Mario Kart 8

So here it is. The second post in four hours about Mario Kart 8. Though I've only beaten all 50cc cups and the first 100cc cup (all three stars!), the credits rolled and I'm putting this post in this books. Similarly to Stan, due to being about 4-5 hours in to a game I'm likely to play for 100, I am just going to post some of my impressions. My initial reaction was "wow!" This game is super beautiful. It's really the first must-have game for me on any of the "next gen" consoles, and although this could probably function easily on PS3 and XBOX 360, it's just such a fucking great feeling to be playing a Mario Kart game that doesn't look like shit. It has a smooth-as-fuck frame rate and great overall gameplay. The Wii U Pro controller really makes the experience enjoyable. Here are some other things I'd like to address:

Characters - Rosalina sucks. She's almost identical to Peach. Meaning that there are 7 characters in this game that are essentially just Peach. The Koopalings are growing on me, but it just hurts me to think that we could have had other characters if they were not in the game. So in total, we have 14 characters that are either Peach or a Koopaling.  We should have as many characters in this game as there are Grand Prix cups. I want each one to count, damn it! And if 14 are gonna be variants of two characters, let's throw in another 14. King Boo, please. But don't worry, Bowser is awesome. Despite Stan's unsuccessful attempt at using it, I still swear by Bowser in the Baby Buggy with cushion wheels. That thing flies! I've one a 100cc cup easily with it so I'm sold.

Courses - I had a similar reaction to Stan. I was underwhelmed with a lot of the new courses. They're beautiful and fun, but most aren't really resonating with me (first impression, I know). I love Sunshine Airport, Shy Guy Falls and Bowser Castle, but my favorite is easily Mount Wario. This game really shines with what it has done with old tracks. All of them have a facelift for the better. It's tough to explain, but it's just a great thing to see. Moo Moo Meadows and Donut Plains 3 really stand out to me.

Free game - Mario Kart 8 came with a free download of either New Super Mario Bros U, The Legend of Zelda: Windwaker HD, some stupid party game or Pikmin 3. So awesome! Getting Zelda free with the game I essentially bought my Wii U for is an awesome feeling.

Overall, this is everything I wanted from a new Mario Kart game. I would love to see them embrace DLC and bring new tracks into it eventually. And new characters! I want every single character and every single race that has ever existed in the Mario Kart universe. And I will pay a shit ton for that option.

Mario Kart 8

Sure, I'll start things off.

Mario Kart 8, the Wii U's last hope, came out earlier today. All four people I know with a Wii U bought it and have played it. I have beaten it, although I'm sure I'm not the only one. I still have the 150cc and Mirror Mode races left, but every course and every character is unlocked and I've played this thing for something like six hours already; it's time for a post.

Everyone who will ever read this has played Mario Kart before, and several have already played this very game. It needs no summarizing from my end. Instead, here are some of my "initial" reactions to the game.

• The reason Mario Kart still matters is because local multiplayer is a dying concept. And this franchise - along with Super Smash Bros. in particular - just makes absolute hay out of local multiplayer. Four friends, one race, endless cursing and sweating with racing hearts.
• I forget whether or not this was an option in Mario Kart Wii, but you can even do a four-player Grand Prix cup locally. That's solid.
• Unfortunately, Mario Kart 8 limits the online experience to two players per console. And there's no LAN option for connecting two Wii Us and having four people on each one. This really sucks, because before the game came out I was envisioning an entire night of twelve-man Mario Kart 8; three Wii Us in one room, four people on each one, and a tour of every single course in the game. It seemed feasible. Now, to get twelve people involved in one race, we'd need to have six Wii U systems, and again, I only know four people who own one. So, that dream is dead, but here's hoping we can get some six-to-eight-man races going on at some point all the same.
• I can't get a handle on whether online play is spotty or steady; I was booted out of the lobby with a "lost connection" message like four seconds after first entering, and before my first race began I was also booted with some kind of communication error. Fortunately, I did manage to get into four races, and I was able to complete all four. Didn't feel laggy at all, which is of course an expectation in 2014, but still nice to see.
• The anti-gravity aspect of gameplay feels like a completely equal balance of gimmick and innovation. Some of the courses just wind you around like a corkscrew, but then other times you can just kind of cling to a few walls as an option.
• The new courses will probably grow on me with time, but I was probably on the whole just a tad more disappointed than I was impressed; Rainbow Road left something to be desired and I saw no need at all for Bone-Dry Dunes or Electrodrome, and by kicking things off in something called Mario Stadium it felt like we didn't also need a Mario Circuit. Having said all of this, none of the new courses are unenjoyable to play. In fact, Shy Guy Falls, Mount Wario, and Cloudtop Cruise are instant classics for me.
• They did a wonderful job with the retro courses this time around, modifying each one for Mario Kart 8 with HD graphics and anti-gravity elements. And, man, these are stunning. Moo Moo Meadows went from being one of the most forgettable Wii courses to perhaps the best-looking Mario Kart 8 course, period. Also, it's great to have N64's Rainbow Road back, if for nothing more than the music alone.
• There are thirty playable characters in Mario Kart 8, which is awesome. 12 of them are baby versions of the main chatracters and Bowser's children, which kind of sucks. This game lacks Birdo, Diddy Kong, King Boo, Wiggler, and other series veterans… for the sake of Lakitu, Baby Rosalina and "Pink Gold Peach," among others. I actually enjoy several of the Koopalings, but their presence at the expense of Bowser, Jr. just feels weird.
• One minor change I'm not happy about, but will more than likely get over shortly? You can't drag an item behind you anymore while picking up a new one. I need layers of defense, dammit.
• Although the karts, bikes, and ATVs feel - and are - endlessly customizable, there really isn't all that much variety when it comes to end-of-the-day statistics on each one.

There's plenty more I could say, but I feel myself nodding off and I also know another three posts or so are forthcoming.

Safecracker: The Ultimate Puzzle Adventure

Unlike the last two games I posted which are more traditional adventure games, Safecracker is almost entirely a straight puzzle game, similar to the Professor Layton series. As some sort of master safe-cracker, you're tasked with navigating a rich dead guy's mansion, opening 30+ safes attempting to find his last will and testament. There's really very little story whatsoever, and not even much exploring to be done here- each room will contain a few safes and once you've opened them, that's really all there is to do except move on to the next room. Each safe comes with a puzzle and usually requires you to figure out some numeric code to answer it, and this is where the puzzles come in. Most of the puzzles were pretty fun even if they're not all that elegant or clever- think a lot of sliding-block style puzzles, but because of this the whole game passed by pretty quickly and I doubt I'll remember much about Safecracker in a few months. 'Ultimate Puzzle Adventure' indeed!

