Review

This Mario Game Was Super. What an Odyssey.

Chris Leave a comment

I have a bit of a strange history with Super Mario Odyssey. I got it the day it came out, left work early to play it, and spent my entire afternoon and evening playing it, exploring the mechanics and getting invested in the story. Then I set it down for the night and didn’t pick it up again until last month, at which point I played it for an entire weekend before setting it down and not picking it up again until this past weekend. Which I only did because my roommate started playing it and I wanted to grab a few more power moons since I had fifteen minutes to kill.

This game is simultaneously a ton of fun to play but difficult to pick up. Odyssey takes me back to one of my first major gaming memories, when I tried to get all one hundred twenty power stars in Super Mario 64 on my own, but it feels even more rewarding now since there is no real interruption when going from one power moon to the next. In 64, you got brought out of the level after every power star (except for the 100 coin stars), but Odyssey lets you flow from one power moon to the next with only a small “got moon” cut-scene. The only exception is when you’re altering the map as a result of pursuing one of the ongoing plot points (such as causing an upside-down pyramid to rise into the sky, exposing a sinkhole or beating a mini-boss and returning to the level following the storm that was the backdrop for your battle. The fluidity of the gameplay is important because there are power moons EVERYWHERE, with a wide-range of difficulties associated with them. Some or simply sitting on the top of a tower you need to climb, while others are buried behind quizzes and mini-games or secret doors that are only revealed if you notice every tiny little detail or spend your time attacking literally everything. If there was even the relatively short “get sun” cutscene from collecting a Shine Sprite in Super Mario Sunshine after getting each power moon, it’d be a real drag to collect them since your gameplay would constantly be interrupted.

Mario’s moveset has grown again, which is part of what has made this huge variety of difficulties possible. In addition to his classic air-dives, long jumps, spins, wall-jumping, this game introduces a companion, Cappy, a hat-spirit that replaces Mario’s destroyed hat and gives him all kinds of new abilities a whole range of attacks based around throwing Cappy, like a mid-air jump (by throwing Cappy out and then landing on him), and the ability to take over the bodies of various enemies. This lets you do thinks like turn into a T-Rex, a tank, a Hammer Bro, or do crazy things like create a tower of Goombas that stretches into the sky (my current max stack is 20), all of which is often a requirement to find hidden power moons or progress through the level. In addition to these powers, Mario can also roll around (for the first time in a 3D game) if you hold the crouch button while running, which so far seems like a great way to pick up a little extra speed when going down a hill. It’s a bit silly at times, but it can be super convenient despite the difficulty of steering Mario when he’s on a roll.

These abilities, combined with levels designed as somewhat “open-world,” means that it is entirely possibly to string together move-combos that entirely by-pass the mini-games that allow you to access secret areas or let you avoid lots of obstacles by moving over open-air that you probably shouldn’t be able to cross. If you spend any amount of time looking, you can find tons of creative solutions to the puzzles in the games that bypass using the intended mechanics for something either much faster or something incredibly and ridiculously over-complicated. The inventiveness required to get some of the power moons in the earlier levels does an excellent job challenging the player to think outside of the box when it comes to the usual linear approach to collecting power whatevers in a Mario game. It leads the player to consider the wide variety of options available when it comes to moving through space and then, after the second or third level, just starts dropping power moons everywhere and letting you figure out how you want to get them. The range of difficulties in the puzzles also means that less experienced players can find enough power moons to move the story along while still providing challenges to the more experienced players. It also cleverly helps newer or less exacting players find the more difficult moons by incorporating a hint system and a coin-based system to help you figure out the puzzles. With enough time, any player can find all the power moons.

The biggest downside to me, and the sole reason this game isn’t easy for me to pick up and play is that it almost requires you to play with the Switch on the TV and the two JoyCon in your hands. Because of the huge variety of moves available to Mario, there aren’t enough buttons or button combinations to let the player control Mario with button inputs alone. Some of the moves require specific motions to be made with one or both of the JoyCon. These moves can be reproduced using only inputs, but they are almost always incredibly complicated strings of inputs that combine other moves together to produce a move that can be done by simply shaking the JoyCon. They can also be done using the Pro Controller or the Switch in Handheld mode, but they become incredibly clunky (and create a significant risk of accidentally dropping the controller or system) because the JoyCon are meant to move independently. As someone who primarily uses the Switch as a handheld device, I’m super afraid of trying to perform one of the “controller twist” moves and accidentally flinging the Switch at the wall or the ground, so I only play this game when I’m feeling like lounging on my couch, in front of the TV.

That’s pretty much the only fault of the game, though, and is more on Nintendo for, once again, pushing a frustrating gimmick (I mean, most new games for the 3DS don’t even pretend to have a “3D mode” anymore…). I’d definitely recommend this game to everyone if it was easier to play without the JoyCon separated from the Switch, but I’m only going to recommend it to the TV players. The game is fun, but it’s not so fun that I’m willing to play it with a super frustrating control mechanic.

Every Day is an Adventure

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I remember, the first time I sat down to watch Adventure Time, remarking to my friends that I wasn’t drunk enough to watch this show after only the first episode. For those of my friends who are adults and trying to start the show, I usually recommend sitting down to it with a strong drink because while I adore the show, it starts off a little weirdly. It also continues weirdly, but it isn’t jarring once you’ve made the mental adjustments required to enjoy the show. They’re not strenuous, of course. It just takes a bit of time to adapt to the over-the-top action and characters before you start to see past the surface to the surprising depths of the story and character development arcs.

