Bite Me: A Love Story — A review
Vampires have somehow become a very popular trend in the last few years, with everyone seemingly wanting to cash in on them. From “Twilight” to “The Vampire Diaries,” the undead have spread through the media and there is seemingly no escape from them. Christopher Moore’s latest book, “Bite Me: A Love Story,” also tells a story about vampires, but not in the traditional sense. No one in this book sparkles.
Finishing up the trilogy started fifteen years ago, which previously included “Bloodsucking Fiends,” and “You Suck: A Love Story,” Moore released “Bite me” at a great time, with everyone wanting to read about vampires (more than pirates, or even ninjas). However, these are not your typical vampires. Yes, they will still die if exposed to sunlight, but they are not the old, romantic brooding types that everyone obsesses over. They are not hundreds of years old and trying to hide among the humans in their secluded castles. These are regular people who got turned and are living with it, one day at a time.
The story is mainly told through the eyes of Abby Normal, an underage goth girl that is, like all goth girls, obsessed with vampires. She serves as a daytime minion to Tommy Flood, a young writer from Illinois, and Jody, his girlfriend who happen to be vampires. The book mainly focuses on their group trying to figure out how to stop a group of vampire cats from killing all the homeless people in San Francisco. The plot, while ridiculous, serves as a vehicle for the character interaction, which is where Moore’s clever writing really shines. He writes dialogue which produces laugh out loud funny lines one after the next, without making it seemed forced. Read more »
The Protomen–Act II: The Father of Death
In an age where CD’s and records have become obsolete in order to make way for the sale of individual songs, it is rare to see a band release a full album that tells an overarching story, rather just being a collection of songs about numerous unrelated subjects. The Protomen’s recent release entitled “Act II: The Father of Death,” does just this, creating a compelling story over twelve songs.
The Protomen are a band that took the plot of the original Mega Man games for the NES, changed it into a 1984-esque world and turned the whole thing into a rock opera. Some details are changed from the original source material, the biggest being that Wily is actually successful in his attempts to take control of the world, and he oversees everything from a tower while his robots create a dystopia where Big Brother is always watching. Read more »
Tales of Monkey Island: A Pirate Tale in Five Chapters
Whenever an old game franchise is revived it is met with fan skepticism and nervousness. This is especially true with games which have large fan bases. Over the years, I have personally seen a lot of old games updated to varying degrees of success. The most recent of those is a revival of one of my favorite series: Monkey Island. Telltale Games took the license from Lucasarts and released five episodes over the past 6 months. The story of Guybrush Threepwood is continuing on and is still filled with plenty of puzzles and humor along the way.
The plot starts off with Guybrush once again trying to take down his nemesis, the demon pirate LeChuck. In the process, Guybrush messes up a spell, and sucks all the voodoo energy out of LeChuck, making him human again. Unfortunately, all that voodoo is spread throughout the Caribbean, infecting all the pirates, making them all sick and prone to fits of demonic anger. Those possessed include his wife Elaine, and like in Evil Dead 2, his own hand. So it’s up to Guybrush to find a cure for this demon pox by traveling all over the Caribbean in search of… a voodoo sponge to suck up the energy, obviously.
You can see where this might be a problem
Little Red Riding Hood’s Zombie BBQ
I am a simple man, the littlest things amuse me. So when I see a game called “Little Red Riding Hood’s Zombie BBQ,” for the Nintendo DS, I am going to pick it up because it has an awesome title. All I expect from the game is two things: Zombies, and a way to kill them. The game does not disappoint in this department.
- Don’t know why Little Red Riding Hood has a huge rack
Pygmy: Is Palahniuk even trying anymore?
Chuck Palahniuk released another book a few months ago entitled “Pygmy,” just a year after his last book, “Snuff,” which I did not like. I was surprised when I found out another book had been released so soon; most authors usually have a larger gap between books. I figured with the steady decline in quality that his work has had that it probably wasn’t going to be any good, but it was short so I figured it wouldn’t take to long to read. So, going against my better judgment I picked it up, hoping it would at least be better than his last few books have been. I really need to start trusting those first instincts.
