Arkham Origins: Blackgate

I was initially excited for this game when it was announced. It seemed like Super Metroid/Shadow Complex meets the Arkham series. I love Batman so I figured I'd love this game. Then middling reviews came out and I lost interest. However, when it was on sale for $4.20 a month ago I could not resist. I did not play Shadow Complex, but what I saw of it seemed great. It was "2.5D" and it worked. Batman is "2.5D" but in the worst possible way. There are random places in which you can go more than just forward or backward, but that is not communicated on the top-down 2D map. Moreover, the map doesn't really differentiate between walls and doors. Also, though there are multiple floors on each area, the map only shows one level. I was lost for 80% of this game. I could never find where I was supposed to go despite there being icons on the map because there's no real way to tell which level it is on. The other 20% was pretty good. The boss fights were actually pretty enjoyable and a lot of them were unique puzzles rather than the traditional battle. I liked that part. A lot. Catwoman and Penguin were both battles I loved. Joker was a little disappointing, but that's fine. The combat is as solid as it is in the other Arkham games. Anyway, this game was fine, but they needed to do a much better job of helping the player out in terms of figuring out where to go. Games where you need to explore or fun, but when the map is utterly useless and the level design is confusing the fun gets sucked out pretty quickly. In the end, the 20% was not worth suffering through the 80%.

Bravely Default

After witnessing earlier this summer just how far off the rails the Final Fantasy series has gone, it was nice to settle down with Bravely Default, an old-school JRPG designed for modern handheld gaming. Turn-based combat, job classes, fetch quests, grind-fests - this game had it all, and if it had been released a few years ago and was called Final Fantasy III, I'm not sure anyone in America would have complained. (Seriously. That game was awful.)

For real though, Bravely Default had everything you could want in an old-fashioned JRPG and it seemed to do everything right, right up to a certain point. New spins that the game put on the genre allowed for features like "summon friends," where you could call on people you had tagged with to help you out in battle. (Thanks, Webber and B-Town!) You could raise or lower - even turn off entirely - the random encounter rate, depending on if you wanted to grind for experience or just complete a fetch quest quickly. A weapon-producing mini-game even made it a benefit to close your 3DS in sleep mode without pressing pause or going to the home screen. The story was generic as hell - four heroes need to reawaken four elemental crystals in order to save the world - but the characters were fleshed out and fully realized and the world was varied and interesting enough to overshadow the mundanities of the plot.

All of this brings us to a point right about forty hours into the game. All four crystals have been awakened and you're off to face the final boss. Except, you know it won't really be that easy, because you know the game is eight chapters long and you're only at the end of chapter four. All the same, off you go. You beat the boss, something weird and spoiler-y happens, and all of a sudden... you're right back at the beginning of the game! Your characters all agree that something weird is up. You still have all of your experience levels and job class skills, but sure enough, the four crystals are dormant again, and you need to go back and reawaken all four. But here's the thing.

You have to do this entire process four more times.

It's not actually that bad. Again, this tipping point came around forty hours into the game for me, and finishing things off, even four more times, only took another ten or fifteen hours. So it's not as if, forty hours in, you're only one fifth done with the game. But... still. JRPGs are notorious for padding their lengths, but this is far and away the worst abuse of reusable maps and bosses I've ever seen. It's not some kind of Bizarro world, either. And the bosses are exactly the same - just stronger and stronger each time. No, the game literally takes you right up to the ending and says, "hey, cool, go back and do that four more times."

Plot-wise, it works. I mean, four times was excessive - why not twice more, with three times being the charm? - but there's something interesting going on and a few twists that I'll admit I didn't see coming. And again, it wasn't really all that terrible a game-padder in the scheme of things. Still, imagine going through the same five or six dungeons five times on one playthrough. It all got very boring very quickly for me, and I imagine I'm not alone in that regard. Bravely Default didn't need to do this, at all. That it did can only be held against it, which is a real shame, since up until that weird "let's do it again" reveal I was having a blast with this game. It's still good. It's still great, even. But man, that is a major flaw that will be hard to overlook even with the benefit of nostalgic hindsight.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

Stan covered most of this in his recent post- we co-op played through this XBox Live Arcade title over two nights a few month apart. I'm a fan of the Tomb Raider franchise and have been wanting to go back and play the games in the series I've missed, but for now this non-Tomb Raider titled spin-off will have to do.

