… they made multiple video game franchises out of this book?

I don’t know really anything about the Persona video games but I know some folks really like them. Doing a bit of reading, I found out Persona is a spinoff of another video game series, Megami Tensai. Which I learned was based on a book series, Digital Devil Story by Ayla Nishanti. The first couple books have had fan translations. So I read the first book.

I have read that Megami Tensai and Persona are philosophical, deep works. Man, the apple must have flat out run from the tree.

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After high schooler Akemi Nakajima gets badly beaten by bullies, he uses his insane computer skills to summon up the demon Loki to brutally murder his abusers. (Wow, what a sentence.) However, this releases Loki into the human world and opened the human world to the demon world.

While the term edgelord wasn’t a term back in 1985, the behavior certainly existed. And, boy, this is a clear cut example. There are definitely scenes that are extreme just for the sake of shocking and grossing the reader. On top of that, Loki’s almost exclusive targeting of women definitely smacks of misogyny. Some parts are just ick.

And Nakajima is a hot mess of a protagonist in a way that doesn’t feel intentional. If he had been horrified by what he’d done, he’d be sympathetic. Instead, he aides and abets Loki, sacrificing students and teachers to him _until_ it’s a girl he likes. Up until then, he is not even an anti-hero. He’s a flatout villain archetype.

And Yumiko, his love interest and co-protagonist, also has issues. She basically  falls in love with him at first sight and is sympathetic to him even seeing him sacrifice a teacher to Loki. And her moment of strength quickly falls into becoming a damsel in distress (and dead) that Nakajima has to rescue (and resurrect)

There are some excuses. They are supposed to be the reincarnation of lovers. At the end, Nakajima owns up to the fact that he’s done some terrible things and has to do something about that. However, we’re basically just told that he is our protagonist and we’re supposed to like him. It’s worse than an Adam Sandler movie.

With that said, there are some interesting elements to the book. It’s a very 1985 vision of using computers to summon demons. The heroic side, becoming embodiments of deities in order to be able to fight demons was interesting. In all honesty, the best  bits of the book actually probably worked better as a video game than as a book.

From what I can tell, out of the nine books in the series, only the first two have been translated into English. And, after reading the first one, I really don’t know if I’m going to bother hunting down the second one. Ultimately, Digital Devil Story is an intellectual curiosity at best.

My Taskmaster Birthday

 Every year, since before we were even married, my wife bakes me a themed birthday cake. This year, she made a Taskmaster-themed cake.

Taskmaster is a TV show from the UK that was developed by sadistic lunatic Alex

Horne. In theory, it’s a game show where five contestants have to complete challenges, most of which are filmed before the show.

In practice, it’s more of a panel show. The contestants are almost always comedians. A couple have flat out stated that they try to be entertaining, not competitive. Everyone zings each other constantly.

The UK, New Zealand, Australian and Danish versions of the show are all on YouTube and we’ve watched them all. If we need to chill and laugh, Taskmaster does the job.

My wife and son didn’t just make me a Taskmaster-themed cake. They presented me with a sealed task. I had to find my hidden presents. They could answer yes-no questions but only with animal names and they could not repeat animals. I had twenty minutes and my time starts NOW.

The code was that warm-blooded meant yes and cold-blooded meant no. For a bit, I tried to figure out if members of the felidae family meant something specific or if there was difference between reptiles and amphibians. 

While I could have just looked without asking questions, where’s the fun in that? And it was a voucher that let me know she had ordered this year’s Taskmaster Advent Calendar. Because this was a Taskmaster birthday!

My family has set a high bar for my birthday cakes but this was a new high water mark.

Packing Party is too colorful for me but I like its interaction

 I have slightly mixed feelings about Packing Party. On the down side, it feels weak to me compared to what I’ve come to expect Shiny Pigeon Games. Two of their games, Around the World in 10-15 Minutes and Beards and Booty, feel like games out of a box, not a printer. They are games I regularly recommend. Packing Party, on the urged hand, feels like a PnP R&W. 

On the other hand, Packing Party is a pretty solid PnP R&W.

My actual biggest beef with it is that it requires six different colors. Not only am I colorblind, I normally only keep four different colors of dry erase markers around. (I ended up using patterns as well as colors)

The game is about packing up boxes. In Moving Day, the one I’ve been playing, you are packing boxes for a move. In Santa’s Helpers, you’re packing gifts for foster kids.

The actual mechanics are drawing shapes in grids. It’s a good thing I like doing that since I honestly think I’ve literally played over a hundred games with that mechanic. So, what does Packing Party do to make it not just be another tree in the vast forest?

In Packing Party, you are filling three different-sized grids. And you are filling them out with six different colors. 

The core mechanic is actually drafting. You lay out the colored writing utensils in a specific order. You roll the dice one at a time, assigning them in order to the pens. Then, you draft them. The pip determines the shape so you are drafting for color and shape.

