So over the break I consumed quite a large amount of media, and actually wanted to write individual reviews for all of them, but I never quite felt like writing them over the break, so instead I'm going to do a series of small mini-reviews just to get my thoughts down. Feel free to chime in!
Red Seas Under Red Skies:
Probably not worth mentioning deeply since I think everyone who reads this blog has read the book, but another great book starring the Gentlemen Bastards that I highly enjoyed. I don't really have any complaints other than I wish Scott Lynch would hurry up and release the next book; it was a thoroughly enjoyable romp in a great fantasy setting.
Family Guy Star Wars:
The first one was kind of funny, but the writers even blatantly admitted that by the third one they'd run out of ideas, and honestly, they had. The first had a couple funny moments, the as it went on they relied on extending a single joke for far longer than it was funny, relying on crude, unrelated SW humor, and just blatantly ripping off content; something I know know FG is known for, but it just strikes as lazy copyright infringement rather than humor. Instead of this, I would highly recommend...
Robot Chicken Episode 3
Like the first two, RC actually shows that they actually are more than passingly familiar with the SW universe, and make a number of insightful jokes that often require the viewer to also be very knowledgeable about the franchise. Like any RC show, quality can vary depending on the skit, but there's enough of them that a few of them are great and make up for a couple subpar ones. If you liked the first two, definitely worth checking out.
Machinarium
One of the game's from the Indie bundle, this is perhaps one of the best. It's a great little puzzle game with a fantastic, unique art style with high-quality background music. The story is pretty simplistic but it's execution is top-notch, and the puzzles are a lot more clever and "realistic" than most games of the type. Highly recommended if you like point-and-click or puzzle games. The only problem I had with it was one bug that forced me to replay a section, but other than that I have no complaints.
Gratuitous Space Battles
Part of one of the Steam indie bundles, this was quite an interesting game. You design ships, go to a battlefield, decide on general strategy and orders of battle, and then watch as the AI takes over your fleet and you watch the battle unfold without participating. It's perhaps the greatest way to theorycraft, and I got a lot of enjoyment out of it. The most glaring flaw is lack of true multiplayer-- while you can send fleets at a friend for them to play against, you both can't watch the battle take place together. Perhaps they'll add that in in the future, but it currently doesn't have it, which is quite sad.
True Grit
This film did for Westerns what District 9 did for sci-fi films for me: make a high-quality, traditional genre film that just worked. I thought all the actors did a fantastic job (I almost didn't realize Matt Damon was one of the characters until I went through a process of elimination), the story was great especially considering I hadn't seen the original, and I really appreciated the accents seeming far more realistic (or at least what I imagine to be realistic). If you like westerns at all, definitely worth watching.
Heavy Rain
For what Heavy Rain tried to be, I think it achieved fully. It tells a much more immersive story than the usual video games and handles a sensitive topic well, and actually makes mundane tasks kind of fun to play. The sense of choices being made seemed much stronger than your traditional RPG, and many were far less black and white than you'd expect. One of the more interesting parts is playing in a group and seeing what people choose different than you; I even saw many people make choices that simply would never have occurred to me. The lack of replay is a slight flaw, but the original journey makes up for it. I could see people not being able to get into it, especially since if you don't take it seriously its impact naturally lessens a great deal, but I do hope to see more games like it in the future, since it was one of the best titles I played last year.
Firefly/Serenity
Since this had been apparently hammering at my "nerd cred" I finally watched Firefly, and my overall judgement was that it was pretty good. My biggest problem with it is the sci-fi universe Whedon chose to create is just bad. I don't like the sci-fi-western feel (especially comparing the accents to True Grit, since I watched both concurrently), the ship design is awful, the combination of things like hovercraft and horses feels weird, and so on and so forth. Things like flying a spaceship underneath a hovering mansion without the people apparently noticing it just struck me as awful. With that said, its redeeming feature is that of its characters and their stories, which are quite strong and make up for many of the other shortcomings. They do take a number of episodes to get going, but about half-way through the season it starts picking up. It was a decent series overall, but not that I particularly curse Fox for cancelling, and I'm more happy I finished it just so I can stop getting knocked for not having watched it :-P. The movie was still good, although I feel like it almost worked better if you hadn't seen the original series, especially since it again showcases how much Joss Whedon hates love.
Super Mario Galaxy 2
Being an extreme fan of the first game, I had high expectations for the sequel. Luckily they were met, and once again SMG2 just felt fun. I actually feel like the difficulty was a little bit easier this time, although it's entirely possible this is due to me being more experienced with the game. The improvements were all fun and kept the game feeling kind of new, and the amount of content was excellent. The only flaw I can see is that if you didn't like the first, there's nothing really new to change your mind about this, but if you enjoyed the first you'll enjoy the second one.
Brave New World
This was the one of the trifecta of dystopia novels (the others being Fahrenheit 451 and 1984) that I hadn't yet read. I thought the ideas were pretty interesting, although the style was a bit odd. I wouldn't classify it as one of my favorite books, but I did feel it was worth the read, especially if you enjoyed either of the other two books I mentioned. It did feel particularly relevant given our current society's values, but I honestly don't know exactly how applicable it is. We'll see, I guess.
-HTMC
Yeah, I watched and kind of enjoyed the first Family Guy Star Wars, but I was struck in a lot of places by the ORIGINAL dialogue being funnier than the parody (perfect example: Han's Stormtrooper bluff breaks down over the radio, violence against innocent radios ensues). So it makes sense that the third one would be a bit short on material.
ReplyDeleteGood to hear that Robot Chicken is still on the ball. Admittedly, their task was a bit less ambitious - sketches are easier than a coherent narrative. But with Star Wars, Robot Chicken definitely made the right choice for format.
Yeah, Brave New World is interesting. It's good to read alongside 1984, definitely, because they both clash and resonate in interesting ways. I'd recommend keeping BNW in mind when you go into 1984. I read Farenheit 481 a LONG time ago, but it probably also offers some interesting commentary.
I had read 1984 multiple times before reading BNW, so I definitely noticed the contrast. I also decided to reread F451 after reading BNW, since I hadn't read the former since freshman year of high school, and they also paired together well. I feel like I picked up on more stuff in F451 than I did on my initial reading, and enjoyed it a lot more (not that I remember disliking it on the first read, but nothing was super memorable at the time).
ReplyDeleteYeah, Brave New World was definitely interesting, but it's hard (at least for me) to really *enjoy* a book that doesn't have any particularly relateable characters. Felt like 1984 also had this flaw; and a lot of other (much less influential) sci-fi besides. I'm actually just starting one of the Honor Harrington books; I've heard it's basically Horatio Hornblower IN SPACE, and I like Horatio Hornblower, so we'll see how that goes.
ReplyDeleteI should look into Machinarum, though. Heard good things about it, but nevertheless have been procrastinating on picking it up.
I dunno, I thought that the main characters in 1984 were pretty relateable, even if their society wasn't. I'd agree with Brave New World didn't have any single person with whom I could generally relate well (though I could relate in certain ways to a few of the characters).
ReplyDeleteI'm with Stormshrug on this one--I'll agree about the relatability of BNW, but I found the characters from 1984 pretty engaging. It's entirely possible that's a personal thing though.
ReplyDeleteAnd I would definitely recommend Machinarium, too, if you can find it for cheap. It's not a super long game (especially if you don't get stuck on any of the puzzles for too long, and they have a nifty hint feature if you do) but definitely quite a bit of fun.