The Martian Review

In my family, we have a tradition. If you drop something, break something, fall down or otherwise injure yourself, but will be all right, you just call out, "I'm Okay!" That way everyone knows we don't need to rush over and run off to the hospital. The Martian by Andy Weir is a bit like that just about every chapter and it's great.

The Martian started as a self-published serial novel on Andy Weir's website, then a $0.99 e-book on Amazon and later was "discovered", published by Crown Publishing Group and optioned for a movie directed by Ridley Scott. The New York Times Bestselling book is the story of a manned mission to Mars, the third such mission in fact, and begins with our main character, Mark Watney, in mortal danger. Things just continue to be dire for Mark from there.

At its heart, this is a castaway story of survival. Mark, a botanist and mechanical engineer, has to find a way to survive everything Mars can dish out with limited supplies and only a sliver of hope of rescue. What is great about the book is the way Mr. Weir weaves solutions based on real-world science (most everything is plausible). Math is applied along with chemistry and plain old ingenuity. I really liked the feel of old-school space exploration with more modern references as well as a dash of 1970s nostalgia (which also fit well with the space exploration background - anyone of a certain age has the two pretty well intertwined in their brain).

I heard of this book through the Sword & Laser podcast, so I knew much of the story ahead of actually reading it. I also knew that a movie was in the works, starring Matt Damon, so I found myself visualizing how the story would translate to the screen (very well in my opinion). I am sure there will be parts of the story that will be cut to allow the movie to fit the time limits of film, therefore you should read the book before seeing the movie.

Pick up a copy of The Martian. The iTunes e-book version had a Q&A with the author, an essay about writing the book and questions for readers groups as extras. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It has reinforced the fact that though I read a lot (A LOT) of fantasy, books set in space are my favorite. The Martian gets 5 Mick Happies. Can't wait to see the movie now.

Silicon Valley Season 1 Review

One of the benefits of having access to HBO Now is the ability to stream HBO's previously aired shows. That meant that I was able to share the entirety of Season 1 of Silicon Valley with my family before Season 2 began. Silicon Valley follows the trials and successes of a small tech start up as they try to bring their new software to market. Incubated in the house of Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller), Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) is joined by Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) when his compression algorithm is shown to be revolutionary.

Together the four work with "Jared" (Zach Woods), who has an understanding of business organization the others lack, and Monica (Amanda Crew), the lead from the venture capital firm that has given them seed money. They fight to develop the algorithm into a suite of products before a large tech firm, Hooli, can beat them to the punch. Season 1 ends with a major showdown between Hendricks' company, Pied Piper, and Hooli.

This is a mature audiences-focused half-hour comedy. One of Gilfoyle's lines in the premiere regarding the liquid shrimp he has just eaten nearly made my wife spit-take her mouthful of water across the room and she was hooked. Silicon Valley is the brain child of Mike Judge, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky. In this case, the show probably is more reminiscent of Judge's Office Space than Beavis and Butthead, but there are shades of both in the humor and character interplay (especially Dinesh and Gilfoyle). Overall this is a show about young brilliant people who struggle to handle the success and opportunity they have earned.

Thomas Middleditch, who I thought was one of the best parts of the movie Fun Size, is great as the incredibly smart but socially inept Richard Hendricks dealing with situations he just isn't equipped to handle. Probably the funniest characters in the show are Jared (Woods) who is completely straight-laced compared to the others and Martin Starr is very good as he delivers the deadpan and dry humor as Gilfoyle. Season 1 is 8 episodes long and the first four episodes are very funny and while there is a bit of a lull during episodes 5, 6 and 7, stick with it. The season finale is some of the funniest television I have ever seen. We were all struggling for breath by the time it ended. Luckily, Silicon Valley has already been picked up for season 3 so Richard and the team will be working together for quite a while.

If you are looking for a mature comedy about twenty-somethings trying to make it as entrepreneurs, give Silicon Valley a shot. At times the show is some of the funniest television out there and overall is extremely good. Silicon Valley gets 4.5 Mick Happies. Can't wait for another episode to air tonight.

In Real Life Review

Like many gamers, I have played Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) at some point in my past. For me it was Multi-User Dungeons like Valhalla (now rebuilt as Asgard's Honor) and Genocide. I never got into the World of Warcraft (WoW) and Everquest games. My daughter did play around in WoW a little and that always made me smile a bit. Now I do play Path of Exile which falls nicely into this genre. I do know that there are a lot of problems that have evolved with the MMORPG format. Not the least is bullying of players and real-money economies building up around the game where those with time sell the fruits of their efforts to those with little time and lots of money. I was then pleasantly surprised to find out that Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang had combined to develop a young adult focused graphic novel, In Real Life,  that explored these subjects all with a girl protagonist.

