Mega Man Zero 2

Another day, another Mega Man Zero game checked off. This time around, I'll touch on gameplay.

All of the basics from Mega Man and Mega Man X are back. You've got your basic run-and-gun platforming, you've got hidden power-ups, and you've got that "choose your own adventure" style freedom to select which stages you play in almost any order. However, there are some key differences between this series (so far) and the two that preceded it.

Stage Selection:

In the Mega Man X games, the order in which you chose to beat levels had an affect on the levels themselves. In the first game, for instance, once you beat Storm Eagle, his ship crashes into Spark Mandrill's power plant stage, which makes it much easier to handle. There's a heart power-up in Flame Mammoth's level that you can't get to unless you've already beaten Chill Penguin; likewise, there's a heart in Chill Penguin's level that you can't uncover until you've beaten Flame Mammoth and have his flamethrower weapon. So any 100% run in Mega Man X involves visiting levels after you've already beaten them. And furthermore, there are eight stages in these games, traditionally, that you can beat in any order. You don't have that same freedom so far through two Mega Man Zero games. In the first one, there were three missions available at once, and you could select any of them, but that still made things progress in a very specific and mostly predetermined order. Part of the charm of Mega Man was that freelancing ability to play things in any order. It's a minor change, but it's one I'm noticing.

Boss Weapons and Weaknesses:

Here, almost every boss has some sort of elemental weakness. Fire seems to damage water and ice-based enemies, paradoxically; ice hurts wind and lightning-based enemies, and it's lightning that hurts fire-based enemies. But that's all! Back in Mega Man and Mega Man X, every time you beat a boss you acquired a new weapon. Furthermore, every boss was weak against another boss's weapon - and often in creative ways. Here, that's just less so the case.

Weapons:

On the bright side, Zero has way more basic weapons at his disposal than Mega Man or X ever did. In addition to the buster (gun, basically), Zero has a saber and a boomerang and a grappling hook. The saber, in particular, just dishes out all kinds of punishment. You could play as Zero in Mega Man X3 and X4, and all he could use there was the saber, so it's nothing new. Still, having both a saber and a buster brings a whole new element to this type of gameplay.

Power-Ups and Cyber Elves:

The classic Mega Man series didn't really have these, but Mega Man X made all kinds of hay out of hidden power-ups that made you stronger and more powerful, or that gave you new abilities. Chief among these were the heart tanks - one per stage - that increased your life bar. In Mega Man Zero, these are sort of still around. The heart tanks are gone, but you can still increase your maximum HP by finding specific cyber-elves. Cyber-elves are a new gimmick in the Mega Man Zero series, and I'm not a huge fan so far. There are tons of them to find in each stage. To use them, you need to level them up by collecting energy that occasionally falls from defeated enemies. And they do just about everything. Some will increase your life bar, others will turn into sub tanks, and several more become these one-time-use instant-cures. Why not just spread heart tanks and sub tanks throughout the stages instead, like in the good old days?

Leveling Up:

This is the worst. There was no reason for Mega Man Zero to do this, but, neither your buster nor your saber is capable of charging up early on in the game. In order to unlock charged shots - and to strengthen the weapons in general - you need to use them. Like, a lot. The only real effect of this is that players just farm enemies for half an hour upon starting the game, grinding their way to having charged shots and stronger saber attacks. Why bother with this? Mega Man games have never needed grinding before.

Difficulty:

I lied - this is the worst. These games are brutally hard. Most of the difficulty is fine - just well-designed and challenging gameplay, really - but occasionally these games will give you a really cheap death due to an off-screen trap or an unseen pitfall. There's nothing wrong with trial-and-error learning curves, but they work a lot better in something like Super Meat Boy, where levels are ridiculously brief and precision timing is everything. Here in the Mega Man Zero games, a silly and unpreventable death might set you back two full minutes. Where's the fun in that?

