Tag: reviews

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The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – ★★★★★

Zelda Tears of the Kingdom

A truly remarkable achievement in ways that I’m not sure any of us could have guessed when Nintendo announced they were making a sequel to Breath of the Wild.

Tears of the Kingdom refined pretty much everything my former (spoiler) favorite game offered and added seemingly endless new ways to traverse, interact, and manipulate the vast world. And it also added an actually intriguing and touching story on top of it, though that story is still told in a slightly improved but still suboptimal non-linear fashion.

220+ hours, all 152 shrines, every single light root, and I barely scratched the surface of everything in this game. I finished the game at only at 61% complete and there are huge areas of the surface map I’ve literally never been to.

It may just be recency bias talking, but Tears of the Kingdom might just be my new favorite adventure/open world game of all time. Breath of the Wild was more of a breath of fresh air and I was still thinking about it months/years later, but I’ve never so obsessively consumed every bit of game the way I did with TotK over the last 2 months. I can’t wait to see what is next for the Zelda franchise and can’t imagine what Nintendo has in store for us next.

Rating: 5 stars

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💿 Buy Tears of the Kingdom for Switch

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Bloodsport – ★½

The first 10-15 minutes of this may be some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen and they somehow don’t bother to start bloodsporting until like 40 minutes in to a 90 minute movie.

The bit at the end where they claim Frank Dux did all these amazing things just screamed “lol, sure you did dude.” Went to Wikipedia and yep, shady as heck and likely mostly all made up including any military history.

Rating: 1.5 stars

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💿 Buy Bloodsport on Blu-ray

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The Codex (by Douglas Preston) – ★★½

The Codex

Ooof. Wasn’t awful but was certainly stilted/poorly written in spots. Not nearly as interesting or in my wheelhouse as the Lincoln Child books I’ve been reading. (Ironically, I’ve been catching up with all these old Preston and Child books while I wait for the first Preston & Child book Relic to be available on Libby.)

I think the voices/accents the reader uses in the audiobook likely made it even worse, but even for a book from 20 years ago this was pretty culturally incompetent. And it saved some of the worst racism for a totally unnecessary final coda that doubled down on bigotry and some of the worst language yet.

I read Preston’s Tyrannosaur Canyon on vacation ages ago and liked it, so despite struggling with this one I’m still eager to reread that and check out the rest of the Wyman Ford books. Hopefully they’re a little more fun and a lot less dated in their perspective.

Rating: 2.5 stars

📚 View my Goodreads review
📕 Buy The Codex on Amazon

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Disrupting the Game (by Reggie Fils-Aimé) – ★★½

A relatively thin personal memoir that tried too hard to be a business book and to cover every one of Fils-Aimé professional life events instead of going particularly deep on anything interesting. Considering the name, tagline, and cover art of the book more focus on Nintendo.

The behind the scenes moments with the late Satoru Iwata were the most interesting but Fils-Aimé memoir lacks much real introspection or insight into what was happening at Nintendo during his time there. 200 page book and only 7 pages or so are spent on the failure of the Wii U and the launch of the Switch.

He still seems just as proud of the Bigfoot Pizza as he does of his time at NOA, despite mentioning in the book that the pizza wasn’t very good and had to stop selling it relatively quickly because it was negatively impacting the overall sentiment of Pizza Hut’s pizza. But I guess it was a marketing success and that’s all he cares about?

I definitely already had opinions on hiring sales people as president/CEOs and nothing in this book really dissuaded me of that sentiment.

I only really know Reggie from his E3 stage presentations, and while this book makes him seem like a pretty decent person it also is written as if he thinks he is the smartest person ever and Nintendo would still be making the Ultra Hand and Love Testers if it wasn’t for him. I’m not sure if that’s really how he feels but the way the book is written frequently comes off that way.

I’m probably just not the target demographic for business dude memoirs and should be reading investigative journalism and history books instead of this.

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The Third Gate (by Lincoln Child) – ★★★

The Third Gate

First Jeremy Logan book where Jeremy Logan was actually the main character and so far the worst of the series. Both the general premise and the actual events in this book were the weakest so far (IMO), and even worse Logan himself is the least interesting main protagonist. There’s just not a lot of personality or backstory there despite the fact that he at least existed in two previous novels.

