I thought about putting this up for the first, but I didn’t feel that was auspicious given the day. April is finally here and I’ve already begun writing The Prodigal Emperor. Here in April I’ve got a busy schedule for writing: I’ve got to finish The Prodigal Emperor (Book 3 of The Shadow Space Chronicles), I’ve got to finish the outline for two books due to publishers later this year, outline and do a cover for Renegades: Out of the Cold, and hopefully get some writing done on that as well.
I’m starting to hear back from my alpha readers about Wrath of the Usurper (Eoriel Saga Book II) and while I’ve got some editing to do, it is looking to be on track for release in early June. I hope to have the cover for Wrath of the Usurper from the artist later this month as well.
In other news, I’ll be at Starfest in Denver, Colorado on April 17-19, moderating a couple panels with more details to come. That’s all for now and thanks for reading.
A new review for Echo of the High Kings and an update on my schedule for March.
Author JP Wilder has a book review of Echo of the High Kings up on his blog here. JP has some awesome books available in both epic fantasy and contemporary fantasy genres, so I recommend looking at those, he’s got some good stuff there at his website.
As for March, I’m happy to announce that I’m doing editing on Wrath of the Usurper, outlining the sequel to Fenris Unchained, and starting writing on The Prodigal Emperor. I’ve also opened a Twitter account. So if you want to see updates from me on that forum, you can follow me there under KalSpriggs. It’s another busy month for me, as you can imagine. Book sales for Fenris
Fenris Unchained by Kal Spriggs
Unchained are very good and I’m excited to say that I’ll be doing more books with Henchman Press as a result, starting with the previously mentioned sequel to Fenris Unchained. If you haven’t bought Fenris Unchained, you can find it here on Amazon, here on Smashwords, and coming soon to Barnes and Noble. Fenris Unchained is currently on Amazon’s top 100 for Military SF and also for Space Opera, it’s a fast, exciting story and writing it was a lot of fun for me.
March is also my last month drawing pay in the US Army as an active duty officer and as yet, I’m still looking for a day job. So, if you’re thinking: “How can I make certain this nice author keeps a roof over his head and putting food on the table so he can write more books?” The answer is: please tell your friends about my books. The money I earn from writing definitely helps to keep a roof over my family’s heads, so if you’ve been putting off writing a review or telling a friend, please get the word out. Reviews help and word of mouth really helps. For that matter, leave reviews for all your favorite authors on Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes and Noble or wherever you read. Every review helps, believe me, it’s become essential to reaching new readers. I don’t write for the money, but right now, the money makes it possible for me to write.
Kingsman: The Secret Service is, in many ways, a throwback to the spy movies of old. It doesn’t hesitate to be self-referential, with references to over-the-top maniacal villains, bizarre henchmen, and suave and sophisticated spies. All the same, the action and violence are modern, with raw violence and and tightly choreographed fight sequences that flow together in a fashion that’s fun to watch, absurdly superhuman, and designed to make you laugh just as much as some of the one liners.
So why am I reviewing it when I normally review only science fiction or fantasy movies? Well, I had a few extra minutes and I think some of the science and much of the plot can fit into the science fiction and fantasy realms. It’s a fun, exciting, movie, with a couple of genuinely emotional scenes and a lot of chuckle-worthy one-liners and sequences. What it isn’t is a movie that you can come away from with anything deeper than that. If you try to make sense of some of the twists and turns, you’ll just give yourself a headache.
The basic premise is easy enough to follow, self-made billionaire and philanthropist turns villainous and has a twisted and convoluted plot to achieve his goals. The Kingsmen, spies who answer only to themselves, lose a member and must replace him. The story then follows Eggsy, who is recruited into their training program by one of the spies who worked with his deceased father. I won’t go into further details to save on spoilers, but I will say that Eggsy’s outfit drove me nuts, a sure sign that I’m getting old. Some part of me just wanted to rip the flat-brimmed ball cap off his head, much less tell him to tie his shoes. Still, by the end of it, Eggsy has completed his transformation and become someone who is a true gentleman as they said earlier in the movie: “A true gentleman is not better than others, he is better than the man he once was.” While that bit of contemplation is about as deep as the movie goes, it was an interesting shift as his character developed throughout the movie, until he finally stood on his own.