Now, one last caveat - I'm playing through the Mega Man Zero Collection on a mode called "Easy Scenario." It's almost an unreasonably cheap way to get through the game - some have dismissed it as a god mode of sorts - but what it does is give you all kinds of hidden power-ups from the get-go. So in both games so far, for instance, I've played with a maximum health bar the whole way. And my saber and buster start out fully charged, and I've already got at least a few of the sub tanks. I'm torn about this. On the one hand, it's making these games much shorter and easier and allowing me to appreciate the story, the art, the design, and everything else without really worrying about the insanely hard gameplay. That's not to say I haven't died - I've died a lot, particularly from the aforementioned pitfalls - but I can't pretend I've "earned" any sort of completion status on either of these games so far. But, yeah, on the other hand, I'm robbing myself of the experience of finding all the cyber-elves and power-ups. A ton of the monotony is gone, but so is the rewarding feeling you get as you build up your character's strength throughout the game. It all kind of feels like starting a "New Game+" in an RPG. Look, as always, I appreciate every opportunity to make a game shorter or easier than it needs to be; I'll spend extra time on the ones that merit it, but I've still got more than 60 games in my backlog, and I just can't devote as much time to exploring them as fully as I'd like to.

In conclusion, the Zero series so far doesn't have quite the same feel as the X games did, and that's too bad. But it's also entirely understandable, and these games have been plenty enjoyable - probably more so than later X games, actually.

Mega Man Zero

Long-time readers know I've got a love-hate relationship with the Mega Man franchise. I mean, I love it, and in particular I love Mega Man X, but for two weeks or so I hated the sheer volume of Mega Man I was playing as I ripped through two separate compilations (the Mega Man Anniversary Collection and the Mega Man X Collection) of admittedly repetitive run-and-gun platforming. Alas, I just don't know when to quit, because a few months ago I purchased the Mega Man Zero Collection, another Mega Man compilation. Yikes!

This one covers the entirety of a third subseries: the Mega Man Zero games. There are four of them, all released on the Game Boy Advance between 2002 and 2005. In these games, you play as Zero, the badass from the Mega Man X series who serves as a mentor and role model to X. Now, right off the bat, Zero's charisma and unflappable cool are gone, since you're the one controlling Zero and making mistakes, but whatever - that's still cool!

The first game in the series took me two and a half hours to beat on easy mode and I expect more of the same going forward, so I'll keep this post brief and try to touch on some gameplay comments and criticisms in an upcoming post.

The World Ends with You

I bought this game not out of the blue, but specifically after holding off for several years after its release in 2008. Any RPG from Square merits at least a strong consideration on my part, but there was always something a little bit off about this game. What finally got me to buy in was a recommendation from somewhere on the Internet, based on how much I had enjoyed both Zero Escape games on the DS. Each of those games had a pretty mind-bending mystery at its core, and if I could play an RPG with a similar set of twists, why wouldn't I?

Now, it's often been said that there are three key design elements of all Japanese role-playing games: plot, exploration, and combat. "Plot" is more or less the story the game tells as you push your way through it. Who are these characters? What are their goals? What stands in their way? That sort of stuff. "Exploration" is everything you do in the game that doesn't directly relate to advancing the plot, like walking around town talking to random people, taking on a side quest, going places you don't need to go, watching scenes that you don't need to watch, and so on. There's often some overlap between plot and exploration, but it usually isn't hard to categorize chunks of different games as one or the other when push comes to shove. Lastly, combat consists, obviously, of all the fights and battles in a game, and more broadly of the entire battle system the game has set up, from move sets to character stats.

The best RPGs excel at all three of these elements, and different types of RPGs add emphasis to different aspects. An MMORPG is, by nature, going to be light on plot but extremely heavy on exploration. A strategy RPG will make its hay in the intricacies of its combat. And then there are RPGs with epic, sprawling stories where the scope and emotional impact of the story is the selling point itself. Let me take a minute now to go over The World Ends with You and see if that's the best way to explain my own reaction to it.

• Plot: The story really was the hook this game had going for it. You play as Neku, a boy who wakes up one day to find himself an unwilling participant in a game where losing means dying. The game takes place on an alternate plane of reality, and the participants can see everything in the real world, but cannot interact with anyone; they're essentially ghosts. Neku partners up with three different people over the course of the game, trying to survive and also to figure out why he's here at all. It's not the best or deepest story in the world, but the constant twists keep it entertaining and interesting enough to grant it a solid B.
• Exploration: Here's where the game starts to suffer. The entire story takes place in a subsection of Tokyo, which means that all the environments end up looking the same. Furthermore, since there aren't a lot of people to interact with from the ghost world, there really isn't much optional dialogue. The game also employs all kinds of roadblocks that don't allow you to progress on much more than a linear track. It's about as straightforward as a rail shooter, unfortunately.
• Combat: In a nutshell, a total mess. First of all, you have to use the stylus to swipe and tap on enemies on the screen moving in real time. Complicating things, your partner battles on the top screen and is controlled by the directional pad. The partner will enter auto-battle mode by default - which is something I learned not to mess with, very quickly - but that just means I spent lots of battles tapping and swiping enemies that were already getting hit by my partner. There was also a "pin" concept that replaced the standard weapon equipment aspect of gameplay, and these pins stood in for attacks and healing spells, and I'm not sure I ever understood it or made much sense of it. The combat here was bold and innovative, but it was kind of a disaster in implementation - at least for me.