I remember being pretty hesitant about Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light when I first heard of it- Lara works with some sort of racist caricature 'tribal warrior' in an arcade-scoring co-op only game? This was all so far away from what Tomb Raider was about. But it got great reviews and I was interested enough to play at some point. Stan and I both ended up downloading this from that XBox Games With Gold promotion but only ended up playing on Stan's XBox- that's good enough a reason to log for me. The game felt like it was as good as I could expect. It's a pretty huge game for XBLA, with 14 long levels and not a lot of repetition. You're mostly tasked with solving a bunch of puzzles to move ahead, puzzles that require two people to work together, so it never resulted in either of us just kinda dragging the other along like so many co-op games can do. A sequel was recently announced, this time allowing four-player co-op, so who wants to play that one?

Hot Fuzz

I liked it! This one seems like it suffered from my not being in the right mood to watch it so many years ago and I found it much worse than Shaun of the Dead at the time. Years later the humor worked much better for me and I'd be happy to watch this for a third time (Trev said he's seen it like ten times?). So yeah, hopefully these guys (Wright, Pegg, Frost) get together to make a fourth movie together. Oh hey, they just announced they are working on a fourth and want to make a second Cornetto trilogy! Like, a few days ago! Great!

The World's End

The World's End is the third film of Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy, three comedy films that dabble in other genres starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. I was a big fan of the first, the zombie-infested Shaun of the Dead, but the second film, action-flick Hot Fuzz left me a little underwhelmed (we've all discussed this before here on the Back-Blog, and I'll likely revisit that one soon). Rest assured, anyone who hasn't gotten around to checking out The World's End- in my opinion it's the best of the three. Pegg stars as Gary King, a deadbeat alcoholic who can't get over the best night of his life, when twenty years prior he and his four friends nearly made it through a lengthy pub crawl through their small town just after high school. Suddenly inspired to return to town to finish the job, he rounds up all of his old friends, finding them all living quiet albeit much more successful lives. They reluctantly join in out of a sense of obligation and return to the town for some heavy drinking, but the movie's first act sees Gary constantly acting like a jackass as he still behaves like a teenager, the self-described "leader" of his group. The movie very quickly shifts genres however, as it's revealed that an alien invasion has been taking place in town- this feels spoiler-y but Trev assured me that this was detailed in the movie's trailer. Anyway the movie gets more hilarious as the crew attempts to keep the pub crawl going, pretending that nothing's wrong in the hopes that it won't raise suspicion, but clearly getting hammered and losing control of themselves. There are definitely a lot of beats here that will remind you of Shaun of the Dead- yet again we have a crew led by a loser Simon Pegg in a bar trying to defend themselves from every "person" in town, but I liked the story a bit more- it's not the simple "a guy finally grows up and takes responsibility and shows leadership and heroism" but something with a little more nuance that takes a few interesting twists towards the end. I started making this post several weeks ago and have since watched Hot Fuzz. How did I like that one on a re-watch?

Assassin's Creed III

I made a big deal about The Last of Us… a really big deal. It’s definitely on my list of top 5 video games of all time. Well Assassin’s Creed III had an even larger impact. Of all the video games I’ve ever beaten, this is my least favorite and it’s not close. There are so many things that this game does and it does all of them poorly. From climbing buildings to attacking enemies to traveling long distances, there isn’t a single aspect of this game’s gameplay that doesn’t miss the mark. The game is super glitchy and loads every few minutes. Oh, and did I mention that the story is HORRENDOUS? FUCK.