Misery

I mentioned in my Firestarter post that I was in the middle of another Stephen King book I was enjoying much more, and here we are with Misery. As we all know Misery got turned into one of King's more popular movie adaptations so most of us probably have some rough idea of the plot- a famous author gets into a car crash (written a decade before King's own brush with death!) and is rescued by a psychotic woman who happens to be a big fan, who doesn't bother taking him to the hospital but instead kidnaps him and forces him to write a new book, just for her. A scary prospect for sure, but there's a lot more to this book than that famous Annie Wilkes character Kathy Bates won an Oscar for playing; Stephen King peppers this one with all sorts of little details about how he comes up with his stories and how to get past writer's block and lots of info about what life's like as a famous author that I just find fascinating. Seriously, sometimes I think I like the little prologues he does before most books talking about writing that story than the story itself. The author in Misery is famous for writing a series of best-selling but cheesy historical romance pieces, feels like he's tied down to characters he doesn't even like anymore, and wants to branch out of his comfort zone, but is afraid of his audience's reaction. It's not hard to see the parallels with King who became a superstar for his horror novels, but received major negative feedback when he tried to write a classic fantasy novel, The Eyes of the Dragon. And yet in Misery, the author is forced to bring a character he killed off back from the dead for one more adventure just to keep the ravenous reader (his psycho kidnapper) satisfied. So yeah, Misery managed to pull off a bit of meta-autobiographical fiction while still delivering a very tense story.

Anyway now that I've finished off Misery it feels like I've read a shitload of Stephen King. I took a look back and realized that if you count the four novellas of Four Past Midnight as separate pieces (they're long enough, they count), then I'm up to 25 books read. It's high time to check in with an overall ranking! Feel free to comment and criticize, I know there will be some disagreement from my fellow posters!

1. It
2. Wizard and Glass (Dark Tower IV)
3. The Long Walk
4. The Talisman
5. 11/22/63
6. The Waste Lands (Dark Tower III)
7. The Drawing of the Three (Dark Tower II)
8. The Stand
9. Misery
10. The Wind Through the Keyhole (Dark Tower VIII)
11. The Langoliers (Four Past Midnight)
12. Christine
13. Secret Window, Secret Garden (Four Past Midnight)
14. Under The Dome
15. The Dark Tower (Dark Tower VII)
16. Gerald's Game
17. The Dead Zone
18. Wolves of the Calla (Dark Tower V)
19. Firestarter
20. The Library Policeman (Four Past Midnight)
21.  The Sun Dog (Four Past Midnight)
22. Black House
23. The Gunslinger (Dark Tower I)
24. Insomnia
25. Song of Susannah (Dark Tower VI)

Dark Fall: The Journal

The most recent bundle of PC games I grabbed was an all-adventure game bundle; the games are usually kinda short, focus on solving puzzles, and aren't too rough on my the non-gaming laptop I play them on. Knowing nothing about any of the games I started in with Deponia which was mostly good aside from it's terrible plot and cast of characters; I followed that up here with Dark Fall: The Journal, which is a very, very different style of game. For one this is more of a horror-style puzzle game that manages to creep me out the way Myst did years ago- you're completely secluded for the entire game, searching for symbols whose relevence won't be apparent until the final puzzle. You're exploring an abandoned train station/hotel for signs of your lost brother, and slowly unraveling the mystery of why people keep disappearing from the place. Also unlike Deponia you're not watching cartoonish characters in third-person, but exploring in first-person in that style of 3-D graphics from the early 2000s that immediately dated themselves. The game was a struggle; within a few hours I assumed I had exhausted all exploration and had no idea where the hell any of this was supposed to lead. Upon checking a walk-through however I realized I missed almost everything, including that game-length hunt for symbols and got to work just plowing through it, because hey, who cares? I'd be surprised if anyone I knew could get through this game without a walk-through, not because the puzzles are particularly tough or require a lot of thought, but because you hardly even realize when they're there in front of you. There are dozens of red herrings strewn about the hotel that seem to only be there for frustration's sake; at one point you pick up some kind of electrometer which goes off when you're near the scene of some ghostly activity- important clue? Hell no! It's just some diversion from the puzzle at hand that provides no hints whatsoever. A good adventure game rewards you upon solving one puzzle with a hint or tool used for the next; Dark Fall: The Journal makes no attempt to do this. I think the developers spent a little too much time trying to fill the game with spooky atmosphere and backstory rather than make it an enjoyable gaming experience. Oh well! At least it was short!

Resident Evil: Revelations

It's been a long time since my last Resident Evil game, so here's a brief recap of the series so far for anyone who doesn't know- it's a survival horror series whose first 3 games came out on the original PlayStation and just got cranked out one per year; they were critically acclaimed at the time but revisiting them all 15 years later it's tough to forgive the awful 'tank' controls- your character controls more like a car than an actual person. The next two games (Code: Veronica and Zero) came out on the next generation consoles and were pretty good too but the formula for the games was quickly growing stale and fans of the series were getting tired of more of the same. Things got radically changed for the sixth game in the series, Resident Evil 4, one of my favorite games of all time. Resident Evil 4 was much lighter on puzzles and had a heavier focus on action, and its much-improved controls gave it unanimous critical acclaim. Then came Resident Evil 5 which shifted the setting to Africa, and it was mostly good, but in my opinion it suffered from taking itself way too seriously and generated a whole racism controversy that was an ugly point for the series. I had played and logged all of these games (except 4 and 5, which I played pre-Back-Blog), and since then two more installments have come out- the criticially panned Resident Evil 6, and the more acclaimed 3DS-exclusive Resident Evil Revelations. I'll begrudgingly play the former at some point, but here are my opinions on the latter.

 

Honestly, it was great. Revelations is a return to the slower-paced origins of the series in which exploring, puzzle-solving and backtracking are the name of the game rather than the more linear action of Resident Evil 4 and 5 (and probably 6). But it's also probably the best game in the series in that style, with much better controls than the old games and obviously the graphics and sound and all that are just light-years ahead of the old games, even on a portable system. The abandoned cruise-liner was a great choice of setting for the game as it uses the claustrophobia of a ship to its advantage, constantly pitting you against big enemies in small, cramped spaces. And of course now and then you get a huge set-piece that looks like it's pushing the limits of what the 3DS is capable of, with the penultimate boss being my personal favorite. There are a couple small gripes- one, you're given a scanner that supposedly makes you stronger as you scan more and more enemies but it seemed poorly implemented, and second there's not too much variety in non-boss enemies- I guess Capcom had to skimp somewhere. Still though overall I really enjoyed my time with Resident Evil Revelations and I'll probably play through it again someday.

Assassin's Creed

And so ends a wildly successful Memorial Day weekend of logress for me. Before you judge me for spending a beautiful weekend inside watching movies and playing video games… shut up! I did like eight hours of yardwork, too, and went out for a couple of nice dinners. Now, next weekend, with Mario Kart 8 coming out on Friday, sure, you can bet your ass I'll blow the weekend on video games regardless of the weather. This weekend? Some opportunities arose, I guess. Nothing more!

Assassin's Creed is, of course, a wildly successful action-adventure video game series. There've been something like six or seven releases in the last seven or eight years. It was high time I checked one of these games out, so when I found the first one for six dollars I jumped right in. The verdict? Eh, I'm not really sure I have one. All of the elements were in place here for a great modern day open world sandbox. It had the same parkour and wall-climbing elements that so many recent classics do, and it tacked on a stealth element as well, allowing you to sneak right up to enemies, for the most part. But there were a few warts here I just couldn't get over. For one thing, the controls were needlessly complicated and a little unwieldy. For another, despite a rich plot and lots of characters, I just never found myself sucked into the story at all. A distant third issue was the combat mechanics; fortunately, the game doesn't rely much on combat, as it's generally a "Plan B" for when a nice stealthy assassination goes wrong.

