Mockingjay: Review

We arrive here, at the end of all things. Mockingjay, book 3 of the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, concludes the saga of Katniss, Peeta, and Gale as the districts begin a revolution against the Capital, a culmination of all that Katniss and Peeta accomplished (accidentally) as they survived the horrors of the Hunger Games. I've already spoken to my distaste for Collins' writing style in my reviews of books 1 and 2, so I'll just say that it doesn't get any better here. We still follow Katniss as she struggles with the events that transpired at the end of the last book: she's been rescued by the revolution and taken to District 13 (gasp!), where they have apparently been biding their time to begin the revolution anew in secret. District 12 has been firebombed to oblivion, and few survived the destruction (naturally Gale and her family are just fine), and Peeta has been captured by the Capitol.

This book suffers by far the most from Collins' sometimes ponderous and repetitive writing style. In what should be the big action piece, very little happens at all. Far little than either of the preceding books, actually. I was really looking forward to the war between the Districts and the Capitol, but guess what? We really don't see it. Instead we're treated to Katniss having a complete breakdown for the majority of the book, spending her time wandering from one closet to the next, where she can hide and cry over her loss of Peeta and her very confused feelings for him and Gale.

This book had a lot of potential. Katniss, who had been such a strong female character for the series, who had used her anger to jumpstart a rebellion, who would do anything to survive and protect those she loves just kind of stops doing all of that. Her big role in the revolution is that of a propaganda figure, dressing up in fancy armor and looking good for the camera. They keep almost taking her into actual combat, but aside from the first foray that never really happens. It's absolutely frustrating.

There are also a great deal of characters that are introduced, and never really used. Or used briefly, then thrown by the wayside. It seems like there may have been a larger plan that just never happened. Frustrating.

Then there's the end. Yes, we get everything nice and wrapped up, but it all seems incredibly rushed and lazy, actually. The love triangle between Gale, Peeta, and Katniss is resolved, but in a completely unsatisfying cop out that does nothing but wrap it up. Katniss' revolution is also rushed towards the end, and ultimately lacks any kind of real conclusion (in my mind). Katniss never actually decides anything for herself. Things just fall in a certain fashion that she decides to go with. Even the love triangle, when it seems that the decision has been made for her, seems undecided. There's a line (I won't quote because I don't want to go digging around for it) where she says that she's "relieved" that she can't go with one of them. THAT is your resolution, her decision. She's just "relieved" that she doesn't have to make any decision.

This book is by far my least favorite of the series, and seems to actually tarnish the first two books with inconsistent character development and plain old annoying decisions. The Hunger Games seemed to have not been edited very well for grammar, but Mockingjay seems to have been poorly edited for plot. I wonder if, due to the popularity of the series, they rushed the conclusion out the door before it could have fully developed, before it had properly matured. If that's the case, then it's a damn shame to conclude what could have otherwise been a very good series with such a lackluster entry. Who knows, maybe translating it to the big screen will allow them to fix what was so very broken with this conclusion.

I don't like this book. Real, or not real?

Real.

Rating: 4/10

Now, I'm off to read something a bit lighter. I think the Black Dahlia should do the trick.

What Keeps Eating My Time

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

I'm a pretty big Star Wars fan. Not the biggest. Hell, not even the biggest out of my close circle of friends. But by most people's standards, I'm a pretty big fan.

Know what else I'm a fan of? Bioware games. Roleplaying games. Star Wars Bioware Roleplaying Games. My kryptonite. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was a pretty singular experience for me, combining all of these disparate elements into one of the best games I had ever played.

Now, the count of excellent RPG's from Bioware is increased by one with Star Wars: the Old Republic, a bizarre fusion of singleplayer roleplaying and massively multiplayer online roleplaying. This weird little amalgamation of genres shouldn't work, but in some bizarre fashion it does.

I've tried MMO's before. Several. Ultimate Online? Cool, but meh. Evercraft? It was fun getting drunk and falling into the ocean halfway between continents, and to wash up on some strange new shore, but that was about it. Meh. I gave World of Warcraft a shot, but just kind of wandered the woods outside Stormwind while my friends raided dungeons and fought demigods. They got the bug, and they got it bad. Me? Apparently I had some sort of immunity. City of Heroes was close, and that was because of the milieu more than anything. Like I've said before, I love comics. So of course I loved crafting my own superhero story and playing it out day in and day out.