Climbing – Let me preface this complaint with saying that I’ve never played an Assassin’s Creed game before. I fully expected the ability to climb anything and everything to be gratifying. It was not. The controls were so touchy that I could barely control where I was going. Oh let me climb this tree… never mind, I’ll attempt to climb this fence three times on my own despite not pressing any buttons. Oh wait, I can’t climb this fence so I will just stand in place for a few seconds before reacting to any button presses. FUCK.

Combat – On the surface, the combat is cool. You get to take out tons of Red Coats with a tomahawk. However, glitchiness gets in the way again. It’s impossible to target a single person. If another person gets in the way, you will automatically switch to hitting them without trying. That would normally be okay except the only way to kill people is to hit a finishing blow on them. The only way to get to a finishing blow is completing a combo. However, you can’t complete a combo when you keep switching from person to person. FUCK.

Long Distance Travel – The world in this game is HUGE. But most of it is just uninhabited mountains and lakes. I was overjoyed when I discovered you could “fast travel” to specific points on the map. I found this convenient because specific missions start in various locations throughout the world. One mission could start in Boston and the very next one could start in Philadelphia! Great. I’ll just go into the map and click on Philadelphia. That transports me to Philadelphia, right? Nope! It transports you to the outskirts of Boston (after a substantial load). Still in Boston, I must cross into the next area on foot (I can no longer “fast travel”). After another substantial load, I am in the Frontier. I then go into the map again and repeat the same process. This process can sometimes go on three or four times before finally reaching my destination. FUCK.

Oh and there are so many missions that just involve following and eavesdropping. Don’t get too close! Stupid. But man, when I finally killed the main bad guy the game was over and I could finally put this to bed. Actually, no wait. I had to solve this stupid puzzle involving setting off three power sources (did I mention that no one prompted me to do this – all of the other characters kept telling me to do something that I couldn’t do until completing this). It sucked. And it took like 40 minutes not including the 20 minutes of cut scenes. But finally, the credits rolled… for 20 minutes! Seriously. You couldn’t skip ‘em. But, I heard there was an epilogue so I stuck around against my better judgment. After another “fast travel” debacle, I was back in Boston looking for “pivots” on the map. The only way to find them was to triangulate using pivotss I already had in my possession. I went into inventory and clicked on the fist pivot. “To access this pivot, you must be connected to the internet. Press X to connect to UPlay.” ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? I immediately turned the game off. FUCK.

The worst part about this game is that it had so much potential. I was so amped about the setting. Check out that fucking cover art! Amazing! But guess what, you don’t get to be that character until 8 hours into the game! This game needed at least another year in development. Avoid it at all costs.

True Blood: Season 6

True Blood has never been great television, but at its best it's been good enough summer television. It's stupid and frivolous and sexy and it doesn't often take itself too seriously and it's occasionally as inconsistent with its own mythos and rules as Heroes was. The series finale is in a couple days, so I figured I amy as well get myself caught up, starting with this penultimate season. And why not? There's nothing else on TV these days. (Seriously.)

This already absurd-beyond-repair show hit an all time low early on in Season 6, breaking through the rock bottom that was Season 5's ending and doing so with determination and vigor. In my brief and disappointed Season 5 post, I wrote: "The show is attempting to serve like thirteen different characters at this point, and rather than have them run around in the same circles it just threw them in pairs at completely unrelated stories that didn't seem to add anything at all to the mythology or overall narrative of True Blood." That rang entirely true here, too, and early on things were as spread out and uninteresting as I could imagine. (Bill is a vampire god! Alcide is a werewolf packmaster! Sam's got to protect a young shapeshifter! Andy's got fairy quadruplet babies! Terry still has PTSD! Sookie is in a dream world getting ravaged by the guy who killed her parents! Lafayette still exists!)

