Wildcard: Warcross Series, Book 2

Wildcard: Warcross Series, Book 2 by Marie Lu

The previous book ended on a cliffhanger. Was Emika helping the right side? This book takes that and runs with a number of twists and turns. The new technology has lead to criminals turning themselves in or committing suicide. However, it may be going too far. Some people are inundating the police for guilt of past parking tickets and the like. The creator of the tech (Hideo) is doing it to try to find the people that had abducted his brother. Emika eventually discovers that Hideo's opponent, "Zero" is actually the AI versions of his deceased brother. This boy was part of big project that took kids out with fatal diseases as the guinea pigs. It was their mom who had brought him out. However, now he had become part of a group lead by a quiet women that was trying to take Hideo's tech for their own benefit. Eventually all comes to a positive conclusion. The tech is initially shut down. However, since most of it is so important to society Emika is brought in to help restore it in a positive way.

Tetris: The Games People Play

Tetris: The Games People Play by Brian "Box" Brown 

Tetris is a simple, addictive game with an interesting history. It was started as a text-based pet project in the Soviet Union. He liked to play it on his own. He shared with others. Soon it spread and eventually made it out of the Soviet Union. The cold war was in process, and Russia was little understood by the west. However, when people saw the game, they saw the potential. There were various businessmen involved in negationations and trading rights to the game. Eventually, one guy managed to cold-call the Russians and get the rights to the game. Nintendo was able to use those to distribute the game on the Gameboy further contributing to its popularity. Initially, the creator made no money from the game. However, he was later able to immigrate to the United States and share in the proceeds. This book tells the story of Tetris (and Nintendo) in the form of a graphic novel.

Glitch: A Graphic Novel

Two high school friends are very excited to play the newest video game. They promise to wait until the weekend to play it together. However, one decides to "test it out". She ends up getting literally drawn into the game. She plays all night and sleeps through school all day. Her friendship suffers. Later she makes up with the friend and they beat the video game together. The "boss" of the game is actually the robot friend that wants to conquer the game and the world. However, the girls are able to work together to conquer it. The story is fairly straightforward. I did not care much for the style of the drawings, but that is a personal preference.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A Novel

Two youth meet in a hospital and strike up a friendship. The girl ends up meeting with the boy regularly as a "service project". Even though they are friends, he becomes hurt when he discovers the "service" and they stop talking for years. Later they both end up in college in Massachusetts. They rekindle the friendship in part through their passion for video games.

As young adults, they join with some of their friends to create a video game. After it succeeds, they devote themselves to video game. They have a tight-knit group of friends that work as co-workers (with occasional romantic relationships popping up.) Some of the games do extremely well, inviting recognition and leading to a shooter in the office. Death and birth enter into the complexity of adult life. It comes full-circle as a young company partners with them in the creation of a spin off of one of the first games.

The book jumps around in time and does accurate portrayals of life and technology in the various time periods. The characters also evolve with the time, accurately reflecting values of the individual time periods, while also representing their various cultures (from Japan to California and K-town.)

Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry

The video game industry has never had a reputation for treating employees well. Workers are often brought on as full time employees, yet let go when the project is done. (This differs from entertainment fields where they typically are brought on specifically for a project.) 

Press Reset is filled with anecdotes from a few video game developers and studios. Some studios (like 38 studios) treated their employees great until they ran out of money and stopped paying their employees. Others ran modern-day sweat shops. Being part of a big company can be both good and bad. It seems to add a bit of security, but can also lead to project cancellation on an executive's whim.

Despite the bad reputation, people are still seek out jobs in the gaming industry. Minimum-wage testing jobs are sought after by active gamers. Video games use a mix of cutting edge art and technology. Artists and engineers are attracted to work in the field, despite the hardships. 

Infinity Blade: Redemption

The second Infinity Blade book continues where the first one left off. The hero is trying to find the easy life. However, he discovers that like the bad guy, he is constantly resurrected. How do they defeat each other? Well, there is a way. This book also drifts into the modern day. They invent some sort of teleportation capability. However, they realize that there are severe capabilities for badness with this. In the end it ends up being part of the solution to the big battle. The blade gives power, but also takes it from the holder and others. Peace can only be found by relinquishing it.

Infinity Blade: Awakening

Infinity Blade: Awakening was based on a video game and it shows. Bad guys can resurrect to fight again. The hero can defeat the seemingly undefeatable bad guys. The back stories make for interesting fluf to keep the battles interesting.