This movie’s action sequences are not, by any measure, tame. Thankfully it doesn’t go the route of many current action films based off comic books (this one is as well, if you read those), and they don’t use too much CGI blood. What they do have is a lot of it as well as a lot of violence. In the opening bit the exotic hench-woman bifurcates a man and about a half dozen people are brutally killed. There is one sequence, in particular where people are shot, stabbed, impaled, bludgeoned to death, impaled some more, and well… you get the idea. The exploding heads sprinkled throughout just add that extra bit of shock factor, I suppose. Even so, it is tremendously entertaining and you aren’t left feeling much sympathy for those who get murdered. Especially in the case of those whose heads do, indeed, explode.
All in all, I’d recommend seeing the movie as a fun night out. It’s not, by any stretch, a profound or deep movie, but it’s a lot of fun and it doesn’t hesitate to poke fun at itself, which is probably why it works so well.
With part 1 of this review, I kept it as spoiler free as I could. However, I think the movie warrants a bit deeper look, both from the perspective of what they did right and also from all the stuff they got very, very wrong.
Starting off… the plot was about as easy to follow as a bucket of marbles thrown into the air. The basic premise was easy enough: Jupiter is the heir to vast wealth to include the Earth and all its inhabitants. The people who want that wealth want to either kill her or control her. Simple, right? But Jupiter isn’t just the heir, she is the person who wrote up that will. According to the (twisted) logic that genetics make someone royal, since she has the same genetics as the royal who wrote the will, she is that person. Which bogs down in any number of ways, to include the basic premise that they seeded Earth to produce genetic variance (IE, to prevent the same genetics from coming up and causing the problems they had with clones). On top of that, several characters comment how her actions, behaviors, even word choices, are so similar to the person that they knew some endless centuries ago. It seems like they wanted some pseudoscience way to say reincarnate or reborn without, well, you know, actually saying something like that. Saying that someone’s behavior, attitude, word choice (conveniently these super-advanced humans all speak english and have had no lingual drift over millennium), and all the rest are all entirely dependent upon genetics is not only doing a disservice to the concept of free will, but is patiently false.
Going on from there, the original heirs, Jupiter’s children, but not this Jupiter, it’s the other one who died long ago, all have their own plots going. We see early on with Balem (best villain in the movie, probably some of the best acting in general), wants to kill his mother (again!), to prevent her from ascending and claiming Earth. Titus pretends to want to stop the trade in the anti-aging drugs, but actually wants to marry Jupiter (his mother, ew), and then kill her to take her claim to Earth. Kalique the lone daughter, has some rather more bizarre plot wherein she subverts Balem’s bounty hunters, imprisons Jupiter, tells her how she wants to be friends, and then promptly disappears from the story. You’re left not knowing if Caine (Jupiter’s protector/love interest) really blindsided her and caused her to bow out or if she really wanted to help her. Basically no resolution there.
In the process we have Jupiter who starts out with a miserable life of scrubbing toilets and dreaming of something better, who finds out she can have something better. This kind of cinderella story can definitely work, so long as the protagonist seizes this opportunity and moves on from there. As characters go, however, Jupiter seems to spend a lot of time being confused and then standing around waiting to be rescued. The one point in the movie where she actually stands up for herself and takes action should have been a triumph… but instead it was just a brief pause in her falling from high places.
And as far as that goes… good lord. I know they have a neat technology/doohickey, but seriously, this felt like a situation where the only tool they had was a hammer so they had the main character fighting a lot of nails. The fall sequences were all gorgeous, (the whole movie was, for that matter), but once or twice is more than enough to showcase that Caine could swoop along on his gravity boots and save her. I’ve seen analysis of the movie where someone clocked in a total of 25 minutes of footage of her falling. That is almost a quarter of the movie spent with her in free-fall.