So at the end of the day, this was a game that felt broken even if it wasn't, and one that didn't allow you to do much of anything beyond pushing through the end-to-end story. That story wasn't bad, but it also wasn't amazing, and a decent story alone doesn't make any game worth spending twenty hours playing. I wanted to like The World Ends with You, and I want to give it acclaim for being so unique and unusual, but ultimately I found it to be little more than a twenty-hour slog with frustrating combat. Oh well!

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

One gift. Forty dollars. Thirty-three games. A year and a half. One Keith. Two more games. Thirty-five total games. And now, finally, at long last, I bid adieu to the Genesis Project. Oh, happy day!

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? is a game I've played before, on a PC, back at some point in the '90s. It's also a show I watched a decent amount when I was a kid. The premise is pretty simple, for anyone who isn't familiar. Carmen Sandiego is a world-traveling criminal mastermind who steals precious artifacts and national treasures from cities all over the world. Your job in these games is to track her and her henchmen down by figuring out where to travel next and what your suspect looks like. The basic pattern is that you start out in one city, and ask people questions. Some will give you information on what your suspect looks like ("she was trying to conceal a tattoo on her shoulder") or where your suspect was heading next ("he exchanged all of his money for francs"). I've always been a bit of a map nerd - geography, history, countries and capitals, etc. - and so I've always had a soft spot for these games. They're baldly educational in nature, and entirely boring if you don't like piecing clues together. That's okay though, since the menu-based gameplay made for one of the least broken Sega Genesis games I've ever played.

One interesting aspect of this game was that, since it was made in 1992, it contained all kinds of dated references. I mentioned francs above, and often the biggest clues for where to head next were based on 2015-extinct currencies. Another big one was flags. "He headed somewhere with a green and white flag," someone would say, but when I looked at my available options for where to head next, none of them had a green and white flag. Yeah, I used my cell phone to look up some cities and regions and flags and such, and I can't imagine what it was like for a kid playing this game in 1992. "Let's go to the library, Mom. I need to look up where Patagonia is in the World Book Encyclopedia!"

Anyway, this was a fitting way for me to end the Genesis Project. I can't rule out that I'll ever buy another Sega Genesis game - I do have a working Sega Genesis now, after all, and who knows what old obscurity may tickle my fancy one night? - but for now that thing is heading back to the closet in order to free up the A/V slots on my guest room TV. I've got a long overdue date with some PS2 titles...

Ecco: The Tides of Time

Ecco the Dolphin

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

Arrow Flash

Golden Axe

Alien Storm

Virtua Fighter 2

Fatal Labyrinth

Ecco Jr.

Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master

Streets of Rage 3

Gain Ground

Streets of Rage 2

Golden Axe II

Kid Chameleon

DecapAttack

Comix Zone

Vectorman 2

Vectorman

ESWAT: City Under Siege

Streets of Rage

Chakan: The Forever Man

Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle

Eternal Champions

Risky Woods

The Ooze

Jewel Master

Shadow Dancer

Columns III

Columns

Crack Down

Golden Axe III

Altered Beast

Bonanza Brothers

Sword of Sodan

And the Mountains Echoed

Here's the third book from Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-born doctor-turned-writer responsible for The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. Those two books focused, broadly, on father-son relationships and mother-daughter relationships, respectively. Here in And the Mountains Echoed, Hosseini has taken a stab at exploring the ties that bind siblings to one another.

