Category: Reviews

MOVIE REVIEW: Spies In Disguise

written by David Steffen

Spies in Disguise is a 2019 computer-animated action/comedy film produced by Blue Sky Studios and distributed by 20th Century Fox. The movie follows super-suave celebrity spy (ala James Bond) Lance Sterling (Will Smith), who is on the top of his game, able to infiltrate an enemy’s facility and make it look effortless with a combination of martial arts, gadgets, and catchy one-liners.

But Sterling seems to meet his match facing off against an unknown adversary with a robot hand (Ben Mendelsohn), when he takes the blame for the theft of an expensive drone, and barely escapes agency headquarters when Marcy Koppel (Rashida Jones) of the agency tries to to apprehend him for it. He makes an unlikely friend in a gadget-inventor Walter Beckett (Tom Holland) he got fired from the agency that same day for his flashy but pacifist gadgets. Shortly after, Sterling unknowingly drinks down an experimental chemical formula that turns him into… a pigeon, albeit a pigeon with human intelligence and speech. Being a pigeon makes most of his tactics… less than effective, though it does have a certain appeal in the fact that there is a major manhunt looking for him but they don’t know he’s a pigeon.

I went into this movie with low expectations. It looked like an okay movie to take a kid too, and I thought there was a pretty good chance that I would nap through it. But I thoroughly enjoyed it, I thought it was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed Will Smith in particular–it reminded me in some ways of his character in the original Men In Black, suave when he needs to be, but out of his element, with a sense of humor that helps him get through more difficult times. I liked the interaction between them, Sterling’s confident and gungho but violent means eventually coming to see the benefits to Beckett’s preferred nonviolent engagement. The villain is suitably scary and easy to root against. My particular favorite part of the movie were the comic relief from the secondary pigeon characters.

I would recommend it, especially if you have kids, but even if not.

TABLETOP GAME REVIEW: Pass the Pigs: Pig Party

written by David Steffen

Pass the Pigs: Pig Party is an expanded version of the game Pass the Pigs. In case you haven’t played Pass the Pigs (which I’m guessing you haven’t) it is a simple game where you score points based on how the pigs land. For instance, a single pig on its feet is called a “trotter” worth 5 points, up to a pig which is balancing on its snout and ear, a “leaning jowler”. You can keep rolling and building up points until you decide to stop and keep the points or you get a “pig out” (two pigs on their sides one showing a spot and one not showing a spot).

Party Edition works a little differently in that in each turn you are rolling for a particular goal and every player tries to get that goal in turn, and there are expanded rules that involve rolling 8 pigs all at once and scoring based on the number of pigs that match certain patterns.

It’s simple for little kids to understand which does make it good for families with young kids!

Audience
Suitable for very young kids (with older people to help with the scorekeeping if they want to play for real).

Challenge
Mostly based on random chance, though with a bit of chance because of whether you choose to keep rolling or not–each roll has a chance of accumulating more points or completely blanking out your turn.

Session Time
Quick game–if you played a full round you’d probably be done in 10 minutes.

Replayability
Not a lot of novelty, likely to wear out pretty quickly except for pretty young kids.

Originality
Although of course it’s a spinoff, odds are most have never played a game where you roll pigs for points, so certainly gets some points for novelty..

Overall
Reasonably compact, easy to learn and play for young children. Likely to wear out its novelty for older players before too long but would be a good way to pass some time with little ones.

TABLETOP GAME REVIEW: Uno: Super Mario Edition

written by David Steffen

Uno: Super Mario Edition is a special edition version of the familiar Uno game much-beloved by generations (which in itself I’m guessing is based on the existing game Crazy Eights, but with trademarks and special cards).

For those not familiar, the goal of Uno is to get rid of all of the cards in your own hand. When it’s a players turn, they want to lay down a card in their hand based on the top card on the discard pile. They can lay one down if it has the same color (equivalent to a “suit” in a regular card deck) or the same number/value. In this way it’s very similar to Crazy Eights, but instead of the number “8” being wild, there is a special Wild card just for that purpose, which can be laid at any time, and allows the person to choose the color for the next turn. And there are also additional cards like “Skip” (skip a player) and “Draw Two” which forces the next player to draw two cards. If a player can’t play a card from their existing hand they keep drawing until they can. When they get down to one card, that player has to also shout “Uno” before another player does, or they have to draw two additional.

Mario Edition has most of the same deck, albeit with new artwork on the cards based on the Super Mario series of games. It also has a couple new cards: a Super Star card that can be played to reflect a “Draw Two” or “Draw Four” card back at the one who played it, and a Blank Wild card which lets you make up your own rule for a wild card (i.e. you could make it also act as a skip, or it could let the person playing it choose someone to draw a card, or it could make every other player draw a card).