But then something interesting happened. Specifically, nearly every completely absurd storyline just kind of slowly faded away by the middle of the season, leaving us with a somewhat entertaining A-story - the first one True Blood has had since Season 2. Every vampire on the show - and at this point, that's half the characters - independently ends up incarcerated in some kind of vampire internment camp. It's amazing how much better even a crappy show like this one gets when it puts most of its best characters in a position to interact with one another. I wound up liking this season more than I expected to like it, particularly after the first three episodes or so. That's not to say that it was good television; it just finally realized it didn't need to tell ten different stories with fifteen different characters. I've got no reason to assume I'll like Seasoon 7, but this was a minor unexpected surprise.

The Man Who Wasn't There

I watched Fargo again recently and absolutely loved it. But my up-and-down experience with the Coen brothers continued, and sank back "down," with The Man Who Wasn't There, a fairly forgotten black-and-white movie from 2001. It's a Coen take on a noir movie, and it just felt very run-of-the-mill to me. Billy Bob Thornton and James Gandolfini were great. Frances McDormand was recognizable and fine. The story was straightforward and a bit dull. I dunno. I wanted to like this one a lot more than I did, is all.

The Last of Us

Most video games I play are nothing more than a distraction. They are fun rides for the 10 hours or so and I never think about them again. The same goes for movies and books. I enjoy the ride and I love checking them off my list, but the experience does little else for me. It’s much rarer that I experience media that leaves a lasting impression on me.  It’s rarer still that I experience something that changes my list of favorites of all time.  The Last of Us is one of my favorite games of all time and it’s easily one of the best games of all time, if not the best. It’s about as close to perfect as any video has ever been for me.

The narrative is second to none. We follow Joel and Ellie as they travel across the post-apocalyptic America with a specific goal in mind. They fight for their lives every step of the way and grow in the process. It’s pretty standard in some ways, but it’s executed flawlessly. It’s nuanced and it drags you in. It’s honestly one of the best stories I’ve ever experienced in any medium. I don’t really want to say more than that because everyone deserves to experience it unspoiled. However, the narrative is only one part of the game. Without tremendous gameplay, a good story can be dragged down. Thankfully, Naughty Dog delivers. Though it’s not revolutionary 3^rd-person action gameplay, it’s enjoyable and it strikes the right balance to really make the player feel as helpless as one should in a post-apocalyptic society. You never feel too overpowered (or underpowered), but at the same time the game isn’t so difficult that you stop enjoying yourself.  The level design (not that there are traditional “levels”) is superb. I was so impressed by how open the world felt despite the fact that there is a pretty linear progression. I simultaneously felt like I could go anywhere while never struggling to figure out where I needed to go next to progress in the story. It somehow felt organic. I was never lost. Or maybe I was but I never felt it. There were a lot of little things to explore that added to the narrative. Nothing ever felt like filler or a waste of my time.

There is so much more that I could say about this game, but I won’t. Please experience this for yourself.

Motocross Madness

Xbox's "Games with Gold" promo has been all over the place, spewing out treasures and trash in equal volume. It's gotten past the point where I care enough to go out of my way to see which games are available every two weeks - which is too bad, as I've missed a few real gems this year - but earlier tonight, after beating Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, I saw this game being advertised on the dashboard and thought, sure, why not?

I dabbled for about an hour, racing around on a dirt bike with my avatar, winning some races and doing some tricks. There was nothing much to see or do here, but the game was free, so it's no skin off my back.

Wow. Two games in one night. At this absurd pace, I'll be done with my backlog in a month!

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

Sween and I started this one a while back - probably about six months ago - and just finished it tonight while gorging on a chicken parmesan calzone that, even through our combined efforts, we could not finish. When it takes six months to co-op a six-hour game, and when two grown men can't put down more than 70% of a large calzone, well, let's just say we're getting older every day. Still! Logress is logress, and it was great to have the kind of night tonight like we used to have every other week or so when the blog began. Even if I am already regretting the way my stomach will behave at work tomorrow and dreading the three large remaining chunks of that hideous thing in my refrigerator.