This 400-page book is nominally a novel, but in truth it's a collection of nine different short stories that intertwine in different places. It takes place not just in Afghanistan, but also in France and America, across seventy years. Each of the book's nine chapters was told from a different point of view. The result, at least for me, was a book that ended up being less than the sum of its parts. The scope and breadth here were impressive, but no character or story was given any real prominence here. That doesn't mean the stories weren't all impressive on an individual level - sad, tragic, uplifting, cynical, enlightening, you name it - but just that they didn't combine thematically or plot-wise into something more for me. Which is fine!

Honestly, Hosseini's writing has gotten a bit formulaic for me by now - which is also fine! Beyond taking place in Afghanistan, all of his work seems to feature elements like wealth gaps, codependent relationships, life-altering accidents, redemption arcs, and adoption. Most of the time, when his characters start out with some kind of advantage - wealth, beauty, power, intelligence, for instance - they'll have the tables turned on them and have to learn to cope with new circumstances. The man is still an effective storyteller - I'm just familiar with his tricks now.

The nine chapters really varied, not so much in quality but in tone and message. None were particularly bad or boring, but some stayed with me in ways others didn't. My favorite involved two cousins who had emigrated to America, visiting Afghanistan after the war. One cousin loved to throw his money around and show off his generosity, while the other quietly judged him for it and preferred making deeper connections with individual people. The conclusion was a real gut punch, but it was so satisfyingly realistic. Another story that stuck with me involved a man who fell in love with his master's young and beautiful wife. He had an opportunity to follow her when she left her husband one night and fled the country, but instead he stayed behind, ultimately becoming the man's caretaker for several ensuing decades. Lastly, the book's final chapter picked up on the thread left behind by the first chapter, and gave a very bittersweet conclusion to two separated siblings after close to seventy years.

These stories and all the rest were touching and enjoyable, but collectively they didn't really compliment one another. There was no impeccably woven tapestry by the end of this book as much as there were several different strands only loosely tied together. The stories all work - truly, there isn't a dud in the bunch - but collectively they make for a shallower novel than Hosseini's previous two efforts. I'm still glad that I read it, and I'd likely be back for more if he decided to write a fourth book one day.

It's Our Sixth Anniversary

Or at least it was, a few days ago. Just for the sake of documenting where I stand:

Hey, look at that. I may be the only one left here, but I just had my second-best year of backlog progress, and best since the very first one! Long live the blog!

Good night, everyone.

Dark Places

So here's Gillian Flynn's second novel - her third being Gone Girl, which I read and liked a lot six months ago. There are plenty of similarities between this book and that one. Both are murder mysteries, both take place in Flynn's native Missouri, both rely heavily on alternating points of view and unreliable narrators in order to pull off big twists, and both feature some pretty gruesome killings. But as dark and deranged as Gone Girl was, Dark Places was just so much bleaker.

The story revolves around a woman whose mother and two sisters were brutally murdered one night when she was nine years old. Her older brother is found guilty of the crime and sentenced to life without parole. Twenty-four years later, the girl - technically a full-grown woman, but understandably carrying all sorts of emotional baggage - lives with terrible depression, no friends, and no source of income. For twenty-four years, she's been living off of a generous pile of donations from all over the country, but the book begins with that particular well drying out. Forced to make her own money, she quickly finds a group of people whose shared hobby is solving decades-old murder mysteries. They're collectively convinced that her brother is innocent, and they'd love for her to reconnect with him and recant her testimony. She's happy to do this for a lofty price - and happy to reconnect with plenty of other suspects in the case for more of the same.

What follows, of course, is a lengthy ordeal in which our sad, sad heroine begins to reexamine her own understanding of her family's tragedy. Every other chapter flashes back to the day of the murders and is told from either her mother's or brother's viewpoint, and collectively the three narratives all end up revealing the full story. In my mind, the ending was a bit of a cheap trick, but I can't complain; the book was enticing and thrilling throughout, even though I'm not sure the author earned the particular conclusion she arrived at, which was kind of disappointing since she absolutely did so in Gone Girl. I mean, all in all, Gone Girl was a much better book.

But again, man, Dark Places was so much darker. The unhappiness in Gone Girl stems from an unhappy marriage. The unhappiness in Dark Places stems from a triple homicide. The main characters in Gone Girl are disappointed when their financial situation forces them to "trade down" from New York to suburban Missouri. The characters in Dark Places are deeply, deeply impoverished. Gone Girl takes place in McMansions and coffee shops and penthouses and conference halls. Dark Places takes place in sober living homes and prisons and strip clubs and run-down farms. Gone Girl is a murder mystery about rich and pretty people. Dark Places features elements of drug abuse, Satanic worship, and pedophilia.