The Eye of Minds: Mortality Doctrine, Book One

In a near future world, a "Vritual world" is extremely popular. People enter "coffins" that stimulate there nerves and provide a full immersive experience. As part of it, they have a special "core" that prevents them from receiving lasting harm from the virtual experience. People play the games, while advanced users hack the system to get special abilities. Alas, there is something gone awry in the system that is resulting in people being harmed in the real world. Kaine seems to be "powerful gamer" that is leading to problems in the system. Not only is he creating issues in the virtual world, he is leading to deaths and potential destruction of the actual world. Three kids were tasked with undergoing a quest to find Kaine. They needed to complete many "video game" activities to eventually find Kaine and discover the "mortality doctrine" that enables Artificial Intelligent "tangents" to take over the body of a real human. The book ends up with an unexpected twist that sets it up for a sequel.

Armada

I remember watching a movie once where every every movie previewed was about the eminent end of the world. Only one ordinary random person could save us from utter destruction. Reading Armada, I could see it fit directly into that genre. It is a CGI-fest in the making, complete with a hard-hitting soundtrack, one-dimensional characters, and a bit of requisite sappy drama. It is also a nerd fest with references to numerous classic games and 80s music.
The story (if it even matters) is about an alien invasion of the earth. The government has known about the aliens, but has been covering it up. However, they have been using science fiction movies to acclimate people to the possibility of aliens, while using video games to help train them to fight them. Government scientists have been able to reverse engineer some of the alien technology to fight the aliens and want video game players to remotely control drones. Our "hero", Zach Lightman, is a teenager who has struggled with violence at school. His only outlet is a video game shop where he hangs out and works part time. His dad "died" when he was an infant. One day, he is finally let in on the secrets. The shop owner was actually a government agent to watch over and train him. His dad actually joined the secret Earth Defense Force and was is still alive. His last video game mission was a real attempt to blow away the aliens. The space probes had discovered a swastika on a moon on Jupiter and attempted to blow it up, triggering the alien invasion.
In the end, they fight the aliens. He meets his dad. Dad gets together briefly with Mom and produces another baby brother - only to have Dad die for real in the process of saving the world. Zach realizes that the aliens are behaving too much like a video game. They are only escalating the violence in response to earth's escalation. He leads the effort to prevent a mission from destroying the alien homeland. He then discovers, that it is only an AI sent to "test" the earth to determine if they can peacefully exist. The aliens then give the earth lifesaving technology, and all live happily ever after.
The story is hokey, but fast moving. My biggest complaint is on the language side. This is a PG-13 story needlessly filled with R-rated language.

Click Here To Start

Click Here To Start has been described as a younger reader's version of Ready Player One. Both novels center around an expert video game player who uses video game skills to complete a real-life quest. They also have a "backdrop" (80s nostalgia or literature) peppered throughout the story. And they both take a few too many jumps to allow them to be truly believable.
Ted is a half-Jewish, half-Japanese twelve year old who is an expert at "escape" video games. His great uncle served as Japanese soldier in the American army during World War II. He recently passed away and left all to Ted (after praising his intelligence and skill at games.) Ted's Jewish dad was recently passed over for the position of English chair at their local Southern California college in favor of a wealthy east coaster. The new professor has a "too perfect" daughter Ted's age. She doesn't want much to do with him, but you can tell she will be part of the story. She, along with Ted and his friend end up solving the puzzle to find the treasure (meanwhile dodging the efforts of a rouge antiques dealer. In the process, they also grow to become good friends.
The mechanisms for solving the puzzles seems to stretch believability. Worse, however, is the video game that only shows up for Ted and exactly mimics some key real life escapades he will have. By never explaining this, the author leaves the novel in a slightly fantastic world, just unreal enough to make it annoying.

