Harlan Ellison's Voice: Way Over the Edge

Harlan Ellison likes to hear himself talk. Now that's hardly an earthshattering conclusion: Ellison's abrasive, vociferous and frequently litigious nature have been fairly well-documented online. But it was only recently that I actually heard Ellison's smug, self-satisfied attention to his own work.

The Voice From the Edge: Volume 1 is the first of two audiobook collections of Harlan Ellison's short stories, read by the author. Now, I've always like Ellison's stories, and his personality was never a terribly important factor: who cares if the author is a jerk if the stories are good?

Here's the relevant quote from the back of the box: "...only aficionados of Ellison's singular work have been aware of another of his passions ... he is a great oral interpreter of his stories."

Well, I certainly wouldn't call his interpretation great, but there's no arguing that Ellison is a passionate interpreter of his own work. So passionate, in fact, that virtually every word is screamed, shouted or howled. His delivery is most akin to a continuously rising crescendo of shrieking: a pompous, overblown, overacted cacophony of undirected passion.

The bombastic, over-the-top delivery is a bizarre contrast to Ellison's actual storytelling. I always imagined Ellison's authorial voice as dry, understated: sardonic, certainly, but letting the fantastic nature of story speak for itself. Read out loud by Ellison, however, every description and every event is given the subtly of a sledgehammer blow to the forehead. By the end of any given story in this collection, the madcap delivery has reduced the essence of the tale to clownish buffoonery.

I'm generally a fan of audio books: they don't work well for every genre or author, but when done well, and interpreted well, they can be a fantastic experience. This collection is not a fantastic experience. It is an embarrassing performance, much like an actor, so praised for his performance in one venue, who decides to release an album (I'm looking at you, Nimoy).

Ellison may be a fantastic author, but he's a poor narrator. I guess the best you could say is that Harlan Ellison likes to hear himself talk.

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Pseudonym: I'm immune to bad narration. I'm a frequenter of librivox.org, a community of random individuals who take it upon themselves to read and mangle the world's greatest literature. Not necessarily a problem when listening to A Child's History of England, but when you get into, say, The Three Musketeers, you will find that the mispronounciations, the awkward cadance and the monotonotic delivery will cause you to laugh and then weep.

I'm not sure what it is that makes some people oblivious to their various obvious deficiencies, but they're in full force on librivox. Some are excellent - you could almost imagine them as professional readers, where some are just awful, and you wonder why they've been the ones to read 50% of the books on the site.

Peggle: The Quickening

This is not a game you can be good at. You can suck, but you'd have to try.

I guess that's the whole point of "casual" games, giving the people who play them the perception that they're not sucky at videogames by taking out nearly all requirements for human interaction.

This game relies more on luck than anything even approaching skill. Even the special moves the computer allows, designed to "maximize" your score, fare no better than me randomly shooting somewhere near an orange peg.

Levels aren't randomly generated, but the colors of the pegs ARE random, so even if you master one iteration of it, when you fail, and replay the level you basically have to start from scratch. Imagine playing Sonic the Hedgehog with all the platforms still in the right place, but the badniks have been randomly changed all over the level. Except in Sonic, you could just slow down and complete the level. In Peggle, you simply have to keep playing until luck decides you can progress. Whoo.

This is a game so devoid of the need for a player that it's available to play inside World of Warcraft, a game itself which is farmed out to masses South Koreans because people can't be bothered to even play it, and which requires all the skill of "click here to attack" during the most exciting parts of the game.

Perhaps Yahtzee said it best: [Peggle] is a game for old people and stupids.

So why can't I stop playing it?? I can only imagine it's like that episode of the Monkees where everyone who watches the TV broadcast is immediately hypnotized. There must be something in the game that makes you want to play it, but where normal games satisfy this urge with boobies, this game is more devious, somehow tapping into your optical receptors directly and short-circuiting your brain.

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Eldritch: Okay, coming in to this late, but I was mulling it over, and I think that Peggle (and all the PopCap games) have some relevance for our recent discussion of open-source gaming. Here you have some really quite frivolous games, but the one thing that they have in spades is good design and nice interfaces. I mean, the Peggle menus are positively lickable. And that sort of thing goes a really long way towards making the games feel like more of a complete project (and by contrast, makes so many open-source games feel like a chore). I can't help but be impressed by the production values on even these very forgettable games.

The Colorado Kid (is awful)

(This review has spoilers. So stop reading if you don't want the ending of The Colorado Kid spoiled. Wait. No, go ahead and read. This book was terrible.)

Stephen King is a household name. From his dozens and dozens of New York Times-bestselling novels to the innumerable movie adaptions of his work (Children of the Corn 7. I'm not kidding. And a eighth in production, plus a sci-fi channel remake), the Stephen King brand is probably the most well-recognized literary property out there. So it's always interesting to see King lend his attention to more obscure projects.

Like Hard Case Crime, an imprint of paperback hardboiled crime novels. Including a mix of brand-new and classic 40s and 50s pulp crime stories, Hard Case Crime seemed like an interesting project. The star-power of King lending a novel to the imprint was an instant publicity-builder: a world-wide bestselling author trying his hand at a small publisher, in a genre outside of his traditional focus.

But wait: can King actually write a hardboiled detective novel?

The Colorado Kid answers that question: no. This is the worst excuse for a mystery you could possibly imagine. The premise is fantastic: a 22-year-old small-town newspaper intern digs into a 25-year old crime. A man is found dead on a Maine beach, with no identification. Turns out, he was from Colorado. But he'd been seen scant hours before, all the way across the country. He barely had time to charter a plane, drive at top speed to the beach and die before being discovered. So what happened?