That was a tangent. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light was an arcade-style take on the Tomb Raider franchise. More puzzle solving than shoot-em-up, it lent itself very well to the gaming tendencies of two guys sitting on a couch trying to figure shit out. It was one of the best local co-op games I've played in years, as each of us figured out a fair share of puzzles and held off a slew of enemies from time to time. We died a shit ton, but all it did was reduce our scores, and even though I ended at least one of the fourteen levels with an overall score of zero, we still ended up unlocking nine of the game's twelve achievements without really going out of our way to do anything. One measure of how good a game is, for me, is how willing you wind up being to go out of your way to do any unnecessary tasks. It's that element of "completion." When a game is fantastic, you're going out of your way to explore every last corner of it and do every last possible thing. When it's terrible, you just want to beeline right through to the ending along the path of least resistance. Here, Sween and I did a lot more, "oh, let's see what's over here," than we did, "who cares, let's just keep going."

All in all, a decent game made better by its temporarily free price.

Halo: The Fall of Reach

I originally started this book back in the summer of 2005. I read a lot of books that summer as I had just finished my first year at a new high school in which I hated pretty much everyone with which I came in contact. Anyway, I didn’t finish it. It wasn’t great. In fact, it was pretty boring. It turns out that reading a book with 90% action can be as tedious as watching a movie with 90% action. Of course, if a movie does it right and you are in the theater it can be great, but watching it at home or reading it at home can be unenjoyable. With that in mind, I restarted this thing in audio form. I don’t know that I want to start logging audio books consistently, but this one has been unfinished for me for going on 10 years.

My huge level of excitement for Halo: The Master Chief Collection was the motivation I needed to put this one to rest. What I liked most about it was that it fleshed out how John 117 became Master Chief, from his childhood into adulthood. It detailed Master Chief’s first interactions with Cortana and it gave details about the “Spartan Program” that I hadn’t know before. It gave insight into Master Chief’s relationship with Captain Keyes and most importantly. It did a lot right in terms of filling in some missing details in Halo plots and I really wish it would have focused more on character. Instead, it focused way too much on action.

Listening to action described is as boring as it seems and because of that, I will never read/listen to a Halo book again. Halo has a much more layered story than the games may suggest, but I don’t care enough to suffer through all the monotonous action… and I LOVE Halo.

Fight Club

Sween gave Fight Club a post two and a half years back, and his main takeaway was that the book was virtually identical to the movie, to the point where reading the novel gave him absolutely nothing that the movie didn't. He's absolutely right - the film was an incredibly faithful adaptation to the point where the book itself read like a mostly-finished version of the screenplay, and there really isn't much to take from here that wasn't provided by the movie. In fact, the biggest difference between the book and the movie was the ending, and honestly, the movie wins on that front hands down.

But I still want to talk about Fight Club. (Seriously, no pun intended.)

The movie is fifteen years old now and the book is closing in on twenty. And while both are noticeably dated in a few ways - Project Mayhem's domestic terrorism seems a lot less exotic and freeing on this side of 9/11 - some of the book's points about working class dissatisfaction jibe nicely with the recent backlash against Wall Street and the one percent. Then again, the struggle of the bourgeoisie and class warfare are fairly timeless themes, so maybe that's a nonstarter. And come to think of it, the rejection of consumerism present in the novel (and film) isn't an entirely original premise, either. And what's the deal with the narrator's schizophrenia-via-insomnia? That doesn't even seem like a plausible medical condition. Ultimately, there are a lot of cool ideas in Fight Club, but I've got to agree with Sween's hot take: the story isn't as great as the sum of its parts. A lot of motifs are suggested and implied during a lot of different scenes. There's a nihilistic longing for death; there's the idea of solace in masochism; there's human bonding through shared suffering at all those support groups. But it doesn't all tie together into one cohesive point at any point in the 200 pages or 2:20 runtime. This is still one of my all time favorite movies, and it was quite an enjoyable book to read, but reading it also opened my eyes to how much of a smoke and mirror show this hodgepodge of mostly-thought-out ideas and witty, quotable lines really was. Ultimately, this is some strong and apt criticism of society, like so many other great books, but it wasn't much else. It may have made for one of the decade's best and most popular films, but as a literary work, the book was merely "good." And that's fine with me! I'd read Palahniuk again any time.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Here's a decade-old book that always seemed to pop into my periphery every few years. Out of nowhere, I'd see a grandparent reading it, or hear a coworker recommending it, or read something somewhere on the Internet referencing it. Apparently, my wife has owned this one for a long time, and it's been sitting right there on our bookshelf. So when I saw it the other day I thought, hey, why not? And I dove right in.