I dunno. I'm not sure what didn't click for me here. The elements were in place, but this didn't resonate with me nearly as much as something like Uncharted or Infamous or even the slightly older Prince of Persia. I've been told that the series really gets good with the next release, Assassin's Creed II, along with its two follow-ups, Brotherhood and Revelations. I could buy all three right now for twenty bucks or so, but for now I'm going to hold off. There are just too many older games in my backlog for me to justify lumping another three in there when I didn't love their predecessor. I'm sure I will someday, but not yet. Not yet.

New Super Mario Bros. U

The running complaint with Nintendo, hardware oddities aside, is that they've almost completely stopped releasing new games in so many of their beloved franchises, particularly on consoles. We've seen one Metroid game in the last seven years, and no future release from that franchise has even been confirmed. We've seen one console-based Zelda game in the last eight years, and again, there's no news of an upcoming release. Star Fox hasn't put out a console game since 2005; Pikmin was absent for nine years before 2013's Pikmin 3. I bring all this up only to serve as a contrast to Nintendo's bread and butter franchise, as there have been five new console-based Super Mario titles since 2007. That's nearly one a year, and I'm ignoring two original handheld games and a Super Luigi spin-off in the same timeframe. Bottom line, Nintendo loves itself a lot of Mario games. And Pokémon, too, I guess.

But how many is too many? New Super Mario Bros. U is the fourth installment in the New Super Mario Bros. offshoot series already, and that series was born on the DS in 2006. The gimmick, back then, was an honest-to-goodness return to basic 2D side-scrolling Super Mario games, which was nice; the series had been exclusively rendered in 3D environments for more than ten years at that point. But then the Wii tried its hand at the same exact concept. And then so did the 3DS and then ultimately the Wii U. And then the Wii U spun it off into the aforementioned Luigi-centric game. At this point there have been more 2D Super Mario releases since 2006 than there were from 1990 to 2005. Not to mention Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel, and most recently two games with the suffixes 3D Land and 3D World.

I'm not complaining, even if it may sound like it; the games are all impeccably polished and completely enjoyable to play. This one right here is probably my favorite Super Mario game since 2007's Galaxy, although I don't think I'll bother to go for 100% completion the way I did in New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I can't even keep track, for the most part, of which fun levels and quirky gameplay elements belong to which games anymore. It's crazy!

I guess all I'm saying is that I wouldn't put it past Nintendo to sneak in another two or three Super Mario games before we see a new Metroid or Zelda. I'm a sucker and a nearly lifelong Nintendo fanboy, so I will buy and play every single one - am I part of the problem? Dang, I am, aren't I? Whatever - Nintendo's release schedule notwithstanding, this was a great, fun game.

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed

I've been a PS Plus member since November and I've been initiating downloads for all the Vita games since then in order to obtain a large backlog of Vita games when I eventually got one. With Mario Kart looming, I decided this would be the first game I play. I didn't expect much, but I was pleasantly surprised. The big gimmick here is that each car can change into a plane and a boat. I played as BD Joe, the crazy driver from Crazy Taxi. The most impressive thing I found about this game was just how vibrant the colors were, particularly on the Vita screen. It's just a beautiful game. But more importantly, it really conveys a sense of speed without sacrificing the player's ability to control the racer. My biggest complaint is that if you play it on easy you then have to go back and play every single race again on medium to unlock the credits. So I literally beat the entire game and then had to beat the entire game again just so I could unlock the credits and consider this game beaten. However, I didn't mind having to revisit it because it was a pretty damn fun game. I recommend it. On a side note, I have no idea why this isn't just called Sonic (or Sega for that matter) All-Star Racing Transformed.

Don Jon

I didn't expect much from this. I love Joseph Godon-Levitt, but I haven't heard very good things. Essentially, we watch JGL do his best "The Situation" impression with a little heart infused in there. There are some good performances and there's a decently realistic portrayal of selfies, but there isn't much to love. Not much too hate, but nothing that really grabbed me. I think my favorite part was Tony Danza. Anyway, it runs less than 90 mins. Could have been worse.

Grey's Anatomy Season 5

This DVD cover isn't in English, but that's ok! I started watching Grey's Anatomy again while traveling on business last year looking for something to occupy me in my hotel room. I watched this a while back (typical).

SPOILERS BE HERE

This season revolves around a couple of story lines:
1. Cristina forms a bond with new trauma surgeon Hunt and they like to make out over a hot steam vent
2. Callie goes full out lesbian with heart doctor who leaves and breaks her heart
3. Derek and Meredith have never ending relationship drama get post if note married.

and the most fun plot line, Alex and Izzy are dating. Izzy sees dead former husband. A lot. Has sex with dead former husband. It's really weird. Turns out she has a brain tumor or something like that.

Then gasp, out of the blue, George dies in the season finale.

Grey's Anatomy is a RIDICULOUS show.

Step Up Revolution

I've watched So You Think You Can Dance since the very first season. I love good dancing. None of this Dancing with the Stars bullshit. I also love the Step Up movies. They are the best worst most formulaic movies with super awesome dance scenes and sometimes likeable actors and actresses. Step Up 2 (The Streets) is still my favorite I think.

A month or so ago, I spiraled down a You Tube worm hole of SYTYCD dances and Step Up dances. It inspired me to buy Step Up 3(D) and Step Up Revolution which I didn't yet own. I bought them both in 3D because we do indeed had a 3D TV which only Shrek and Uncharted have been utilized for in 3.5 years. I got all excited to watch Step Up yesterday and turns out one of our pairs of 3D glasses broke sometime in Move 1 or Move 2 or random other time and two of the pairs needed special batteries which we didn't have. Oh well, no 3D for us last night!

This movie is pretty fun. I think I like it better than Step Up 3 so I felt like watching this one before it's counterpart. Boy Meets Girl. Boy and Girl Fall in Love. Boy and Girl Have Epic Dances Together. Boy and Girl and Boy/Girl's Friend Have A Falling Out Over Dramatic Event. Sad Montage. Boy Wins Back Girls with Epic Dance Finale. Those are the Step Up movies in a nut shell, and you know what? I THINK THEY ARE WILDLY SUCCESFULL SO WHATEVER. Plus, this movie featured Sandy Cohen and the 3rd place contestant of SYTYCD  Season 6 and a Twitch a SYTYCD alum and a few notable cameos by Step Up 2 people. So It's great, you dig it?

Ibb and Obb

I know Steve already posted this game, but I played it too! I keep a running list of posts I back log because I rarely actually make them. I had an itch to watch Step Up so Steve and I made a deal that we could watch it if I posted three times. Post number uno!

