coprime

I saw Dark Phoenix with Husband today, and we both enjoyed it! It was much better than X3, which is not exactly a high bar to pass but an important one.

( Cut for Spoilers )

(I cut for spoilers nearly always because I don't care about spoilers but that means I'm not always great at deciding what's a spoiler. And because I know other people do care lots, I prefer to err on the side of over-cutting. This policy also gives me the added bonus of not needing to think about what is or is not a spoiler, everything goes under the cut.)

Hah, I think Ralph Breaks the Internet is the...third? maybe? movie I have seen in theaters this year. I saw Pom Poko with a friend, which was a trip, and Mary and the Witch's Flower with the same friend. Maybe we saw one other film together? Either way, my not-seeing-films-in-theaters-regularly has kept an important piece of information from me: my preferred movie theater, in addition to the seats being reclining La-Z-Boy loveseats, has heated seats. It was glorious.

Anywho, my thoughts on Ralph, in no particular order:

( Cut for Spoilers )

I also finally saw Black Panther recently! It was also very good! I don't really have any thoughts about other than it was neat and I'd like to watch more movies like it.

I once again attended Gen Con with the BF and played lots of new games!

( <strike>Seven</strike> Nine Games Behind the Cut )

Once again, lots of new-to-me games played that I really enjoyed.

Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium is a JRPG with a science fiction setting that is totally awesome. I loved it so much! And I played it all by myself too.

So I loved it partially for the setting, which has androids and space travel and environment control centers and all sorts of creepy monsters that looked like they escaped from an evil scientist's lab. I feel like science fiction backdrops are rare in RPGs, so I really enjoy that aspect whenever it's present.

And I loved it partially for the characters. Alys is my favorite type of RPG character: badass woman who's good at hitting things, takes no shit, and does it all with a twinkle in her eye. I also came out of the game shipping Demi/Wren and shipping them hard. (Demi's sprite is so cute! She is noticeably shorter than everyone else, and her walking animation is consequently much faster.) All I want is for them to build little helper robot babies together, but there is a sad dearth of readable PSIV fanfic on the internet.

The game has a lot of references to the first two games in the series (but not the third because that one doesn't quite fit with its siblings), which is pretty cool. It really gives the game a sense of continuity and history and weight that I enjoyed, even though I know I missed a lot. Everything I did get was because I watched a tool-assisted speedrun of Phantasy Star. (And I subsequently fell in love with Alis--female main character is set on her quest because she wants revenge for her dead brother--and want to play Phantasy Star sooooo bad. Except the TAS is super grindy, so I don't want to imagine how much worse the regular game would be.)

The gameplay has a couple nifty aspects. The biggest one is that you can set up macros for what you want your party to do, and it makes the dungeons so much simpler. I thought that was pretty cool! You can also do combo attacks, but I managed to go through the entire game without managing to do one accidentally and so did not learn about this aspect until I finished and the BF told me. On the other hand, the game was still totally beatable without the combos, so missing out on the combos didn't affect the game at all for me. I found the spell and technique names to be inscrutable. (Tandle? Warla? Brose? What?) But then I made a simple cheat sheet, and that was no longer a problem. I had to grind for about two or three hours at one point, but that was painless to do with the help of picture-in-picture. And I was happy that was all the grinding I had to do. (Other people may have to do more because other people will probably get lost wandering around less than I did.)

My only quibbles with the game are minor. You have to ask an NPC to wax rhapsodic about the measurements of Alys, the Eight-Stroke Warrior, in order to advance the plot. Ugh. Whenever Rika physically attacks enemies, you get a <sarcasm>lovely</sarcasm> ass shot to go with it. The inventory system really needs a way to automatically sort it because as is, everything gets jumbled together and it's difficult to remember/find what you have. The quibbles especially look minor when compared to all the rest that is awesome in this game.

Science fiction. An exciting conclusion to the series. Alys. Demi and Wren and Rune and Raja and everyone else. One creepy dungeon that grossed me out every time I walked through a door. Macros. A spaceship. Ataraxia. The most awesome healer in RPG-dom who is fond of bad jokes and also a dude. Phantasy Star IV really does have a lot of things going for it.

The impetus for my video game playing revolution came from watching the BF play games for my entertainment. I want to give my impressions of the game he played for me, but it's been long enough for these games that I don't remember much. So, quick hits.