Characterization was done sort of well with some of the characters. We had this nice little bit about Caine (Channing Tatum) being a lone-wolf outcast, a genetically engineered soldier, who has every reason to hate the royals but still protects Jupiter. We also had a nice little subplot where it mentions he ripped ones throat out and so was court-martialed. A wide opening they had here and that I think they were going to use was with the villain Balem, who all movie talked hoarsely and had his throat covered by his costumes. Whatever the reason they didn’t use it, it was there and would have made for a nice connection or at least some initial link to why Caine would oppose him.
Balem and Titus both seemed to have their weird love (sick, sick love) and hate relationships with their mother, personified by her reincarnation as Jupiter. Titus wanted to marry and then kill her, and then Balem admitted to having killed her before. The general attitude here being he didn’t really want to and has been tormented by the fact that he did, because his mother apparently abhorred her life and begged him to end it. Balem, who seems to be the main antagonist, at one point says he would harvest the entire planet of Earth before he lets her take it from him, yet we have no sign as to why he feels so strongly… and then at the end of the movie, he’s apparently let her ascend and has yet to make his move, instead trying to manipulate her into signing Earth over in return for her family (and not even bothering to suggest that he’ll let any of them live, only that he’ll kill her family in front of her if she doesn’t sign right now).
This brings us to what was presumably supposed to be one of the main themes with the movie: the harvests. We are given to believe that human life is of such little value that entire worlds are seeded with populations who then, thousands of years later, are harvested and rendered down into rejuvenating drugs. Okay, sure, I’ll bite. This allows the elite in this universe to live essentially forever and they justify this survival basically in that the people on these harvested planets didn’t live very nice lives anyway. Excuse me, but what? We get introductions to a number of law enforcing people in the movie both in the form or the Aegis and at a step removed in the Legion through Stinger and Caine. These people seem to uphold morality codes that suggest that they value individual lives, they go out of their way to protect one another, and they live for duty and to uphold the law. If their rulers survive from the consumption of billions of people on hundreds of planets, that basically turns them into some of the worst villains in the universe. If they’re upholding a system that murders countless people for the survival of a few then they can be chalked up in the ranks of genocidal types like Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot.
This precious commodity that is required to extend/improve lives has been done so much better in such a less heavy-handed fashion. Just off hand I can mention Frank Herbert’s Spice, which requires an entire planet’s resources to harvest and costs the lives of many of those who harvest it, is incredibly addictive, and has severe long term effects. On the other hand, Frank Herbert’s Spice allows for travel throughout the galaxy, extends the lives of those who consume it, and in large enough quantities provides for telepathy and such. That’s complex, it allows for some conflicts of morality about it’s benefits and costs.
In requiring that this elixir of the Abraxis family murder a hundred people and render them down for one liter is a little absurd. Basically it’s a plot point that this process needs to be horrible enough that Jupiter will reject it off hand and that even the most cynical movie-goer will have no choice but to agree. More than that, it becomes a side note in the rest of the movie. It doesn’t matter what Balem wants with the Earth if he is willing to brutally murder people to get it, that in itself is a sign that he’s the bad guy. Making him a genocidal nut with a god complex doesn’t make him any more impactful as a character… it actually makes him painfully one dimensional as all he cares about is his own wealth and profit. It robs us of the why of how he could so hate his mother and the Earth is so important to him and turns it into a sort of “because mine.” That level of petulance reduces him from terrifying to a mere childish bully with too much power.
On top of that was the conspiracy fodder that was thrown around. It ranged from the midly irritating such as when Caine says that the powers that be would wipe everyone’s memories, “They won’t get everyone, but no one believes the few they miss.” To the downright immersion-breaking, such as when the ship takes off from the corn-field and leaves crop circles. Seriously? Was it meant as a gag or what? The former implies that people will forget not just the missing day but the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people killed, all with a quick memory wipe. Let’s not even go into the dinosaur extinction and the rest that they spend precious minutes explaining to no real purpose.