Ibb and Obb was super cute and super frustrating. I was the cute little pink fellow Obb. Much of the game relies on you and your partner working together to kill the bad guys and help each other into sections of the level that you wouldn't be able to get without them. For example, to kill the bad guy one person has to be on the bottom of the screen where the vulnerable part can be hit and then the other person can collect all the diamonds that pop op from the dead villian. I'm a huge fan of collecting video game currency or coins and this was no different. Very often though, one of us would run ahead and kill the bad guy but the other person was not position to get all the coins. What a disaster!

Much of the game was a puzzle. I could only get through certain doors that were pink. Steve would have to boost me on his head and jump me up to somewhere he could reach on his own accord through some other fancy door. It really was a fun truly cooperative game. We spent a lot of time looking at certain hard parts just trying to figure out what we were supposed to do. We only used the walk through 2-3 times and I was angry about it because I don't like walk throughs, but it was also 3AM and Steve was angry because I kept walking into the enemy. Ooops. I was the anti gravity bubble pro though.

Fun game!

Ibb & Obb

Here's a PSN game I beat in three sittings with Marissa. It was challenging, fun, and above all, a truly cooperative experience. This is a game absolutely designed for two players. Marissa has played several games with me before, from Donkey Kong to New Super Mario Bros., but she grows tired of them pretty quickly, generally. She'll complain that I'm often running ahead and just playing the game at my own, more experienced pace, making her feel like a burden when she dies and just pretty bored when I'm doing all the heavy lifting. But Marissa's not a terrible gamer - I mean, she managed to beat Ocarina of Time without Epona. And she shined at Ibb & Obb, where she was more or less equally responsible for all of our successes and solutions. (And I, for all of our failures and frustrations.)

Ibb & Obb has the look of a very straightforward platform game at first; you're limited by how high and how far you can jump, and if you run into the spiky black bad guys you will die. But there's a simple gameplay element that drastically changes the game; half of every level exists on the other side of a solid black line, where gravity works in the opposite direction. Little portals scattered throughout the stages allow you to transition from one gravity field to the other, and you can even get some slingshot-style jump combinations going. Most of the fifteen levels introduced at least one new gameplay quirk, which not only kept the game from growing stale, but also offered an ever-increasing array of challenges. We spent twenty or thirty minutes on a couple of puzzles, and ultimately had to consult a walkthrough two or three times, much to our chagrin. This was a very difficult game, but it was also a whole lot of fun. Try it out if you've got a PS3 and a willing gaming partner.

The Last of the Mohicans (1992)

This was a gift from Keith some time back. (Thanks, Keith!) The Last of the Mohicans has long been one of my favorite movies, and it's a movie I like more and more upon every viewing. At this point, having just seen it for the fourth time, I'm ready to make a bold statement. Are you ready? Either way, here it comes. The Last of the Mohicans is the most under-appreciated movie of all time.

I was careful not to say "underrated;" the movie actually rates pretty highly, and always has. I'm not suggesting that people dislike this movie. But they don't like it enough! Bring up contemporary historical epics and people are quick to recognize the likes of Braveheart and Gladiator, but - in my experience - they're more apt to include forgettable stuff like Troy and Kingdom of Heaven than to acknowledge The Last of the Mohicans. On IMDb, the movie has an unassuming 90,000 votes cast on its rating; this makes it just the 193rd most voted on movie of the 1990s alone, one spot above The Wedding Singer. For comparison, The Shawshank Redemption has 1.2 million votes. It's not that people dislike or even don't love The Last of the Mohicans; it's got a 7.8 on IMDb and an 88% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Rather, the 22-year-old movie seems largely forgotten or otherwise ignored by the general public today. And that's a shame, because The Last of the Mohicans is a fantastic movie.

I will now spend the rest of this post hyping and gushing over The Last of the Mohicans. In bullet form, of course.

• Daniel Day-Lewis. One of the most intense method actors in our time, and arguably the most selective, here plays a frontier bad ass.
• "Epic" is an overused word, but there's really no other way to describe this all-genre-encompassing film. Romance? Got it. Bromance? Oh, you better believe in the bond between the Mohicans. Drama? Certainly. Action? In spades. Suspense? Right before a couple of Huron raids, for sure. Western? Takes place on the very Western frontier of America, which at the time happens to be upstate New York. War? Yeah, the French and Indian War.
• Historical accuracy is one of those things you tend not to notice in a film, as it's the inaccuracies that stand out. Well, The Last of the Mohicans pays attention to all the immaculate details, from clothing to accents to weaponry. The only glaring inaccuracy is that the whole thing was filmed in the Carolinas, rather than upstate New York, but if anything that just makes it a more beautiful film.
• Speaking of which, oh man, the scenery here is just phenomenal. Woodland chases, waterfalls, cliffside climaxes. Gorgeous, gorgeous stuff. And because this was 1992, there's no digital retouching or color balancing going on; the "orange and teal" phenomenon is averted, replaced instead by a much more natural "autumn and forest green" palate achieved without any post-production editing whatsoever. This is a beautiful, beautiful movie.
• And that music! Oh, man. You know the song. Or maybe songs. There's the rhythmic bouncy frontier-ish part, and then there's the bombastic melodramatic explosive part. I'm terrible at describing music, so let's just say the first part is like diligently climbing a mountain, and then the second part is like getting to the top and admiring the view. Does that work? Anyway, you know the song. Or songs. So damn good!
• Also, the movie was way better than the book. I read the book, hoping for the movie. It was drastically different. This makes sense - the film's director notoriously decided not to read the book before going to work on whatever adapted script he had, so this was going to be a rather faithless adaptation right out of the chute. But, hey, it's better off for it.
• Magua is one of the greatest film villains ever conceived. His motives are clear, and although they aren't necessarily relatable, they're understandable. He speaks in the third person. His threats are elaborate and full of imagery. "When the Grey Hair is dead, Magua will eat his heart. Before he dies, Magua will put his children under the knife, so the Grey Hair will know his seed is wiped out forever." He's such a memorable character, and he looks like a badass to boot.
• This one may be a stretch, but the movie isn't entirely chauvinistic, either. Sure, the only two women in it are the romantic interests of the Mohicans and a British guy, and yeah, they get captured more than once, but still! One of them successfully rebukes a marriage proposal and the other one takes matters into her own hands when she's forced to marry Magua. Couple of regular Miss Independents, I tell you. As far as 1757 standards go.
• Speaking of the women getting captured, how about when Daniel Day-Lewis gives that brief but inspired promise speech? "I will find you!" This was such powerful stuff that Hollywood started making movies based solely on the premise of women getting kidnapped and men pledging to find and rescue them. That's right, Taken. You're nothing more than a thematic spin-off of one aspect of The Last of the Mohicans.
• Holy hell, that final battle scene. I'm tempted to just link to a YouTube clip, but that would spoil the ending of the movie for anyone out there who hasn't seen it yet. (See it already!) That final series of battles, void of any spoken words, and acted entirely through conflict, body language, and reaction shots. It's a flawless, powerful, escalating sequence of death, loss, vengeance, and justice. So good!
• The closing monologue, delivered by the titular last remaining Mohican, is a bit on the nose, but who cares? So is the title, in the first place. This isn't a movie with subliminal messages or hidden motifs. Anyway, here's that monologue: "Great Spirit, Maker of All Life. A warrior goes to you swift and straight as an arrow shot into the sun. Welcome him and let him take his place at the council fire of my people. He is Uncas, my son. Tell them to be patient and ask death for speed; for they are all there but one - I, Chingachgook - Last of the Mohicans." Cue the bombastic music and the end credits.
• Actually, here's the alternate ending monologue, which may be even more on the nose, but which I think I like even better: "The frontier moves with the sun and pushes the Red Man of these wilderness forests in front of it until one day there will be nowhere left. Then our race will be no more, or be not us… The frontier place is for people like my white son and his woman and their children. And one day there will be no more frontier. And men like [him] will go too, like the Mohicans. And new people will come, work, struggle. Some will make their life. But once, we were here." Just kind of casually foreshadowing, with perfect hindsight, not just the removal of the Native Americans over the next hundred years or so, but also the rise and fall of the Wild West for fifty years thereafter. And what a coda! "But once, we were here." A fitting enough summary to an excellently bittersweet movie.
• All of this, and the movie is less than two hours long. That's a rarity for any great drama, much less a historical epic like this one. So see it! See the movie!