The book made for a quick but engrossing read. Presenting itself as a murder mystery, its real merit is as a point-of-view narrative from the perspective of a teenage boy with some form of autism. Although he's a fictional character, it's so easy to understand and appreciate his worldview, and by extension, to gain a better appreciation for how high-functioning autists deal with stress, strife, and daily routine.

To share much more about this book - which, again, is a quick little mystery novel as far as you should initially be concerned - would be to risk spoiling or ruining the experience in some way. And among all the books I've read over the years and discussed on this blog, this is one I really would strongly recommend to anyone. It's got simple mass appeal and it's just over 200 pages long. There are even lots of pictures.

Ecco: The Tides of Time

I had to resort to copy-pasting directly from Wikipedia in order to explain the first Ecco game. The same strategy doesn't even begin to do this second Ecco game justice.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here, then, in lieu of a 200 million word attempt to describe this game, is a two-hour YouTube playthrough. Go ahead. Skip around a lot. Bask in The Tides of Time for all they're worth.

I have nothing more to say. This game has left me speechless. Not without questions - oh, all kinds of questions - but speechless all the same, unable to even gather all of my curiosities into clear and concise inquiries.

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

The Inbetweeners: The Complete Series

Yeah, another Britcom for me. What can I say? Six-episode seasons and less-than-stellar production values have a certain appeal to them.

"Inbetweeners" is a term I did not know prior to checking this show out. Maybe it's British. Maybe I'm just old. Apparently, it's the term used to describe all the kids in high school who aren't popular but who also aren't social outcasts. (Hey, that was me! And most of my friends. I'm relating to this show already!) The series could pretty aptly be described as American Pie in England, the TV show. It's about four friends, 16 to 18 years old, just making their way in the world. They rag on each other for having hot moms, hot sisters, gay dads, and shitty cars. They spend most of their free time trying to get either drunk or laid, succeeding fairly consistently on the first front and very rarely on the second. They're a little gross and a little socially awkward, but, hey, they're just kids, after all.

This was a pleasant but utterly non-essential show. None of the jokes or misadventures are particularly memorable and most of the entertainment comes from the actors and the chemistry they have with one another. Most episodes feature all four of the guys embarrassing or humiliating themselves in new and unique ways. Again, nothing special, just a bunch of high school hijinks.

A movie was made and a sequel to that movie is coming out soon. I'm sure I'll see both.

Bagombo Snuff Box

I find short story collections tough to blog about. Actually, I find them kind of hard to read. You can really sink right into a good novel, but no matter how invested you get in a short story, it's over in ten or twenty pages. In this collection's introduction, Kurt Vonnegut shares a similar sentiment, comparing short stories to "fifteen-minute cat naps." This is the second Vonnegut short story collection I've read, and definitely the stronger of the two. The first one, While Mortals Sleep, was the second posthumously released collection of unpublished Vonnegut works. This means it was full not only of works that publishers had passed on when Vonnegut was young, but of the "next-best" thirteen or so such works.

I've said it before, but the difference in quality and style from Vonnegut's first novel to his second is bigger than the gap between his second and his fourteenth. Player Piano, from 1952, just wasn't that impressive; The Sirens of Titan, from 1959, is my second-favorite Vonnegut book behind only Slaughterhouse-Five. (Mother Night, his third book, from 1961, ranks third for me, and the classic Cat's Cradle - his fourth, 1963 - ranks fifth. So only a decade separates Vonnegut's clunkiest and most undercooked book from his golden era.)