In Moving Day, there are two ways to score points. Boxes score points for the number of different colors. You also have to pick a color for each box (in game terms, label what room the box is for) and you will score points based on that specific color. You can label the boxes at the end of the game but you can earn bonus points doing it earlier.

The game ends when either someone labels their third box or everyone passes in a row. Most points wins.

Other nice touches: There are one-shot special powers. There are six and three are available per game. There are advanced sheets where you randomly determine the pip shapes. There’s a solo mode that simulates the draft. You have some control over what the dice get taken away but not total control.

In short, while Packing Party doesn’t break any new ground and, if you’re used to gaming, the mechanics will be comfortably familiar. However, it does more than just have you fill in a grid. How you fill it in matters. It is simple but there are layers to the decisions. 

More than that, by having a draft as a core mechanic, it has legitimate player interaction. So many R&W are solitaires you play next to other people. Or with no one. In Packing Party, your choices affect other people. That’s it’s real standout quality.

As I said before, my honest problem with the game is that I have very limited color vision. I laminate sheets and use dry erase markers for games I plan on using more than once. With the standard colors that are easy to get, the black and the blue look alike to me, as do the red and green. Playing Packing Party gives me eye strain.

Which isn’t a real knock against the game. I can find dry erase markers with enough contrast if I wanted to. It’s not as big a problem for me as the original five-to-six player expansion for Catan, which added brown and green. With the original red, half the options were identical to me!

Ultimately, while it’s a game I physically struggle with and I don’t think is as strong as other Shiny Pigeon games, I do think that does its job well, particularly because it has that solid player interaction.

Which means I will be trying out the other version, Santa’s Helpers, before Christmas.

Weetzie Bat - searching for love in a dream of Los Angeles

 Weetzie Bat is Tales of the City on peyote.

It is the first book in a series by Francesca Lia Block. I had heard that it was a pioneering work of urban fantasy, like War for the Oaks by Emma Bull. Now that I’ve read of, I really can’t see it.

That said, boy is it its own thing.

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Plot wise, Weetzie Bat is about how Weetzie Bat and her gay best friend find their soul mates and form a family with some bumps along the way. 

The only overtly magical event is Weetzie using a genie’s wishes to form said family. Although not even she is sure that it happened. I get the impression that the later books might have more overt fantasy elements but it felt more like Tom Robbins than Charles de Lint. 

The book takes place in what feels like a mythic Los Angeles, a place of Hollywood legends and local restaurants. However, the book also describes these things getting torn down and replaced. I felt like the characters want to live in a dream world but the real world keeps creeping in.

In fact, I would go so far as to describe Weetzie Bat as prose poem disguised as a short novel. The book plays with names and lists and imagery.

I am not the main demographic for Weetzie Bat, although online commentary makes it clear this was an important book for many people. It is technically a young adult book but it is one of those young adult books where you have to be told that it is one.

However, the chapter about the death of Weetzie Bat’s dad, Charlie Bat, that was powerful. His overdose makes it clear something precious but broken was lost. That chapter ended up being where the book clicked for me and the reason that I might read more of the books.

I don’t think Weetzie Bat is a part of the same literary evolution at Charles de Lint. However, it does its own thing and stands by it.

Balatro - the beating card heart in a video game

 I have tried several times to write about the video game Balatro. And every time, it ended up being paragraph after paragraph of me summarizing the rules and it was just unreadable.

Balatro is a video game that answers the question of how do you make Poker into a solitaire with add a healing scoop of special powers. The elevator pitch for Balatro had to be this is the love child of Poker and Magic the Gathering.

Every round gives you a point goal you have to meet or exceed by playing a given number of hands. You multiply the value of the cards by the value of the hand. It’s only confusing until you play it.

You start with a regular deck of cards but as the game goes on, you can modify, well, everything. You can add or remove cards. You can upgrade cards or hands. And you can get jokers that give you special powers.

There’s a good chance you’ve already played and can testify how ridiculously addictive it is. My incredibly abbreviated summary fails to describe all the variations incorporated into the system. Honestly, I cannot imagine what the play testing had to be like.

What makes Balatro so brilliant is that Poker is baked into it. It’s the heart of Balatro and Poker is like a common language as far as the world of gaming is concerned. The basic idea is intrinsically intuitive. You automatically understand what you need to do. It’s the fine details, and there are a lot of them, that make it interesting.

While someone has developed a version of the game that uses physical cards (Solatro, which isn’t bad), there is no denying that having Balatro really sings in the video game format. A lot of things start happening all at once very quickly in the game and it’s really nice to have a computer keep track of it all.

We have had a lot of fun and a lot of play out of Balatro, sometimes even playing it as a cooperative. It might need a computer interface to work, but it is a card game at heart.