These flaws are all to the worse for the few moments of genuine enjoyment. I could gush about the visuals and about how the sets and costumes felt interesting… but that would be pointless. You can watch a trailer and see how good it all looked. The characters that stuck well were often the side characters, the Aegis (police) who went out of their way to protect Jupiter. The entire scene with the bureaucracy with Jupiter trying to do her whole ascension thing was not only hilarious but utterly fitting in an empire several million years old. Jupiter’s manipulative family members provided some of the best comedy “Your cousin is not a chicken, you do not sell her eggs!” Some of the one-liners thrown out by Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, and others were excellent. The red herring of having Sean Bean not die was excellent although slightly immersion breaking as the audience kept waiting for it to happen anyway. There were some brilliant scenes throughout the movie… which just didn’t connect to make anything. Was it worth watching? Absolutely. But it was incredibly frustrating as we would get moments of brief humor and originality which were then buried by rehashed themes from previous movies, painfully heavy-handed exposition, and a mix of heavy editing and a bad script that meant the whole couldn’t fit together into anything remotely coherent. I really wanted to enjoy this movie, but at the end of the day, it came across as a popcorn flick rather than anything deeper.
I went into Jupiter Ascending with somewhat mixed expectations. On the one hand, I already knew that the movie had been delayed for reshoots, re-edits, and stuck in post production for the past six months to a year (thus the delay in release). I already knew that the protagonist looked a little silly (I think I counted three different occasions of her plummeting to her doom in just the standard trailer). At the same time, the visual effects, artwork, and some of the concepts just looked stunning. The action from the trailers also looked pretty solid, with less of the shaky-cam that means you can’t take any time to enjoy the pretty stuff.
After watching the movie I came away with many of my expectations met. The story is disjointed, the protagonist often seems more like a passenger along for the ride than any kind of influence upon the story, many of the themes were recycled from previous Wachowski movies, and some of the background stuff is pure conspiracy theory fodder that breaks immersion. On the other hand, the scenery was gorgeous, the technology was suitably advanced and impressive, and there were a lot of great individual scenes (even if they didn’t necessarily connect into some greater whole). Oh, and yes, Jupiter (Mila Kunis) fell a lot. I counted at least seven times, though sometimes it’s hard to tell where one falling scene overlaps up with another.
I was absolutely floored by some of the designs. Some of the side characters felt strong and solid, with back stories and fully fleshed motiviations… while some of the main characters motivations and even actions seemed to have little to do with the overall movie. I could tell that we were missing scenes and even parts of the plot arc, with characters who appeared and disappeared with no seeming purpose. There were several sub-plots, too where you could see connections that they almost made… but either they ended up on the cutting room floor or just never fully materialized and I’m not sure which.
Gravity boots, personal shield generators, complex and varied species, and a gruesome (but heavily foreshadowed and easily predictable) secret all made the movie both fascinating and at the same time somewhat frustrating. There were scenes that were absolutely brilliant and others that just felt like they put them there to explain things to the idiot in the room. Most frustrating of all, I think, was the parts that were actually very interesting received either a generic explanation (The Aegis, the Legion, what it means to be Entitled and Royal) or no explanation at all (Who the Aegis and the Legion normally fight, what exactly certain powerful people’s motivations are, why certain illegal/criminal actions aren’t punished or investigated, etc).
All in all, it was a fun movie, but I still walked away not quite satisfied. There was a lot of potential… but also a lot of scenes where they went for flash without substance: something impressive to draw the attention away from the fact that they really hadn’t figured out how they wanted it to really work. I enjoyed it, but I’m frustrated because there was just enough there to tell me that I could have enjoyed it much more. The obvious comparison is the movie it was supposed to be released near in 2014: Guardians of the Galaxy. Both movies feature an Earthling drawn into a space opera where the stakes are billions of lives… and Guardians succeeded with brilliant characterization, a solid plot, and the confidence to poke fun at itself. Jupiter Ascending’s characters just weren’t on that level, the writing didn’t quite have the chops, and it felt like the Wachoskis were trying to tell the same stories they told before… albeit on a much larger canvas.