Just fantastic stuff here, guys. Fantastic stuff that deserves more of a legacy in the zeitgeist than it's ever achieved.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

I didn't expect much from this one, but you know what? The Pirates movies are pretty damn fun. I've always held that the franchise was "overrated," though perhaps that stems from what felt like my entire high school class going into full-blown pirate mode after the first one came out in 2003 and misusing the word "savvy." But you know what? I did like that first Pirates movie, if I'm being honest with myself. And I liked the two sequels, too, in all their twisted and convoluted melodrama. But by the time this fourth movie came out in 2011, I just wasn't interested enough to see it. I'm pretty sure my wife (then-girlfriend) and a couple of my friends all saw it together, and unless I'm remembering things wrong, I just straight up didn't want to go. The idea of Disney and Johnny Depp making a fourth movie  even though both Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom were done, done, done with the series felt wrong to me, for some reason.

Turns out, On Stranger Tides doesn't want for Knightley and Bloom at all; if anything, it's traded up for Penelope Cruz and Ian McShane. Besides, the Bloom and Knightley love story kind of concluded anyway when they made a half-zombie baby and she came back for him ten years later to relieve him of his curse, or something. This was a leaner, newer, and more exciting movie than either the second or the third one. It came in at just over two hours where the previous two were bloated up enough to approach three hours in length. I guess at the end of the day, if Disney wants to keep churning these out every four years or so, I'm willing to give them a chance. Eventually, I mean; I'm still not regretting not seeing this one in theaters.

The Lincoln Lawyer

I still haven't seen Dallas Buyers Club, but Matthew McConaughey was excellent in both True Detective and his one scene in Wolf of Wall Street, so, sure, I'll buy into the McConaissance. Some people aren't doing so, however. These people tend to be those who suggest that McConaughey isn't so much suddenly turning it on as an actor as he is suddenly finding the right roles and showcasing his latent talents to a newly receptive audience. It's a career rebirth either way, but I figured I'd pay at least some heed to the anti-McConaissance crowd who'd been with the guy all along.

All of that led to me watching The Lincoln Lawyer last night, and frankly… I've got nothing. The jury's still out for me. It was a fine movie - a bit bland and boring, if anything - and McConaughey did a fine job in the title role. Honestly, I was more excited by all the actors popping up in smaller roles: Brian Cranston, Marisa Tomei, William H. Macy, and others. Legal dramas just aren't my cup of tea, I suppose. Maybe I'll give Twelve Angry Men a shot one of these days and then swear off the genre entirely if even that one can't get me going.

A Confederacy of Dunces

That this book was published at all is something of a miracle. John Kennedy Toole spent the early 1960s writing it only to kill himself in 1969. His mother found a copy of the finished manuscript and shopped it around for a time in the late '70s before finally landing a deal to have it published in 1980. It won the Pulitzer in 1981, nearly twenty years after it had been written.

Toole's legacy more or less begins and ends with A Confederacy of Dunces, and that book's legacy more or less begins and ends with its main character, Ignatius J. Reilly. Here in 2014 we would easily identify this man as one suffering from Asperger's or some other kind of high-functioning autism. In this book, written fifty years ago, he's just kind of a great big buffoon who acts like an asshole and struggles to hold down a job and interact decently with strangers. Toole frequently describes him as gassy, bulbous, and plenty of other unflattering adjectives, but the author obviously had a great deal of love for his protagonist, who has favorably been compared to a modern day Don Quixote. The novel's setting is New Orleans, and while I can't vouch for this personally (I've never been!) it is apparently a wonderfully accurate depiction of that city and its culture embraced by Louisianians.

But frankly, there's just not that much to this story. A series of escalating events that happen to or are otherwise caused by Ignatius and a cast of supporting characters is present, sure, but I never felt, while reading this one, like anything was heading anywhere meaningful. In fact, after I finished reading the book, I did a little online research to make sure I hadn't missed any major subliminal messages in the story, or hadn't ignored a vital plot point here or there. What I found, on the contrary, was that the entire reason Toole couldn't et the book published in his lifetime was this very lack of cohesion to his story. This made me feel good. Publishers in the 1960s found the same flaws here that I did some fifty years later! I quickly stopped feeling good when I realized that this is part of what ultimately drove Toole to suicide at 31, but, yeah. Here's the response from one publisher, which summarizes my main beef with the novel better than I could:

It seems that you understand the problem—the major problem—involved, but think that the conclusion can solve it. More is required, though. Not only do the various threads need resolving; they can always be tied together conveniently. What must happen is that they must be strong and meaningful all the way through—not merely episodic and then wittily pulled together to make everything look as if it's come out right. In other words, there must be a point to everything you have in the book, a real point, not just amusingness that's forced to figure itself out.

It's not clear to me how extensively Toole reworked his novel before dying, but the same problem remains today. So, in the end, this was a very well-written book with some memorable characters and a great sense of place and setting, but it was a book where nothing really happened and it was frankly a bit tiring to slog through sometimes, no matter how amusing each individual page was.

The Long Walk

I've had a rocky relationship this past year and a half with Stephen King, in which I've struggled a bit too much to enjoy a lot of his writing that a lot of other people seem to love. Fortunately, the blog is just absolutely crawling with King posts made by other bloggers, so I've had quite a few opportunities to read up on the very wide array of work the famous author has put forth. One such posted item that always stuck with me was Sween's Long Walk entry a few years back, where he described a very dark tale of a hundred teenage boys walking for days on end under penalty of death for stopping or even slowing down. The concept intrigued me in its simplicity, and I recently bought the book for that very reason.

I started it last night, finished it this morning, and enjoyed it immensely. One of my biggest struggles with King to date has been a propensity to just stop reading his stories for weeks on end. Two of his Dark Tower books - the better two of the three I've read, actually - took me multiple months to finish even though neither was absurdly long. Under the Dome - which was absurdly long - took me the better half of a year. But The Long Walk, despite being 370 pages and no thin volume on its own right, just sucked me right in from the beginning.

