Nerdy Month in Review: July 2015

On the first of every month, I will recap my nerdy endeavors over the course of the previous month.

July was a hectic month from a non-nerdy standpoint, helping our little lady get through having her tonsils out and adjusting to another foster child in the house. We've also had some pesky visitors in the form of lice and mice, so I have been busy and will continue to be busy. Here is what I did manage to get in, though:

TV
The Little Lady and I have been working through Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. As of today, we have gotten about 10 episodes into season 2. We've witnessed the Avengers tackle Loki and his invasion of Asgard, the Kree, and right now, the Skrull invasion. The cartoon is epic, far more than the movies ever will be, so for anyone that wants to get into the Marvel universe, this is an excellent place to start (others might suggest the comics, naturally, but if you are like me and comics aren't your thing, then check out the cartoon). I wish they worked harder to get more female superheroes into the mix - we've recently been introduced to Ms. Marvel, a strong female superhero, and Wasp has been there since the beginning, but she fits too many ditzy female stereotypes to really count as a solid female superhero. The comic relief is consistently good, and the series does a good job of recalling intertwining storylines that began at the beginning of the series. Despite the complexity of the storylines, The Little Lady has had no problems getting what's going on until recently, when she got thoroughly confused on who was a Skrull and who was not.

In other TV nerdiness, Umberto MacJay and I are attempting to watch every season of Dexter and rank each and every episode. We spent one glorious afternoon discussing our rating mechanisms and how we are going to rank each episode and present it to all of you wonderful readers. The entire list will probably be available on this blog sometime in the Fall, but don't hold us too closely to that - this is a significant undertaking, and I myself am only about halfway through season 2. I have seen every season except for the final season, which fans were not crazy about, but I am going to withhold judgement until I see it for myself.

Video Games
Where to begin here? I have been playing a wide variety of games over the course of the month, mainly because whenever I finally get time to sit down and play one, it's been so long since I have actually played anything. As a result, I've done mostly gaming without any semblance of a story - Super Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. I already wrote at length about Super Mario 3D World and will spare you anymore details here (no, I have not yet beaten that STUPID OBNOXIOUS RIDICULOUS final level). Mario Kart 8 continues to be a challenge with the addition of 200cc, a ridiculously fast romp through the levels that forces you to change your entire racing strategy. It's like playing a brand new game after being so accustomed to 150cc and the Mirror tracks. I am still missing a 3-star, gold trophy on one of the Mirror tracks, and got 2 stars on one of them (I HATE not getting 3 stars - I usually quit as soon as I don't get first in a race as a result). But, I have enjoyed trying 200cc and silently cursing Nintendo for forcing me to change the strategy that I used over the course of an entire 8-game series.

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U is out and about again in my house because I purchased all of the DLC. Ryu has been a fun addition, and I have enjoyed whipping out all of my old Street Fighter moves when I use him (although really, I usually fall back on using the B button to use all of the special moves to ensure my victory). I wish they had added more locations in the new DLC - I miss the stages in Brawl and Melee so much, the newer versions haven't quite lived up to those - but overall, the game is still a blast to play in a living room full of people.

I spent a lot of the beginning of the month playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. It's easily one of the strongest entries in the Zelda franchise, and perhaps, at the moment at least, is my favorite of the overhead, 2D Zelda titles (not that it is really 2D, with its gorgeous 3D visuals). I am super glad they ditched the requirement of using the touch screen to control Link. I never finished Phantom Hourglass as a result - my hand would get cramped up eventually, and I always ended up doing things I didn't want to do eventually, because of the odd controls. A Link Between Worlds, while I am not even halfway through, has proven to be a phenomenally deep game. I just hope I have more time over the next month to play it.

The Little Lady has taken over LEGO Marvel Superheroes, although I got pretty far before she decided she was going to play it all of the time. Again, I wrote at length about this earlier, so I will spare the details now, but the depth of the game continues to amaze me. I could wander around LEGO New York City for HOURS and still not find everything, and that's a good thing. The Little Lady has also taken over Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and thankfully, she is no longer leaving all of her stuff lying around town. As the mayor of Koholint, my town in Animal Crossing, I want my village looking immaculately clean. She probably wouldn't have cleaned up the town except I pointed out that, if you go to the Mayor's Office, my secretary points out how absolutely annoyed all of the villagers are about it. Thanks, Nintendo, for making a game that encourages me to obsessively organize things - that almost makes up for changing my Mario Kart strategy.

Movies
Nothing much going on here. We have been having The Little Lady watch the original Star Wars trilogy, and yes, we'll probably show her the prequel trilogy because it is, after all, canon. Then we can take her to see the new one, whether she's still living with us or not. I continue to love how interested she is in virtually everything - it was so easy to get her into Star Wars and keep her interested. She still asks me sometimes why Obi-Wan didn't tell Luke the truth about Darth Vader. She seems very annoyed about that.