What's interesting about Bagombo Snuff Box is that it presents a bunch of previously published Vonnegut stories from 1950 to 1962, provided here in chronological publication order. I know it's a cliche, but you really do see the man evolve stylistically as an author throughout this collection. That isn't to say that the beginning is all trash and the end is all treasure - the gems and duds are a little more intermingled than that - but there's a pleasantly perceivable shift in tone here all the same.

As far as the stories themselves go, there are plenty of standouts - so many, I guess, that "standout" isn't really an accurate term. Regardless, these were some of my favorites.

"Thanasphere" kicks things off with a wonderfully macabre sci-fi story. The first man goes to outer space only to be overwhelmed and driven insane by thousands of disembodied voices. This man's trip to the heavens has literally taken him to the realm of the dead. What's crazy to me is that this story came from 1950, and Yuri Gagarin didn't go to space until 1961, which means for a good eleven years or so this one was at least spiritually plausible for readers.

"Any Reasonable Offer" deals with a recurring Vonnegut theme - people pretending to be something they aren't. It's a tame story, like so many of his early efforts, but it's short and sweet and more than just a build-up to a punchline of sorts like some of the young author's lesser efforts from the time.

"Souvenir" involves a man remembering a dark episode from the end of World War II. It felt like a small Slaughterhouse-Five teaser of sorts.

"The Powder-Blue Dragon" featured a middle-class nobody blowing his life savings and then some on the sleekest, nicest, and sexiest car in the country, only to immediately despise it when it doesn't lead to affectionate attention from the fairer sex. A simple and enjoyable lampooning of masculine car culture.

"A Present For Big Saint Nick" was just patently absurd, even for Vonnegut. A mobster dressed up as Santa just keeps being an asshole to all these kids lined up to sit on his lap, and when he opens up a package rigged with small explosives that blow half his face off, the kids just erupt in cheers. Bizarre but darkly comic.

"Der Arme Dolmetscher" was a war-time story that dealt, again, with a man posing as something he wasn't. This one was teeming with military-related absurdisms, much like Catch-22, and it ended with a real stinger of a punchline.

"Find Me a Dream" was one of many quick little love stories in the collection, but this one had some real witty and bouncy dialogue. I attribute this to Vonnegut's evolving style and tonal command.

"Runaways" gently mocked the idea of young love and the mentality of every teenager who falls infatuated with the idea of being in love without having the slightest clue about what it means to actually love somebody. This one simultaneously made me laugh at kids and also miss being so young and naive. Timeless and endearing.

"2BR02B" is probably my favorite Vonnegut short story, and could be one of my favorite short stories of all time. In the future, aging has been cured. No one really dies of natural causes anymore. But this means population control is essential. Told with a perfect economy of characters (four) and settings (one), this ten-page tale will stay with you forever.

"Hal Irwin's Magic Lamp" started out seeming a little Gift of the Magi-esque, but made an abrupt dark turn toward the end and was all the better off for it. It is, essentially, the story of a proud man and his humble wife. It takes place in 1929.

I've rambled a lot at this point, and I still haven't even hit on a number of observations I wanted to make. Meh. So it goes!

I've got two more Vonnegut short story collections in the backlog, and there are a couple more in existence beyond that. We're not done with this guy at all on the blog. Not yet.