There really isn't much more to the book than is given away by the summary or Sweeney's post. In a vaguely described totalitarian state in an alternate America, a yearly contest is held in which a hundred teenage boys just keep walking - just keep "picking them up and putting them down" - until ninety-nine of them have been shot dead for slowing down or stopping. The winner is awarded "the prize," the details of which are basically left up to him; most boys simply envision millions of dollars, all sorts of special privileges and recognition, and scores of beautiful girls and women

The book mostly alternates between describing the group's slowly waning strength - mental, emotional, physical - and just listening in as they banter with each other like high school kids will do. There's a lot of talk about girls, dreams for the future, backgrounds and childhoods - the whole thing is a pretty thin metaphor for young men in a foxhole bonding and then dying. It's an interesting anti-war sentiment; Vietnam ended or otherwise ruined a lot of young American lives, but it's not like the Vietnam War was a voluntary contest with a 99% lethality rate.

One of the recurring questions the kids ask each other throughout the book is, "why are you here?" In truth, many seem unable to rationalize it to themselves, and a few articulate that they didn't really fully realize the life-and-death nature of the walk; most agree, not long into the walk at all, that they'd gladly forfeit the "prize" and back out now for a chance to walk away with their lives. One of the more cryptic kids remarks about halfway through the book that every last one of them knew why they were here, but wouldn't admit to it: because they all had a death wish.

It wasn't a perfect book, ultimately, and the end fell just a little bit flat after the build up from the previous 350 pages or so, but then, maybe that was intentional; maybe the end of this horrific ordeal was always going to feel a little bit flat and numb and not very exciting, so why try to spruce it up with a flourish of action or a twist ending? For me, it was just nice to see Stephen King staying in his own comfort zone. These were young men with varying personalities, walking through the state of Maine. (No awkward racially spiteful rape victim amputees here, and no arbitrary alternate world map to create and then repeatedly contradict.)

Anyway, again, I was a big fan of this book, and that's honestly the first Stephen King book I can say that about. (I'm still trying to reserve judgment on The Dark Tower until I can consider the whole and not just the individual parts.)

Firestarter

Stop me if you've heard this before- a Stephen King story about a little girl with telepathic capabilities who ends up starting fires. Yeah, at first glance Firestarter may appear to be King's first book, Carrie, all over again, but thankfully despite the similarities on the surface the plot is wildly different. Here King trades the pressures of fitting in at high school for the pressures of running away from the government; the titular firestarter Charlie was born to two parents who took a bizarre experimental drug in their college days to make some quick cash- the drug gave them some light psychic abilities, but their child was born with a much more powerful ability to start fires. They've tried to hide her powers for years so as not to arouse suspicion, but as she gets older this is harder and harder to do and soon enough the family is on the run from the FBI, when the book starts up. For the first half of the story we see the family constantly on the move and trying to outwit their potential captors, and then halfway through there was a huge event that I assumed would be a game-changer; unfortunately for me it "changed" in that it got a lot more boring. Seriously, the second half of the book just dragged and dragged for me as a major conspiracy is unraveled and you find out more about the people who are trying to get their hands on Charlie. There are a few great scenes in Firestarter, particularly the bizarre drug trip Charlie's father recalls early on, but there was a reason Firestarter took me forever to get through. And it's not that Stephen King is getting stale to me after plowing through so many of his books lately; I'm nearing the end of another one and it was much better!

Family Guy: Volume 12

In 2002, back when Family Guy was in its pre-cancelation "Golden Era" of sorts, Fox refused to air an episode called "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein." It did eventually air on Adult Swim, and a few years later on Fox itself, and of course there was buzz and promotional interest in this forbidden episode. This was Family Guy, after all, easily the most offensive and controversial show on network television, so for something to be deemed to inappropriate for Family Guy was a big deal. So, just what was it about this episode that had pushed the envelope too far?

Some potentially anti-Semitic content. The gist of the episode is that Peter does something foolish with his money, then decides he needs a Jewish guy to look after his money, then decides that Jews are great and that he needs to convert his son to Judaism, then ultimately gets talked out of all that in a fairly standard episode-ending "everything is back to normal" discussion with Brian or Lois or the Jewish guy or some combination of all three. It's actually amazingly vanilla stuff, especially when you compare it to other content Family Guy "got away with" both before and since that episode didn't air. By and large, the episode treated the Jewish guy as the straight man and Peter as a buffoon, as always. The episode has found its way back into syndication and DVD releases, and if you were to see it today without knowing about its initial controversy you wouldn't think anything of it at all.

I bring this up just to serve as a remarkable contrast to "Turban Cowboy," an episode of Family Guy that aired in 2013 without any fuss whatsoever. The set-up is fairly similar, in that Peter makes a new friend with different religious beliefs and then makes a misguided attempt to convert his family to that religion - in this case, Islam. There were two enormous differences in the way the two episodes unfolded, though. Where Peter wanted to become a Jew in 2002 because he admired their intelligence, he wanted to become a Muslim in 2013 because of how subservient Islamic women are to their husbands. Yeesh. And then, where Peter gets talked out of becoming a Jew through a somewhat formulaic conversation, he only decides not to be a Muslim once he realizes his new friend is a member of a terrorist cell.

So, to reiterate, in 2002 an episode was deemed unfit for TV broadcast because there were a few Jewish stereotypes in it, but in 2013 it was cool to depict American Muslims as womanizing terrorists? There's got to be a reason for this. Have broadcast standards fallen that drastically since 2002? Are the big wigs at Fox far more willing to denigrate Muslims than Jews? By the way, I'm not suggesting that "Turban Cowboy" should have been banned or anything - I'm just sort of amazed that it wasn't, given that "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" once was.

I've now rambled way too much about one specific episode on this volume of television, but then, what else am I going to say about a stale cartoon Ive discussed four times previously on this blog? I'm already as bored with this post as I was by most of these episodes, so rather than highlight some of the good stuff - and there was some good stuff here - I'm just going to call this one finished and move on.

Dust: An Elysian Tail

I still can't believe what a good deal "Games with Gold" can sometimes be. Once again, the deal is that two preselected games a month are available and free to download for any Xbox Gold subscriber. While the  deal has filled my backlog with more than a few duds, I've recently tried only to acquire and play games that I've at least heard of. Dust is one such game, a side-scrolling hack-and-slash indie RPG.

All in all, it was a fine game. Could have been a little better, but given the free price point and the independent studio behind it, I can't complain. You play as "Dust," a mysterious warrior who doesn't even know his own origins. You're aided by a talking sword and a miniature flying cat-bat hybrid thing named Fidget. Fidget was… a little too "furry fuel" for my comfort, with the voice of a giddy Japanese school girl and oddly voluptuous hips. The whole game was full of anthropomorphic animals. It was a design element I couldn't quite ignore.

Mostly, this one fell right in the middle of the pack as far as Xbox Live Arcade games go. It wasn't Bastion or Braid or Shadow Complex, but it wasn't Shoot Many Robots or Harms Way or A World of Keflings, either.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Those of you with long-term familiarity of my book backlog know that one of the most stubborn categories I've been unable to even attempt progress on, for years, has been "science books." It looks like August, 2011, was the last time I read one, which is both amazing and shocking to me. No matter - I'm back in the saddle now, at least for one post.