Like a lot of “children’s shows,” Adventure Time can be enjoyed on multiple levels. At the most basic, there are good lessons about how to be responsible, what it means to strong, how to deal with emotional problems, and how to treat people who are different from you, to name a few. These lessons are delivered through fairly straight-forward plots and the colorful fun of an action show with heart, making it an instant hit with most kids. For those looking for a bit more, there’s actually some complex emotional and interpersonal problems that happen through the various seasons that are resolved slowly. It can be difficult to watch if you want the sort of cleaner wrap-ups of most adult shows since, for example, some things are introduced in season 1 that aren’t addressed until season 5. Emotional development takes a long time, in terms of seasons and shows, but it happens at a rate that lets the adults watching the show appreciate what is going on beneath the surface but also lets the kids slowly see the changes happen in a way they’ll understand as they go through similar (if somewhat less fantastical) situations in their own lives.

For instance, a lot of the earlier episodes are non-sequiturs, with nothing to place them inside the show’s overarching timeline, but there are details that slowly fill in the world around the protagonists, Finn the Human and Jake the (magic) Dog. Finn’s sword is an easy indicator of when an episode takes place as he has a tendency to go through them a lot faster than you’d think. His behavior and age are much more subtle ones since they don’t mark most of his birthdays or give a number to his age that frequently. Instead, you can follow the show’s continuity using plot markers and shifts in character relationships. Old enemies become friends, allies reveal ulterior motives and become enemies, and background characters rise to sudden prominence before establishing a firm place in the long list of secondary characters.

The way information is revealed to the viewer can make it a difficult show to watch haphazardly. While understanding most episodes isn’t dependent on having watched all previous episodes, a lot of foreshadowing or important subtext can fall between the cracks in your understanding of the show. As information is slowly revealed, one small bite at a time (bites that increase in size as the show goes on as the first two seasons are particularly light on details), so much that you suspect is confirmed. If you pay attention to the background in almost any episode, you could reasonably draw the conclusion that Adventure Time occurs in a post-apocalyptic world. You could also conclude that humans are rare, magic has risen in the place of most of the sciences, and there’s an incredible danger present in the world that most people see as ordinary because of how screwed up the world became following whatever apocalyptic disaster befell it. Eventually, you get enough information to assemble a picture of the past on your own. Full reveals or complete pictures are super rare, but they become reference points for the show that help shore up the history you assemble as you watch it and you can usually tell where you are in the show’s timeline by references to these points.

My favorite part of the show is the way the writers use the same method of small hints and details mixed in with a few big reveals in the emotional development of the characters. Finn, as the primary protagonist, deals with the most as he grows. Jake, the secondary protagonist, has his share as well. Even a lot of the secondary characters (who occasionally have small arcs featuring them) have complex emotional journeys throughout the show. The best example of that is probably the Ice King, a certifiably insane wizard with ice powers given to him by a magic crown he wears. Not only does he feature in a lot of Finn’s emotional growth, he changes throughout the show from a pathetic villain to a tragic villain who can’t help himself, seeing as he’s been driven insane by the magic crown he wears. Some of the most powerful and emotional moments in the show come from his stories and the way people start to treat him as they grow to understand and somewhat accept him. There’s a whole list of other characters, some with their own special mini-seasons, that undergo growth and change, and each one gets their moment to shine, even the pesky whiny ones you want to just disappear.

 

Throughout it all, aside from the big reveal or big change moments, the show manages to keep an upbeat sense of humor and a positive look on even the most difficult situations. The characters rely on each other to get through their weak moments and humor is a constant aid as they try to cope with the world they actually live in as it pushes aside the world they want to live in. Even the most resilient characters are sometimes knocked down and we get to watch them struggle to their feet again. The entire show is a lesson in getting back up after failure until you succeed and learning to accept change and growth into your life gracefully.

I’ll admit the pacing can be weird early on and that it can be difficult to accept some of the asides the show makes as it slowly works its way through a difficult problem, but every episode has something important to say if you’re willing to look for it. A lot of these messages are repeated many times, but they’re usually important enough that it’s worth hearing them again. Plus, with how human they all act, even Jake the Dog and Princess Bubblegum (who is made of gum), it can be incredibly refreshing to see people struggle to deal with lessons they’ve already learned and taken for granted.

I recommend watching it. The seasons are pretty cheap on Amazon or Best Buy, but I wouldn’t recommend getting them on a streaming service as they are sometimes in weird orders and the season-by-season breakdown in the later seasons gets super wonky. It is way cheaper to get them on DVD or Blu-Ray than to buy them on Amazon or iTunes. If you want a show that will make you laugh so hard you cry and so sad you just have to laugh, that will take you on an incredibly complex emotional journey through the eyes of a wide range of very (mentally and emotionally, since “diverse” means very different things in our world than it’d mean in their world) different characters, and will leave you constantly wanting more, I cannot recommend Adventure Time strongly enough.

The Dark Lord? He was more a “Shady Lord” Than A Dark One

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The Wizard Derk was a simple man who wished for nothing but to putter around his gardens and magically breed interesting creatures. Unfortunately, in The Dark Lord of Derkholm By Diana Wynne Jones, Derk is selected and that year’s Dark Lord for the tours that pass through and has to scramble to perform a job that he is not only ill-suited to perform, but which was purposefully given to him in the hopes that he would be the last Dark Lord. Not only does Derk need to worry about all the “Pilgrim Parties” (vacationers from a different world who have paid to be the heroes in an adventure story) passing through on their vacations, but he has to worry about the leaders of his world who have set him up for every kind of failure they can imagine and a few they never expected.