Really it’s not that much different from the regular game, though I suppose if you really love Mario the artwork on the cards would be worth picking up a different game.

Audience
Uno has a pretty broad age group, which makes it a suitable game for playing with mixed-age groups.

Challenge
It’s pretty easy to learn how to play and most of the challenge comes from sheer chance–i.e. if you have bad luck and have to draw and draw and draw it sets you back significantly.

Session Time
Hard to tell, I’ve had some games drag on when no one seems to get the right cards.

Replayability
Can play it for quite a while though it does start to feel repetitive before too long.

Originality
This edition doesn’t add much beyond the original Uno, if you have Uno already, this isn’t exactly a significant expansion.

Overall
If you already own Uno, getting this game probably won’t be that exciting of an edition. If you don’t already own Uno, you could consider this one for its game-based artwork. I’ve seen the game for about $6 retail.

BOOK REVIEW: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

written by David Steffen

written by David Steffen

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is a 2004 fantasy novel by Susanna Clarke conveyed as a historical account of two magicians interested in the revival of English magic in the 19th century.

English magic has been on the decline for centuries, to the extent that those who call themselves magicians in the 19th century are really no more than scholars studying the history of magic, rather than practicioners of the magic arts themselves. Theories abound as to the cause of the decline, but little is known for sure. There does, however, appear to be one actual practitioner of magic, one Mr. Norrell, who has been known to perform the occasional magical feat, though he is reclusive and secretive.

English magic began with the arrival of the Raven King, a human with ties to the Fairy realm, but he disappeared hundreds of years ago with little explanation.

This novel is an annotated volume telling of the story of Mr. Norrell and of Jonathan Strange (more information about whom is available only late enough in the book that it feels like any mention of him would constitue a spoiler!). Historical footnotes about the significance of various events help educate a layperson on the rich historical background upon which these events rest.

When I started this book, I found it hard to get into the pacing. Throughout the book it was hard to tell where the book was going, was hard to tell which characters I was supposed to be following, and sometimes several chapters would seem to be entirely tangential. I am not one to feel obligated to finish a book if I’m not into it enough. But there was always enough to get me to read a little bit longer, and finally by the middle I was entirely charmed by the style of storytelling and would happily recommend the book. I don’t think everyone would be able to pull this off but Clarke did a splendid job making this feel like a real history, and I felt like I very much knew the characters, and the writing style was very much like books written in that period of time that it did a lot for plausibility of the story. I admit I am a sucker for explanatory footnotes of sometimes excessive quantity and size (perhaps because I always enjoyed them in Pratchett’s work). This book took me a long time to finish, it is not short, and it is at times pretty dry, but I ended up loving it and now I want to watch the tv series based upon it.

BOOK REVIEW: Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler

written by David Steffen

Mind of My Mind by Octavia Butler was the second book published in the Patternmaster series (preceded by Patternmaster), as well as the second book in the chronological order (preceded by Wild Seed). I read the books as a collection that included the four main books in chronological order, rather than ordered in order of publishing, so depending on what order you prefer to read them, this could have spoilders for Wild Seed.

Doro, who was thousands of years old, is not immortal in body, but (among other abilities) whenever his physical form dies his consciousness hops to another individual and takes over their body. He has had some measure of success, producing bloodlines with various psychic abilities, such as mindreading, telekinesis, different kinds of healing, but also significant problems in that the more powerful psychics are naturally averse to each other, sometimes violently so.

One of the most promising new members of his bloodlines is Mary, a Black girl living near Los Angeles. She doesn’t know about Doro’s breeding experiences , only that her family has a strange relationship with this visiting man named Doro. But she is quickly approaching the age where psychic powers suddenly and traumatically manifest, so she will soon be getting a crash course in it one way or the other.

Soon her abilities begin to manifest, and they’re different than anything even Doro has seen before.

Especially after reading Wild Seed this book feels like the natural progression as Doro’s breeding programs race towards some inevitable (but long-awaited) conclusion, and this helps bridge the gap to the events in Patternmaster where that conclusion has manifested.

I like Wild Seed better, but this was good as a progression of the events in that book. Butler was a master and I look forward to catching up on more of her books.

GAME REVIEW: Undertale

written by David Steffen

Undertale is an RPG game developed by indie developer Toby Fox published by 2015. Its based on a familiar format to many gamers–the RPG, walking around the map and contending with random monster attacks and boss fights as you go fulfill your quest.