Sink the Bismarck is a celebration of the inevitability of failure

 Sink the Bismarck is a hit of a historical oddity to me.

I remember seeing it years ago, close to when it originally came out. At that time, I was vaguely aware of Print and Play but it wasn’t any kind of focus for me. I am under the impression that a higher percentage of Print and Plays were war games at the time but I could be totally wrong.

A lot of the ‘early’ print and play war games that I looked at back in the day were hex and chit. Sink the Bismarck is actually more of a push-your-luck game.

The game is about the 1941 sinking of the German battleship Bismarck by the British Royal Navy. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, this was a turning point in the naval part of World War II.

You take on the roll of the Bismarck’s defenders, trying to shoot down the planes and torpedoes that will eventually sink her. There is no winning condition. The battleship is going to sink. You are just trying to see how much at the enemy, you can shoot down before it happens.

The version of the board that I used was simple line art of four tracks leading to the doomed battleship. The last two spaces on each track are where the plane tokens turn into torpedo tokens. Which are harder to hit.

Roll two dice to see if and where two British planes are going to enter the tracks. Place four dice on the track where you think planes or torpedoes are going to move. Roll dice for each plane to see if they go left, right, or straight as they moved down. Any placed die that has a plane or torpedo in the same space to see if you hit it. (Planes get hit on fives and sixes. Torpedos require sixes) Repeat until the Bismarck gets hit five times and sinks.

That’s pretty much the rules. You get 1 point for every plane you shoot down. You get five points for every torpedo you shoot down. Try and beat your best score.

BGG user C Hansen compared Sink the Bismarck to an old school video game and I think they really nailed it. More than anything else, it feels like an adaptation of Space Invaders, despite its historic theme. (I do appreciate it when a game gives you a history lesson though)

The gameplay is very simple and luck-based. In some cases, you can make some very good guesses on dice placement. Planes on the edges are going to go straight down 2/3 of the time and torpedoes just go straight down. But then you have to roll a five or a six or just a six. No way to modify that.

On the positive side, the game delivers the  tension. The planes and torpedos just keep coming and their numbers just keep growing. Failure may be inevitable but trying to stave it off is fun. Honestly, more fun than it has any right to be.

Sink the Bismarck’s strongest selling point it has really minimal construction requirements. One page board with very minimal ink. I just used cubes instead making the airplane/torpedo chits. And I do have plenty of dice around.

Sink the Bismarck has so-so mechanics but remarkably strong tone. The opportunity cost is so low that It doesn’t hurt to try it out.

A. Lee Martinez and Meta

 I’ve been meaning to get around to reading some A. Lee Martinez. They specialize in deconstructive/reconstructive fantastic comedy. You know, where the characters are genre savvy.

I recently read an article where Christopher Nolan said that the problem with amateur critics is that they feel if they can recognize a trope, the work is a failure. I somewhat agree that if people actually use that argument, it’s not a valid argument. However, I don’t actually know how common it is.

The problem isn’t recognizing plot devices and tropes. I’m going to arrogantly argue that it’s a problem when creators let tropes do all the heavy lifting by themselves. You still have to tell a compelling story. (Yes, I am thinking about Rob Liefeld)

I don’t think creating a meta heavy work is a big deal and I think that it’s something that pop culture increasingly leans into. TV Tropes is basically an instruction manual for it. I personally think Buffy the Vampire Slayer really pushed meta heavy into the lime light but it goes back at least as far as Don Qioxote.

(Actually, A True Story by Lucian of Samosota which was written in second century AD is an even earlier example of meta aware fiction. No, I’ve never read it and I have no idea if it’s any good. However, it’s clearly not a new idea.)

While I had read some of Martinez’s short stories, I’d been meaning to read their longer works. I started with Divine Misfortune pretty much at random.

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I won’t really be spoiling much 

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A world where every myth is true, interactions with the gods has stopped really being about religion and become contractual. Phil and Teri decide to make a contract with Luka, a raccoon-headed god of luck. Unfortunately, Luka fails to mention this will pull them into the bad graces of a couple of gods who are out to get him…

The short version is, I felt that Divine Misfortune works because the characters are sympathetic and engaging. The setting is utterly silly, but we are still drawn in and don’t want unspeakable things to happen to the characters.

Can we see the strings? Is the Man Behind the Curtain pretty obvious? Yes. Martinez treats the setting as a joke but not the characters so I don’t mind. It’s enough for me to buy the ticket and go on the ride.

Honestly, my biggest question was why is Luka a raccoon and not a tanuki?

Now that I’ve convinced that A. Lee Martinez is a fun author, I’m planning on tackling his Constance Verity trilogy, about a heroine who is always the chosen one and really burnt out about it. Clearly trope heavy but being thoughtful with those tropes.