The Dark Lord of Derkholm is a wonderful fantasy book that does a great job of satirizing fantasy. The story illustrates how silly (and how devastating) some of the typical fantasy tropes can be for the people experiencing them. World leaders complain of destroyed countrysides, ruined crops, obliterated towns, slain citizens, and pillaged homes, all while some man from the same world as the Pilgrim Parties, referred to only as “Mr. Chesney,” reaps profits that put the collected salaries of the people actually doing the work to shame. As a result of the damages, each person hosting a part of the events spends more than they earn and are in the end stages of slow economic decay. If that wasn’t enough, most of the damage comes from large groups of condemned criminals who are brought into their world to act the part of the Dark Lord’s Army, some of whom wind up escaping their prison camps in order to pillage the countryside for real, killing and burning as they go.

Each of the characters who takes part in the story, aside from the one who came up with the idea of ending the Pilgrim Parties instead of just getting more money from Mr Chesney, is a wonderful and complex person who still plays into stereotypes in ways that serve to better accentuate their characters rather than limit it. The one exception, Querida, the head of the Wizards, is an enormously powerful and clever old woman who feels one-dimensional because all she does is come up with a plan. That’s it. Her plan is to ask the oracles how to end the Pilgrim Parties and then throw as many wrenches into the works as possible. She comes up with ideas and then has other people actually figure out how to make it happen, but winds up getting all the credit for things working out. Not only that, but she expresses no concern when Wizard Derk is devastated by the results of the Pilgrim Parties, callously tries to separate him from his wife, Mara (magically, since Derk and Mara love each other and their children too much to separate), and tries to kidnap or trick most of Derk and Mara’s children. She’s awful and seems to be just as callous as Mr. Chesney.

Give the clever ways the other characters are written, how human and real they feel, with personalities distinct from each other and personal goals they pursue in entirely Human ways even as they’re tasked with seeing to the Pilgrim Parties, I can only conclude Diana Wynne Jones wrote Querida that way on purpose. There are a lot of powerful characters in this book, from Elven lords who can just wander into any part of the world they like to ancient dragons who can warp reality with the merest hint of their power, but most of them fall into one of two categories: those who respect people and those who do not. Even in Derk’s world, the ultimate victim of Mr. Chesney’s machinations, people with power but no respect for individuals without it are just as bad as Mr. Chesney and, though it is never confirmed, you get a sense that those sort of people are the ones who agreed to Mr. Chesney’s proposals in the first place. “I’ll get what I want because I have power and screw everyone else.” All of the villains that emerge are like this and so are some of the supposed good guys. The people who respect others, some of whom aren’t even people, wind up being the true heroes of the book because they work to mitigate the damage being done by this last season of Pilgrim Parties as everything goes haywire, eventually bringing the story to its happy conclusion where all the villains get punished, the ‘good guys’ are mostly ignored, and the good guys get to return to the happy lives they knew before they were interrupted by the awful ‘good guys’ and the Pilgrim Parties.

To be entirely fair, the plot itself wasn’t anything remarkable. You know from the start that things are going to more or less work out the way they seem to even though there’s not much in terms of foreshadowing, subtle or otherwise. In the end (SPOILERS), things literally only work out because the gods intervene, which apparently only happens because the world rose up to save themselves so the gods finally decided to pitch in. Literal deus ex machina. It hurt a little bit to see everything capped and explained in a few pages by gods who let all these people suffer for so long simply because the leaders hadn’t decided to put a stop to the Pilgrim Parties. Which is another example of powerful people who don’t respect less powerful people. The book is full of them, and they show up in the least likely places. Almost like it’s a theme, or something.

In the end, the only people who are truly happy are those who respect other people and treat everyone with a certain amount of kindness and care, regardless of how much power they have. The theme only becomes visible once you get to the end and can reflect back on the book, but it was a really fun read so I recommend taking the time to get there. If you want a good book that plays with your emotions and reactions to make its point, reads very easily (I cannot stress how wonderful a read this book was), and will show the humanity inherent in everything from Dragons to Griffons to Demons, definitely give Diana Wynne Jones’ The Dark Lord of Derkholm a read.

This Book Stole my Attention for an Entire Day

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After I finished reading Priest by Matthew Colville, I immediately picked up the sequel, Thief. It takes place immediately after the first book, though the focus has shifted a little bit. Instead of sticking almost solely to the protagonist, the view shifts between him and a few of the other important characters. Haden is certainly an interesting character to follow–that’s kind of the requirement to be a protagonist–but it was also incredibly informative to see him through the eyes of the people around him. Beyond that, the second book was an incredible step forward in depicting the scenes and the fight descriptions were exponentially better. I had to put it down shortly after picking it up in order to play D&D, but I picked it up immediately afterward and accidentally stayed up way too late in order to read more of it.

