The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

A thread on Talking Time made me think about what my games of the year are. Surprisingly, I managed to make a list, and I’m actually pretty happy with it. So here it is, cross-posted, with some more comments.

And now, here are my top 10 games of 2009.

10) The Path: Not really a game as much as an Art thing, but it certainly got me thinking more than any other game this year. So much that I was inspired to write a pseudo-paper on it, just because it stuck in my mind. I really need to get around to playing Fatale.

9) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: This game really disappointed me. After how awesome the first game’s single player was, I admit I was expecting a lot. It left me down. I never would have guessed I would have ranked it so low. Still, I’ve had a lot of fun with multiplayer, both with my friends and alone. It’s still pretty solid stuff. Just not super-great, game-changing stuff.

8) Klonoa: I know it’s a remake, but dammit, I love Klonoa, and I loved playing through it another time on the Wii.

7) Left 4 Dead 2: It’s more Left 4 Dead, and it’s great. I’m honestly surprised that it isn’t higher on this list, but I just haven’t been playing it too much. I mean, it’s not that it’s not quality? But the focus of me and my friends has been elsewhere. I’m sure I’ll get back into it a bit more sometime soon. Doesn’t make it any less fun, though.

6) Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story: Like most Mario and Luigi games, it suffered from a last boss with too much HP, so I didn’t technically beat it. But I enjoyed the ride getting there. More Bowser is awesome. I heart Bowser in these RPGs, and his battles were surprisingly fairly different from that of the Bros. I liked it muchly.

5) Word Ace: I hate poker, but I love word games. Somehow, combining Texas Hold ’em with Scrabble basically created crack for me for awhile. It is just so, so much fun. I wish there were a desktop app, instead of just an iPhone and Pre app, so I could play it on my computer way, way too much.

4) Borderlands: A friend of mine just randomly bought me a copy of this on Steam so I could play with him, and man, it is just so well put together. It brings everything I love about playing RPGs co-op, but it puts it in a shooter scenario where there’s always action and it doesn’t get boring. I am totally going to buy a second copy of this on 360 next year to play with a completely different group of friends, and I’m probably going to buy some of the DLC on PC.

3) Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War II: I literally bought a new gaming PC to play this game, and it completely delivered in every way. It mixes RTS with RPG so well that it rekindled my long-ended love of RTS, at least for a little while. But seriously, the single player in this game is completely fantastic, and I cannot wait until the expansion comes out next year. I didn’t much care for the multiplayer, though. I’m sure someone would get a kick out of it. I liked getting to paint my units? But the single player package is more than enough on its own. If you have a PC that can play it, you really should.

2) Beatles: Rock Band: This game has created some of my favorite gaming moments of the year. Standing for an hour, learning harmonies with my friends, and mastering singing while playing Guitar has been just so much fun. Granted, it helps that my friends love the Beatles, so they’re more willing to play this than normal Rock Band. But man, as far as games with friends go, this is, by far, the game of the year.

1) Red Faction: Guerrilla: This is probably the best open world game I’ve ever played. Granted, I only really got into playing such games after Crackdown surprised me and warmed my heart, but man, this game was excellent the entire way through, and came out of nowhere. I love the freedom felt by being able to smash every single thing. Great stuff. Add to that the nights me and my friends spent having a blast with Wrecking Crew, and you have a pretty solid choice for my game of the year, I think.

Notably Missing is Dragon Age, which I haven’t gotten a chance to play yet, but which I bet will deserve a pretty high spot when I finally get around to it. I just didn’t want to dig into a huge RPG while I was still so busy with school and shit.
Additionally noticeably missing is Plants vs Zombies. Maybe that should have been up there! But I’m pretty happy with the list. I could fiddle with it forever, but it’s probably best just to leave it be. Still, Plants vs Zombies is awesome, and you should play it.

Anyway, there’s my picks. Let me know what you think, hm?

