Sorry, a consequence of reading (all the good books in) the Animorphs series is that I didn’t have much time to read other stuff. I also started a few new shows like Ted Lasso and Person of Interest but haven’t finished them. It’s going to be a short review post.
2024 update: I’m retroactively adding the modern ★/* highlight system to the top of each old monthly review post, as it was a well received feature.
★: Taskmaster, The Exorcist, Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey
*: Cowboy Grak 5, Animorphs
However, previously on Record Crash, a LONG one:
The Exorcist★
I hadn’t seen this one before, though of course I thought I knew how it went based on popular culture.
It was way better than what I expected, though. I watched it on a big screen for the 50th anniversary, with a bunch of boomers behind me that thankfully managed to shut up when the tension started ratcheting up.
It was really competent horror, and while I wasn’t scared (I’m one of those people), I really appreciated its quality and how original it was. Everyone seems to focus on the little girl, but the priest main character is one of the best I’ve ever seen. If I had to mention a flaw, it’d be that it has a couple too many elements in its “lore” (like the amulet) that just serve to complicate things. I had to look up a couple things that were apparently clearer in the book.
But yeah, go watch it if you haven’t yet, you won’t regret it.
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey★
It’s less tightly plotted than the first one, but that just gives the creators more room for crazy sets and situations. It's a shame about the credits scene contradicting the final movie, which was apparently due to executive meddling.
Don’t really have anything else to say.1 The clip above reviews the movie better than I ever could.
The Talos Principle II
As you can see in the video above, the puzzles do get as good as they did in the original game.
But that’s about it… I’m about to sound like I’m destroying the game, but it’s enjoyable, I got 39 hours out of it. It just pales in comparison to the first in almost every way.
First, you’ll notice I weaselly said the puzzles “get as good” and not “are as good”. This world is divided into twelve segments, most of them with unique gimmicks that weren’t in the original. The issue is: most of those gimmicks fucking suck?
All the devices from the original game were kept, with the only exception being the “cameras,” which, to be fair, were never before seen in puzzle games, but were super janky and unfun in practice. Those got replaced with “extra bodies” you can teleport into. But the new stuff is mostly bad.
Let’s take the “drillers”.
You might think, "Whoa, this is cool, you can now open up walls to send lasers through them," and wonder how they designed the puzzles so this doesn’t make them all trivial. Well, they didn’t. You can only drill through specific, obvious metal walls. They don’t even bother having red herring walls, if you see one, you HAVE to use it at some point, and there’s only one thing to do with them, aim and shoot. These “sub-puzzles” become just filler, require no thought whatsoever.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have teleporters. You look at them and you teleport from where you are, holding onto your stuff.
These are on the other hand so powerful they become unfun. There is not a single puzzle that is made better by allowing you to move an entire level’s worth of devices around. To add insult to injury, you never feel clever by using them. They feel like a less realized version of the “extra bodies” I mentioned.
Luckily, it’s not all bad. I enjoyed almost all the gravity well, laser combiner and “area-of-effect jammer” (all of these have real names but I never memorized them) puzzles. But since entire worlds are built around every new gimmick, you’re going to have to deal with the same number of each, with only some rare crossover.
A special (derogatory) mention goes towards the final level, which is offensively lazy compared to the first game’s plot-heavy climax. It legitimately feels like a regular, extremely long puzzle, but if you get softlocked you have to start from the beginning. What should be the apex feels like a boring drag.2
So yes, the puzzles are lazier and more annoying than in the original game even if they reach the same heights. What about the plot?
It’s even more of a downgrade.
They used up all their best stuff with The Talos Principle I. All of western philosophy was represented in that game, pretty much. There were no good answers, and you’re almost discovering yourself as you play, with the game not taking sides, putting up a mirror.
What’s left for II is pathetic, just some musings about government and conservative vs progressive attitudes to technology. Chesterton’s fence, essentially, and that’s it. That would be marginally more tolerable if it was like Road to Gehenna, a short DLC expansion about one topic, but this game is far more plot heavy and maybe even a little longer than the first, with an entire character cast that constantly asks you your opinion on the same two topics. Even the game’s ending hinges on choosing between the two.
It’s not a fair contest. The writers of a sci-fi video game about cool robots aren’t at all afraid of technological process, and it shows. The first game was a bastion of neutrality compared to this, where the figurehead for the “conservative” side is merely pretending to be a corrupt moron, which you only find out 95% into the game. All the cool characters are pro-technology, and arguing with them feels like being a dick.
Once again, the game isn’t bad compared to other puzzle games on the market, but absolutely expect to be disappointed if you’re looking for a proper sequel to The Talos Principle. It feels perfunctory, unneeded.
Man, I miss Milton.3
Snakes and Ladders (previously "I’m An Actor!")
I randomly saw the title (which included the parenthetical A Hollywood SI/OC) and I was like alright let’s check this out.
The only other story of this type I’ve read that involves going back to the “real world” is Trailer Trash, which handles its plot in a different way. For one, the protagonist in I’m An Actor doesn’t get sent back to his poor family with knowledge as his only weapon.