You can fight the monsters, like you’d expect. But the entire game is built so that you never have to kill anything, in fact the game is much more interesting if you don’t, because each kind of monster you face off against requires a different strategy to not kill. Your goal in each battle is to get the “spare” button to work, but often you need to prep the enemy some way. You have a menu of commands to try to each one and you never know which one will make the difference–such as “flatter” or “insult” or a variety of other things. The catch is that if you don’t kill any monsters, you don’t get any experience and level up, so you don’t get any more capable of defending yourself.

Besides the menu dynamic, the monsters are still attacking you, and it has an interesting way of dealing with it–your soul is represented by a heart in a square you can move around to dodge enemy attacks. Unlike the games it’s based on where an attack is just a damage number that pops up, if you figure out the patterns you might be able to avoid all damage entirely.

The game has a great sense of humor as well, and interesting storyline about how the dynamics of the monster world to human world works. It’s a fun game worth playing, and well worth it!

Visuals
Cute, I particularly like some of the closer images of the enemies during battle seasons. Especially the warrior dogs.

Audio
Cute.

Challenge
Decently challenging in a different way than most RPGs. Each kind of enemy requires a new kind of strategy–there are multiple options to try and you never know which of them. It turns out it’s more trouble to spare most of the enemies than to just fight them.

Story
No particular story (not that that’s unusual for an arcade game from this era).

Session Time
Not too badly spaced, I think most of them were within 15 minutes or so of gametime (plus the Switch can sleep at will).

Playability
Easy, pretty standard RPG.

Replayability
You could at least take a couple passes at it trying to play pacifist or trying to play violent.

Originality
Takes a very familiar RPG format and does something very interesting and new with it–monsters are always presented in these kinds of games as being inherently evil, it’s nice to see something different.

Playtime
A few hours of playtime, but doens’t overstay it’s welcome.

Overall
This is a very neat and original take on a genre of games I know and love, the RPG. The entire premise being based around doing your best not to kill monsters that are determined to kill you while still achieving your objectives. It’s fun and original and adds some compassion for those who usually aren’t considered to be worth it.

BOOK REVIEW: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

written by David Steffen

The Testaments is a 2019 near-future (or I guess alternate-history at this point?) novel by Margaret Atwood, a sequel to the well-known 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (reviewed here) (which in itself spawned the ongoing Hulu TV series of 3 seasons, seasons 1 2 and 3 reviewed here). Note that for the purposes of this novel, the tv series is not part of the same continuity, so don’t expect the two to reconcile.

The Testaments takes place over a span of time but beginning approximately fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. The Handmaid’s Tale was the reader’s introduction to Gilead, a Christian fundamentalist dystopic nation born from the ashes of the United States after a violent coup. The first book followed a single point of view, of one of the handmaids known only as “Offred”. The handmaids are a lower class in Gilead society, who are believed to be sinners, and who are considered to do a public service by serving as breeding stock in this future where healthy birth rate has plummeted.

In this new book, rather than a single point of view from a handmaid, there are three first-person points of view interleaved with each other. The first one is a familiar character from the first book: Aunt Lydia, one of the women who was responsible for acclimating the Handmaids to the brutal new conditions they would be living under, taking on the guise of a teacher but with brutal torturous methods.

The other two points of view are young women, one young woman who is the daughter of a Gilead commander, and the other a young woman living in Canada. Their importance and connection to each other becomes apparent as the story unfolds.

The novel is an interesting addition to the tale of the nation of Gilead, but it lacks the impact of the first novel in large part because it doesn’t have the novelty of the original. While it’s interesting to see some different points of views from different occupations, and it casts some new light on the characters (Aunt Lydia in particular since we’d never had her own account before). It’s well worth a read, and it flowed from beginning to end, but it felt like an addendum to the original story to tie up some things than something strong in its own right (when I thought that the mystery of the original was a strength of that book).

So, it’s worth a read if you thought the original was powerful, or if you have followed the TV show as an alternate series of events from a similar origin, but not as impactful as the original.

VIDEO GAME REVIEW: Monument Valley

written by David Steffen

Monument Valley is a 2014 touchscreen indie puzzle game developed by UsTwo. The plot is fairly light, even for a puzzle game, and the main focus is on maneuvering from one door to another door, with a charming and simple graphical apperance.

Optical illusions play a big part in the puzzle system, in that the layouts are reminiscient of an M.C. Escher drawing, where an surface can be a walking surface, and so you need to be able to rotate to see what surface. And also, some pathways are only navigable when they visually align–if they LOOK like they make a continuous path then they can be traversed, even if from a different angle they’re clearly discontinuous.

I played the game for the first time at the Game Changers exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota in spring 2019.