It’s almost Christmas. I figured I needed something lightweight to play. Something mindless. Something where I could shoot tons and tons of Nazis without any problem. I ordered Gamefly to send me Wolfenstein, the new one for 360, to me for just this reason.

The game will knock you over with how mediocre it is. There is nothing particularly bad about this game. Nothing is broken. None of the combat scenarios are particularly awful. It’s a completely functional video game. You will pull the right trigger and shoot many people!

The main highlight of the game is the weapon upgrade system. A good weapon upgrade system is a lot of fun, and Wolfenstein is great for that. After every mission, I found myself going back to the Black Market to add more upgrades. They really do affect how the weapons work, too! It works really well.
However, since you have limited funds, and can only upgrade maybe 3 guns of the 8 you get, at most, you end up only upgrading the “normal” guns. Granted, those feel just fine, and I used the MP40, MP43 and Kar98k for the majority of the game. The Kar, especially, is awesome because it gets this incredibly over-powered bayonet upgrade, making it an obscenely deadly melee weapon. Enemies that took whole clips go down with one stab of the bayonet. It’s crazy. There are other guns, too, including some crazy space guns that shoot lightning and shit, but since normal enemies don’t carry them, and thus you only really find ammo for them every once and awhile, you’ll only really be pulling them out for bosses, if that, and they just aren’t worth upgrading.

Mr. Blazkowicz also gets this crazy magic medallion that gives him various Bullet Time effects. None of this is new or revolutionary, but having that extra set of options does make combat more enjoyable. One of the powers surrounds you with a shield for a short period of time, letting you run out and shoot at people. I eventually upgraded it so that the shield actually bounced bullets back at people shooting at me, and walking out in a huge crowd and having them mow themselves down was some of the most entertaining moments of the whole game.

Overall, though, as I said, there’s nothing particularly stand-out about the game. They obviously spent a lot of time on the multiplayer, for no apparent reason, because most of the achievements are for that. I didn’t even try it. Why would a game like this have multiplayer? It seems stupid. Still, it was exactly what I was looking for: a low stress shoot-em-up that wasn’t very long. It’s a perfect rental. Although, honestly, if you haven’t played Bound in Blood yet, that was a much better shooter in this vein. It had some intelligent story, and just felt a lot more polished and a lot more enjoyable. I’d go with that one first. But yeah, you could do worse than play this game for a weekend like I did. It’s pretty alright.

After a little getting the band back together (which, honestly, has left me completely hoarse. I was singing way too intensely. Heh.) I was invited, last night, to a showing of James Cameron’s Avatar, a complete reinvention of how movies shall be made forever more. Why not go? I mean, if nothing else, there was going to be a bunch of talk going on about it on all my podcasts and shite. It would be good to actually know what’s up. I paid my crazy 12 dollars for the stupid glasses and ticket, and went.

I had went into the movie planning on completely hating it. Well, not completely hating, but certainly thinking it very silly, and very bad. All the reviews I had heard so far talked about how breathtaking it was to watch, and how empty the story was. Not usually one to be taken by visuals alone (not that they don’t help), I expected to be pretty down on the whole thing.
The farther you get away from Avatar, the more holes you find in it. But while I was in the theater, I admit I was mostly entranced. Pandora is fucking beautiful, and the Na’Vi are animated just… so fluidly, they really don’t look out of place next to the fully-human, filmed characters, which is a real feat. Well, let me rephrase that: they look out of place, but that’s because they’re aliens, awkward, and don’t know how to treat the smaller humans, as opposed to it being “oh, there’s a CGI dude next to that human dude.” There’s no doubt that all of that is really, really impressive. You’re seeing a lot of cool stuff.