The Tetris Effect

Tetris is a fascinating video game. It is simple, yet challenging and very addicting. I remember spending way too many hours playing "Nyet", a Tetris clone on the IBM PC. I managed to justify this as "study" for the computer science class project. (In the end, we implemented an "online" version of Tetris for computer bulletin board systems.) The code is easy to implement. However, if you do it a little bit wrong, the quality of the gameplay can significantly degrade. Do it right, and you have an addicting experience.
The story of Tetris is even more intriguing than the game itself. Tetris was one of the earliest of the "casual games". It has been implemented on just about every platform imaginable. It came out of communist-era Russia, being implemented originally by Alexey Pajitnov in his spare time. It ran only on some ancient Soviet hardware. However, it quickly became popular there. But do to the platform, was somewhat limited in how far it spread. Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov then ported it to MS-DOS, and it started to really take off. (The original version can be downloaded from Vadim's site - alas without the source code- at http://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm ) The name is a combination of "Tetra" (four) and "Tennis" and really has nothing Russian about it. I had always thought it was a Russian word - especially with the frequent backwards-R version of writing it.
Tetris spread behind the iron curtain where it was discovered by Robert Stein, who was looking for software in Hungary. He had license it to MirrorSoft (owned by the infamous Robert Maxwell) and tried to officially secure the rights from Russia. There was only one catch - Russia had very little understanding of intellectual property rights. Eventually, they were able to have something worked out. However, Henk Rogers was later able to scoop in and snatch the rights away for Nintendo.
The bulk of this book covers the protracted negotiations for the rights to the game. Rogers is portrayed as the "hero" of the negotiations. He originally developed Black Onyx - an early fantasy role playing game. He had branched from development to the business side, and thus was able to connecty well with with Pajitnov. (The two eventually obtained the rights for themselves.) The book waffles on the portrayal of Stein. First he is a great guy, who seems to know how to get through the Soviet system to get the world a great game. Later, however, he is a greedy businessman who doesn't have the charisma to get along with the programmers.
The book clearly has its biases. (For example, Tengen is portrayed as an evil corporate entity that "lost", even though they had the best version of Tetris.) Telling a story a story involving cultural barriers a few decades after it occurred also introduces additional challenges. The book also repeats itself at times and the "bonus" chapters stuck in the middle seem to go on for too long. In spite of these shortcomings, it is a riveting read that is difficult to put down. I just it was easier to come by a good Tetris game.

Ready Player One

Read Player One is set in 2044. However, it really feels more like 2010 meshed with the 1980s with a few "futuristic bits" thrown in. Clearly the author grew up in the 80s and enjoyed the classic video games of those days. Modern video games don't play a huge role.

The novel starts with the death of a major video game designer. He is a billionaire who made a fortune from this game (and even the associated schools.) However, he died without any heirs. There are however, easter eggs in his famous video game, Oasis, and whoever finds them first, inherits his money. The novel is the story of the boy who found it.

It seemed like a great topic, but it wasn't executed well. The setting just wasn't convincing. Laptops? Really. Those probably wont make it to 2020 let alone 2040s. I liked the 80s games, and could see this as an alternate universe where we just went straight from that. But this setting is not convincing. Some of the philosophizing and language gets tiring also. It does, however, succeed as an 80s nostalgia piece. Just turn off the part of your brain that wants something at least remotely believable and you'll be entertained.

Wreck it Ralph

It has been a while since Disney has released a good animated movie. However, they have bought Pixar, who seems to have a recent monopoly on quality animation. So, it would only be time before Disney would start poaching Pixar to ramp up the "native" animation studio. John Lasseter (of Cars and Toy Story fame) was the executive producer of Wreck it Ralph. This film has much more of the Pixar "magic" than Brave, the most recent Pixar release. The director, Ralph Moore is best known for directing Simpsons and Futurama episodes. This just sounds like a great combination for a fun movie.

The movie doesn't disappoint. Apparently, the film had been seeded back in the 80s when the video game arcades had their initial burst of popularity. Now it is 30 years later and the movie thrives on a lot of the nostalgia for the video games. The video game characters work their games during the day, but after the arcade closes, they can freely travel. (They just need to be careful not to die, because they don't regenerate outside their game.) "Ralph" is the "bad guy" in the Fix it Felix video game. He feels sad beacuse the good buy always gets the credit and the medals. He eventually goes to a "bad guys anonymous" meeting (run by one of the Pac-man ghosts). Unfortunately, he soon discovers he hasn't been invited to the big party for his game's anniversary. He gets upset and runs away to try to find a medal. He finds one in a modern first person shooter game, but ends up being flown out to Sugar Rush, a candy go-kart racing game. There he meets a "glitch" who wants the medal to be able to race, they fight, become friends and eventually have a happy ending after some close calls.

The movie is filled with a lot of the small visual details that are common in the Simpson's episodes. There are plenty of inside jokes and video game allusions. The music works well, with a nice classic video-game influence. The closing credits song, "Sugar Rush" is by AKB48, A Japanese girl group. I seems just perfect in the video game setting.