Check back for Part II for a more in depth (and spoiler-laden) plot.
I’ll preface this by saying that Interstellar is the best movie of 2014 that I nearly didn’t see. Why did I nearly decide to discount it? Well, the trailers did a terrible job of telling me what the movie was about. The trailers made it out (with me reading between the lines) that the movie was about how terrible mankind was that we had destroyed our only home and had to go to space to survive. Heavy on a message of doom and gloom and without any real ounce of hope, with the thought being we were destined to repeat the process as celestial locusts. This was not the type of movie I wanted to watch. Luckily, it wasn’t the movie I got to see.
You see, Interstellar is nothing less than a movie about discovery, adventure, and exploration. The crew that goes to the stars in this movie are people chosen to do that most dangerous exercise: go someplace new and come back to tell everyone all about it. They are also the last, best hope for humanity’s survival, so no pressure. The movie has a slow, building pace where weight is added to every decision and the protagonists are struggling against that most certain enemy: time.
The science of the movie is excellent as well. Yes, there are liberties taken, but there are also elements and plot twists taken from science and enough ‘what if’ that any science nerds will probably be on the edge of their seats. Visit a planet in close orbit around a black hole and have time dilation wipe out twenty three years in an hour. Also, get to see the tidal effects upon that lovely ocean planet, and that the woman sent ahead ten years ago died only minutes before your arrival, and just right after her own arrival. Playing with time is something this movie does incredibly well, along with hints and peeks not only at the movie’s plot, but also at the great potential to be found in humanity.
Some of the best lines in the movie are about human nature and nature itself. At one point, the characters in space argue about what they might find being more or less dangerous than what they bring with them. Later on, they are both proven correct when one man is killed by the waves on the first planet they find and another is killed by a human scout sent ahead, who was willing to do anything necessary to ensure his own survival, even if it meant dooming billions of people back on Earth. The movie manages to capture the stark beauty of space, with apparently scientifically accurate depictions of both black holes and wormholes (see this interesting article).
And too, this movie does very well in capturing the spirit of exploration. The characters pause in wonder at the sights, caught up in the wonder and excitement of doing and seeing new things, and while they’ll take the time to mention the why or the how, that doesn’t rob the moment of it’s beauty. The characters are very much explorers, having little idea of what they’re going to discover, building upon what they learn and finding ways to use that knowledge to survive. They are forced to make decisions based off of their supplies and equipment as well as their limited amount of time. The weight of those decisions is upon them all and each choice they make is one that comes with a cost.
The movie does have its faults, I’ll admit, and several of them are in the plot-driven variety. The voyage to the wormhole takes a meager two months, which is incredibly impressive given chemical-powered rockets. My assumption was that they used a nuclear powered drive and just didn’t want to discuss it in the movie. The ‘blight’ that seems to be affecting the crops is more of a mysterious force than anything else, though depictions of it as breathing nitrogen suggests either a very odd metabolism or just hand-wavium. Why this terrible stuff doesn’t follow the evacuees from Earth is another question I asked myself. Contamination is sort of a given for colonization and transportation. I mean, we can’t even stop rats from getting to remote islands, how can we stop an apparent super-microorganism that has adapted to attack all manner of food crops? Also, what did people eat if it killed everything else while they were waiting for their star ships over fifty-plus years?