The plot, though… there are no surprises. It is what I have heard described as a “noble savage, mighty whitey” storyline, and it is completely. Human becomes a Na’Vi, learns their ways, becomes their leader, better than them all. It’s… predictable. You know exactly what’s going to happen in this movie before you even sit down. You can see all the plot twists coming from two miles away. There are no surprises, and none of the characters are deep enough to give a shit about whatsoever, which I’m sure was something that was intended. People die, and you can tell it’s supposed to be moving, but it really just isn’t. The only thing that pulls at your heartstrings a little is when Love Interest (can you tell how important the characters on when I can’t remember the names of any of them) is upset and crying. Whoever did her acting and voice acting did something so seriously raw that you can’t help but sympathize a bit. Certainly some of the best anguish. But the moment she stops, you realize you don’t really agree with her. It wasn’t a great loss. It was just some stereotype that died. Besides that moment of crying, none of the acting takes these characters out of the realm of stereotype.

Seriously, if you’re going to spend so much money on making such a fucking beautiful movie, you really could spend some time on the acting. For example, this blew my mind: the ore the humans are on Pandora to get is literally called Unobtanium. Yes, the joke term for MacGuffin ores that allow fantastic sci-fi tech to work is the ACTUAL TERM for the ore. They really couldn’t have taken a few minutes to come up with an ore name while they were coming up with an entire Na’Vi language? That’s the kind of thing that’s in the first draft of a script, but then is written out. Ridiculous.
You could also, of course, write a story that doesn’t blatantly steal from most of early American literature. I mean, sure, steal from it. Nothing particularly wrong with that. Keep those themes and put them in a Sci-Fi setting. But dammit, at least try to mix it up. Just a little. To disguise what you’re doing. To leave some tiny inkling of suspense.

There is just so much that could be said on an English Majority thing about how bad the whole story is too, but I think I’ll leave that to the experts. Or at least finally see what they and Spoony have to say and see if that inspires me to write a companion post where I do that.

As I said, though, I can’t claim I didn’t enjoy it while I was in the theater. It is just such a technical showcase that it is just pretty damn cool to see play out. But goodness, if you want to see this film, see it in theaters. If you take away the 3D and the huge screen, I have a feeling it will be even harder to forgive its flaws. All the fun comes from that spectacle. This is a solid spectacle. But not a particularly good movie, and it is a shame that such effort was wasted on a plot so lackluster.

Alternate Title: Trine, Trine Trine.

Trine is a game that has garnered a lot of critical praise, at least among the podcasts I listen to, and it was completely deserved. Granted, the PS3 release is apparently a buggy mess, so maybe you shouldn’t play that one. But the PC version? Amazing, and completely worth your time.

At first, it seems like Trine is trying to be a modern Lost Vikings. You have a puzzle-y platformer with three characters with different abilities. The Wizard levitates things and creates physics objects. The Thief has a bow for distance attacks and a grappling hook to swing about. The Warrior can pick up heavy objects and has a wide variety of ways to fight enemies. Seems very similar to that Blizzard classic. In reality, though, it doesn’t play very much like that at all. It’s still very much a puzzle platformer, but since you don’t have to maneuver and keep track of three different people at once, simply poofing into other forms whenever you need their abilities, it goes much simpler, and that’s a good thing.

The controls on the PC were something I was really worried about. How could I play such a serious platformer with a mouse and keyboard? However, I don’t claim to know how they did it, but it controls perfectly that way. I was doing some very intense and complex swing/jump things with the Thief near the end of the game without any problem. It just controls in a very solid fashion. Never do you feel like it’s the controls making you fail. That’s really important.