Spoiler: You never find out! King spends an entire novel mulling over the case, like a slackjawed Maine yokel with a mouth full of tobacco, before figuratively shrugging his shoulders and saying "I guess we'll never know."

As means of explanation (or apology), King includes an afterword, essentially explaining that mysteries aren't really about solutions, they're about the investigation.

Well, Mr. King, that's a load of horseshit. Mystery novels are all about the solution. The concept of a mystery novel is a suspenseful build-up to the reveal. The investigation is just a way to delay the single most important part of a mystery story: the solution.

Don't read this book. Please. It's really, really terrible.

Eldritch: At some point I'm going to write a positive book review. Really, honestly. But there are some books that demand to be held to account.



Pseudonym: I had always wondered where Stephen King (and Tom Clancy) find the time to write 15 1200-page books a year. Though I haven't read a King book since... The Tommyknockers? (which was also pretty terrible), I see his work on store shelves all the time and think, "is this new, or just a reprint of an old one I hadn't heard of?" Nope. All New. How does he do it??

Now I know.

Weaselsnake. Saving you $5.99 one spoiler at a time.

Somewhere in the Carribean...

"Turn around," she said, into my earpiece.

We had been out for a few days, tediously but not unenjoyably cataloging for hours at a time. She had been out more than I had, exploring on her own, and she had excitedly forced me to join her this time.

There were rumors floating around about this find, which I had dismissed. I didn't believe a creature so rare to begin with would be in this part of the world.

I was wrong. I awkwardly turned around and widened my eyes. She had even seen it before, the reason for her excitement, and was still silent as it swam slowly by. Which took some time for a sperm whale.

Taking out my new underwater camera, I took a few shots, but without a wide angle lens, it was somewhat pointless. It wasn't close enough to touch, but it was close enough that I was completely unaware of its scale. I felt overwhelming gratitude to her for showing me this amazing creature.

We got back to the boat, and I wrote the sighting down in my journal, and said goodbye as she jetted off on her ski-doo. Nighttime had forced us to stop diving, as we had no lamp, but it was just as well. Hard to top her find.

I sat down on my deck chair and watched the sun retire behind the low mountains to the west.

Then I shut off my Wii.


Endless Ocean isn't really a game, as such. But to call it an "ocean simulator" robs it of a lot of its playability. It implies that there's no point as you can't affect nearly anything in the game world. No, there's no boss, to fight to save the world, no conflict. No, there's no levelling up, no points, no frustrating throwing of controllers against the wall. There's even less plot than you get in Super Mario Bros. But as you progress through the game, taking would be Cousteaus out on tours, stocking aquariums, and other seemingly mundane "missions", you'll notice less and less.

I enjoyed this title quite a lot. Developed by Akira, the same team at Capcom responsible for the Street Fighter series (really), it is a spiritual successor to their "Everblue" series, available in Japan and Europe. Though somewhat less focused on intrigue as Everblue, Endless Ocean is perfect for diving into (ha?) and relaxing with.

You start off with a pretty feeble character-creation tool, which is ok, because like most everything else in Endless Ocean, it doesn't matter. You'll meet your research partner, who gives you an obligatory tutorial. There's no rush to learn everything; there's no rush to even do anything. The game is just above a screensaver in terms of excitement. Once in the water, you'll be delighted with a variety of sea life, beautifully animated. Your main "task" is to catalog, similar to catching all the pokemons, but you don't really have to if you don't want to. You won't be punished for just swimming about, enjoying the scenery. (And I'm not just talking about my diving partner).

Through the course of the game, you'll eventually get a lantern, the aforementioned camera, some fish food and a neato pen which is somehow able to allow you to draw shapes in the water. Whether you use this for communication, for helping yourself map (I used it more than once to find my way back out of a tricky underground cavern maze), or for drawing crude drawings is up to you.

You'll meet various non-fish sea life too, like penguins, seals and dolphins. The latter can be befriended and trained, and can accompany you on dives your partner can't be there for.

Let's talk about partners for a second. The game is primarily single player. Even with a partner, you'll often be off on your own, doing your own thing, but having a diving partner makes the experience much more connected, more safe (though the game does shield you from death, it's a good reminder for the kids: Always dive in pairs!), and just more enjoyable. Parners are invited onto your boat over the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection through an innovative in-context ladder. When you want them to show up, you lower your ladder into the water. When they want to show up, they arrive on their jet-ski and come up the ladder. Fourth wall saved.

The game isn't perfect. The first and most common criticism is that there's no end. If you're positive this game isn't for you, that'll be enough. But that sort of thing might be good for casual gamers just looking for a relaxing time. The second is the music - though the tracks are pleasant to swim to, they tend to get repetitive if you're in the water for very long, as the song you choose to dive to is the only one that will play while you're down there. And don't think you'll have a hard time making a choice. The game has two songs to choose from. It does however, have the option of awkwardly pulling MP3s off the Wii's SD card slot, so you can jazz up your dives with "Hot for Teacher" or whatever. The title Endless Ocean refers to the game's lack of endgame, not the ocean's breadth. You can't swim forever; you're restricted to your set of archipelagos, but it's large enough not to be boring. Finally, despite the amazing animation underwater, upstairs is a different matter. You lurch around on your boat with animations that are literally laughable. I found this charming, you may not.

All in all, it's a great way to spend the evening hours, and I heartily recommend picking it up, especially if you have someone to play with. Let her find all the goodies first, so you don't have to.