Bill Bryson has written a number of things I've read over the years. This is the sixth book of his I've finished, but only the first in the Back-Blogged era. The man is a talented author of all things nonfiction, from travel memoirs to autobiographies to popular science. A Short History of Nearly Everything is, in fact, more or less what its title suggests. It's only 500 pages long, yet it covers a whole lot of ground from the origins of the universe to our solar system to plate tectonics to the oceans and skies to bacteria and dinosaurs and cells and DNA and human evolution. Bryson spends about ten to twenty pages each on covering thirty or so topics in a neatly arranged and loosely organized manner that does indeed seem to cover nearly everything. The whole thing is very conversational and approachable. This is not, whatsoever, heavy science. In fact, if anything, I was often bored not by scientific detail but by all the historical anecdotes Bryson threw in there to liven things up for a general audience.

I started reading this book well over a year ago, but must have stopped abruptly at some point along the way for unknown reasons. (Once again, 2013 was just a terrible year for book reading on my end of the blog.) I can't think of any specific impetus that drove me to resume reading this book, so I'll just credit the Neil deGrasse Tyson Cosmos revival for rekindling a general interest in me for the history of science. Kudos!

Hugo

Simply put, this movie did nothing for me. I've come to expect more - or at least something entirely different - from Martin Scorsese. Some say this was his attempt at a Stephen Spielberg pastiche. Lonely orphan, animatronic robot, fantasy elements - it's all there, and it's all just fine. It just didn't quite resonate with me on any level, and while it was by no means a bad movie, I'm left without much of a positive reaction to it all the same. I wish I could elaborate more, but I'm not even inspired to comb through my own reaction to this one and pinpoint strengths, weaknesses, highlights, or flaws. This was just a nice and easy PG movie without much of a statement beyond the idea that old films should be preserved. Hot take, huh?

God of War: Ascension

I am a huge proponent of the God of War series. With Ascension, I’ve beaten each game in the series including every game on the PSP (and I replayed them on the PS3). This is a prequel story I think. It takes place “before the time of the Titans” as Kratos breaks his blood oath to Ares, whatever that means. Because he does this, he gets pursued by what I think are three (maybe just two) sisters who have the power of illusion and the power to summon bugs. With giant bugs and tricking Kratos into thinking his family is alive, these sisters plan on keeping Kratos chained to Ares for life. SPOILER ALERT: IT DOESN’T WORK supposedly even though it seems like it does based on the games that come after this one chronologically. What all this amounts to is a game that doesn't quite feel as epic as previous iterations. Yes, it still has the giant set pieces and it still makes you feel like an almost god-like warrior, but there's just something missing when the main evil isn't Zeus or Hades or someone awesome like that. 

As you can see, this is the hardest story to follow. Also, the variety of enemies just isn’t up to par with God of War 3 and what enemies this game does have are kind of lame. There are a lot of bug enemies which don’t really fit into this universe to which I had been introduced in previous games. Moreover, the controls have changed from previous installments to incorporate a new feature in which you can harpoon your enemies and hold onto them as you battle other enemies. It's cool in theory but not as fun as I would have hoped. Because of it, I was constantly getting confused with how to do some moves that were previously second-nature to me. On top of that, this game went from having 0 puzzles to having a shit ton in the final hour or so. Lastly, the final boss is pretty lame. Though this is my least favorite of the God of War games, it's easily the best looking (probably the best looking game on PS3). The sound is incredible. The actual gameplay is as fun as ever. If you consider yourself a God of War fan, play this game. Just temper your expectations just a little bit. But damn it feels good to beat another God of War game.

Gladiator

 

When Danielle came home from Italy she immediately asked to watch Gladiator. Boy was I excited. It’s just such a good movie. Russel Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix are just so damn great in this movie. But we all know how goddamn good this movie is. It’s one of the most goosebump-inducing movies of all time and has arguably the best heroic speech of any movie of all time (although my personal favorite happens in Braveheart). On a side note, I hate when people say goose pimples or chicken skin. Thank god R.L. Stine doesn’t say that shit.  Anyway, this movie holds up and flies by despite being 2.5 hours long. My biggest problem with this is the transfer. For a Blu-ray, it looks like dogshit. Apparently Dreamworks offered a replacement with a better transfer of which I never took advantage so I’m stuck with this junk. I would like to rebuy it one day with a better transfer, but not today. It just blows my mind that a movie like this could look this bad. It looks worse than the DVD. Anyway, great movie. If you haven’t seen it you’re dumb.

Rachel Getting Married

It's pretty easy to compare this movie to the entire first half of Melancholia, as both films take place during some posh and elegant wedding weekends and both directors just kind of dove right into those wedding sequences to immerse the audience in the festivities and simply observe all kinds of different characters and their interactions. The comparisons more or less end there, though, as where Melancholia was dark and depressing, Rachel Getting Married gave off an indescribable inviting warmth of sorts.

That's not to say this was a bright and happy movie. Characters have all kinds of baggage and familial histories, grudges, and rivalries, and lots of Rachel Getting Married is just adults yelling at each other. Anne Hathaway plays Kym, the little sister and maid of honor to Rachel, who, of course, is getting married. Kym is selfish and unreliable, but she's also a drug addict struggling in rehab. This puts her in sharp contrast to the responsible and generally even-keeled Rachel, and the two spend a great deal of the movie arguing with each other and unloading years of baggage. Mom and Dad get in on the arguments, often turning on each other, and even a few bridal party members find the time to have some words. Still, while there's plenty of dysfunction here, it's such an honest and realistic dysfunction. These aren't bad people and their relationships aren't ugly.

Anyway, this isn't for everyone and I can't even say that I genuinely loved it, but I was in the right state of mind when I saw it, and for reasons I still can't fully articulate, it really worked, from my perspective.

Young Adult

Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt were terrific in this way-beyond-coming-of-age comedy about a thirty-something woman on an ill-advised quest to reconnect with her high school boyfriend, a married man who has just had a child. One thing I really appreciate about this one was how honest and reasonable it felt. A much simpler movie would have made the wife of the aforementioned ex-boyfriend an obviously terrible match, allowing the audience to easily root for her marriage to fail. A darker movie more interested in making Theron's character an anti-hero would have featured the actress just dripping with sex appeal and wrecking the shit out of that ex's home. Instead, the joke here is on Theron's immature character; the ex is perfectly happy, and although both he and his wife initially welcome his old flame back into their lives, that flame never comes close to being rekindled, at least on his end. Because this was a movie, and because we're trained to expect certain things from movies, I won't pretend I knew all along that nothing would happen between these two characters. But when nothing did happen - and when it happened in spectacularly embarrassing fashion for Theron - I was very happy with the movie's restraint and straightforward frankness. This is a sad, lonely woman, after all, and not some star-crossed lover who deserves this particular happy ending.