The gameplay itself is, well, puzzle platforming. You have to figure out how to hit various buttons or get past various obstacles in order to get to the end of the level. Throughout each stage are scattered bottles of experience, which can provide extra challenge, if you want to get them. However, you also get experience from killing monsters, which you do have to do from time to time. Therefore, it’s not important that you grab all of these. I only maybe got half on my run through the game. In the same way, there are sometimes hidden chests, which contain equippable items for your heroes. These are very useful things, like letting the Wizard have more boxes summoned at the same time, or giving you a life potion that refills a hurt hero’s life whenever they get low. Once again, though, these are useful to pick up, but they aren’t game-breaking if you don’t have them: The only ones you need to pick up, ones that give the heroes brand new powers, are situated so you can’t miss them.
Everything about the game seems really hardcore, but it is actually very forgiving. Checkpoints are spread about liberally, so when you die, you never lose much progress at all, especially since the world-state doesn’t reset when you have to restart at a checkpoint. If you’ve already flipped a switch, it’s still flipped, and so on. When you pass a checkpoint, it also revives dead characters and heals everyone to 50% health. If you’re having trouble with a combat, you can just keep running over a checkpoint multiple times to heal up. Therefore, it’s really just about figuring out how to navigate around the challenges, which I very much enjoyed. If you can’t pull it off, you can try as many times as you need with no penalty. At the same time, it does take skill and sometimes some thinking to get past some challenges, and there isn’t always just one solution. It’s really rewarding to push forward most of the time.
There’s a story, and it’s cute, serviceable, and in no way a hindrance to the game, but it isn’t really important. The gameplay is just so great, it will carry you through till the very end. The end level is stupid difficult, though. I played the whole game through on “Medium” until the last level, where I had to change to “Easy.” It’s amazing to me that they apparently patched that level to make it easier before I played the game. Gods, how could it be any harder? They basically remove the liberal checkpoints you’ve gotten used to using, and make you go through one of the hardest platforming sequences in the game all in one go. It’s pretty mean of them. Still, once I switched it to Easy, it wasn’t too hard, and it certainly didn’t ruin the game as a whole.

Trine is an excellent game. With really well-done gameplay and controls and graphics that will kind of blow you away as being from an indie studio, Trine is certainly one of the best indie games of the year. It’s good, good stuff. Unless you simply can’t stand platforming, you’d do well to pick this game up on Steam sometime. It was worth every penny I paid for it.

There is one thing I’ve been doing all day for several days, and that thing is playing Words with Friends. Please note how awful that title is. Words with Friends. Ugh. It sounds like you’re about to confront your friends for something they did wrong. It’s… pretty terrible. However, it is actually a well-implemented Play-By-Email style Scrabble Clone for the iPhone. I’m enjoying it a lot.

I learned about the Words with Friends phenomenon (okay, it probably isn’t a phenomenon) from Cara, who was playing it with her aunt as we sat down to take our awesome final. The final consisted of having lunch, good conversation, and, as it turned out, playing fake iPhone Scrabble, because I downloaded it immediately onto my iPod Touch and had at it. See, the main feature to this game is that it has a fully-featured free version, so you can just tell anyone you want to download it and play with you. This is a really effective feature. The free version isn’t a demo. It’s the full game. The only difference is that it pops up an ad every time you make a move. However, there’s nothing stopping you from immediately hitting the home button, backing out of the program, and not looking at the ad at all. If you are monetarily challenged, you’ll have no problem dealing with these ads and having a good time. Still, they annoyed me, so I splurged and spent the 3 dollars on the ad free version. I didn’t mind: even though the company that made this game obviously had no idea how to title something, they still made a game with a great interface that works very well for a game you play slowly over the course of a day or two.

Basically, you set up anywhere from 1 to 20 games running simultaneously. As I said, it’s done in a casual “play at whatever pace” style: You play your turn, and then it sends a push notification to who you’re playing, who can respond whenever they want. Then you get a push notification, and so on. This works extremely well for Scrabble, especially since it’s often a game where you’d like some time to stare at the board and evaluate your options, options, options. This also works surprisingly well with my iPod touch. When I’m at home, not doing anything, I’m in Wifi, and I get these notifications, so I can play. When I’m out and about doing things, I’m not in Wifi, so I don’t, but they’ll be waiting for me when I get home. Granted, the game can’t entertain me during boring parts of life that way, but it actually still works fairly well when not always connected, like when you’re on an iPhone.