No, this guy is chosen by God. He gets sent to an alternate universe where the best movies and books haven’t been created, so he can sweep in and do it himself. Wait, how will he be respected? Because he has a father with a net worth of 700 million dollars. Oh, it’s alright, I guess life is still somewhat socially hard even if you’re rich—not with a game layer.
Wait, what? Yeah this is a LitRPG that takes place in the real world. He’s just great at athletics, writing, charisma, etc. Guy’s the biggest Gary Stu ever written and he’s not even in a fantasy world. Humanity doesn’t stand a chance.
And that’s basically what happens, he keeps winning. Honestly, it’s even more terribly written than the premise suggests, but it’s one of those “outsider art” fics where you have Al Pacino4 having a serious conversation with the main character about method acting, and you can’t get that anywhere else. I don’t recommend it, but it was a fun 30k words so far.
Pokémon: Radical Red
This game is a romhack for Fire Red, which itself is a remake for the first ever Pokemon game. It’s ostensibly the Pokemon equivalent to Kaizo Mario World, designed to make players suffer. That sounds horrible, but the difficulty curve is initially really good, smoothly re-training your expectations from a normal game to a Pokemon Showdown style experience.
There are a bunch of amazing quality of life bonuses, which are too many to list here, but a few are: every Pokemon is in the game, yes, including the latest generation; there are raids in the overworld (from the latest gens) which give you EV altering items, utility pokeballs and so forth; TMs are infinitely reusable like in the good games, and HMs only need a valid pokemon in the inventory, they don’t need to be actually learned...
The cool factor doesn’t last forever, though. There’s a big wall starting with the first Giovanni fight, and from there on the game started feeling more like a trading card game than a JRPG. I wasn’t enjoying the plot or having an immersive adventure,5 I just needed to put a counter-team together before every big fight from my 200 captured pokemon, grind them to the right level and then baffle the enemy with bullshit. Rinse and repeat. Eventually I got filtered by Sabrina’s Trick Room team, and the game locks your progression so you can’t even temporarily skip her.
There is an easy mode I could enable, but I don’t want to give the game the satisfaction. I do very much recommend this game if you’re the kind of person that likes Pokemon Showdown, though, it’s really really well made. Just not for everyone.
Cowboy Grak 5: Yet Another Fistful of Obols*
Remember Worth the Candle? Remember Chili and the Chocolate Factory? The writer for the latter made a sequel fic for the former.
It’s really, really, really, really funny, and somehow answers a few of the last remaining questions in the setting and closes some of the unaddressed themes. Sadly, I can’t get more into it without spoiling the source material.6 I’ll just say it’s an absolute must-read for WTC fans. The epilogue every single fan will love instead of just the ones with taste.
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Much like the recent Dungeons & Dragons movie, I enjoyed this, but I don’t think it was particularly great or interesting.
It often made me wish I was watching Shrek 1/2 instead, because those movies had an edge that was completely missing from this one. For example, the Goldilocks jokes were the same shit over and over, which I guess is the point, but they were too “safe” and stopped being funny around the third time. Most of the jokes with Perrito were just kind of sad. The themes in general seem laser targeted at adults, but the plotline, characters and humor are very much aimed at children, so ??? There’s a tension there that’s never resolved.
Jack Horner was great though, stole every scene. Venom got a movie, let’s get the Shrek villain cinematic universe going, starting with him.
A Space for the Unbound
This game tries so hard to hide that it looks like the above screenshot most of the time. Search the name, and you’ll find a lot of cutscene and commissioned not-in-the-game art that makes you think it’s a visual novel or even an action game.
In reality, it’s a walking simulator. To complete the first chapter you have to slowly run around for ten minutes before you even get to play the first puzzle, which consists in running around even more, finding the right items three times, and applying them to the right interactive elements. It’s like a classic adventure game simplified to the point of uselessness.
I dropped and refunded it pretty fast. The reviews are extremely positive, which is why it was on my radar in the first place, but I later found out it’s because it’s a rare Indonesian game, and people from that country are artificially boosting it out of national pride I guess.
It’s a game that desperately wants to be a visual novel, which might have a decent plot (in all honesty it just reads as cliche-y and feels-baity when I looked up some of it, but more respected reviewers say it’s good), but clashes against its horrible, horrible gameplay. You can’t force me to play a game that doesn’t respect my time, no matter how good it eventually gets.
Taskmaster★
Taskmaster is technically a “panel show” or a “game show” but that label is borderline offensive to this amazing kino of the highest order.
Usually these are extremely formulaic. Even with the allegedly good ones like Jeopardy, you get people that treat the game like a decision tree, and the variation only comes from the small bits of often boring trivia spread throughout the runtime.
With Taskmaster, every season you get a new set of five of the best comedians in the United Kingdom doing original “tasks” every episode. The video above explains what a task is pretty well. The titular Taskmaster rates them from 1 to 5 points based on performance, and the top player at the end of the show gets a few of the other contestant’s possessions (providing the best themed possessions is in itself a perennial episodic task).
