Batman: Year One (1987)

I recently saw the animated version of Frank Miller’s Year One of Batman, which I thought was nice adaptation and really captured the gist and the tone of the comic. But after reading the Deluxe version of the comic (I’ve forgotten how often and in how many versions I’ve read the comic so far), I have to say, while the movie was nice, the comic is stellar. There’s just something about Mazzucchelli art that’s hard to copy. Sure, it can be adapted to animation, but when compared to the comic itself the movie looks like a shallow copy.

It’s not just the grittiness and darkness, I’ve long outgrown that phase (at least I think), but how he manages to give everything a vibe of realness without making the whole superhero conceits look ridiculous is magnificent. There are elements grafted wholesale from the real world and yet Gotham still looks like a real city in its own right, not the disturbing spires of Tim Burton’s Gotham, but believable city that is both rundown and vibrant with life at the same time.

And there’s the second half of the duo. It’s easy to forget after Miller’s more recent outpourings, that he has been good. Great even. And Year One is Miller at his height. It’s character study of two people, told in turns via a first person perspective. Both characters have distinctive voices, both appear human with strengths and weaknesses and yet Miller manages to capture Jim Gordon and Batman perfectly. I wish Miller could still write like that, but it appears the man is gone. But thankfully his best creations will always remain.

Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends (2004-2009)

What can you say about a six season show that seemingly jumped the shark around the end of the second season. That it wasn’t just for you or that you just grew tired of the entire show. I’m talking about Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, which has a cool concept, a gang of likable characters and yet, with each new season, I liked it less and less. That I actually watched it all to the end was for the few episodes each season that still worked. And each episode with Guu or Cheese. But mostly, it was a show that squandered its potential.

The basic concept, a foster home for imaginary beings, made up by kids and abandoned once they grow older, gives ample room for a variety of stories. Add to that a house that seems like the pipe dream of any adventurous kid, with thousands different rooms and hallways and stairs that evoke Gothic architecture, but with a playful bent. And yet all the episodes were about Bloo (the imaginary friend of Mac) becoming more flanderized as the series went on. For a show that should have been about exploring the imaginary creatures we dream up as kids and the adventures we had with them, instead it became a show about the boring shenanigans of one assholish imaginary friend.

But since that direction was there from the start, it’s probably more a case of a show that just went on a different path than I hoped. Though toward the end of the fourth season the show completely got off-rails, as if everyone involved became really tired of making the show. Whereupon up to that point the show was merely not fulfilling its potential, from this point on it was failing to be anything good at all.

Armalyte PC (2010)

I had considered buying Armalyte PC in the past, but something about the art put me off. Thanks to RGCD I got to play the game anyway and what I expected turned out to be true. Armalyte PC is a conversion of an old C64 shmup where instead of glorious pixel graphics they went with what I assume are render-graphics, which to tell the true look absolutely horrible. With pixel graphics everything looks cohesive, with these render-objects not so much. I get just nightmares from the 90ties when everyone suddenly discovered rendering.

As for the rest of the game: the sound is great (+), the ship moves far too sluggish (-) and the gameplay seems to be your standard shmup, nothing you haven’t seen elsewhere, but not too bad either (+/-). I haven’t played too far, because of the graphics and how slow your ship is, but if you can stand that, its probably not the worst shmup you’ll ever play, though not one of the good ones by far either.

Guxt (2007)

Size and length of a game is often measured in time played, though Guxt brought home just how wonky such a measuring method is. I’ve played to the end of the third level of this five-level shmup, but needed actually one hour to get even so far. And these levels are small, like 3 minutes at most if you manage them perfectly. Some games generate gameplay by an endless cavalcade of content, others by racking up difficulty so high that you’ll die a thousands times before getting forward. It’s a viable approach to extend play time, though I prefer save points, a health bar and some other accommodations for less skilled players.

If the game wasn’t that good, I probably would have given up after dying countless times in the first level (I’m just not good at shmups, that’s why I love emulators and save stats). Guxt shows the same level of polish Pixel has applied to his other two big games (Cave Story and Ikachan). Controls are perfect, the pixel graphics are damn beautiful and the game is just pure fun to play. If it wasn’t so hard, I probably would even try to beat it. But I have only so much patience with seeing the same level again and again. That’s why I prefer a lower difficulty and a higher number of levels. It might be not the hardcore experience some crave, but at least more players will actually see most of the content (thankfully there are also youtube playthroughs).