The game lets you challenge Twitter and Facebook contacts, as well as type in usernames on their little service. It also has a matchmaking thing for play against random people, because random people are your friends whom you want to Word with, obviously. You can leave messages after every move to gloat or just talk, and when you finish a game, you just hit the “rematch” button and start a new one with your friend again, immediately. It’s pretty well everything one could want from a mobile, online Scrabble game, and it’s available for the price of free.

I’d have a hard time not recommending that you download the free version. If you enjoy playing it and hate ads, feel free to throw some money the developer’s way, if you want. But you don’t have to to have a great time. If you download it, face me. I’m, shockingly, named poetfox on there. We can words. With friends. All day long. Perhaps.

I guess at some point I played Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.

I was really kind of unimpressed. Back a few Christmases ago, Jonathan got me Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters for the PSP, and that was pretty great. Since I hadn’t played one of these games before, the shooting and stuff was really kind of novel and fun. I blew up a bunch of things, and tried a bunch of weird weapons. It was pretty neat. Near the end of the game, though, I got to a boss battle that I just couldn’t handle, and had to put the game down. Up until then, though, it was fun times.

However, I didn’t really realize a couple things about the game, since I hadn’t played others. For one, I didn’t realize that the incredibly disjointed and almost nonsensical plot of the PSP version was actually accurate to what the full console releases had. I felt like stuff had gotten cut out to fit it all on a UMD or something, but no, Tools of Destruction has the exact same lack of plot. You’re just going to incredibly random locations for no real reason to shoot people, and it never really tries very hard to explain it. There are some cutscenes, where people talk, but there might as well not be: they don’t say anything that clarifies anything that you are doing. This was really disappointing to me. People throw around terms like “Pixar movie” when describing the style of these games, but there’s nothing about them that connects with that at all besides a vague art direction element.

I also didn’t expect the big games to be so dead-set on giving me huge areas with no guidance that I have to stumble my way through. Because it was on the PSP, there were no big arenas in Size Matters. It was one straightforward shot. This worked well, and Tools of Destruction works well when it is following a linear path, shooting dudes as well. When it gives you bigger, exploratory areas, though, the game completely falls apart. The controls and the map system were not designed for this kind of gameplay. There’s no guidance on where to go, and some of the jumps you have to make are not very clear. The whole reason I sent this back to Gamefly was because I got into one of these exploration sections and, even after consulting a walkthrough, I had no idea where to go. It was infuriating.

Eventually, though, I did figure it out, only to get into a Clank puzzle section in which I was given no guidance at all. I was told that Tools of Destruction was a “reboot” so the series would be friendly to newcomers, but the game assumed I knew all the, quite different, Clank controls from previous games. Once again, I had to consult a walkthrough just to learn what arbitrary buttons to press to get the game moving again. After managing that, I got a long way through the puzzle section, then died. I learned, then, that I was checkpointed at the beginning, and I had to redo it all.
Fuck. That.
I sent it back to Gamefly.

So yeah, I guess I didn’t really enjoy Tools of Destruction too much. Which is a shame, because it was yet another PS3 game that had gotten great buzz and I was really looking forward to trying. I don’t know if I just have a very thin skin for not knowing what to do now, or what, but I just can’t stand that kind of guesswork any more. I have so many other awesome things to do with my limited free time, I see no reason to spend it frustrated at a game that won’t make my objectives clear.

I wrote an actual professional review of the book, and I was just going to cross-post it, but then I’m like, wait, that’s stupid. If I post the full text here, then I can’t put it up elsewhere. Therefore, you get the very casual review version. Lucky you.

I had to read a book of short stories for my short story class. The press constantly gets review copies of books, so I always just assumed I’d grab one from the review shelf and use that. Susan tends to use the reviews for class in Big Muddy anyway. So, a few weeks ago, I grabbed a copy of the first short story collection on the shelf that seemed halfway interesting, and was soon in possession of a copy of Fugue State by Brian Evenson.