The plot picks up immediately where the first book left off, throwing in enough background information that a new reader would be able to figure out what is going on but not so much that it gets onerous for an established reader to get through. The twists from the last book are still twists, as Colville often reveals the plot information by exposing other characters to either what happened in the first book or some offshoot of it coming back to bite someone else. There are still enough new twists and plot hooks to keep you pulled in and even more of the wonderful world-building that lets you feel the size of the history without spending more time than necessary talking about it. We’re still not sure what happened to split up the group of adventurers that Haden belonged to, but we do discovered more of what happened as a result of the split. We meet some more of his old friends and discover a little more about the life that Haden lived before he retired. We also get to see more of the incredible weapons, artifacts, and allies he has gained over the course of his career and they are just as incredibly powerful and crazy as you’d expect from a high-leveled D&D campaign. Demigods, wealth beyond the dreams of most mortals, and a casual arrogance when it comes to the importance of stuff. Who cares if your building burned down when you’ve got the money to build a new one or for a wizard to just make it not have burned down in the first place?

I honestly really enjoyed seeing the sort of crazy stuff that is so common to D&D enter into a more typical fantasy novel. The wealth thing I’ve already mentioned, but the incredible fights are also a part of it. Haden gets into it with assassins, a member of his old party who he never liked, a giant elf-creature that is basically a minor deity, and a bunch of weird “undead” creatures that aren’t really undead. He overcomes all of his opponents with the exclusion of the other adventurer. He almost dies half the time, but that’s how a lot of the fights in D&D go: you almost die, but that’s only because you focused on ending the fight as quickly as possible. You could have taken a little more time to avoid injury or fix a problem, but you knew that you’d be able to overcome anything but death itself as long as you were still alive at the end of the battle. He gets poisoned by the assassins he fights, but he doesn’t waste time healing the wounds or purifying his blood, he just kills every assassin in maybe half a minute and then finally fixes himself. Even the description of the fight feels short and brutal, reflecting the way the fight would have seemed to anyone participating in it. The big fight with his ex party member is equally brutal, each participant a hair from death at any given time, only surviving by relying on their instinct, guts, and luck. It was incredible to read.

I enjoyed the expanded cast since it brought a lot of interesting character development to the books and highlighted the way we tend to make assumptions about the people we encounter in our lives. I enjoyed one of the relationships, between Haden and a friend he made a dozen years prior to the novel, and how it develops in this book as Haden realizes he maybe didn’t know as much about his friend as he thought he did, but that doesn’t mean his friend isn’t the man he’d come to appreciate and respect. None of the characters ever feel one-dimensional and, while the villain does go on a bit of a stereotypical “I’m all-powerful and can do whatever I want without consequence!” bender, his megalomania is somewhat excused by the way he’s actually cleverly set up his organization and laid his plans. If it wasn’t for Haden and a few things that can be chalked up to back luck for the villain, he’d have been entirely right. No one would have been able to stop him, even if he walked up to the king and confessed his crimes.

There were more spelling and grammar errors in this one, but the only thing that actually threw me off was a couple of places where the wrong name or pronouns were used as it made it seem like the wrong people were saying things or showing up randomly in scenes they couldn’t have been in. That’s a small price to pay for two really solid, incredibly fun books. Since Colville has plans to make some changes and do some editing, I think they both (but especially Thief) have the potential to be incredibly fun reads.

I hate that I have to wait a while longer (probably at least a couple of years, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more than that) for the next book and the updates Colville plans to make, but I really think Priest and Thief are both really solid already. I suggest picking them up if you’re looking for a fun fantasy book and don’t mind starting a series that doesn’t really have a release schedule of any kind.

Not a Young Priest or an Old Priest, but a Middle-Aged Priest

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I’m on a bit of a “Matthew Colville” tear this week, so I figured I might as well review the first book in his Ratcatchers series, Priest. As Colville often says in his videos, the best way to support him is to buy his books. Since I’ve gotten so much enjoyment and refreshing information from his videos, I figured I might as well buy his books as a way to contribute to his well-being, despite the fact that I know his recent Kickstarter has helped him build a company that will probably have more to do with his income than his book series will for the next several years. I also figured he’d be a good writer since he does an excellent job with his videos and seems to be a DM people loved to play D&D with.

Priest is a surprisingly complex and nuanced book that stands out from most of the (honestly, pretty awful) D&D-fantasy books I’ve read. To be fair to the genre, I haven’t read most of what people say are the good ones since I get most of mine from used book stores and people seem disinclined to sell the reportedly good ones. I enjoyed it, and I’d say it was a really fun fantasy novel that broke away from a lot of the typical fantasy tropes by relying on the sort of stuff that comes up in a D&D world that is a bigger deal in a typical fantasy novel world.

For instance, the gods are real and have intermediaries who do their bidding, like the titular character, a Priest named Heden who used to be an adventurer. Heden, an ex-ratcatcher–to use the term most people use to talk about adventurers and all the chaos they bring to locals–is a shut-in priest who hates leaving his closed-down inn but is tasked to go investigate The Forest by his immediate superior, the local bishop. Heden not only has to face the dangers of a forest that generally kills everyone who goes into it and brave the mysterious Green Order, an order of knights who protect the locals from the dangers of the forest, but also his own anxieties and PTSD from his past as an adventurer.

There are a lot of mysteries about Heden’s past and Colville does an excellent job of giving the reader just enough information to slowly create a picture without tipping his hand. He lets us know that the past is important because it informs who Heden is and why he’s been chosen to investigate the death of a knight from the Green Order, but he also lets us know that it isn’t a central point of the story. Heden’s PTSD and some of the horrors from his past impact the present, but the important part is him facing them, not exactly what happened years ago. In addition to the glimpses through Heden’s quickly avoided memories, you meet some of the members of his old adventuring group and get a sense that Heden was the reason they’re all retired. Clearly they had all become very powerful by the time they retired, judging from the casual power of the magic items Heden has available to him, but still they all toil away at their own solo endeavors and don’t seem to speak to each other very much.