Spoiler warning
I found myself rolling my eyes several times at Logan’s statements/beliefs and the entire pseudoscience connection to the ancient world a lot harder to connect with then the good ol’ fashioned ancient aliens or mystical beasts tropes from the first two books. The direction this one took definitely has me a bit worried.

I’m flying through these audiobooks on Libby super fast so unless book 4 falls off a cliff I plan to keep going but hopefully the characters and mysteries of the next books in Child’s series are much stronger.

📚 View my Goodreads review
📕 Buy The Third Gate on Amazon

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Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind – ★★★★

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind poster

Took the kids to watch this in the theater today as part of Studio Ghibli Fest. First time for me to ever see a Miyazaki movie on the big screen.

This was one of my least favorites when I originally was running through my Miyazaki blind spots back in 2020, but giving it my full attention now I really enjoyed it quite a bit. I was pleasantly surprised how much both my girls liked it considering how “old” it is and how relatively few laughs there are. They were probably the only 2 people under 30 in the theater today.

Nausicaä is such a fantastic character as are all the other valley residents, but boy do I hate every single Tolmekian and Pejite moron. And they remain pretty much completely irredeemable for the entire movie. (I know we’re supposed to dislike them but still.)

It is bit depressing how little progress we’ve made as a society in 40 years towards the Nausicaä’s basic themes of environmentalism, empathy, and pacifism.

It’s early so not quite as breathtakingly beautiful as some of the films that followed it, but it sure is imaginative and interesting to look at. It is also remarkable how much imagery from this have influenced (or share influences with) current Japanese video games including Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. TotK’s “depths” areas seem like a mix of Nausicaa’s forest and the gloom from Mononoke.

Buying tickets now to go see Mononoke in a month.

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💿 Buy Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on Blu-ray

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The Lightning Thief (by Rick Riordan) – ★★★★

Percy Jackson 1 - The Lightning Thief

Rated this maybe a 2.5-star after my initial listen on Audible, but enjoyed it quite a bit more on this reread with the actual paperback.

My oldest kid is very into the entire Rick Riordan catalog but surprisingly never read the Percy Jackson books so I read this to her a little bit at a time at bedtime. (Seriously there’s more than 20 Riordan books and she’s read almost all of them except this main series for some reason.) Not sure if it was the audiobook’s fault or just the extra joy of reading with my kid but I found both the story and Riordan’s writing itself much more engrossing this time.

📚 View my Goodreads review
📕 Buy The Lightning Thief on Amazon

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The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter (by Theodora Goss) – ★★★★

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter book cover

Interesting premise and framing device support a pretty fun and intriguing story. The daughters/creations of classic literary characters (scientists and “monsters”) come together, become unlikely friends, and adventure and mystery solving ensue.

Not sure how much of the characters and their personalities come directly from their sources (I’m not super familiar with the source material), but they were all pretty interesting and meshed together well as a group. The way the characters interrupted the narrator and had side conversations was something I haven’t seen before and work really well for added color especially in audiobook format.

After checking reviews, I probably won’t keep going on with the series, but I enjoyed “Alchemist’s Daughter” a good bit and recommend it to anyone who finds the basic plot summary intriguing.

📚 View my Goodreads review
📕 Buy The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter on Amazon

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Review: Flight of the Navigator

Flight of the Navigator

Watching Flight of the Navigator with the kids, and in the first 10 minutes we see David and his brother ride unbuckled and wrestling in the back of a station wagon, find out he keeps a giant box of fireworks next to his bed, and then that his parents expect his 8 year old brother to walk home in the dark in the woods and across the train tracks.

The 80s man.

First time I’ve seen this since the 80s myself. All I could remember was thinking it was scary, which watching again with my own 7 year old makes me realize I must have been quite the weenie. She really enjoyed the early mystery and then the tiny cute alien, and unlike her dad didn’t find it one bit scary. It was fun watching it with her and I enjoyed the first 2/3rds, but when the alien ship turns into Pee Wee Herman it lost me a bit for a while before picking up again towards the end.

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💿 Buy the Flight of the Navigator DVD on Amazon