First off, I highly recommend clicking on that link up there, or these next links, and it seems like my favorite story from the collection, “Younger,” is available online in audio and text forms. It might give you some idea of what I’m talking about.

“Younger” really sums up what I did like about this book, and I did like it. It’s filled with psychological horror, the sort that isn’t connected with monsters or anything supernatural, but is just powered by characters having internal conflicts that make things creepy. I’m not a horror person, but this kind of character struggle is something I love in stories, and Evenson does a fantastic job of it, when he puts his mind to it. The majority of the stories play out in a form similar to “Younger.” I don’t feel they’re as successful, but, you know, they’re still fairly entertaining and, if nothing else, are based on a very entertaining idea.
The rest of the stories are split between a dark humor and what I would call more standard horror fare. You have stories that are just humorous in the tale of a editor who wants to publish literary work but ends up publishing trashy mystery novels with names like “Never Been Bjorn” about a detective who’s a swede, because that’s the hook. You have stories about a woman fucking a mime because “it would be a good story to tell at parties” who is haunted by the act ever since. These are just really clearly meant to be humorous. Then you have stories like the title story, “Fugue State,” which work with a supernatural threat. Still, even the supernatural stories are very character-driven, which is good. At least in my opinion.

The main issue I had with the book is that many of the stories have endings that fall completely flat. I know endings are hard. Endings are very hard. But it’s just a shame when you get a published work with so many failed endings in it. So many stories have such great premises, but once that premise has run its course, the story just stops, without any sort of satisfying conclusion. The previously-mentioned “Invisible Box” is probably the worst offender in that regard, being so entertaining, funny, and slightly creepy all the way up to the ending, which just seems completely phoned in.

Still, as I said, I certainly enjoyed the book overall. There were some very good stories in there. At least read “Younger” for me, hm? If you like that, and think you’d like a little more, even if it isn’t quite up to that quality, then Fugue State is almost certainly a book for you to check out. It’s pretty solid stuff.

People are saying that Uncharted 2 is one of the best games of the year.
I’ll be honest. I don’t see it.

I mean, you know, everything that has been said about the storytelling in this game? Completely true. The voice acting is top-notch, the characters actually act in realistic ways, there’s great dialog while you’re playing… you believe these characters. Nathan Drake is a pretty likable guy, though how anti-gun he is at the beginning of the game is pretty humorous seeing how many dudes you kill by the end. But those elements, that people point out as being excellent? Are.

The rest of the game? Not so much.
I feel like this game has a lot in common with Brutal Legend because of that. The presentation of Brutal Legend was top notch, but the gameplay was lackluster. This is the same way.

The shooter segments basically work like Gears of War. You’re hopping behind cover and shooting dudes, only you don’t chainsaw them. You can rush up and do a punch combo to take them out, if you’d prefer. The controls, though, feel really weird. I never felt like I had exact control over the shooting, and it felt like the guys took too many bullets to kill. There were these super-dudes covered in armor with big helmets that you can only kill in an efficient manner by shooting them in the head. They’re really annoying. It’s all passable, but nothing special.
The one interesting decision I think they made is that Nathan can’t carry many bullets. You only have enough bullets to reload your gun twice, at most, at any time. It really makes you scavenge for ammo, which is a different feel than something like Gears. You often had to debate whether to run out of cover to get more ammo or to switch to your pistol to finish people off, which is cool. I did like that.