We went and saw Inside-Out and both my wife and I bawled while the girls were simply non-plussed by (spoiler alert) the realization that yes, some important memories can be sad and our emotions get more complicated as we enter our teenage years. Pixar's slogan should be "let us entertain your kids while you bawl your eyes out." That damn Lava short-movie didn't help - I honestly thought they would give us a sad ending to that volcano's tale for a few seconds, and thought, "Geez, Pixar, I thought you wouldn't stoop this low after the first ten minutes of Up." Don't worry, guys - it's Pixar, it ends happily, although you still might cry.

Books
After finishing Stephen King's It, I read the not-so-nerdy Faithful, the story about the 2004 Boston Red Sox in which Stephen King was a co-writer. The Red Sox are my one truly non-nerdy interest, although I needed to read Faithful to remind myself that I am still a Red Sox fan after such a horrible season up until now.

It is a good book if you think about it like a short story collection, but overall, it's a mess of missed opportunities and silly storytelling shortcuts, all in an effort to force out some sort of epic story even though there really isn't any need for it. Characters like Henry Bowers (a truly amazing King villain) and Beverly's father (King knows exactly how to take abusive, horrible people and make them somehow more disgusting) are far more terrifying than It, and the backstories and the little vignettes King tells are often far more fascinating than the main story. I want to like this book, but it's such a mess that I have to consider it one of the worst King outings I've read, probably the first one I have read that disappointed me (I haven't even come close to reading them all, and if it matters, my favorites so far are The Stand, The Shining and The Dead Zone).

I am now reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, something I am told I should have read long ago. As a nerd, it's probably criminal that I haven't read it yet, and so far, I am pretty impressed. Some of the comedy within it feels twinged with arrogance on the part of the author, a sort of "oh wow, look at how clever I am" sort of feeling, but enough of it is quite entertaining that I am continuing to read it each night before going to sleep. It's part of an anthology with three other books by Adams, so I'll probably read those too.

Coming Up in August...
My wife and I will see Ant-Man at some point, and I am sure I will just throw all of my wonderful feelings about the Marvel cinematic universe down in a blog entry at some point afterwards. I will continue to read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as well, hopefully getting through it by the end of the month, and I want desperately to work harder on The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, in the hopes that I can write a Game Profile about it. More Dexter is on tap as well, perhaps allowing me to write an entry about how well it humanizes such a dark character, and adds darkness to characters that are otherwise good. I have also been thinking a lot about online gaming and what it has done to the social aspect of gaming. I have an opinion that is probably in the minority of opinions on online gaming, but hey, I'm going to throw it out there anyway.

An Honest Defense of the LEGO Video Games

I think in most gaming circles, I would not be considered a "gamer," as most hardcore gamers interpret the word. Yes, I play video games, for many more hours than the average human being. Yes, I do buy some games brand new and play the heck out of them, my sights almost always set on that elusive yet tempting "100% completion" rating. And yes, in the words of a good friend of mine from my youth, I am "obnoxiously good" at learning how to play a game quickly and efficiently. I remember that particular conversation occurring over Soul Caliber 2 for the Gamecube. He had bought the game a week previously, and within about twenty minutes or so, I was beating him regularly with characters I was only trying out for the first time. As a result of all of this, most people, particularly those that do not play video games on a regular basis, consider me a "gamer," and I, too, refer to myself as such. Yet, because of what games I play, how often I end up playing those games, and my attitudes about gaming in general, in spite of everything I just wrote, the gaming community would probably not consider me a true "gamer."

It's sad, though, that such a community can only be open to those that play certain games. The online gaming craze that start in the late nineties has grown exponentially - now, some people only play games online. Moreover, the need for better and better graphics (which most people interpret as "more realistic") has captured the attention of the hardcore gaming community, as well as the need for "grown-up games," leaving gamers like myself out of the loop in many instances. And, while I could write forever about how sad and depressing that all is, that is not my goal here. No, my goal is to make an argument about a specific type of game, one that is regularly disregarded by those that consider themselves hardcore gamers. This type of game, despite its fun-factor and playability, gets labeled a "kid game," and naturally, anyone that plays this type of game is not serious about their craft. These games, for lack of a better word, are actually quite...

Awesome (because everything is awesome ... am I right?).

Alright, so I've really only got experience with two of the games in this series: LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Wii version) and LEGO Marvel Superheroes (Wii U version). A few summers ago, LEGO Star Wars was my jam - I played it nearly every morning (something I can afford to do over the summers, since I spend the rest of the year teaching). I was obsessed with collecting every single little thing I could, unlocking every character and trying them all, and watching the entire Star Wars story played out by what amounted to be mimes, since the LEGO characters were given no dialogue. The game was charming, fun, and catered to my need to collect things, no mater how insignificant those things are. Did I ever get everything? As is often the result of my tireless hours spent playing a single game ... no, I did not. I could have, damn it, but the summer ended, and my schedule became full from teaching, planning and grading. By the time I had time to play something else, I had gotten something new and my attention shifted away from my beloved LEGO Star Wars.