Lastly, a film adaptation is due out in just a couple of weeks, starring Charlize Theron, Christina Hendricks, and Chloe Grace Moretz. Early reviews? Not great! I'll probably see it at some point, all the same.

Stan's Movie Dump: June/July 2015

It's time for another installment of Stan's movie dump! It's summertime, which means I've seen some of the year's biggest blockbusters in theaters and also plenty of last year's most acclaimed movies as I look for things to watch during the big TV hiatus. Anyway, check out this mixed bag.

The Babadook

Hailed by plenty as one of the scariest movies in recent memory, The Babadook is an Australian film about a single mother raising a terribly behaved little shit. She reads him a gruesome scary story one night, and all of a sudden she and her son are both plagued by a nightmarish entity known only as the Babadook. I thought the movie was legitimately terrifying right up until about the halfway point; the final confrontation with the monster was dark and twisted, but also just a little bit boring. Worth a shot if you're into horror flicks, but otherwise it's easily skippable.

Jurassic World

Does it live up to the original 1993 classic? Of course not - and neither did that movie's previous two sequels. Is Jurassic World still an easy low-stakes summertime movie to enjoy while chowing down on popcorn? Absolutely. It's got all kinds of problems, like virtually every big-budget PG-13 movie from the last twenty years, but most of them are forgivable in the long run or ignorable in the short term. If you want a scientifically plausible monster movie with impeccable character development, I mean, first of all, maybe lower your expectations, but go find something else. This right here is a barrel of squeaky clean dinosaur fun and plenty of explosions - nothing more, and nothing less.

American Sniper

Good God, the hype around this one! And the backlash! And the partisan back-and-forth! Let me get this out of the way - I think this movie kind of sucked, and it has nothing to do with my political compass or the overblown expectations. It was just a slow and pretty boring movie - which would have been fine, except that this one also didn't try for much thematic depth or atmosphere or anything. This was just a too-long and too-simple story about a guy who served his country and suffered for it. The Hurt Locker was better. Zero Dark Thirty was better. Even Jarhead was better. Bradley Cooper was pretty great, though.

Fury

Just when you think you've seen every type of World War II movie, something like Fury comes along and reminds you that you haven't. This one just felt dark and cold and angry. It was gritty and it felt uncompromised, which I appreciated, but it also dragged on a bit too long and ended with one of the least realistic firefights I've seen in any movie ostensibly rooted in historical reality. Decent, but not great.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Trevor threw this on during an evening lull on our big friends Cape Cod getaway weekend, and wouldn't you know it, despite some initial groans we all made it all the way through. I thought it was a cute movie. Easy, silly, funny. Short, above all else, really. I just may see the sequel on my own accord one day!

Nightcrawler

This was awesome. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a nightcrawler - a freelance video footage collector who trolls the streets of LA looking for accidents and robberies and tragedies so he can point his camera at them for a few minutes and then sell the footage to the highest bidding news station. It shouldn't be much of a spoiler to say that he eventually gets in way over his head and begins to affect the news rather than just recording it - where else would this kind of movie go? - but Gyllenhaal's easygoing and completely steady performance is absolutely amazing. Nightcrawler is easily one of the best movies I saw all year and it reminded me a great deal of 2011's excellent LA noir caper, Drive.

Europa Report

At this point, low-budget found footage movies are a dime a dozen. But Europa Report was, I promise you, a good low-budget found footage movie. A crew of six astronauts heads for Europa, the ice moon of Jupiter, to do all kinds of science experiments, and chiefly to find out if life exists in its liquid oceans. While you can probably surmise how that goes for them based on the fact that this is a found footage movie, I stand by my assertion that this is worth seeing for yourself. It's only 90 minutes long and it's available on Netflix.

Ant-Man

I liked Ant-Man more than I expected to like it, and more than I've liked any Marvel movie since The Avengers a few years ago. It was refreshingly (and appropriately) small in scale, and I appreciated how low the stakes were in this particular narrative. Paul Rudd was cast more or less perfectly here, like the older and more smart-alecky Chris Pratt that he is. And hey, Evangeline Lilly! This is literally the first time I've seen or heard of her since Lost ended five years ago. Glad to see she can still find work. But no, really, this was fun.