Cave Story is a really cute platformer where you play as an amnesiac robot who makes friends with some bunny people and go on a quest. The story is entertaining and fun and there are multiple endings. I adored the graphics; all the sprites are super cute so I really enjoyed watching the BF play. The platforming elements seemed well done to my untrained eye: some tricky bits but nothing impossibly hard assuming you can play platformers, with the exception of the requisite platformer hell bonus level.

An Untitled Story is another cute platformer where you start out as an egg exploring your world. As you explore, you gain new abilities allowing you to explore previously inaccessible areas. Gradually you also discover a story. The graphics all look like they were drawn in MSPaint but have a surprising amount of character for their simplicity. The exploration elements are a lot of fun. There are lots of different areas, each with its own distinct feel, and the areas all have reasons to revisit them multiple times because there's so much in each one to explore and discover. By the time the plot finally kicks in, it adds this amazingly menacing and suspenseful air to everything you do. I could never ever manage to play this game on my own, but I was enthralled with it from the start.

La Mulana is also a platformer, this one done by fans of the Sony MSX computer. You play an archeologist exploring an ancient temple and discovering its secrets. In a lot of ways, La Mulana is similar to An Untitled Story: both are non-linear, exploratory platforms with a slow-developing plot. However La Mulana delights in tricking the player, and hardly anything is what it seems. I found the graphics to be pretty meh. They're well done, but I don't respond to them. My biggest problem with La Mulana is that the player ends up traveling in circles a lot trying to find the new area or unlock a talent or otherwise move things along. (This feeling is not helped by how tricksy the game and its puzzles are.) People who are fans of Metroid and Castlevania (a.k.a. the game's main audience) probably think of this as a feature, but it makes for boring watching. The plot was interesting and I enjoyed watching when stuff was moving along, just there were a lot of times when stuff wasn't moving along.

Super Meat Boy is a platformer where you're constantly trying to rescue your kidnapped girlfriend. Unlike the previous three games, Super Meat Boy does not have an involved plot. But the levels are generally short enough that watching the BF try multiple times was fun - yay, he made it past this tricky bit! oh, he just barely missed this other bit! - rather than sleep inducing. This is very much a platformer designed for platformer nerds. As a reward for completing a level, you get to see a video of all your tries at once, which was my favorite bit. The graphics are a weird combination of gory and cute, and that probably goes a long way to explaining why I was less bored by this than La Mulana.

In conclusion: The BF really likes platformers, and I really like cute graphics.

Stretch yourself a little and try something new. Go play in a new fandom or with a new pairing. Try working in a new medium. Or consume different fanworks. Give that new fandom a go. Listen to a podfic or watch some vids if you haven’t before. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

This one was tough to think of something to do! I read pretty widely and capriciously, so stretching my fic-reading boundaries was out. I thought maybe I'd try recording a short podfic before remembering that I really don't like listening to my own voice. In the end, I stuck Pokémon White in my DS and started playing my first Pokémon game.

I bought my DS used, and it came with several Pokémon games (Pearl, HeartGold, and White) that I have been side-eyeing for the past month and a half. I had no clue whether I would like playing Pokémon or not. On the one hand, lots of cute things to collect! I like cute things! (They are possibly my favorite part of video games.) On the other hand, I have a couple friends who are way more into Pokémon than I will ever be who put me off the series. And a third friend scoffed at me when I told her I might play one of the games.

But I'm about two hours into it and thoroughly enjoying myself. I have a fluffly little otter as my main pokémon! So far I have been able to navigate the menus and win battles with relative ease, so I am doing pretty good skill-wise I think. And it is free to stay at the inn! I do like that. I only have four pokémons on my team so far, so I expect things will get slightly more complicated after I capture my seventh pokémon. But yes, I have enjoying what I've played of Pokémon White and am glad I didn't wait for months on end like I probably would have without this challenge spurring me on.

Mother 3 is the third game in the Mother/Earthbound series and was never released outside of Japan. There is however a very well-done fan translation available on the internet. I enjoyed this game, although I let the BF do most of the battles. (I probably actually played around a quarter to a third of the game and played armchair quarterback for the rest of it.)

The Mother series has a neat battle system where your health scrolls down when you get hit (instead of being immediately gone) so if you're fast enough, you can heal characters before they die. I...was not fast enough, even if I am getting better at menu interaction in games. Mother 3 introduces a hit system where, if you can time your attacks to the beat of the battle music, you can get up to sixteen hits in a row. It's a nice way of making it so that the non-magic characters can also do significant damage.

