as funny the third time through. They might focus on Iron Man, but Hulk is the real star. There's not much else to say about this movie as everyone has seen it, but I will say that Black Widow is an incredibly lame super hero. What is so super about her? Looks don't count. Or Webber would be a super villain.

Apollo 18

I've wanted to see this movie for a while, despite the lousy reviews. Another found footage movie, but this one is on the moon. Anyway, as it is with most found footage movies, nothing much happened. There's not enough of a budget for anything but a lot of talking and a few scary moments. The actors in this movie kept me interested and the moon sets were actually pretty believable, but the baddie in this movie left a lot to be desired. This movie is really just an awesome premise (a highly classified trip to the moon that we had never heard about until now), but the script just doesn't live up. If you are bored, I think this movie is on Netflix, but don't bother otherwise. Still, it was better than a lot of movies I've seen.

The Dirties

After listening to Kevin Smith interview the director on one of his Smodcast's, I decided to give it a try. Smith dubbed it the most important movie we will see all year. It's definitely not that, but it's compelling. The leads are pretty charismatic and I've never seen a movie quite like it before. They somehow convinced some schools to allow them to shoot while school was in session. Most of the people in the movie are actual students. In a weird way, it's basically a mix of reality television with a few full-fledged actors thrown in the mix to create a semi-cohesive story. Because of that, the story doesn't quite become cohesive and the payoff at the end isn't fully earned. The tone of the movie switches from comedy to serious drama pretty quickly. As you can tell, I don't really know how to explain the movie. That's part of its charm, but it also keeps it from reaching its full potential. But anyway, it's about two students who are making a film for their multimedia class about a couple vigilante students who kill all the bullies in the school. Give it a watch. Or don't.

Dragon Quest IV

For a while there each Dragon Quest game I played was better than the last, and now predictably as I transitioned from the fifth installment down to the fourth, there was a small drop in quality. But hey, that just means chronologically, these games keep getting better and better! Dragon Quest IV is subtitled "Chapters of the Chosen", due to its chapter-based story- you play each of the five chapters as a different character or group, with the first four lasting a few hours each and the last one taking up more than half of the game's length. I wasn't a fan of this choice- the worst part of many RPGs is the first hour or so where you need to build up your weakling character enough to finally move on to the next town; repeating this five times over felt unneccesary. That's really the only knock I have on Dragon Quest IV compared to DQ5. The gameplay and graphics are almost exactly the same- where the Final Fantasy series is famous for introducing wild new mechanics and summons in each installment, Dragon Quest is content keeping things simple and straightforward. This means there's far fewer missteps in the series, but it will also probably never reach the heights of some of the better Final Fantasy games. Oh well! Dragon Quest IV and V are both fun old-school RPGs and I assume Dragon Quest VI will be too.

The Bourne Supremacy

I first saw this movie back when it came out in 2004 without the benefit of the context of the first one. It was a decent little action movie but I always figured I was missing some sort of plot relevance having not seen The Bourne Identity. Well, almost ten years later, I just re-watched it with the benefit of first movie contextual relevance and, nope, didn't really miss anything the first time.

These have been fun movies but they're largely inconsequential. Oh well!

The Pearl

Here's the second Steinbeck book I've ever read, and once again it came in at just about a hundred pages. Dude knew how to write novellas! This one was even simpler and more straightforward than Of Mice and Men, with fewer and less complicated characters and a tale-as-old-as-time type of plot. A poor pearl diver living a simple but happy life finds the biggest and most perfect pearl the world has veer seen. It will bring him wealth and that wealth will bring his family opportunities they never could have dreamed of. Except, of course, that's not how things go. His friends and neighbors turn on him out of jealousy. Jewelers and bankers try to con him out of the treasure for a bargain. A few burglary attempts are made, and before long he is homeless and on the run with his wife and baby boy. The pearl hasn't brought him happiness at all, but despair, fear, and anger. Oh, the irony! Eventually, tragedy strikes in the form of a catastrophe bigger than all those yet faced by our humble pearl diver. He returns to his village, head hung low, and flings that pearl back into the sea.

Nothing you haven't seen before, I'm sure, in one form or another a few hundred times. But at the same time, it's laid out here so plainly and so perfectly that this just may be the perfect version of that all-too familiar tale. I'm left unsure about whether this was mundane and unspecial or timeless and flawless. Since I enjoyed reading it enough, I'll lean more toward the favorable side of things. At any rate I liked it more than I liked Of Mice and Men, and I didn't even dislike that one. Steinbeck, everyone!

The Bourne Identity (2002)

During a recent Costco trip - yeah, we're gettin' old - my soon-to-be-wife and I came across the Bourne trilogy on Blu-ray for something like $18. We realized we had each only seen the middle installment and decided, hey, why not? Tonight, we watched the first movie in the trilogy, 2002's Bourne Identity. I liked it. Didn't love it. More specifically, I loved the first hour and was bored by the second hour. Action movies don't generally do a lot for me, so I was impressed when I was, well, impressed by the film's opening and rising action. But the resolution was sort of bland and predictable for me. I remember enjoying the second film, even without any precursor context, back in 2004. That'll get re-watched soon enough.