And then we have Star Wars Galaxies. Now, there was an MMO with potential. A game of paradoxes, SWG was simultaneously one of the best MMO's ever made, and one of the worst. It had so much going for it: level-free class system, player controlled economy, multiple enormous worlds that you could do anything you wanted to on, and a sense of wonder. I don't even know how many nights my friends and I were up until sunrise wandering from one horizon to the next, exploring every nook and cranny, floating from one vista to the next. Sure, we did the quests, did the grind whenever we were in the mood for it. But mostly we just wandered, and explored.

It's cheesy, I know, but that game had a bit of magic in it that I have yet to see since. The Morrowind games come close, maybe as close as a single

player game can come, but SWG... No other game have I ever enjoyed making a campfire and literally just sitting at it, watching the stars cartwheel overhead and wild beasts just skirt the halo of light before disappearing back into the night, just for the sake of enjoying it. We'd do this on most nights; set up camp in some undiscovered spit of land on Tattooine or Corellia, let our droids out to do tricks for us, and just talk (in character!) about what we'd seen that day, or what we had planned. What grand adventures we no doubt would be going on the next day, what our ultimate goals and dreams were. The level of immersion of that game was almost magical.

Then of course there was the lack of starships, the interesting but ultimately broken language system, then all of the bizarre things they'd ultimately do with the Jedi. It was fun while it lasted though.

The Old Republic, on the other hand, is a completely different experience. A little more sterile, a little more walled in and already set up for you. There's not quite so much magic that you bring to the game yourself. You don't have to wander around with friends, roleplaying on your own. That's already in the game. Every quest you take, every person/droid you kill. These things all have meaning and weight in the game. There's little grinding, because most everything is paced well enough that you don't need to. You go to an area, talk to a myriad of NPC's that all need your help with something or another, and complete these quests at roughly the same time, earning a certain amount of XP that is calculated to level you up in line with your own personal storyline that will take you to another area at the appropriate time.

This sounds rather bland and run of the mill, and if you look past some aspects of the game it absolutely is. But that’s only if you actually go and completely ignore the more obvious aspects of the game. The typical Bioware skill for telling a story is ever present, in every single fetch quest, every grind mission, every conversation with an NPC.

Much has been made of TOR’s fully voice acted quests, and for good reason. It takes what should be somewhat repetitive grinding and elevates it to something that you actually want to do. You need me find out what’s killing settlers? Sure, no problem! Somebody is stalking your wife? Hey, I’ll take care of it.

Then there is the Storyline that each character class has. The Storyline is a series of quests spanning the entirety of the game that apply only to your character class, and involve your character pursuing some far-reaching goal that is “unique” to you. I say “unique” because every character in that class is experiencing the same story for themselves, though their decisions and the way they go about it may change. This is fantastic, and because of this it’s the first MMO that I’ve actually made three characters in the first month of playing, and played each for at least a few days each. I want to know what each class is doing, what their own story is. And I want to make an original character that actually has a personality, has something that actually is unique to them.

I want to create a story,  and thanks to the online component, I can involve others in that story.

I don’t know what this article is. Is it a review? An exercise in compare and contrast? Or just simple, good old-fashioned rambling? A little of each, I think (though probably a little more of the latter than anything else), but mostly it’s just my thoughts and experiences with MMO’s, RPG’s, and Star Wars in general. I have a love/hate relationship with the brand, but despite all the grief I give Lucas and his lackeys, I can’t stop going back to that time that is so long, long ago, and that place so far, far away.

Damn you George Lucas.

Catching Fire: Review

Lucky number thirteen (which is somewhat ironic, since the other book I'm reading right now is actually called Thirteen), we arrive at Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, book 2 of the Hunger Games trilogy.

I've already written about the Hunger Games, so I'll do my best not to rehash that subject. Catching Fire is a fun continuation of the series, following Katniss six-months after the events of the first book as she tries to cope with the challenges that the evil Capital and their Hunger Games have brought into her life.

Now, there really aren't any surprises here as to the main focus of the book. If you were paying any attention at all in the first book, you'll know where this is going. The Capital is pissed with Katniss, and President Snow (quite possibly the most incompetent public relations president since Stalin) has it in for Katniss & Co.

I'll avoid spoilers here, so I won't go into what that entails. Instead I'll just speak to the merits of the book, and the problems I have with it.

It's a fun read, there's no doubt about that in my mind. I enjoyed it, the characters and the events are all things that keep me interested. I sometimes balk at President Snow's ideas for punishment, but I guess he's just not that great at actual manipulation. Katniss is a decent narrator, though she does get a little annoying at times.