Several months ago, using an Amazon gift card (thanks, Mom and Dad), I ordered another LEGO game, since I had enjoyed one already. The Marvel movies, as much as they are able to keep things cohesive and consistent, couldn't quite put together the heroes I wanted to see together (the X-Men and Fantastic Four being shunted away in their own franchises for stupid reasons having to do with "rights" and crap like that). So, given my brief research into LEGO Marvel Superheroes, I was excited for the possibilities. I have not been disappointed - I just finished a level where the Human Torch fought alongside Black Widow and Hawkeye! This game, unlike LEGO Star Wars, has dialogue, but that doesn't detract from the fun: the one-liners are not only true to the characters in their more goofy moments, but also to my incredibly "punny" sense of humor (ask my foster kids - if they don't cover their eyes and shake their head in embarrassment over a terrible joke I have just made at least three times a day, I have not done my job). The game, like the Star Wars iteration, has plenty to collect, and will undoubtedly take up much more of my time than Star Wars did. This thought makes me happy.

Now, I can hear some of you now, groaning and wondering how on Earth I am able to call myself a gamer with any amount of dignity. "LEGO games?" you might ask, "How on Earth are these the tools of a mighty gamer? They're too easy!" On that note, I kind of agree. These games were certainly not designed to be incredibly challenging - as a matter of fact, just a quick perusal of lists online of games that are great as "starter games" for those people with zero or little gaming experience will prove that point. Nearly universally, these games are labelled as easy to pick up and play and enjoy. You don't have lives - you simply lose what amounts to money each time you die. The default game mode yields helpful hints regularly, prompting you to use a certain type of character or interact with a certain object. The controls are quite simple - just directions, and maybe two or three other buttons are used. Combat is straight-forward, with no crazy button combinations to worry about. For someone like me that has been playing games since I was 3 or 4, these games present little to no challenge.

So why waste my time on something so easy? I'll tell you - because it's fun. Sometimes "fun" is being challenged, and for that, I turn my attention to other games (particularly the classics on the Sega Genesis and SNES or the NES - some of those are freakin' impossible). But, sometimes "fun" is something lighter and friendlier, and after an entire school year of trying to make high school students care about algebra and calculus, I'll gladly take some time to play something easy if it means I mostly just get to be entertained. Although I wish Mr. Fantastic didn't constantly repeat the line "I really had to stretch my legs for that one!" (or something along those lines), I still chuckle every time it happens, and every time something ridiculous happens. Anyone ever want to see Wolverine make one-liners at the Hulk's expense? Done. Ever want an image as funny as Iron Man just wearing his helmet and a pair of spotted boxers? Done. And nothing makes Return of the Jedi more believable than making everything out of LEGOs (seriously, that is the only way those freaking Ewoks could have completely manhandled the Empire!). LEGO games bring out the fun parts of ever franchise it seeks to embrace.

And that's the key word - embrace. These LEGO games, perhaps more so than the more "serious" games based on the movies from these franchises, embrace some of the more wonderful things these franchises have to offer. We all know the Marvel movies can be fun - so, if you are in the mood for the fun from that franchise, pick up the LEGO version. The same applies to Star Wars. LEGO games, in my experience, show just how entertaining some of these franchises can be, without sacrificing what these franchises are all about. Mind you, I haven't played all of the LEGO games, but if the others are anything like the ones I have made time to experience, they must be just as solid in terms of their representation of the franchises they emulate.

Now, don't mix up my defense of these games with their quality - these games are by no means the "best" out there. The vehicle levels in LEGO Star Wars are downright unwieldy most of the time, and both games I have played have their share of glitches. Case in point - I fell into the water as Iron Man in a level on The Raft in LEGO Marvel Superheroes, and it respawned me on a slanted part of cliff that dumped me right back in the water, over and over again. Even when I switched to my other characters, I could look over at Iron Man and see him, again and again, spawning and falling into the water. These games are not artistic masterpieces, and there are bugs that probably should have been worked out, but that doesn't mean they aren't an absolute blast to play.

In the end, a game doesn't need to be perfect to be fun - sometimes fun is all a game really needs to succeed. And in that regard, the LEGO games are hugely successful at what they seek to do. If I want a good laugh and an opportunity to explore a digital world that is far removed from my own, I pop in a LEGO game and let the ride begin. If I want something more meaningful, I'll find a Zelda game. If I want a challenge, I'll break out a classic platform like Lost Vikings (GOD, that game is hard!). If I want something that's pretty to look at, I'll play a Batman game or one of the Super Mario Galaxy games. But, if I want something stupidly fun and entertaining that probably won't drive me to rage quit (here's talking to you, Super Mario 3D World and your STUPID final level), I'll pick up a LEGO game and be able to relax for a little while.

Well, relax until someone needs me, or I need to feed someone, or put someone to bed ... you get the idea.