Theron plays Mavis, the one-time homecoming queen turned ghost author on a failing young adult series, with a perfect ice cold bitchy demeanor that surely would have fallen flat in the hands of a less talented or less beautiful actress. She's a genuinely bad person, openly flirting with her old flame in front of his wife and nurturing a disgust for being back in her hometown, which is the one place some people still recognize her for being such a popular high schooler. Yet underneath it all is an unconcealable emptiness; just about everyone around her has moved on, the way people tend to do at some point between senior year of high school and their thirty-fifth birthdays, but Mavis is clinging to that entitled popular girl attitude because, really, stuck in her arrested development, it's all she has.

Young Adult was a great movie. It wasn't drop-dead hilarious, and its "some people need to grow up" theme wasn't very original either, but this was still a fresh and enjoyable take on some old cliches. I'd see it again, gladly.

Super Mario Bros.

Rest in peace, Bob Hoskins.

Alright, so I knew going into this one that it was really, really bad. I was very prepared for a bad movie, I assure you. But I expected, say, a bad kids movie. I expected to smile a little bit at a few references to Super Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom and maybe roll my eyes at some plot inconsistencies. I did not expect woefully bad science fiction with such minimal awareness of the Super Mario franchise. I knew this movie would not be good. I didn't know it would not be fun. Since it serves no one's interest for me to ramble on and on with nerd rage over something that happened twenty years ago, I'll just leave a few observations in bullet point format and move on with my life afterward.

The following are all unfaithful adaptation decisions made by the movie:

• Mario is depicted by a man in his fifties, and Luigi by a man in his twenties. While they were still ostensibly brothers, and while the duo have always had ambiguous ages, they have always been depicted as being relatively the same age. (Games that came after 1993 would depict the two as being babies simultaneously.) It was just a werid creative liberty to take, to turn Mario and Luigi into essentially an uncle-and-nephew type of pairing - not quite father-son, but certainly mentor-apprentice in some way.
• Although the brothers don their overalls and signature red and green shirts and hats late in the movie, Mario spends more than half of the movie in an olive green jacket and Luigi spends the same amount of time in a maroon sweatshirt. What a senseless oversight.
• Here's one where two wrongs inadvertently make a right. The movie's damsel in distress isn't Princess Toadstool (which is what Princess Peach was called back then), but Princess Daisy, instead. Furthermore, it's Luigi who's interested in saving her and in the same process courting her. Yes, Luigi and Daisy is technically a canonical pairing, but in Daisy's only appearances prior to 1993 she had only been another princess saved by Mario; if you want to give this movie credit for predicting or even creating the Daisy-Luigi pairing, fine, but the Daisy in this movie had blonde hair and was clearly just Princess Toadstool with a different name and the opposite brother as a love interest. Whatever.
• King Koopa - not Bowser, even though that had become the character's canonical name long before 1993 - was not an oafish snapping turtle with a spiky shell, but instead a human descendent of a Tyrannosaurus rex. His only reptilian feature was a long, pointy tongue.
• Goombas were not little walking mushroom things, but instead massive creatures with human bodies and tiny little heads. They were heavily armed with guns. You can find pictures of them all over the Internet. It's almost unbelievable.
• Toad existed, nominally, at least. Toad was a Goomba with a harmonica. Nice to see him get name-checked, I guess?
• Yoshi also existed. Yoshi was a small velociraptor-like pet of Koopa's. Again, why make the reference only to completely butcher everything about the character? (This movie came out two weeks before Jurassic Park, which really highlights the night-and-day difference in the quality of the dinosaurs.)
• The movie didn't take place in the Mushroom Kingdom or in Subcon, but instead in Dinohattan, which is Manhattan in an alternate dimension where the entire planet, outside this city, is a giant desert.

The following are examples of terrible science in a science fiction movie that didn't have to be a science fiction movie at all:

• Dinohattan exists in an alternate dimension that was made into an alternate dimension when a meteor hit the earth 65 million years ago. In our world, mammals thrived and went on to evolve into humans, but in the other world, dinosaurs thrived and went on to evolve into humans. Like, the exact same humans, except one of them has a pointy tongue.
• These dino-humans are somehow more technologically advanced than real humans despite the complete absence of oceans or any discernible biosphere outside of Dinohattan.
• The dino-humans have created an "un-evolving" ray or some other horseshit that essentially turns you into a different animal from further up your own evolutionary tree. This thing is used to make Princess Daisy's father - the king - into a sentient sprawling mess of fungus. It is later used to make King Koopa into a puddle of goo.
• The gun is used on a human being at one point, and he turns into a chimpanzee. Chimpanzees are not evolutionary ancestors of human beings, and this was well known even back in 1993.
• Some female bad guy gets shocked by a bunch of electricity and immediately becomes a fossilized skeleton embedded within a rock wall.

Here are some more cringe-worthy elements of the film. There are plenty to choose from, but these stuck out:

• Plot hole! If you are going to turn the king into sentient fungus, why not just take the extra step and turn him all the way into a puddle of amoeba goo? That's what happens to Koopa, so we know it's what the technology can do.
• The entire reason Koopa kidnaps Princess Daisy, through an inter-dimensional rift, is so he can obtain a meteor fragment necklace she owns, which will allow Koopa to reopen an inter-dimensional rift, ostensibly to take over our own dimension, even though he's already running the show in his own dystopian universe. Also, how did his henchman get to Daisy in the first place, in another dimension, if the only way to cross dimensions is to use the necklace that Daisy had with her? It just doesn't make any sense! And this is the basic, basic plot!
• Koopa lives atop the "Koopa Towers" a partially destroyed and burnt-out looking World Trade Center. Yeesh.
• There's a scene where Mario and Luigi get arrested in Dinohattan and sent to jail. The officer booking them does so from behind a desk, and throughout the scene, a woman standing on the desk is just digging her heel into the officer's neck and shoulder. It's completely ignored by every character on screen and never referenced again, and it appears to serve no other purpose than to garner a "WTF?" reaction from audiences, as if the absurdity of the movie has not yet registered for some. Consider the target audience, and know that the film was rated PG.

You know what? Just watch the thing on YouTube. Skip around and find whatever bits and pieces are enough to satisfy whatever craving you had to see this film.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGGS0YozIgk)

NBA Hangtime

After realizing this game came out on PS1 as well as N64 I immediately downloaded it to play on my PSP. It’s essentially NBA JAM with create-a-player and what I think is a better announcer. Upon completion, what I’ve discovered is that this game is amazing with four people, but it’s downright unenjoyable as a one-player experience. The reason for that is simple: the CPU manages to be incredible as an opponent but doesn’t bother playing defense as your teammate. What that amounts to is that I have to chuck up threes all game to make sure that I score more despite making fewer shots. The CPU never misses. Ever. I have to shove them multiple times to cause turnovers. Also, I only managed to win one tipoff despite the 40+ games I played. Also, the CPU gets the ball at the second and fourth quarter no matter the result of the tipoff. Large Marge was eventually large enough to beat all 29 teams and be declared “Grand Champion,” but not before some of my love for this game was choked out of me.  Now that I’ve beaten all 29 teams, I get to play random teams with randomly generated Create-A-Players. Those teams are even harder than the goddamn deadly Jazz combo of John Stockton and Jeff Hornacek. I’m a bit ‘timed out at the moment, but will get right back into it when I finally drag my N64 from CA to MA. REJECTED!