What the movie does very well is to get it’s point and message across with painful brutality. The ‘teacher’ at the beginning criticizing the pilot about believing in the moon landings. The quotes: “Man was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.” and “We used to look up and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” These are statements that paint a bleak (and unfortunately accurate) picture. We don’t look up at the stars with hope. Too many people are far more concerned with ‘fixing’ problems here rather than expanding out there. There will come a day that we are forced to choose between staying here and dying and going out to the stars and surviving.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie and I highly recommend it. It’s a great movie, with gorgeous effects, a powerful theme, and a spirit of wonder that still gets me excited thinking about it.
2015 is here, and boy is it busy already. Production continues on the audiobooks for The Shattered Empire and Renegades: Origins. I’m continuing work on Wrath of the Usurper and plan to have it done and the first version out to my alpha readers by the end of the month. I’ve got The Prodigal Emperor outlined and I’m outlining Renegades: Out of the Cold in my free time.
If everything goes to plan, I’ll begin samples/snippets of Wrath of the Usurper sometime in February, followed by samples of The Prodigal Emperor. I’m really excited to be working on both books and I can’t wait to get them ready and finished for publishing. I can tell already that 2015 has the potential to be a great year and I’m starting it off with lots of projects.
I’ll be attending Cosine here in Colorado Springs from 23-25 January. I’m excited to be participating in another local convention and this one looks like it’ll be a lot of fun. Check here for the website.
That’s all for now, check back soon for reviews on some movies and some other content!
Star Citizen isn’t even past the alpha stage yet, but it already looks incredible.
As I said in my last post, space simulation games, such as X Wing, Wing Commander, and Freelancer, have basically been a thing of the past. RPGs such as Mass Effect or MMORPGs like Eve Online or Star Wars The Old Republic dabble a bit in this area, but these oftentimes come back to character skills rather than a player’s ability to fly. Up until fairly recently, big developers like EA didn’t want to produce games for what was seen as a ‘niche market.’
That all changed with Kickstarter, which has changed the paradigm for a lot of things. Chris Roberts, creator of the Wing Commander and Freelancer games, posted that he wanted to get a few million dollars and produce a modern space fighter sim game. The overwhelming response brought in over 17 million dollars. At this point, they are nearing seventy million dollars of funding from around half a million people, many of whom have access to the game as it currently exists in development. Other games, like Elite Dangerous, have been similarly funded and are going live.
What this means, in a lot of ways, is that the big developers were wrong… or at least, not entirely right. Star Citizen is an incredibly ambitious game design, which will feature First Person Shooting, Space Exploration, Mining, Combat, and a fully interactive in-game economy. All of this will be controlled by players, not their characters, but through actual player skill. The physics are, while not one hundred percent accurate, include inertia, acceleration and G-forces. A player in this game could fly up next to another ship, jump out an airlock, board the other vessel, and fight in first person mode, while a space combat occurs outside. The game isn’t even out yet and many of its detractors say that it never will be… yet I think it’s a sign that we want more, demand more, than the slow, incremental improvement (such as World of Warcraft getting new character make-overs… yay) of the same games and types of games that have been popular.
I think it’s also a sign that we humans still dream of travel into space and we want to be as close to the action as possible. If we can’t go out, we want as accurate a simulation of that as we can get. The great thing about games like Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous, is that they’ll inspire a next generation, not just with the excitement of ‘being there’ and doing things themselves, but with the idea that getting into space is something that we should put a bit more effort into… if only so that their children can experience it first-hand rather than through a computer game.
Going up against a Star Destroyer in a snub fighter, what’s not to like about X Wing?
I still remember the first time I bought X wing. I was in high school at the time. I spent $40 at the time, was so excited by the idea, couldn’t wait to get it home and hop in the cockpit of my very own spaceship.
Of course, I didn’t know much about computers and discovered I’d bought a mac version of the software, which I couldn’t then exchange (store wouldn’t allow exchanges of computer software). Money wasted, in a lot of ways.
But the dream lived on, and when I saved up, I got a version of Tie Fighter that worked, complete with a joystick and I settled down to play. Even at the time, I knew it wasn’t a very good simulation for actual space combat. Ships moved at WWII aircraft speeds (sometimes WWI), the graphics were great for their time (but very dated now), the physics were completely inaccurate, and the overall gameplay was relatively simple and linear compared to modern games.