Appy 1000mg (2011)

Appy 1000mg is another Ludum Dare entry by Sébastien Bénard (I spoke about his entry Time Pygmy here). It’s a mini-platformer that tells a short story that mainly goes for a shock effect. The main gimmick is that you start out in happy land, while occasionally flashing back to a disturbing vision of the world. When you take your medicine, it’s back to happy land, but when you’re back in horror land, fluffy creatures becomes mad suicide bombers. Mostly you explore a bit, collect a few items and get to the end of the level and the game. The game engine and the controls are good, but there’s just not much gameplay to this game and the shock effects barely register with a jaded modern audience. Nice try though.

2XS (1992)

I find it always much harder to praise something, than to pin down when something doesn’t work. 2XS is one of those, one of the few novels I read more than once or twice in my life, which is exceedingly rare. It’s a sort of hard-boiled detective fiction set in the shadowrun universe by author Nigel Findley. And since it’s sitting at the crossroads of nostalgia, a highly addictive setting and detective fiction, I’m not always sure what element exactly makes me like it so much.

On a recent re-read I realized that the main character is actually less hard-boiled and more soft-boiled than I remembered him. He’s not weak, but he has a tendency to overanalyze his emotional landscape and the people around him, mostly seeing the pain, loss and misery. Normally I would dismiss him as emo, get annoyed with his weakness, but his personal voyage seems to hit so many notes that reminded me of myself at various phases in life, that despite his emo-ness I can empathize and even channel my own inner emo (though most of the time I try to kill that sucker).

There’s an authenticity to Findley’s description of Dirk Montgomery that smells of the real thing, as if he had imbued the character with a little more of his own self than he planned to do. I’ve read other novels by Findley and while most of them are good fare, none of them have the same effect.

Though, it’s not just the characterization I like. Findley had the whole feel and look of the shadowrun universe pinned down. A short remark about something awakened crawling out of a lake, the succinct and yet textured descriptions of the surroundings, Findley didn’t just reproduce the setting with words, he gave it life (not for nothing he wrote some of the best early rule books for the shadowrun RPG).

Also, he was one of the few writers who managed the balance act between technology and magic. 2XS took one element (the BTL-concept), infused it with some clever speculations about the next development stage, ideas you could have found in any hard SF novel, and then fused it with a magic-related plotline to make it all work marvelously. Most shadowrun writers handled all the advanced tech more like fixed, unchanging gadgets, than actually thinking about the technology itself, how it actually worked and what would come next.

I’ve read 2XS the first time when I was, I think, 15 or 16 and was blown away. Now nearly two decades later, I’m still feeling the same way. The book sucks me in and doesn’t let me go. Actually, I think I like the book even more, after having lived a bit and seeing how I can relate even more.

Knight ‘n’ Grail (2009)

While I kind of get the idea why some people still make games for dead platforms (either because it’s a nice challenge or an aesthetic ideal), I think it’s unfortunate since when once in a while a good game actually comes out, those playing it are mostly enthusiasts for the platform and the few others who stumbled upon the game and are willing to fiddle around with emulators. Not many, I gather.

Point in case Knight ‘n’ Grail, which is a metrovania platformer for the C64 which is thankfully not only available in disk format, but also as a digital download (and at the low price of ca. 3€ it’s pretty much a steal). The game isn’t perfect, the boss enemies are too easy, you either get music or sound, but not both at the same time and sometimes the controls can be a bit wonky (not to the extend that they stop you from playing, but there’s definitely room for improvement).

All that said, the game sports beautiful sprite graphics of the kind you rarely see these days, the gameplay follows proven paths (map, double jump, different weapons and armors) and has some clever tactical touches. Your chosen elemental armor either stops damage from enemy attacks (wind, fire, ice, etc.) or from touching the enemy itself, but not always both when the element of the attack and of the enemy are different. Size-wise, it’s medium. Depending on how good you are you can clear the entire castle in under 3 hours, but those are really fun hours.

All in all, if you like metrovanias and dig a beautiful looking old-school game, I would definitely recommend it.