This cleverly side-steps the problem that arises when you have a large group of very powerful people united towards a single purpose. With all of them together, there would be very little that could stand in their way. Alone, Heden misses important clues in his investigation, can be brought down by sheer numbers, and has a hard time processing what is happening because he’s alone all the time. With the full group, the story would have been over in the first quarter of the book and there would probably be no sequels. Alone, you get to see that Heden still has a lot of growing to do and there is opportunity for mishap when he has to tackle every major task on his own.

The plot was a little frustrating, but that was mostly a personal thing. Heden is supposed to investigate and then redeem or condemn the Green Order, but he struggles with the task because of his own prejudices against knights and because literally everyone seems to put all of the responsibility on him and then do their best to make his job harder. Eventually, you see everyone was acting appropriately, but felt like “there needs to be a problem so everyone is going to be stubborn and difficult” while I was reading it. In hindsight, it was a clever thing to do because it aligned the reader with Heden’s feelings on the matter, but I really dislike stories that have problems because there needs to be a problem, so I almost put it down.

I would definitely recommend this book. It was a lot of fun to read, the characters are all intricate and super interesting, and it deals with something most people don’t consider: what happens to the mental health of adventurers after they retire. Not many stories seem willing to consider they might wind up like a lot of modern combat veterans. I like that Matthew Colville clearly did his research and does an excellent job of bringing PTSD and panic attacks to life in the novel in a way that isn’t so rough that it could easily trigger someone with related issues. I suggest picking up a copy of Priest and giving it a read.

This Book is Stuck in my Head!

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If you’ve already read John Scalzi’s Science Fiction novel, Lock In, or its sequel that just came out, Head On, you know the title is a tasteless joke and I’d like to apologize right now for being unable to resist it. If you haven’t already read either of the aforementioned Scalzi books, then I will apologize after I’ve explained why the joke is tasteless. In the mean time, the most important thing for you to know is that my favorite Science Fiction author has started a new series and the series is excellent.

Lock In and Head On follow FBI agent Chris (No, I don’t just like this series because the protagonist shares my first name. It certainly doesn’t hurt it, though) Shane who isn’t what you or I might call an ordinary person. Agent Shane is what is called a “Haden” in his world. A Haden is someone who contracted a flu-like virus, survived all three stages of the disease (Stage 1 is flu-like, Stage 2 is meningitis-like, and Stage 3 is a coma), but never woke up from their coma. They’re still mentally all-there and capable of sensory input, they just can’t make move and their brains have been altered by the disease (which is why the title is in bad taste). Some of those who wake up from the coma also have their brains altered, but we’ll get into that in a bit.

Agent Shane, like a lot of Hadens, gets around the meat world by using what everyone calls a “Threep,” a nickname based on C-3PO from Star Wars for what is legally called a “Personal Transport Vehicle.” It is basically a high-tech robot body that communicates with the device implanted in his brain so he can experience the world with a minimal amount of lag and all the perks of being able to record everything, access the internet with a thought, and bail out of your body if it gets trashed (as happens more than once). There are certain limitations, of course, such as the inability to eat things and the rather pervasive (if relatively minor) prejudice humanity if famous for, but it allows Agent Shame and many of his fellow Hadens the ability to live a relatively normal life.

To further help the Hadens live a normal life, there are these people called “integrators.” Integrators are the people who progressed all the way through the disease but did not either fall into the coma or did not stay in it. Because of the way the disease altered their brain, they were also able to be fitted with a brain implant device that lets a Haden basically take a certain degree of control over their body. The control is limited, as the integrator remains conscious and aware the entire time, able to reassert control over their should the Haden attempt to do something illegal or harmful to the integrator.

There’s a whole culture that grew up during the decades are the disease first appeared, and they place a central roll in both of Scalzi’s books since the protagonist is a Haden who works for the FBI and his partner is an ex-integrator. The two work out of the Washington D.C. office of the FBI and investigate Haden-related crimes that fall into federal jurisdiction. In the first book, Lock In, the story kicks off with an integrator who is found next to a dead body in a hotel room after a sofa is thrown out of a window. The investigation serves as an excellent showcase of Haden culture and some of the finest subtle world-building I’ve ever read. It introduces readers to many aspects of Haden culture as the two FBI agents try to unravel the true tale of what happened in that hotel room and has a lot of nods to the way the modern, primary world works. I’ll admit I might like it a bit more than I otherwise might because it changes our world’s history a bit to fit better in the future Scalzi created along with showcasing the kind of positive development you’d like to see happen in our species, but it feels like it really could just be a couple of decades down the line from our current time.

The characters are all wonderful, each of them a complex person with layers. There are no caricatures in Scalzi’s novel and that’s worth mentioning because the circumstances of the story make it incredibly easy to justify using them. The books are better for having a full cast of complex, multi-faceted characters, and while there a lot of the same characters across the two books, different ones are highlighted in each book. You can tell Scalzi is building a series out of these books without even taking into account the novella explaining Haden’s Syndrome and its history in greater detail than either of the novels does.

