The Misenchanted Sword Review

Back in the 1980s I was reading most any fantasy book I could get my hands on. There were epic fantasies like the Lord of the Rings, more pulpy fare like Gary Gygax's books centered on Gord the Rogue and others. Somewhere in that mix, my dad and I read The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans. The Misenchanted Sword was something different from the other fare of the time and has become one of my favorite books.

The Misenchanted Sword is a standalone novel and first in what would become the Legends of Ethshar  series. This is the story of Valder, a scout, in the middle of a Great War that has been going on for generations who finds himself lost behind enemy lines. He finds a hut to shelter in, but some of his enemies come and burn the place down. He survives and runs into the owner of the hut, who is very angry to see his place ruined. The man who owns the hut turns out to be a wizard and enchants Valder's sword to help get Valder to leave. The rest of the book is about Valder and the sword and how his life is changed by the wizard's choice to help him.

What is different about the book is how quickly you become immersed in the world and the story. The book is not long, but you get a pretty meaty story about Valder and his challenges (I am trying to avoid spoiling anything). It also introduces you to a world that is fleshed out and vast, having started life as a role-playing campaign setting before becoming the backdrop for many novels. Lawrence Watt-Evans also has an easy style to his writing that blends humor and irony with nice twists, good for readers just getting started with fantasy.

Like the Discworld series, The Legends of Ethshar novels take readers to different parts of Ethshar and focus on different characters in almost every book. There are a couple that continue the story of one character or another for move than one book but in the early novels they are usually standalone. However, each peels back another layer in the overall world. There is war, magic, adventures, politics and more to be found in the stories. Overall, as of right now, there are 13 novels and one short story collection in the series. The most recent books having been written by the author as part of a reader-funded experiment on his website. He seems to be done with that experiment, but hopefully not done with writing in Ethshar.

Over the years, I have owned two copies of the book and loaned or gifted both away to try to share the story with other readers. It may be hard to find, but I think the Del Rey version has the best cover art, but any copy is good. If you like fun adventures with neat twists and imaginative world-building, you should give The Misenchanted Sword a try. Compared to the door stopper sized books in Fantasy today, you may find the shorter, but no less enjoyable, Legends of Ethshar books to be a breath of fresh air. Plus with as many of them as there are, people liking longer series will be covered as well. Here's hoping there are more Legends coming. The Misenchanted Sword gets 5 Mick Happies.

iNethack2 HD Review

@

The @ symbol has a lot of meaning for me and quite a few older gamers. Long before it was a part of user names on Twitter or even widely known as part of everyones email addresses, it was your player character in one of the best games ever, Rogue (1980). Yes, THE Rogue that is referred to when someone says (or writes) that a game is Rogue-like. Rogue begat Hack (1985) and Mike Stephenson made NetHack (1987). All of them share the same premise of an adventurer trying to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor from deep in a dangerous dungeon. They all sported the same ASCII graphics with the @ as your character you moved through the dungeon. If you haven't heard of them, they are the precursor to games like Diablo.

iNethack was the original version of NetHack to grace the App Store, but it was removed in 2014. It is now back as iNethack2 due to the hard work of Future Shock Software to update the code and get it back out there for players. As a free download, there is no reason why this isn't already on your device. It is compatible with iPhone, iPod and iPad. Or play the latest version of NetHack online here.

Pick a class, any class

The basics of the game are simple. You tap the screen in the direction you want to go. Double-tap and you move in that direction until you run into something or a monster shows up. Run into a monster and you attack it with your weapon. Have a ranged weapon, use the correct command letter in the command bar at the bottom to throw something (or zap if you have a wand or spell) at the monster. Kill it and you gain experience. Don't and you likely are going to die. To help you in your travels you start the game with a pet (kitten or puppy) who can also fight for you in some cases. Warning, your pet can die. You will die. Horribly and often. All of the Rogue-likes share one thing, death is easy and permanent. With the right settings chosen you might even run into your ghost in the dungeon one day.

The Quest

DawnHack tileset and UI

Sounds simple right? It is and it isn't. You have to manage your hit points, collect enough food not to starve, and solve puzzles to make it all the way to the bottom of the dungeon and get the Amulet let alone make it back out again. I have been playing for 30 years and I have never won. I have never even had the Amulet in hand. Even using wiki pages or downloaded guides, I have never ever even been close. It is that hard. I have also never stopped playing. It is that good a game.

Sometimes you take a risk and a Water demon crushes you.