For the first couple chapters, you do a lot of character switching, which is kind of fun (new characters! new perspectives! new things to do!) and kind of annoying (so-and-so was finally leveled enough to be decent!). You also spend a fair amount of time in the beginning with just one playable character and maybe an NPC, and the battles therefore feel more reactive than my preference.

Plot-wise, the game was interesting. The main themes are the perils of consumerism and dealing with the loss of family members. (Between the themes, the ending, and the genderqueer Magypsies, I am unsurprised that Mother 3 never got an official English release.) The game did a good job of making it so that wandering around the main character's hometown for the umpteenth time didn't feel like the umpteenth retread. Characters said new things, different stuff was happening, and the town changed as the plot progressed. Having watched the BF play through enough games where you just go in circles unlocking one tiny, new spot at a time (La Mulana and I Wanna Be the Guy, I am looking at you), I am always thankful when games make revisiting places seem new.

( I have spoilery thoughts about the ending. ) I do recommend it if you're the sort of person who likes RPGs.

I really enjoyed playing this game! Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals is actually a prequel to Lufia & the Fortress of Doom, and the intro to Lufia & the Fortress of Doom is the end boss battle of Lufia 2. According to both the BF and the internet, Lufia 2 is easily the best game in the series.

The plot is fairly standard with some "chosen heroes" having to fight a rising darkness from taking over the world and destroying everything, but it's enjoyable enough. ( Generic spoilers for the ending ) However what was really fun for me was the gameplay in the dungeons.

( A Let's Play video showing part of the beginning of the game )

In the dungeons, the monsters all move according to a defined pattern (different patterns for different monsters) and only move when you move. No random encounters! Yes! There are random encounters when you walk across the map, but you really don't spend much time walking around the map unless you can't figure out where you're supposed to go. I love that you can avoid most monster fights if you're smart and careful.

And the even more awesome thing about the dungeons is you have to solve puzzles in order complete them! I can do puzzles! And puzzles are much more interesting to me than just fighting monsters and making sure you've walked everywhere.

Originally the BF played and I watched, except he more did the puzzles than solved them as he'd already played through the game a couple times. But that was boring to watch because he "solved" everything too quickly for me to try solving anything myself. So I convinced him to let me play instead, and that was a lot more fun, haha. And later in the game, we collaborated on the tougher puzzles. Good times, lots of fun!

This was the first RPG I've ever successfully played, and I would recommend it especially to people who like puzzles.

I convinced my boyfriend to see the Disney documentary Oceans with me on Thursday. I loved it, although given that it was about marine creatures, it would have had to work hard to get me to not like it. Pierce Brosnan surprised me by being quite an enjoyable narrator; he had a nice, soothing voice that you could listen to without being distracted from the amazing images on screen.

The actual words of the narration, on the other hand, were odd. There was very little factual information, and instead there were a lot of romantic ideas about the ocean and life in it. For example, at one point Brosnan starts going on about how the sea has tried every trick of life -- every color, every face, every look -- and they show this neat little fish with fans for pelvic fins. I don't recognize him offhand, but I can't look him up at home because he's never named in the narration. Most of the facts were along the lines of "the blue whale is half a city block long but eats tiny, tiny krill" and "otters use rocks as tools to open shellfish to eat." Which is fine, I guess, but not very deep.

The visuals were amazing however. Lots of neat animals, lots of close-ups and sweeping vistas. I kept going "oooh!" and "ahh!" throughout at just about everything they showed onscreen. They tried to show a bit of everything -- sea mammals, sea birds, sharks, fish, reefs, etc. -- and did a pretty good job of it. The one thing lacking was any sort of deep sea creatures, which is sad because they're often super interesting due to the extreme environment they live in. Ultimately, I think this documentary is the equivalent of a coffee table book: it's very pretty to look at, but it's a bit light on substance.

I think the xkcd comic from that day manages to sum up the driving point of the movie in one panel while also being pretty to look at.

I want the Trilogy bookcase so bad. Look how geometric and orderly it is! Sadly, I cannot afford it, and even if I could I have no place to put it. I think the Platzhalter bookcase is cool idea well-executed. It was my favorite bookcase until I saw the Trilogy one.