Head On focuses around a sport developed as a result of the ability to destroy a Threep without killer the person inside it, as one of the players in a huge game dies during the match after behaving strangely. A lot comes up during the investigation, including a few nods to current events, but ultimately the story winds up feeling pretty similar to Lock In. Which isn’t a bad thing. Head On doesn’t feel like Lock In repackaged in a new book, but it has a lot of the same qualities and features the same character work and subtle story-building. The investigation is different and you can see some growth in the characters, but it ultimately was made to serve as a stand-alone book featuring the same characters rather than a sequel building off the last book in any significant way.

If you’re looking for some new, fun science fiction to read and like these sort of “cop” books as well, I highly recommend checking out John Scalzi’s new book, Head On and the first book in the series, Lock In. You don’t need to read them in order, but it does help if you do.

The Man in the Golden Hat

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While my favorite Terry Pratchett stories are those following the Night Watch and Sir Samuel Vimes in particular (because of the themes they explore and the cast of characters in each of them), my favorite Pratchett character is Moist Von Lipwig. This unfortunately named man is introduced in his first story, Going Postal, as he sits on death row. The narrator reveals that he was a swindler and crook who defrauded banks, cheated people, and convinced himself that he wasn’t doing anything wrong because everyone chose to be swindled (for common street swindles like the shell game) or because they tried to cheat him (by buying a ring supposedly worth a lot of money for a tiny amount and then selling it to a jeweler only to find out it wasn’t even worth what they paid for it).

Eventually, of course, he was caught and sentenced to die for all of the money he stole and hid. Of course, nothing is that simple in Ankh-Morpork, the city most of Pratchett’s stories revolve around. Lord Vetenari, the current tyrant, decides to spare Moist on the condition that he take a job as the postmaster of the city’s failing post office. As is his modus operandi, Lord Vetenari leaves out just enough information to make Moist Von Lipwig’s life interesting.

Moist wisely takes the job and the arc of each of his three books is set. Vetenari gives him a difficult, nigh-impossible task and he rises to the task, not only figuring out how to restore public faith in his assigned institution, but often taking care of several other problems for Vetenari. The plot of Going Postal isn’t just about restoring the postal service, but about fighting against the corruption plaguing the rapid-communication towers. These semaphore towers were bought out by a group of greedy men who wanted to milk them for all the money they’re worth, regardless of what it costs in people and reputation to do so.

Moist, of course, rises to the occasion, taking on the administrative challenge of the post office and the inter-personal challenge of facing down the head of the company that owns the semaphore towers. He puts his silver-tongue to good use, selling the entire city on the idea of a functioning post office and his new invention, stamps. The people of Ankh-Morpork are easily entertained, as Pratchett likes to point out, and Moist is a master showman. He gets a golden suit (with matching hat) in order to stand out, he constantly makes bigger and bigger claims, and he constantly steps up every challenge he’s given. When he manages to somehow squeak through as a result of sheer luck or some audacious plan, the people reward him with their belief in the dreams he weaves.

That is why he is my favorite. He talks big and never feels more alive than when he is taking some insane risk. He wants to be challenged and to risk everything on the power of his tongue and the ideas he can sell people. He talks his way out of almost every corner he’s in and then somehow manages to deliver on everything he promised. He feels like a fraud and knows that he’s selling an impossible dream to people all too willing to believe him because he makes them want his dream. All while wearing a flashy golden suit.

In his subsequent books, Making Money and Raising Steam, he finds himself in a few more tight corners and needs to put in a bit more effort to get himself out, but he always manages it somehow. Despite the fact that he was a con artist for most of his life, he has become one of the most beloved people in all of Ankh-Morpork. He gets his kicks taking insane risks for the good of the public and constantly helps pull society forward by, as he likes to say, “selling them the sizzle” because a sausage always smells better than it tastes.

He’s one of the few heroes in Discworld whose power lies in his words. Some of Pratchett’s protagonists have magic. Some have luck. Some have a keen detective instinct or impeachable ethics. Some are strong. But only two rule through the power of their words and only Moist Von Lipwig has more than one book. William De Worde, the editor and first reporter for the Ankh-Morpork Times, does similar things in a different way, but his power lies more in his access to printing things in a paper than the words themselves, so I prefer Moist Von Lipwig.

I don’t really identify with him or anything like that, I just like the idea of a hero who abhors violence and wins using the strength of his words. The ability to spin a tale so well that you can talk yourself into or out of anything is a power I’d love to have. More than any other power, honestly.

Ready Player One: The Book

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After writing the review for last week, I sat down and powered through the rest of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. I liked it a bit more than the movie in some aspects and a bit less in others. The plots are essentially the same: the game world’s creator passed away and left his vast fortune to whoever completed his puzzle first. There are a series of challenges and puzzles, each set awarding a key and then a gate, at the end of which is the prize: Halliday’s Easter Egg (in this case, an easter egg is something hidden by the developer of a game, usually as a way of leaving their mark on the game they created). The exact challenges are all different, though some are more similar than others, but the basic ideas of the competition are the same.

Overall, I probably liked the movie more, but I think that is a result of the different reference period. In the movie, the cultural references have been expanded to include more modern references in addition to the 80s references. While the movie was super fun to watch because I could look for things I knew, the book felt like it was touting the superiority of 80s culture and implying that there hasn’t really been anything worthwhile since. It wasn’t a huge deal because either I knew enough to understand the references or they were explained well enough by the narrator, but it felt a lot like I was talking to someone who is so convinced that they are correct in their opinions that they refuse to even listen to what you’re saying.