To be honest, the biggest problems I have with the book are two; first, like the Hunger Games, it takes a little while to get off the ground. It took me almost a week to get past the first 30% of the book, but once I got over that hump only about two days to finish it. The other problem I have with the series at large is Collins' actual writing ability. Yes, I know it's aimed at "young adults," but I think we're somewhat shortchanging them here if this is intentionally written down to them.

Collins has a pretty great imagination, I really enjoy the ideas she presents here and the overall story. It's just when you get into the actual writing that things become rather weak. Near the end of the book I thought of a completely different conclusion based on a simple sentence that could have easily been glossed over. "Wow, that's a really clever use of foreshadowing!" I thought, and read on only to find that it was just an accidental turn of a phrase that meant exactly what it was saying.

Then there is the end, which takes a lot of important information, wrapping up just about every loose story thread and explaining it in a brief one-paragraph summary. Don't tell me what has been happening, show me! There's a pretty big (though obvious) reveal that I would have loved to have Katniss describe in shock and wonder, instead of just lumping it in with a half dozen other "revelations" that seem rather boring when put down in such a brief synopsis.

There's just not very much depth to Collins'writing, and I think that the series would really benefit from a little more emphasis on the "adult" in "young adult." See Heinlein's YA books for what I mean.

Catching Fire is an entertaining read, no doubt in my mind about that, and worth the time it takes to actually pick up the pace. For someone who is interested in YA books at all, I certainly would recommend them, and I can see why they enjoy the popularity that they do.

Rating: 7/10

Amazing. Spider-Man?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tnxzJ0SSOw&w=560&h=315] The new trailer for the Amazing Spider-Man was released today, and for the most part, I think I'm loving it.

I've been told that I can be a bit obsessive when it comes to comic books. I read them pretty avidly when I was a kid, always getting my parents to buy me a couple whenever we went to the pharmacy/diner (no, I didn't grow up in the 1950s). Uncanny X-Men, Detective Comics, X-Force, and Amazing or Incredible Spider-Man were always instant purchases. Though to be honest, it wasn't until I got back into comics in highschool that I really started to appreciate Spider-Man and his strangely animal-themed rogues gallery.

There was a handful of years that I really didn't buy comics, but those "Dark Times" as I think of them seemed to have just compounded how obsessed I was with the medium. About halfway through highschool when I started reading them again, more out of curiositiy than anything else as to what had happened to Scott Summers and his band of merry mutants, I chased that rabbit down the hole and kept chasing it for years.

I don't even know how many comics I amassed in the time that the high point of my week was New Comics Wednesday (the day may have a different title where you live). I've tried cataloguing them several times, using different software suites for the job, but it was always a bigger job than I had anticipated and I soon found myself overwhelmed. All I can tell you was that I had a fifty-buck a week habit well into college, and everyone in my local Heroes & Fantasies comic book store knew me by name and knew what I wanted to read. I wasn't even one of the weird guys that hung around to talk about who would win in a fight between Wolverine and Batman. Maybe that endeared me to those that worked there, the fact that I could hang out and not be weird about my passion for comics.

Yes, this is the collection that is gathering dust at my parent's house.

And no, that's not all of it. That's just what I was motivated enough to catalog.

That stopped when I went cold turkey and stopped buying comics all together. I tried only getting a few issues for a while, but that never worked. The only way I could keep myself from spending every dime and nickel I had to my name on the pages of Brian Michael Bendis and his peers was to never set foot in that shop again. It's been years since I have, and I'm probably the wealthier for it (or at least less poor).

But again, I ramble. I wanted to talk about my passion to give you a sense of perspective on how much I care about the medium, the characters, and the translations to the big screen (and elsewhere). 

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGt-saFvkNk&w=560&h=315]

Comic books were pretty much my life, for a while. I lived and breathed the medium. Nowadays, not quit as much. Don't get me wrong,  I still read the latest company crossover or catch up on Ultimate Spider-Man whenever I get the chance on my iPad, but the Golden Age is over for me, I'm afraid.

Which is perhaps why I've been enjoying the latest line of Marvel movies, that began with Iron Man and seem to be culminating in some kind of impossible movie-crossover event of my dreams the Avengers (which I still can't believe is being directed by Joss Whedon). For years, I've talked with my friends about what exactly Marvel should do with their characters on the big screen. And one of the few things we could agree on was that they needed to create a shared universe that they could have crossovers in. And against all odds they seemed to have finally done that.