What the game did do, however, was tell a great story, give challenging scenarios that required skills, thought, and even tactics. This further evolved with the follow on game a few years later with X Wing Alliance, which updated the graphics and allowed the player to play through a fun campaign, as well as evolving the multiplayer a bit more and allow crafting of scenarios.
What did I get from these games? Well, they let you live out some of the most exciting aspects of the Star Wars universe, putting yourself in the pilot of a tiny ship and pitting your skills against not only the computer, but other people. They were tremendously fun, but they also were a key aspect of inspiration to me. They opened up a section of the Star Wars universe that was, until then, sort of vague and abstract. You could not only see what it was like to be in a military unit in this universe, but you could see how the flight mechanics, technology, and tactics could unfold. You could witness the awesome firepower of a Star Destroyer and also work together as a team to take one down using outdated snub fighters and hot-shot piloting.
I still maintain that a lot of modern games lack that same spark. Games like Mass Effect and Eve Online are RPGs, where it is the skill of the character rather than the player that determines an outcome. This is fine, in many ways, but it also somewhat distances the player from his accomplishments. With an RPG, you can ‘build’ a character to accomplish tasks. While you might take some pride in taking down a ship or discovering some new planet, you aren’t the one doing it… your character is. At most, you have skill in using the character’s abilities… which isn’t the same thing at all.
With simulator games like X Wing and it’s follow-ons, the player has a direct connection to their accomplishments. I think that brings a whole new level of excitement to the game. In many ways, getting into space behind a joystick is the pinnacle of my dreams… and doing so as me versus a character is far better. Other games, like Freelancer also explored and expanded on the groundwork, adding more options, entire worlds, star systems, and other mythologies as well as a bit more accuracy in physics and technology. They still have a WWII fighter feel, but they have entire star systems to explore and discover, with options to trade, explore, defend, and pirate.
These games, in many ways, allowed their player base to live out their dreams of reaching the stars, if only in a limited sense, in a way that RPGs can’t do, in a physical, exciting fashion that brings the risks and rewards of space to the player. I’ll gladly admit that those old space simulation games inspired me with ideas and possibilities, and in many ways were responsible for keeping my excitement over space travel alive. I know for a fact that I wouldn’t be where I am now if not for the excitement that these games gave me in my youth. Unfortunately, these types of games became less and less common in the last decade, with most of the focus going to First Person Shooter games, sports games, or RPGs/MMORPGs. Space fighter simulations basically vanished, especially as big developers, like EA, consolidated a lot of the gaming companies and set about producing incrementally improved games based off their big sellers.
Check back soon for my next post: Computer Games: Modern Space Simulations.
Big Hero 6 caught my attention with its first trailer. I don’t normally find myself laughing hysterically at a movie trailer. This movie managed that and the combination of dry humor and silliness seemed like the perfect choice on an otherwise dreary weekend. They did a great job with the trailer, which spread its appeal to both kids and adults. Unfortunately, the trailer probably wasn’t targeted very well.
Let me say this: Big Hero 6 is a great kid’s movie. It has excellent characterization, wonderful visuals, and good moral lessons and choices for kids to enjoy. That said, for an adult, there’s just not much depth. The humor is good, except that they showed the best jokes/gags in the trailer. The story as a whole is a bit too predictable, with the big plot reveals being easily foreseen and the character development being aimed more at young adults than anyone who has already gone through puberty. The whole movie, also, feels vaguely reminiscent of How to Tame Your Dragon.
That said, the characterization and story are well done, the visuals are fantastic. For a kid this movie has everything. The story is engaging, a revenge story where the hero must come to grips with his own emotions and chose justice or revenge. It teaches the importance of responsibility and the potential for redemption. I very much recommend it, especially if you have kids.
Kal Spriggs 