So, dungeon crawl, permadeath and deep gameplay are all here. You choose between a number of character classes and races at the beginning of the game. Your choice determines your starting stats and general equipment. Rangers start with ranged weapons and food, Wizards with wands, rings and spells, etc. Your pet can help you find out if anything you find in the dungeon is cursed or not (a pet will only reluctantly step on a cursed item). Your pet can even help you steal from shops you find along your journeys - you just have to train him or her to do so (by throwing them food when they do something you like). Wish for the right thing and you can have Excalibur in your hand, polymorph objects to change them into better ones, use Genocide scrolls to get rid of extremely dangerous monsters like the Basilisk. Pray to your god for help. Eat what you kill to stay alive. It is all up to you and all in the game.

Here's a death. A sad pathetic one.

Worried that ASCII, old school graphics aren't your thing, you can change it in your settings to something more modern. (Exit the game, go to Settings on your device, find iNethack2, scroll down to Tileset to find a new one. You can also change your character name there or make other adjustments to the gameplay. The game has in-game help to get you started on what the commands do. Don't forget to use s to search as there are hidden traps and doors all over the place.

Here's a better death.

Here's everything I killed on my dungeon crawl.

Don't take my word for it. iNethack2 and its predecessors are some of the best games ever. They are free due to the awesome work of very smart people making them available that way. Go get a copy or play online. You won't regret it. iNethack2 gets 5 Mick Happies. If you like it, buy a copy of Future Shock Studios' Interplanetary Drift to say thank you for making it available on iOS again.

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies Review

Trailer

I remember reading The Hobbit when I was growing up and again later at least once or twice. I watched the Arthur Rankin and Jules Bass animated movie many times growing up. It is probably that version of The Hobbit that is most visually imprinted into my mind when I think on the novel or any movies. I own at least two different versions of each of the Lord of the Rings movies (standard and extended) and enjoyed them quite a bit. The Hobbit trilogy, however, has been a bit of a mixed bag for me and here is why.

Visually, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies and the preceding two films are amazing. The sweeping landscapes, the depth and awe-inspiring views are fantastic. Peter Jackson knows how to do a sweeping shot, such as looking up the vale from Laketown to Erebor. You can practically feel the distance and weight and breadth of the world. The sound is also exceptional and puts you right there with the characters on screen.

In addition, the source material is beloved, making me predisposed to loving the films. Unfortunately, as the Hobbit was stretched out to 3 films, so much had to be added that wasn't part of the Hobbit story that it became something different. The story grew in the telling as it were and ultimately what we get in The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies feels slow and plodding at times and rushed and incomplete in others.

Let's get through the things that didn't work for me (or my family) first. When we first see Legolas on screen my wife said, "Who's that?" and after I told her, "What did they do to him? He looks like a Ken doll." It took me another hour of the film to figure out why that was. I think it has to do with the frame rate or the way the movie was filmed, but the characters are all hyper-clear on screen and it makes everything look very odd overall. It is almost like the characters are super-imposed on the background at times (and maybe they were), but it took me out of the film at times because the world looked real, but the people didn't. They just didn't blend together right.

Another issue was the characterization. In order to build tension we have Thorin, Thranduil and others all being complete jerks. This actually drove my wife and daughter away - they left about an hour into the film to go play Chihuahua-opoly with lots of laughter ensuing. Of course the tension and characterization was in the original book - things are going on with these characters that cause them not to get along, but a lot of screen time is given to it that would have been better suited to use later in wrapping up the battle itself or giving others their due. For instance, we don't get enough of Beorn or wrap up of the overall battle. Also, why do dwarves gear up for battle and then take off a lot of the armor before actually going out to fight? Crazy.

Okay, deep breath, there are good things here as well. Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and Bard (Luke Evans) shine as good people in a bad situation. Both of them actually carry a lot of the real emotion in the movie (okay, Tauriel - Evangeline Lilly - does as well), but we get to spend a lot more time with Bilbo and Bard and none of that time feels wasted. Again, the visuals and sound are amazing - just what you would expect given the high bar that Peter Jackson has set with earlier films in Middle Earth. In addition, the very end of the film at Bag End is a lot of fun and much like I pictured in my mind.

Is The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies a great film? Not quite. Is it a decent film that gives us one last go-around in Middle Earth - absolutely. The film links up well with the Lord of the Rings in a way and getting to go on the journey with Bilbo has been nice. While I would have wanted more in some areas and less in others, I think the trilogy would have been best served by being 2 films, There, and a sequel, And Back Again. Maybe someday it will be tried or edited from the 3 films we did get. Three Mickhappies.