Unfortunately, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men still exist outside of that storied realm. Until that day when Tony Stark can call up Mr. Fantastic for advice on force field technology, or Peter Parker can go hang out with Kitty Pryde for an afternoon, those franchises will be walled off in an inferior corner of cinema. Finally going back to the title of the post (forgive me, I get sidetracked), I really really liked the new trailed for the upcoming Amazing Spider-Man film. It seems to have the right mix of comedy, drama, and superhero action/angst that a good Spider-Man film needs.

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed most of what Raimi did, especially at the time. Unfortunately, they don't really hold up in quality to the more recent superhero movies in quality. The costume is tacky as hell, Toby Maguire still sounds absolutely terrible as Peter Parker, and I don't even want to mention the third movie.

But this trailer seems to have pretty much everything I would like to see. Mechanical webshooters? Check. Relatively witty banter (for a teenager)? Check. Gwen Stacy? Check. And they finally got around to having the Lizard as the villain. The stars seem to be aligning.

Now, if only we could get Jonny Storm to drop in for lunch and get the X-Men to do something useful in the modern era, we'd be set.

Until all are one (and until we get a Moon Knight movie).

2012: January in Review the Final Chapter

And we arrive at the end, wherein I dig into what amounted to a rather eclectic portion of the month. We've got instructional, post-apocalypse sci-fi, pulp noir, post-apocalyptic young adult, and Star Wars. Let's get to it, shall we?

Writing a Novel with Scrivener by David Hewson

Writing a Novel with Scrivener was a Kindle exclusive that was offered in the Lending Library, which is a program Amazon offers to Prime customers that essentially lets them read a book for free a month. I am a pretty die hard Scrivener user, and have been for about four or five years now. I'd go into that further, but that seems to be the kind of thing I should save for later.

This little book is essentially one author's user case for the software. He details how he uses it in his own fiction writing, and what he thinks are the best ways to get the most out of it when writing a novel. And that really is all there is to it. It's well written, informative, and is pretty helpful with a lot of things that even after using the software for so long I didn't really know. Scrivener is like that, there's always something useful if you dig just a little bit deeper.

Hewson did a good job of writing something informative, but keeping it brief and interesting.

Rating: 7/10

Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson

I really like Star Wars. That's no secret, ask anyone. But I'm not really a huge reader of the Expanded Universe books. Back before the prequels, when old man Lucas refused to acknowledge them one way or another, it was mostly just the "Doomsday weapon of the week" kind of deal, where Luke and the gang had to run around the galaxy destroying one planet destroying gun or bomb or starfighter after another. Then the Prequels happened, and it was all about the Jedi, and how awesome they are with the help of their clone soldiers. Super fun!

I hate most of that. So you may be able to see why I enjoyed the Republic Commandobooks so much. Written by Karen Traviss, a former war reporter who readily admits to not being a Star Wars fan in the first place. In fact, after being offered the job to write some tie-in novels she said she did a lot of research and found the Jedi to be a lot of jerks for the most part.

I'm taking a long time to explain why I love this series, but bear with me. Her task was to write a series of novels following a group of the Clone Commandos that are created in Episode II, Attack of the Clones. So she takes that concept and runs with it. The Clones are trained/raised by a badass Mandalorian (think Boba Fett, or, sigh, his father Jango) who treats them like his own sons and makes them realize that they're a literal slave army, created for the sole purpose of fighting and dying for the Republic with no choice in the matter.

When the war breaks out in the movie/books, the Jedi are all made officers (and Generals for the most part), not because they're trained to be such, but because they can do magic! And not only are they cool with these slave soldiers, most don't even acknowledge there being a problem. So the Jedi are dicks, essentially.

And I've gone on a long time without even talking about this book. Okay, back on track. This is the fifth book in the series (or the first in a second series if you want to get technical), and features the same characters that we have followed for the previous four. It takes place at the dawn of the Empire, with several of the main characters having been forced to join the Imperial 501st regiment, or the Vader's Fist, tasked with hunting down and killing the remaining Jedi.

Unfortunately, the book is better conceptually than in actual practice. There is little in a whole story arc, rather it feels like the first part in a much larger arc. It almost feels like she had a whole large story plotted out, then as she wrote it her editor told her to stop at a certain page, and to save the rest for the next book. Which would be fine, except for Old Man Lucas has decided that the books are now non-canonical, effectively ending the series.

I could go on, trust me, on how much Lucas has screwed up Star Wars over the years, but I'll quit after going on at length already. Traviss is the best of the EU writers, and it's too bad that the last of her books in this pretty great series is going to be the worst of them all.

Rating: 7/10