PS.: if you’re like me and never touched a C64 emulator before, I would recommend playing the game with the CCS64 (Vice hang up on me). When you start the game and can’t get anything to work apart from using SPACE to see the map, go to input and enter:

Control Port 2 = Joystick
Node = Key-Set 2

Then you can use Right-CTRL, SPACE and the NUM-Block. Furthermore, if you want to use a game pad, use JoyToKey.

Shadowboxer (1997)

Whereupon The Terminus Experiment was an awful book through and through, Shadowboxer is merely a big disappointment. It has two big flaws, that completely made me go sour on it, despite showing many strengths. What Shadowboxer had was well written and intriguing characters, who were the usual assortment of Shadowrunners from all walks of life, and a story that took place in a rather fresh corner of the Shadowrun world (Miami). The plot was pretty typical fare, but fun nonetheless and involved pirates, so a good mix of the conventional and the original. And the overall writing sucked you in easily.

So, if it had all that, why did the book fail. First reason, Pollotta killed off the main viewpoint character of the book. This felt completely gimmicky (look what I did, I defied reader expectations by killing off the main character) and counterproductive (I wanted to read Two Bears story, not that of his runner team after his death). Furthermore, Shadowboxer is the only Shadowrun novel that had a dwarf as the main character, one who I felt was strong as a character in his own right and not just as a token dwarf. And then Pollotta went and killed him. Really irked me.

But that’s not the worst thing about Shadowboxer. That was the completely WTF-ending. It could be explained away as just another gimmick (he did it again, defied reader expectations), but honestly this felt more like Pollotta had written himself into a corner and just shoddily threw something together. After infiltrating a deep sea base of the enemy, the Shadowrunners ended up in a situation where they couldn’t escape alive after all. So what did they do? They joined the bad guys. At least a last stand with all of them dying I could have taken. But this felt like a complete cop-out.

That said, the writing is good and I would recommend the book if it weren’t for the ending and killing Two Bears early on.

The Terminus Experiment (1999)

Let’s talk about the worst of the English Shadowrun novels. There are actually worse German only ones, but let’s rather not talk about them. The Terminus Experiment is about a vampire conspiracy who aims at nothing less than taking over the world (though the small scale goal in the book is to develop a new strain of the common HMHVVirus). A vampire conspiracy isn’t a particularly bad idea, conspiracies are one of the driving factors of Shadowrun-metaplot and could work very well all things considered. But (big but), TTE basically claims that becoming a vampire makes you evil. Not just prone to following the urges of those infected with the HMHVVirus, but taking on the evil alignment of the DND-universe.

That’s just wrong. The whole idea that entire races or types of creatures are evil is ludicrous at best. Thankfully, Shadowrun has always handled morality more ambiguous, not as a dimension of what you are, but of the decisions you make. And that is my big beef with the book, the boyfriend of the main character becomes a vampire, turns evil, she doesn’t believe it at first, then comes into her role as vampire-killer and stops him for good, having learned that only a dead vampire is a good vampire.

This might work in a different setting, but in Shadowrun it just feels wrong. Instead of the multiple shades of gray, all you get is a simple black and white tale. To add insult to injury is that most of the book is one long action sequence where the shadowrunners take out countless modified vampires in some hidden base. While I like action in Shadowrun, I don’t want an SR novel to be only action with nothing much else to it.

Boring, unconvincing characterization, lacking any subtlety, managing to mess up an idea that shouldn’t be hard to do right and also pretty sub par writing all around. Don’t read this, it’s shit.

The Forever Drug (1999)

Two of the worst ways to end a narrative is either with a deus ex machina or with the annoying it was all a dream approach. The Forever Drug introduced me to another way to end a story that manages to make me feel like everything that happened in the novel was entirely pointless. Basically, the main character has been made to forget the entirety of the last few days (the entire story of the book).

Why is that so annoying? When I read a story, I don’t want an ending that is basically ha ha, fooled you. Resetting the character at the end of the story to how he was at the beginning, with none of the events having an effect on him whatsoever is exactly what will do something like that. I don’t need life-changing events taking place, but at least I want to feel like the character I’ve read about has something happened to him. Here, I felt cheated out of everything.

Also, the main characters was the most wishy-washy werewolf I’ve read in a long time. They don’t need to be all doom and gloom, but a little backbone or at least some bite would be nice.