The story focuses on Anda, a young girl who's family has just moved to a new town. There she hears about an online game, Coarsegold Online, and convinces her parents to let her play. After that we follow the story as Anda meets other players and learns a lot about the world of Coarsegold Online, our world and the impact of one's actions.

The artwork by Jen Wang is vibrant and fully enhances the story being told. This is a great book for anyone with children that are getting ready to play online games. It broaches the subjects I mentioned before as well as opens up the opportunity to talk about those topics with your kids. Along the way they can learn for themselves the best way to interact with other people online where doing what is right or wrong is sometimes more than just a choice of following the rules or not.

Pick up a copy of In Real Life, read it and share it with someone else. You will be glad that you did. Written with a young adult audience in mind, there is still enough depth and story here for adult readers and, again, I think it is best when thought of as a story you read together with a teenager for the dialogue it will raise. Once you finish In Real Life, there is a short story on Tor.com called Con/Game with the same characters. Due to the short length of Con/Game, I don't recommend reading it first as you will not have an understanding of the characters or backstory and thus Con/Game will not be as entertaining as it could be. In Real Life, 4 Mick Happies, is available digitally and in paper form at all booksellers. Enjoy.

HBO Now Review

The family and I have been sans cable TV for nearly 4 years now. One of the things we have always said is that we have no problem paying for the content we want to see. We just don't want to be paying $60 - $100 a month for a bunch of channels we will never watch. Don't even get me started on commercials as well. We bought 3 apple TV boxes for our televisions and started streaming Netflix (we already were paying for Netflix on top of our monthly cable TV bill). We supplemented Netflix by buying season passes through iTunes to any TV shows we wanted to watch. Upside was access to shows the day after they aired without any commercials. It even felt like we were saving money when we used credit card points to get iTunes cards. Since then we have purchased replacement apple TV boxes twice but overall we probably have saved a few thousand dollars by not having cable TV. On thing that always bothered me was that we couldn't access shows like Game of Thrones because a) HBO wouldn't allow season passes for the show on iTunes and b) they wouldn't allow viewing of their content without a cable subscription, until now.

This past week saw the rollout of HBO Now, a standalone HBO streaming service available without cable subscription. For $14.99 a month, you have unlimited access to HBO series and whatever movies they are currently offering. Though a bit pricey over all when compared to Netflix's streaming service, HBO Now does offer some things Netflix can't.

With HBO Now, you get access to content like Game of Thrones, Sex in the City, The Sopranos and Entourage (along with others). All available right after they originally air (no waiting for the season to end or the DVDs to be released a year later). You also get access to a mix of older and recently released movies, most of which are not available on Netflix. There are also the sports (mainly boxing), comedy and documentary specials that HBO has produced. HBO Now is accessible by computer, an app on Apple TV as well as a mobile device app (I have been using it on my iPad Mini). There is also one feature in the app that is unique compared to Netflix, the +10 button, allowing you to fast forward 10 seconds, which is so much better than trying to track forward using the scrolling bar - which always leads to buffering delays on Netflix.

HBO Now interface

As with any new service, there are some drawbacks that you should be aware of. The first movie we streamed on our Apple TV, The Heat, had a lot of stuttering in the video playback - no problems with the sound. The user interface on the mobile app is a little limited on the home screen when you first open the app, I find using the menu button the best way to navigate. The other drawback compared to Netflix is that content rotates on and off the service much faster than with Netflix (not including HBO-specific shows and specials). The monthly cost is also a little on the high side for the total amount of content provided, but the free first month helped mitigate some of that cost.

Main front screen for HBO Now - the 3 menu button upper left is your friend

I was able to sign up and register my device quickly through the iPad app using my iTunes account. This means I can pay the monthly fee through iTunes and not worry about my credit card being hit (as long as I keep an iTunes balance up). You can stop the subscription renewal at any time, it only renews one month at a time. Want to see all of a given show, sign up for a month after it has aired and stream it all then let the subscription lapse.

HBO Now is exactly what all content providers should be moving toward. There is no need for a "middle man" cable provider curating a large number of channels - we want and will pay for access to specific content we want to watch. It is cheaper for the viewer and directly benefits content providers who offer what we want to see. Is the service perfect, no, is it a good start, yes. Especially with the free first month, you should jump in and give it a try. HBO Now gets 4 Mick Happies. Now back to watching The Grand Budapest Hotel.

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.