Uncharted Territory - Connie Willis
For the longest time, whenever I went into a bookstore, I had to remind myself that it was a bad idea to start collecting everything by an author when I'd only read one thing of hers, even if I had really enjoyed it. And that I already had two other novels of hers sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. So I finally decided to actually read one of those two novels, and I picked Uncharted Territory (rather than Lincoln's Dreams) because the premise sounded fun -- hijinks and adventures! exploration! needlessly ridiculous bureaucratic red tape! a socioexozoologist who specializes in sex! -- and it was short.

And I did really enjoy it until the end because nothing had changed in the end. Fin and Carson are the same at the end of the story as they were in the beginning. I would have been happy even if the end change had just been mental or if they'd decided that they didn't want to be in a relationship. Instead, I finished and was left with the impression that all the events in the book might as well have not happened for all the impact they had on Fin and Carson. Which is not what I would call a satisfying ending.

The Drakon #3: Queen of Dragons - Shana Abé
Ohh, I wanted to like this book. It's a historical romance about a race of dragon/human shapeshifters, and glenraven read and thought I'd like the first Drakon book. I picked up the third Drakon book first, but I thought I'd be okay because I've found that most romance series can be read out of order so long as you don't mind not knowing all the details when couples from previous books pop up. But it turns out this approach doesn't work so much for this series because when the hero from a previous book popped up, he was doing secretive, important-to-the-plot things and not a one of them was explained. I was left thoroughly confused, right in the middle of the final action scene.

I also had an issue with the fact that the entire action plot was just a set-up for the next book and nothing actually gets resolved. No, seriously, I very nearly threw the book across the room I was so frustrated with the ending. The book ends with ( spoilers if you care )

And then I had a lot of issues with the romance aspect of the novel. Partially, it's because I'm a bit sick of every shapeshifter/demon/animal hybrid/etc. having some sort of "animal instinct" where they must mate for life with one specific person and if that person isn't overly enthusiastic about them, then they just keep pursuing the person despite the other's wishes because their instinct tells them differently. It's very popular in paranormal romance, which is mostly what I read. And I don't like it because it dehumanizes the couple for me. There's always lots of talk about mates and alphas and such, and it's done regardless of whether our hero and heroine are dragon-shapeshifters, psychics, vampires, some form of were-. I can understand it more with the weres/shapeshifters, but why with other paranormal characters? Why can't the hero and heroine just fall head-over-heels for each other like normal, human romance couples do?

I will give Abé credit for doing a good job of integrating the different forms of the Drakon so that they all seemed equally natural. Kim and Mari were appreciative of each other and had chemistry no matter their form, and it never read weird for me. (Although -- and I know I'm harping -- I wold have expected dragon instincts to tend more towards a solitary existence rather than a pack existence.) But then halfway through the novel Kim did something where, if I had been Mari and had gone through what she'd gone through with her previous husband, I would not be able to trust him again without some serious work on his part.

I never got the emotional payoff of them rebuilding their trust however because Abé (and therefore Mari) didn't see what happened as that much of an issue as I did. So Kim made extra special sure not to do what he did again, and Mari had no doubts or hesitance at all stemming from Kim's actions. Sure, she still didn't want to end up in the same situation as when she'd been married before, but that was because she was against getting remarried in general. She never once thought "I don't want to get married, and especially not to Kim because he treated me like my former husband did (albeit by accident)."

Oh, and then there's Kim, who (along with the rest of his village) spends nearly the entire book acting like Mari and he are already married because years before he met her, he and the village council decided he should marry her for political reasons. And then when Kim and Mari finally meet, bam! they're married in the eyes of everyone except Mari, who keeps saying that no way no how is she going to get married again. Kim doesn't ever physically force himself on Mari, but it's incredibly annoying to have the hero saying that he doesn't care about the heroine's wishes on the matter of her marital status, he's decided they are and that's that.

Between my numerous frustrations with the romance plot and the wash-out that was the ending of the action plot, I was very dissatisfied with this book, and I don't think I'll read any more of this series. I might be willing to read one of her other novels if it was recommended to me by someone I know, but that's it.

ETA: glenraven has informed me that this is the really sucktacular book of the series and that the two before it are better. So maybe I'll read them at some later date.

Warrior - Marie Brennan
I have nothing bad to say about this one! Haha, finally my first book of the new year that I just out-and-out enjoyed. It was fun and interesting fantasy, and if I had the sequel I'd probably be reading it. I really like both Mirage and Miryo, and it was a nice change of pace to read a fantasy novel without any romance in it.