And just like that, there are only five months left in the year. I'm at 48 movies. Can I ramp things up and hit 100 by the end of 2015? Ha! Fat chance.

Yoshi's New Island

This was, all things considered, one of the most disappointing games I've beaten in the Back-Blogged era. It's hard to explain why. It wasn't a bad game on any technical level, nor did it take up much of my time, clocking in at less than six hours long. I didn't even pay any real money for it. (Thanks, Club Nintendo, and rest in peace.)

No, this game wasn't broken or relentlessly difficult or glitch-prone or anything like that. It was just so profoundly lazy. And boring. At no point in the six hours I spent on this game did I ever feel challenged or impressed in any way. I ended the game with 91 lives and lost maybe ten over the course of the game. It was just this strange reboot of a Super Nintendo classic that nobody ever asked for.

In all seriousness, aside from an overused giant egg mechanic, this game added no new gameplay whatsoever from 1995's Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island. It had no charm and it didn't even look prettier. It was somehow much shorter. Worst of all, it took a big old shit directly on its predecessor's happy ending. The 1995 game ends with Baby Mario and Baby Luigi being safely delivered to their parents thanks to the tireless work of eight different Yoshis. As this game begins, it turns out that the stork fucked up and delivered them to the wrong house. And then on the stork's way to the real house, the babies are stolen once again by Kamek, and once again it's up to eight different Yoshis to save the day. (Are these the same eight Yoshis? You'd think so, but then, this is all taking place on a new island. Fuck it. Nintendo doesn't care. Why do you?)

I've gotten this far into my post without even mentioning Yoshi's Island DS, a 2006 title that served as a spin-off of sorts to the first game. It wasn't nearly as good as that first game, but at least it tried a whole bunch of new things instead of stripping down the 1995 game and polishing up the graphics a little bit. The 2006 DS game introduced Baby Peach and Baby Donkey Kong and Baby Wario. It utilized both screens on the DS. It wasn't a great game by any stretch, but at least it was something new and different. This 2013 3DS game didn't make any effort whatsoever to be anything new whatsoever. Its very existence was such a shamelessly no-risk move by Nintendo.

Almost every time I beat a video game, something stirs somewhere in my emotional recesses. Satisfaction, usually. Relief, sometimes. Sadness, rarely. But Yoshi's New Island didn't make me feel anything other than tired. My favorite memory from the game was the moment I learned that there were six worlds and not eight. I gave the game an honest chance at first, and it was stale and repetitious by the third of its forty-eight levels. By the second or third time I picked the game up, I just kind of felt like, "Am I done yet? Can I be done yet?" And even while I was fighting Baby Bowser - and then later regular Bowser, from a time warp, apropos of nothing whatsoever - I just kept thinking, "Can I be done yet? Will this be over please?" One of the most bittersweet things about living a very long and very happy life is that sometimes, by the end, the person is just tired, and just ready. Not depressed or suicidal, but completely melancholy. At peace. Simply no longer interested in any aspect of living. And I bring this up because Yoshi's New Island kind of made me feel that way about video games. "Are we done here? Is this really all there is?" What a soul-crushing disappointment.

Look at the Birdie

It’s time to take a break from my recently adopted five-paragraph format.

This is the third straight summer in which I’ve read a Kurt Vonnegut short story compilation. Like While Mortals Sleep - which I wasn’t big on - Look at the Birdie contains around 250 pages of previously unpublished material. But Look at the Birdie had the benefit of coming out in 2009, two years before While Mortals Sleep, and as a result it’s noticeably better. This makes sense; the well of unpublished Vonnegut short stories only runs so deep, and every time you take a dozen or more acceptable ones it dries up a little more. After two or three collections of twenty stories each, you’re left with a situation where stories that didn’t crack the top fifty at the time of Vonnegut’s death are now some of your best available options.

Anyway, I mostly enjoyed Look at the Birdie, and since there were only fourteen stories in this one, I think I can touch on each one of them.

“Confido”

A man invents an earpiece that amplifies internal thoughts into actual voices, audible only to the people wearing the earpiece. He thinks he’ll strike it rich - who, after all, doesn’t want a little voice reassuring them that every opinion they have is correct? It goes about as well as you’d expect, amplifying dark thoughts and generally causing jealousy, paranoia, and depression - a classic Vonnegut take on the nature of man, right down to a sort-of optimistic ending.