Puzzle Agent 2

Here's Puzzle Agent 2, the sequel to... Puzzle Agent, obviously. I played the first one last year and found it to be decent, but the game ends on a cliffhanger that required a sequel to finish up the story. FBI Puzzle Agent Nelson Tethers basically solved a mystery of why the local eraser factory in Scoggins Minnesota has been shut down (yeah, that's really the central mystery to the first game) but was forced to leave the town and return to work with many questions unanswered. After some time, Nelson decides to take a vacation to return to Scoggins to figure out what has been going on and why everyone in town seems so paranoid. Where the first game had Nelson running around town finding new puzzles everywhere like Professor Layton, Puzzle Agent 2 is a more linear game that basically turns into puzzle, then exposition, then puzzle, exposition, and so on without much exploring town or adding many new characters. It wasn't that there was some 'magic' in the first game that the second was missing, it just felt like the second game was a lazier effort. Lots of the similar puzzles and re-used environments and plot points. Oh well. I do still really like the art style here at least, and now the series is done so that'll be the last we hear of Nelson Tethers and Scoggins and puzzle agents.

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 4

For the first few episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm's fourth season, I just wasn't feeling it. Larry David was inexplicably cast in a Broadway production of The Producers along with Ben Stiller, and from the start of the season the two co-stars just couldn't stand each other. It lacked the relatable annoyances of Seinfeld, or the more over-the-top arguing of Always Sunny, and simply felt like a lot of bickering without many jokes. I was considering how to put together a post detailing why I thought Seinfeld was just clearly a better show. And yet, once Ben Stiller finally left the Producers (and Curb Your Enthusiasm), the show quickly rebounded and I ended up loving the back half of this season. Standout episodes include The Carpool Lane (Larry takes a prostitute to a Dodgers game), Wandering Bear (hijinks ensue after Larry tries to buy a porn video) and the one-hour finale, a first for the series, Opening Night where the season-long punchline is finally revealed on stage. I don't know if I'll ever like Curb more than Seinfeld- I just like the characters more in the latter, but Curb Your Enthusiasm's fourth season was a fun watch and I just may catch up before new Curb ever airs. There's going to be more, right?

The Game

I've gone back and forth on David Fincher, loving some of his movies completely, and just not caring at all for others. Still though, almost every movie he makes seems to be pretty buzzworthy. Alien 3, Seven, Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Social Network- these are movies that, love them or hate them, everyone who's seen them seems to have a strong opinion on. Here's one of his that pop culture seems to have left behind though- The Game. Who still talks about The Game? Does anyone feel like it's a classic, or was it a whole bunch of crap? Was it just not memorable? I had no idea, so I gave this a shot recently.

 

And yeah, it's decent. It's a pretty interesting concept- Nichlas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is basically a less villainous version of Douglas' character Gordon Gekko in Wall Street but this time he's supposedly the good guy. His deadbeat brother Sean Penn gives him an odd gift for his birthday- a membership in Consumer Recreation Services, a vaguely-detailed company promising to give him an entertaining 'game', but refusing to detail what it will involve. Before long it's clear that the company is up to some shady shit- Nick returns home from CRS's office to find a weird life-size clown-doll left in a heap in his driveway, cameras installed in his living room, and the guys on the news is talking directly to him. Are they playing a game, as they said they are? Or is there more at stake here?

 

The movie jumps back and forth, seemingly a clear game at some points, and a ploy to steal Van Orton's fortune and ruin his life at others. It all wraps up with a bit of a twist ending, but nothing earth-shattering, like say, the one that ended Fincher's next movie, Fight Club. So all in all, I'd say The Game's place in history as one of Fincher's less-known movies seems justified- aside from a solid performance from Douglas and a well-done air of paranoia throughout, there's not much else here.

Today We Are Five

Milestones have a way of sneaking up on people only to leave all kinds of artificial significance in their wake. Today this blog is five years old. And while five years isn't really much more than four years and eleven months, it seems like we have now crossed the threshold between a little hobby we've been doing for a few years and a passion project we've been doing for a significant portion of our lives.

I have no idea how long we'll keep this up - even for summertime, the blog's been awfully slow lately - but I've enjoyed the last five years a lot, just sharing my thoughts on books, movies, and games with you guys under the shared illusion of goal-oriented entertainment. Here's to all the time we've spent here for the last half-decade, and here's to many more posts, comments, and shared opinions.