Visuals
Simple, but cute

Audio
I honestly don’t remember

Challenge
Not what I thought was particularly challenging, I played through most of the game in less than an hour. But it is sufficiently mind-bending to be an interesting angle.

Story
Some story, but it’s not apparent in most of the gameplay.

Session Time
Since I played through it in one sitting, I don’t honestly know.

Playability
Very simple touch interface. The player movement is simply clicking the destination and the player tries to move to that spot if there is a path open to them at the time. The angle of the screen comes into screen here because you can only move to a surface facing the viewpoint. The other major part of the play control is manipulating the level–which are marked out by having visible grab points to rotate different sections. I think the hardest part about learning to play is understanding that an “apparent” path is a path, that is even if you know two platforms don’t touch each other because they’re too far away, if the perspective makes them look like they connect then they connect.

Replayability
Not much in the way of replayability, since the puzzles are all set and the game isn’t very long.

Originality
Reminiscient of some other games–most particularly FEZ with the perspective-based level traversal, but has its own feel

Playtime
Less than two hours, so pretty short.

Overall
A fun and cute puzzle game, but do keep in mind that it is also fairly short. It’s currently $3.99 on Google Play.

BOOK REVIEW: Stranger Things: Suspicious Minds by Gwenda Bond

written by David Steffen

Suspicious Minds is a fantasy/science fiction thriller prequel novel, the first official Stranger Things novel, written by Gwenda Bond, published in 2019. The book (and this review) may container spoilers for the first two seasons of the TV show.

In the TV show we eventually meet Eleven’s mother, Terry Ives, but she is in a nearly catatonic state, living within her mind in an internal loop a traumatic event. Eleven manages to establish psychic contact with her and find out a little bit of her story, but this novel is the story of a younger Terry Ives.

The year is 1969, Terry is a college student, while the Vietnam war is raging overseas. Strapped for cash, Terry volunteers to be a medical test subject for the local laboratory. She has the sense that the experiment will change the world in some way, but she doesn’t know much details. She makes new friends in the waiting room for the experiment, and soon they all meet Richard Brenner, who is now in charge of the experiment.

Since the book is written with an audience who knows how Terry Ives ended up, much of the ending of the book is already known, so there is a looming sense of dread throughout the book. There are some significant things we know, but there are plenty of other things we don’t, such as the fate of her friends, and what other things Terry is involved in during this time period.

I found this a solid read for fans of the TV show, though I would recommend waiting until watching seasons 1 and 2 before watching this. Even knowing how much of it turns out, there area lot of interesting and compelling characters, high stakes, you get some more insight into characters that you know, including Richard Brenner, Terry Ives, and Kali.

GAME REVIEW: Scramble

written by David Steffen

Scramble is a side-scrolling shooter game published as an arcade machine by Konami in 1981.

The controls are very similar to other games of its type (many of which were inspired by this directly or indirectly). A joystick to move, and two fire buttons–one for quick forward shots and another for slower falling bombs. The object is to stay alive by avoiding terrain and destroying or avoiding enemy craft, but you also need to maintain your fuel supply or your ship will fall to its doom, which you do by attacking fuel tanks on the ground.

I played this game for the first time at the Game Changers exhibit at the Minnesota Science Museum.

Visuals
Decent for their time

Audio
They’re okay.

Challenge
Very challenging, especially the fuel aspect of it. Without that you could probably just avoid things entirely much of the time, but many of the fuel tanks are inconveniently placed so that you have to try to bomb them which is difficult to time correctly because the bombs are so slow.

Story
No particular story (not that that’s unusual for an arcade game from this era).

Session Time
Depends on how good you are. An average player, probably a couple minutes.

Playability
Easy to understand, hard to master the timing of the bombs.

Replayability
Like most old arcade games, they did get replayed alot, with the goal being to get further and further and get higher scores, but not really replayable in the usual sense I mean this, since the game starts completely from scratch when you start playing.

Originality
It is based around a familiar type of game but with rule rewriting system I’ve never seen before, ends up making it a whole new kind of game.

Playtime
I haven’t finished yet, so I’m really not sure, if you like this kind of game you could put in many hours trying to perfect it.

Overall
This is a fun side-scrolling space shooter game, which even if you haven’t played you might have played other games in the same style that came later like Gradius III (also by Konami), though it’s simpler in some ways than those the added challenge of needing to collect fuel adds an interesting twist to it that I haven’t seen in other games and forces the player to perfect their timing with the bomb attack. There have been some re-releases of this game, including as part of a downloadable Konami collection on Steam for $20, bundled with 7 other Konami games