The real part where the game falls apart for me, and for some reason, this is what people say they like the most about the game, is the platforming. Nathan Drake has the best grip of any person ever, and has to climb every wall forever. You often have to traverse terrain like this, scaling walls, leaping from roof to roof, etc.
There are two main issues with this. One, the game is almost always one or the other. You have to platform for a long period of time, then you have to do nothing but shooting for a long period of time. The game would have been much better had they mixed it up a bit more than they did. They could learn from Arkham Asylum.
The real main issue, and the reason why I got so frustrated that I sent the game back, is that the game gives you very little indication of what you’re supposed to do. You’re given a goal, and no clear way to get there. The locations look fairly realistic, so they’re lacking markers that jump out at you to say “climb here!” The characters in the game, whom you’d think could give you hints with the good dialog, are useless in these sequences. In fact, most of them start with Drake saying “how the hell am I supposed to get up there?” This frustrated me to no end. He’s supposed to tell me so I could do it! There is a hint system to help you go where you need to go, but you can only activate it when the game thinks you’re lost. Making the game think you’re lost basically involves setting the controller down for a few minutes. It’s stupid. Once you find the path, it’s not like there’s any challenge in it, either. You just move on a linear path forward. These sequences really got to me.

On top of it all, the game is kind of stupidly hard. There are five difficulty levels. I picked Easy, one up from the easiest setting, and I died constantly. I picked Easy so grenade launchers wouldn’t cheaply kill me in one hit out of nowhere, thanks. I just wanted to play through the story everyone was saying was so good. But no, they had to make the game stupid hard.

So I sent it back right at the end of the game. I really don’t get Uncharted 2. If you enjoyed it? Wonderful. Good for you. But there was so much bullshit annoyance in the game that I just can’t really recommend it that highly. Obviously it just wasn’t a game for me.

For Droib’s birthday, I was attempting to think of something cool to get him. It was then that I remembered that, at some point this year, Droid was in the market for filling up some shelves with some good board games. Now there was an area I knew about! We had also, in our youth, played hours and hours of Risk at his house. So I went out and, with some funding help from one Justin Spants, acquired Risk 2210 A.D. for him, since everyone has always said it is the best variant of Risk created yet. I hadn’t played it though. However, we got together on Friday night to give it a try.

First off, let me just say where I stand on standard Risk: it’s not very well designed. The first few turns are fun stuff, but after that, the game gets boring and stupid. I don’t think we’ve ever actually finished a game of Risk. It’s just too much of a pain to do so. There are also some constant strategies that are always brought to a Risk table, for better or worse.

Risk 2210 addresses most of those concerns. First off, because the game is always only 5 turns long, it keeps the game confined to the turns that are interesting, keeping the game from going on for hours and hours in wars of attrition and rolling that nobody really cares about. Secondly, the fact that you have to mark four random territories on the board as “nuclear wastelands” at the start of the game really changes how the board, whose land spaces are pretty much the same as regular Risk, play. In our game, for example, large portions of Asia were irradiated, and the other wastelands were blocking passage into Asia. This made Asia way, way easier to take and defend than in a normal game of Risk, and thus way more viable, which was interesting. Next time, something else will be more useful to hold because of those areas. I really like that.

The other things Risk 2210 adds to make the game different from the normal Risk experience are also fun. You have commanders, something taken from Lord of the Rings Risk which is a very welcome addition, as those are quite fun. However, you have five different types: Diplomat, Land Commander (or Landmander, as we called him), Naval Commander, Space Commander, and Nuclear Commander. Each type lets you use a d8 instead of a d6 in certain situations that are pretty self-explanatory. Are you fighting at sea? The Naval Commander would give you a bonus there, and so on. Having a commander on the board lets you buy and use their Commander Cards, which do different things related to their specialties. Each deck is shuffled and random, but since each Commander has a different style of ability that you know beforehand, you really can plan your strategy more than you can with some cards of this type in other Risk variants, which is really cool. You can build Space Stations to fortify specific areas and let you send troops to the Moon. Oh, and there’s a separate Moon board to take, and underwater sea colonies to conquer. You also get to bid resources on when you take your turn, which is a great mechanic. Do you save your resources to buy more Commanders and commander cards, or do you really want to get in there and go first?
Honestly, though, it’s just Risk, in the end. You still point at places on the board and roll dice over and over again to whittle down armies. But as I mentioned before, that only gets boring when two players are crazily fortified and there’s no chance for people to swing from the bottom to the top. Since the game only lasts 5 turns, and there are so many more options than in a normal Risk game, it really keeps the fun going all the way through.