“F U B A R”

There wasn’t much to this one. A man with an isolated and terrible office job gets a young and lively assistant assigned to him, and everything immediately changes for the better. No twist, no punchline. A happy little story, but completely inconsequential.

“Shout About It from the Housetops”

One thing Vonnegut has always done very well with his whackier characters is toe the line between believable quirkiness and completely absurd insanity. I liked this story about a couple with a rocky marriage and the traveling salesman who saves it, and the highlight for me was the way the wife was introduced: violently pumping water out of a well in the backyard and screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Ed Luby’s Key Club”

By far the longest story in the collection, this one clocks in at 52 pages and is broken into two parts. I loved it. It starts when a modest man takes his wife out for an anniversary dinner and ends after a couple of murders, a jailbreak, and a statewide manhunt. It was gripping and tense in ways that Vonnegut has never really been before and I absolutely loved it. It also ends in a completely satisfying manner, which is no small feat.

“A Song for Selma”

This one featured a recurring Vonnegut short fiction character: George Helmholtz, high school music teacher. I’ve never really enjoyed that particular anthology, but this one was alright. One of George’s most promising students has dropped out of his music class unexpectedly, while another completely oafish student is suddenly showing great interest in the class. The explanation, once revealed, is pretty funny and satisfying, and the story manages to find a nice ending.

“Hall of Mirrors”

I loved this one. Two detectives visit an eccentric old hypnotist on a missing person investigation. The hypnotist slowly pulls them under his control in order to escape from the pickle he’s in. Or does he? The policemen seem to think they’re duping the hypnotist into believing they’re under his control in order to draw a confession from him. After a few layers of “gotcha!” play out, there’s a well-earned concluding twist.

“The Nice Little People”

A man discovers six quarter-inch-sized people while waiting for his wife to come home from work on their anniversary. He plays around with them for a little while, but the climax of the story has nothing to do with the little people whatsoever, and instead deals entirely with the man’s marriage.

“Hello, Red”

This was the first true dud in the collection for me. A soldier - or maybe a sailor? - returns from spending nearly a decade overseas only to find that the woman he loved has moved on to another man. There was just nothing profound or entirely interesting here for me, even if the idea was fruitfully melancholy.

“Little Drops of Water”

A second straight stinker, unfortunately, and this one’s got even less to say. A man ill-suited for relationships gets married, I think, but if he does it doesn’t happen until the end. Honestly, this and “Hello, Red” sort of blur together for me. I remember nothing about this one with any level of certainty.

“The Petrified Ants”

Two Russian ant scientists discover that prehistoric ants were actually incredibly complex creatures who built great societies with houses and wheels and literature. And then some ants evolved to have giant pincers, and in short time they killed all of the other ants, and today all ants are just savage and mindless and slavish to a central power. This was an enjoyable but fairly flat and blatant metaphor for the arms race, and it appropriately ends with the two scientists doing time in a Siberian labor camp.

“The Honor of a Newsboy”

A murder investigation hinges on whether or not a newsboy delivered the newspaper to a prime suspect on Wednesday night. The newsboy swears he did; the suspect swears he didn’t. And for the investigator, defending the honor of a ten-year-old kid suddenly becomes more important than the issue of whether or not the suspect committed the murder. An enjoyable but largely forgettable tale.

“Look at the Birdie”

Very unsettling, and also the only tale in the collection told from a first-person perspective. The narrator meets a hitman at a bar, and the hitman takes his picture. The implications are dark as hell, and it's kind of weird to me that the publisher chose to use this story to represent the collection as a whole. I'd have gone with "Hall of Mirrors" personally, but what do I know?

“King and Queen of the Universe”

Two rich and naive teenagers spend a night seeing how shitty life can be for those without money or privilege, and they end up much better off for it. It would have been easy to make the rich kids terrible little brats, but Vonnegut instead manages to find all kinds of sympathy in their growth arcs.

“The Good Explainer”

The collection ends on a real gut punch, and while I won't spoil it, I'll say that it involves a man and woman at a fertility clinic and a secret burden from years gone by.

All in all, a great collection, and with its completion I've got just one Vonnegut book left in the backlog - his famous 1968 collection of short stories called Welcome to the Monkey House.