Despite this feeling, I actually liked the characters from the book more. They felt a lot more human and behaved a lot more like every gamer I’ve ever met. They get things wrong, they make mistakes, they’re all hyper-paranoid, success-obsessed dorks who are so focused on their current goal that pretty much everything else fades from view. The protagonist abandons his friend and, to a lesser degree, his quest for the prize, in order to spend time with his romantic interested. As soon as he’s back on the quest, after being rejected by his romantic interest, everything else fades away as he tries to make progress on the next puzzle between him and the next key. At the same time, some of their interactions felt a little off as well.  The eventual relationship between the protagonist and his romantic interest feels even weirder than it did in the movie, when she suddenly just gives the lead to him as soon as they meet. The relationships between the other characters who aren’t potentially romantic partners feels a lot more natural, so the contrast makes the fledgling romance stand out even more. There’s also a deus ex machina moment from Ogden Morrow, where he just shows up and fixes something.

That part was probably the most frustrating part of the novel that they thankfully changed for the movie. The protagonist comes up with this ridiculously complicated plan that relies on getting extremely lucky and not only does everything work out as he hoped it would, it all turns out even better than that. Everything just falls into place for him at the end. As soon as crunch time starts, gone is the fallible human character who made mistakes. He gets replaced by a god who is nervous about whether or not his plan will succeed, but who ultimately manages to pull it all off without any major stumbles, thanks to several other lucky occurrences from the past. There was no tension at the end of the book because it was so obvious he would succeed, and not just because I saw the movie. Plans that shouldn’t have worked, work. No one recognizes him or sees through a rather desperate plan. He manages to just have everything he needs to make it work, because he’s a little magpie who collects shiny things that just so happen to always be exactly what he needed later on.

 

That frustration aside, I think I appreciated the way they overcame the antagonist in the novel a bit more in the movie. It made for a much less tense and showy moment, but I like the critique a little better. The movie says it is easy to hide in a faceless crowd if you are faceless as well, but the book says that relying too much on technology to work for you without having a proper understanding of it allows other people to use it against you.

They also changed some of the points that the game world’s creator makes at the end, but I feel like the movie’s point made a bit better than the books. Even though I enjoyed the book, I felt like it was trying to say a few important things about the world but sort of stopped a few steps short of actually saying them because it just assumes you’ll understand. If you enjoy video games and want a cool book about a virtual reality world that doesn’t wind up asking questions about what is real and does the “real” world matter if we live our lives in the virtual one, you’ll enjoy this book. If you dislike pandering or feeling like someone is saying that nothing cool or worthy was created since the 80s, then you probably won’t like this book.

Ready Player One: The Movie

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I have a lot of mixed feelings about this movie. I enjoyed watching it, for sure, but I feel like I’ve got a few too many problems with it to really come up with a positive review as I look back on it. The effects were great, the movie did a great job of pulling me in, and the characters were a lot of fun to watch. At the same time, the plot felt very rushed and kind of oddly-paced, the main character basically Mary Sue’d his way through everything, and all the other characters pretty much just fell by the wayside in order to let the main character stand out when he really shouldn’t have.

To be clear, I had only read half the book before seeing this movie so I’m going to completely discard my feelings about the movie as they relate to the book. I’m going to focus on the movie as a movie and then, once I’ve finished the book, review the book in a separate post.

I really enjoyed the visuals of the movie. It looks like mostly CGI, which made a lot of sense given that most of the movie happens in a virtual environment. The effects team did a great job of mixing wondrous and mundane so that everything felt familiar and understandable while still feeling different and interesting. Subtle shifts in the environment, the variety of the characters depicted who WEREN’T just copy and pasted from some game, the movements and body language of the characters was superb, and the few mixed live-action/CGI shots were sewn together wonderfully. There were almost no awkward angles, the battles flowed like a mighty river, and the few scenes we got off the character’s while they were logged into the virtual world were hilarious depictions of the sort of odd way the virtual world translated to the real one. all together, it did an excellent job of keeping me invested in the movie aside from a few points when the plot or writing threw me off.

Despite those moments, I have to give the writers credit for taking a story that is difficult to tell without the slower pacing of a novel and turning it into something a coherent movie plot. The world takes a whole lot of introduction to make sense in the book and the movie manages to not only skip most of that, but make the world feel more real in one fell narratorial swoop. That being said, it feels like an incredible stretch that no one figured out the secret of the first challenge until our main character just got lucky and stumbled onto the answer. Because that’s what he did. He got stupidly lucky and just stumbled his way into the correct solution. He didn’t have a flash of insight, he got spoon-fed the answer by a robot. Being an avid gamer myself and knowing people who take gaming to the point of an unhealthy obsession, I can say that someone would have figured out the secret of the race in the first month.

In a similar vein, it was incredibly frustrating to watch a bunch of uber-gamers work together without so much as an argument or attempt to get one over each other. I can’t even get that level of cooperation out of my friends when I play Overwatch and that is a game literally designed to promote teamwork. Most of us gamers have a massive competitive streak and I have a hard time believing that not a single one of these top five gamers thought about going for the prize themselves. They eagerly stand aside for the main character and one of them, the main character’s romantic interest and the player who seemed to be his main competition, literally declares that the main character has to be the one to take their one shot at the prize. That’s seriously a (paraphrased) line from the movie. Its even repeated a few times and absolutely no one says anything against it. Every other player competing for the prize is some amazingly skilled and wealthy character who has spent a huge amount of time accruing items, weapons, armor, and skill, but they all stand aside for the leather-clad, pistol-toting main character who was so broke at the start of the movie that he had to slow down during races to collect the coins from dead characters in order to get enough fuel for his car to finish the race. Seriously. One of the characters turns out to be the leader of some kind of rebellion and they immediately stand aside to let the main character take the lead as soon as he shows up (which only happened because they rescued him). It was so grating to see a powerful, strong character immediately defer to this wimpy, useless main character.