The story is about a young Asian spy from an unnamed country posing as an exchange student in America. While here, he is working to put a plan in motion that involves winning the local science fair so he can go to Washington and set off a device that will kill millions of Americans. This is different from his usual work and for some reason felt a little ridiculous to me. Yet I had no problem accepting the plot of “Survivor,” which involved a man becoming the leader of a cult and building a giant landfill of pornography. Maybe it had to do with the narrative style of this book that just completely turned me off to the story. Read more »
A look back on: Monkey Island
Lucasarts used to do more than just release multiple Star Wars games year after year. That was twenty years ago. They had a game division which made a lot of classic adventure games that had nothing to do with Star Wars. I always thought the term “adventure” wasn’t all that fitting, that brings to mind more platforming elements, but I guess it sounds better than “plot-driven puzzle games.” They produced many classic titles, such as “Maniac Mansion”, ‘Grim Fandango” and “Sam & Max Hit the Road”, all of which had memorable characters, hilarious dialogue and brain-scratching puzzles. The genre died out in the mid to late nineties, but fans have always wanted more.
In the past few years, they’ve had something of a revival, especially by the company Telltale Games who have been releasing adventure games in an episodic format. They started getting major attention when they released two new seasons of Sam and Max two years ago and continued on with other games like “Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People” based on the characters on Homestarrunner.com and “Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventure” based on the famous duo of the same name. Recently, it was announced they would be releasing episodes for one of my favorite series next month: “Monkey Island”. Read more »
“Wolverine: Origins” Review
Many writers of superhero comics commonly write themselves into corners, and have no idea how to get out. They have their heroes defeated, the villains winning and everything looking hopeless. However, the good guys need to win so there can be an issue next month, so some superheroes are incredibly overpowered just so they can be thrown at problems to fix them.
For DC, it is Superman who is impervious to all types of damage and can punch through planets. Marvel has Wolverine. Wolverine is not as strong as Superman, but he can’t die either, and has a personality that is driven by more than a simple need to do the right thing. The main problem with this type of character is that someone who can’t die lacks a lot basic conflict and has problems carrying on a story of their own. This does not stop Wolverine from being popular, so to cash in on this Marvel has just released a movie about him. Read more »
Fool by Christopher Moore: A Different Take on King Lear
Christopher Moore’s latest book, Fool, is a retelling of Shakespeare’s play King Lear through the eyes of Pocket, the court jester. Being one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, going in I imagined it was going to be hard to find humor in the plot. However, Moore uses the plot, the language, and every situation in the book to fit a joke onto almost every page.
This is Moore’s second re-telling of an old story, his first being Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, which I greatly enjoyed. In this book however, he decided to use an already existing minor character, and develop him greater, instead of making an entirely new character and inserting him into the story. The way Pocket is developed and inserted into the events happening in the narrative, it’s hard at times to imagine him as a minor character in the play.
Going in, I was a little worried that I would have a hard time following the plot since I wasn’t too familiar with the original work, despite being assigned to read it in multiple classes in college (I was never really a motivated student). This was not the case though, as Moore keeps things simple, clearly keeping all characters and titles in order and avoiding traditional Shakespearean dialogue, making it a very approachable book to those not familiar with the bard. Read more »
FFX-2: Girly Propaganda from lazy programmers
A few years back, Square came out with its tenth game in the Final Fantasy series, cleverly titled “Final Fantasy X.” I picked it up, because, like I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy the series, and the Playstation installments 7 and 9 were good. I also thought that there was no fucking way they could make a game as bad as 8 ever again. Overall, it was a mediocre game with a confusing ending. Something about the main guy being the lost dream of a dead city, or something. I don’t know, I didn’t really get it then and I still don’t particularly care.
I can’t wait for the e-mails I get about that. God you people love to bitch about spoilers. Well, here’s a hint: if you haven’t played a game, don’t read articles about its sequel.
Speaking of spoilers, this guy framed Roger Rabbit.
Anyway, I’m not here to talk about the mediocre game, I’m here to talk about its very crappy sequel. Square realized the money-making opportunities it had, as can be seen in the recent sales of final fantasy sex toys (ok, no, but they could have! and they still might), so they decided to start cashing in and making sequels where they aren’t needed. One could argue there is a need due to the confusing ending, and the fact that it wasn’t exactly a happy one, but I still think it could have been left alone. Read more »
Choke: A Movie Review
As I have stated before, I am a huge fan of Chuck Palahniuk’s earlier books. Like most people, I found out about his work from the movie “Fight Club,” which I loved, and still do to this day. Fans have been waiting nine years for another adaptation, getting their dreams crushed along the way with cancellations for various reasons, such as Survivor not being adapted after September 11th due to the fact the plot involves a plane hijacking. After a long wait, they finally got their wish, with the newly released movie “Choke.”
The plot follows Victor Mancini, a young sex addict who makes himself choke in restaurants in order to get saved by people so he can use the sympathy of a near death experience to get money from them in order to keep his senile mother in a nursing home. His mother never remembers who he is, and Victor is trying to find out about his past before she loses her mind completely. The story only gets stranger from there. Read more »
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