This would already be a cool spin on the formula, but the tasks are designed to be broken. As you see in the video, any other show would want you to just be a good potato thrower. Taskmaster benefits munchkinry like creating a platform over the game board, sweeping it away, tying a string around the projectile, etc. Tasks vary a lot, so there’s really no way for these comedians to be prepared. The fact that they’re funny also prevents the stage segments from getting old.
I can’t recommend this enough. You have like 150 episodes, all free to watch on Youtube. It’s not even just that, the New Zealand and Australian versions of the show are allegedly just as good.
Animorphs*
I’m known for making extremely good life decisions. When my brain asked me if I really wanted to spend all of November reading 41 children’s books just to marginally improve my upcoming readthrough of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning,7 I was like yeah sure. Or my brain was, I guess.
Animorphs is often described as “wow, in retrospect this children’s series was really fucked up. the kids have PTSD!!!” and that’s an oversimplification. I think it’s best to say that this was a good sci-fi series for adults desperately trying to corner the children’s literature market, to its detriment.
I’ll start with the bad parts. Every single book starts the same, with a new yet repetitive recap of everything that’s happened in the previous ones. Despite the plots being largely episodic, there’s a clear progression. Most of them have a single character as their viewpoint, and run for only around 20k words. The covers look funky. All of this is carefully designed to catch kids at Scholastic book fairs, so they can pick any of them, get hooked, and buy all 64 books, making the company money.
Money was such a factor that, around the 20th book, they started being ghostwritten. The main writers only returned for a couple important lore-heavy books and the final arc, and you can definitely feel the step-up in quality. Not all the ghostwritten books are bad, but as the reading guide I followed shows, they’re incredibly hit and miss.
The single-book-protagonist gimmick that loops through the cast also repeatedly forces full books on the two simplest characters, Tobias and Marco. The word count isn’t really warranted, and those were the books I enjoyed the least. Tobias in particular had so little going on that, once you’ve read one of his books, you’ve read them all.
All these factors make a “marathon” of the series a painful experience.
Once you ignore those bad parts, and learn to skim through the opening sections of every book, you’ll find Animorphs an amazing experience. I’d say it’s an Ender’s Game-style approach to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Star Trek in particular is directly referenced in nearly every book, these novels wear their influences on their sleeve.
The main plot is as follows: an alien empire of brain-controlling slugs is taking over humanity. Five kids get their hands on alien technology that allows them to turn into animals. There’s no obvious way to win this war fairly, so they’re going to have to do some war crimes.
Yeah, war crimes. I thought it was a meme when I read, but the Geneva Conventions are actually called out by name in a latter book, and not lightly. The exploits of our “heroes” include alien baby murder, threatening to murder hostages, false surrenders, permanently trapping an enemy in animal form and leaving them to die, torture through starvation, and letting a serial children killer go because he’s also killing the slugs in the children’s heads.
I really could keep going for a while. The series pulls no punches. This isn’t merely the classic “they didn’t think of the implications” business, Animorphs is explicitly an anti-war novel, and I’m unsure how they managed to sell it to children. The incompetent main villain is only not assassinated because he’d just be replaced with a more competent one, that’s the kind of plotline you get in one of these books.
Character arcs are pretty good. I particularly enjoyed Rachel’s for not having a resolution, but Jake and Cassie’s are played straight and are interesting, with more nuance than I’d read in this type of sci-fi… maybe ever? I mentioned Ender’s Game before, but that’s pretty unambitious compared to this. The single-book plots are often wacky hijinks with a single hard moral decision near the end, but some like The Attack stand out.
There are also some standalone books like The Hork-Bajir Chronicles and Visser, which don’t feature the main cast and just focus on the lore. These tend to be marginally more adult and more straight up sci-fi, without the elements of young-adult fantasy involved in the main series.
I’m throwing a lot of information at you, but to be fair, the total word count is 1.5 million words. I probably read around a full million of those overall. I’m going to stop it there before I go into a full review.
I didn’t regret reading this. Would I have if I didn’t have a justification? I don’t think so either. It’s better than I expected, worse than I hoped, flawed and yet with salient goodness I’ve not seen elsewhere. I’m not even a furry, I can’t imagine how much furries would love this book. Let’s say this is an overall recommend and call it a month.
Aaand we’re done. I’m actually still reading a bonus Animorphs book, The Ellimist Chronicles, but hopefully I’ll be free to read more fics next month. I know that’s what the masses demand.
NO WAYYY
Yes, the first final puzzle did that too, but it was harder to get softlocked, and it used time pressure instead as its main source of difficulty.
I mean, it’s Pokémon, but you get what I mean.
Once again, thank god I’m not being paid for this.
It’s a famous Rational Fic of the original series. I kept getting it recommended, but the target audience is people who vaguely remember reading it as a child, and I never heard of this until I was already an adult. Not a very popular series outside the US, presumably because not many other countries need to be told that war is bad.