Seriously, aside from knowledge of the subject matter relevant to their search, the main character had nothing going for him. He should have been outclassed at all turns and only isn’t because everyone around him does everything for him or he just gets lucky. He shouldn’t have won. Anyone who was obsessed with this competition as the movie said all the other characters were, should have been able to figure out what the main character did. That’s the trouble of solving intellectual puzzles in a movie: there’s no way to show the character straining or working hard without showing them fail and failures are trimmed down in most movies so that the director can save a few minutes for more action sequences or proselytizing from the movie’s moral authority.

Thankfully, all of the “good” characters shared that job.  No one person acted as the moral figure and the constant interaction between the characters kept things interesting when they were all around. Their banter was fun to listen to and they all did an excellent job of keeping the story moving along despite the awkward plot choices. The biggest problem I had, was that there was almost no awkwardness when the characters meet for the first time. Only two of them have been friends on the internet for very long, but they all seem to fall in together like they’ve been the best of friends for years. As someone who has had several of those “meet someone in the real world for the first time after really getting to know them in the electronic world” moments, I can say that they’re almost always awkward to some degree or another. It expedited the plot, but it pulled me out of the movie a bit.

There’s a lot to be said about all the references I saw and all of the ones I didn’t see, but I’m going to skip over that because finding the references for yourself is a significant chunk of the fun of the movie. I wouldn’t want to take that away from you. Which means I think you should see it. Probably not at full ticket price, but it is definitely worth the $5 for a Tuesday showing at a Marcus theater or however much a ticket costs at your local cheap theater whenever it hits the cheap scene. Or rent it when it comes out on DVD/Blu-Ray. Whatever you prefer since this really isn’t a movie you need to see on a big screen.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Hilarity

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Over the weekend, I went to see Jumanji at the cheap seats theater with my girlfriend. Despite the fact that the movie was out, I managed to avoid spoilers or any of the hype so my only real expectation going into the movie was that I was probably going to enjoy seeing Jack Black do the most realistic impression of a teenage Instagram-addicted girl any older man has ever done.

I want to officially go on record as saying this is not only true, it was so entirely believable that I forgot that he wasn’t actually a vain teenaged girl whose only pursuit in life up to that point had been more Instagram followers and how to take the perfect selfie. It was uncanny, amazing, and I recommend checking the movie out for this alone. You will not regret it unless you are some kind of awful person who dislikes laughter, hilarity, and anything fun. I think you will like it so much that if you watch it and dislike it (and prove you are not an awful, fun-hating, potentially-a-robot-who-wasn’t-programmed-to-understand-humor person) then I will send you my address so we can duel with sabers at sunset.

There are a lot of other really enjoyable aspects of the movie as well. The update to “modern” times was a lot of fun. Instead of being a board game, the nightmarish magic of Jumanji transforms itself into a video game for some obscure console none of the actually modern protagonists can identify. All of the new players get sucked into the video game and have to beat it in order to escape. The game world is filled with a bunch of wonderful nods to the way video games work, including NPCs with limited dialogue options, weird bits of food that are only ever called “rations,” and a really clever way to show the players how many lives they have left.

Each off the four protagonists falls into the four main high school kid stereotypes off “vapid popular girl,” “popular jock guy,” “Smart unpopular girl,” and “nerdy awkward boy.” Eventually, you learn enough about the characters to realize that they’re not just their stereotypes. The jock isn’t dumb, he just needed help with one of his homework assignments. The nerd isn’t just awkward and scared of everything, he acts confident in the things he does to cover up his insecurities. The popular girl isn’t just vain, she actually puts a lot of work into living the life she wants and has some startling insights into how people think and behave. The unpopular girl isn’t just smart, she is so worried about people not liking her that she pushes them away before they get a chance to make up their own mind. The entire movie is filled with these little moments where the characters break their molds. (Spoilers, sorta) The popular girl gives up one of her lives to save an ally without a moment’s hesitation or consideration. The jock winds up talking the nerd through his confidence issues and shows his wisdom. The nerd faces his general fear off the world and protects the rest of the group. (Spoilers, definitely, though not in the way this sentence makes it seem) The smart girl sacrifices herself to help the group win the game.

The world of the game is fun, the villain is super creepy, and the missing child is so mid-90s it almost hurts. The character stereotypes (the video game characters that the protagonists become) are hilarious. The rock acts like a small frightened boy and the only reason he doesn’t steal the show is because it has been hidden in Jack Black’s back pocket from the instant he opened his mouth to talk like a vapid teenage girl. The NPCs are hilariously only concerned with their little programs, which means that a character can explode five feet from them and they will continue to, once the dust has started to settle, hawk their “rations.”

Every character gets a moment to shine and there’s never a slow moment. Everything is incredibly well-paced and the only time I was pulled out of the story enough to anticipate what would happen next was when they had beaten the game and were going through the end of the game. Though it is a fairly simple movie that is exactly what it seems like it would be, I can’t recommend it enough. It is definitely worth two hours of your time, plus the drive to wherever its showing. Or at least a digital rental once it has been released.