Here are three strategy tips for when you play. 1) People seem to forget to look at the Moon board. If you can sneak some troops up there and take one of those continents, that could be a huge help. That was what I did, and it let me manage to win. Somehow. 2) You want to go last on the last turn, so you can be completely suicidal. It doesn’t matter how many armies you have when the game ends, just how many territories, so a suicide run is very effective! This was the other reason I managed to win, even though I was in bad shape for most of the game. Bid to make that happen! 3) If you add magnets to your game, this is what happens.

I think I picked a pretty good game to get for Droib. We had a great time playing it, and hopefully we can play it again sometime. What people were saying was completely right: this pretty well is the best variant of Risk I have played, and I have played quite a lot of them. If you’re going to play any kind of Risk, I would very much suggest this one.

There are very few movies that I wait for with incredible excitement. I’m pretty completely in the video game camp now. I only ever see movies when Essner invites me. That’s always enjoyable, but, you know, I rarely have a movie that I desperately need to see.

Fantastic Mr. Fox was that movie.

I’ve had plans to see it forever. I wanted to see it while I was in Arkansas, but it wasn’t out yet. I wanted to see it opening night, but I got sick. Last week, I finally got to see it.

It met all my expectations.

I admit those expectations were high. I mean, it had anthropomorphic, talking foxes, so you know I was interested. But even without that, it was a Wes Anderson movie, and he is, by far, one of my favorite directors. It had all the great actors involved for voices that he uses time and again because they’re totally awesome. It seemed like a winner. I wanted it bad.
And it was every bit as wonderful as I had hyped it up in my head to be.

This movie is not for kids. Sure, it’s rated PG, and is a stop-motion animation film with talking animals, but it is completely for adults. Characters say proxy f-bombs using the word “cuss,” which is kind of humorous in is own right. There’s fairly extreme violence. The plot is completely based off of a mid-life crisis plot that children will likely not resonate with, and has consequences that do not magically disappear at the end of the film, though it does come to a sort of happy ending. It’s a very adult movie, and a very excellent one.

This is completely a Wes Anderson movie all the way through. The stop-motion may be considered by some to be a gimmick, but I think it works incredibly well. Wes Anderson has always had a sort of weird retro kitsch style about his films. It makes them look very distinct. Therefore, it makes sense that, when making an animated movie, he would use a sort of outdated method that gives it a weird, but unique outdated look. It works just great.
The dialog, too, is completely Anderson fare. It is both hilarious and subtle, bringing out some fairly deep characters, certainly deeper than you might expect from a family of stop-motion foxes. Mr. Fox is a full-featured person, who’s dealing with a lot of issues having to deal with settling down and having a family when he feels himself a wild animal, not to mention dealing with the fact that his “fun” may have brought down an entire community later in the movie. Ash, his son, is dealing with issues of “being different,” something everyone tells him even though he thinks he’s just another member of the group, even while his cousin, who has moved in with the family and is better than him at every activity he tries, is seemingly proving otherwise. These A and B character arcs give the main plot, which, honestly, can get incredibly silly at times as Boggis, Bunce, and Bean spend insane amounts of money to take down Mr. Fox, some really strong depth.

The film is just incredibly fun. It was very enjoyable to watch, and it wasn’t mindless in its construction. What more could someone want from a movie? If you like Life Aquatic, Rushmore, or any of Anderson’s movies, don’t overlook this one just because it’s animated. You’ll enjoy it just as much, I promise.

Also, it is supposedly about penises. So, you know, that’s exciting too, right?