Catching Fire and Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl

At the end of the Hunger Games, I didn't really think that it needed a sequel. It felt more like a standalone book than the first part of a trilogy. That being said, if it required a sequel this is the one it needed. I've heard some people talk about how long it took to get to the Hunger Games part of it, but I liked how it was paced. If it had moved faster it would have seemed insubstantial, and if it moved slower it could have been boring. What I like about it is that everything in it has an impact on the characters, and they all have some kind of personality that's easy to relate to, rather then project onto.
As I said in the Hunger Games review, they actually feel like they could be actual people. I liked how it acted out the interactions of all the characters. Not much to say about it that I haven't already said in The Hunger Games review, so I guess I'm just gonna talk about why I like it.
Catching Fire is a book from 2009 that's a sequel to The Hunger Games. It's not as visceral as The Hunger Games, but it's still a good read. It doesn't really feel like it hurts you as much as The Hunger Games does, and as such it's a decent break from the hard-core survival in the first book.

 In a lot of ways it reminds me of Back to the Future II, only with political intrigue and love triangles.
Now, I probably shouldn't address this, but the triangle in this actually has some kind of impact on the situation the characters are in, as opposed to simple teenage politics with bastardized werewolf and vampire lore surrounding it. The thing is, in a world like the Hunger Games, where public image is everything and appearance keep people alive, there's actually some potential impact to it all, as opposed to the real world with a few random supernatural creatures running around because Buffy and Dante forgot to kill some stuff.
All in all, it was a tad less excruciating than the prequel, but still fairly hard on the characters.
I give it a 9.4* rating.
Now that that's over with, I might as well review a movie since this is a little too short.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl is eleven years old, and I like it. It's a fun movie to watch, and the funny moments are great to keep the pace up.
I was gonna say that I don't know why it's good, but I can tell you why it's good. Amazing choreography, stunning special effects, and a story that nobody cares about, but has some really cool turns to it that work well if you're paying attention. It's got some good characters in it that are as timeless as the seas, the set-pieces are amazing, and I just like watching it. Johnny Depp is great as Jack, you never know what he's going to do. He works well as Chaotic Neutral. I like Orlando Bloom as Will Turner, he does a good job of bringing forth a sense of bravery and nobility, and Keira Knightly isn't the greatest, but she's pretty good as Elisabeth Swan. Geoffrey Rush is great as Barbossa. It's hard to tell what his motivations are. It would seem like simple greed and selfishness, but at the very end he felt somewhat sympathetic. Not greatly so, but still not totally and completely despicable. All in all I guess I don't really know what all I like about it, but it's a nice film to watch. I give it an 7.98* rating.
Bloody hell, that's two different ends of the serious spectrum ain't it?

Sakura Samurai: Art of the Sword first impressions.

This is a game I started a while ago, but put down because I was busy with other games.  Well  The game is essentially diet Prince of Persia, or maybe a watered down version of The Legend of Zelda, only with controls that don't really mesh into the gameplay as well as they could. The plot is this: Princess Cherry Blossom has been kidnapped and it's your job to find her. Not the most original plot I've ever heard, especially since you play as the silent hero with a magic sword only known as the Sakura Samurai, or The Samurai Hana. Resembling Zelda a bit more yet? I'll get to that soon, but first I need to say that while the game is actually entertaining, it's got some flaws. First things first, there's no autosave. While a lot of games can get away with that, they also need to make the save points harder to completely pass up. You could potentially go through the whole game without ever entering a town and therefore never finding the inns. And while I didn't get that far, I did manage to get a decent ways into the game without knowing there was no autosave feature. Because I had other things to do, I set the game aside and later on started up a different application (I think it was the eShop) then when I came back to it I found that I had to start all over again. Which was actually good so that I could go back through the game from the beginning. I should probably get to the combat, which is the real meat of the game. It's a lot like Zelda, except that it locks into the Z/L targeting system without the option to turn it off. While you can switch into free-roaming it leave you open to attacks. That, and the fact that you can't go from locked combat to free combat smoothly. In addition to that, the camera controls are left up to the game, which winds up making it swing around wildly and frustratingly. While the combat system doesn't let you hone in on a single enemy it also keeps more than one enemy at a time from striking you. But that just seems like compensation for bad programming. You can only strike your enemies when they let their guard down, and if the movement speed of the main character was a little quicker than a snails pace while targeting then it might be a lot more fun. The main way to strike your enemies is to wait until they're gonna strike and then dodge to the left, right or back to avoid the attack and then slice them in the rib-cage. While the game isn't an RPG, it does require a bit of grinding, specifically for flawless consecutive attack dodges (Which can be exchanged at the nearest items shop for gold) and gold. This is to upgrade and maintain your sword, as well as to buy items that are almost required to finish the boss levels. Speaking of which: The boss levels consist of an endurance test against waves of enemies, and then a fight against a big guy with a huge weapon and a ton of health. Now in Zelda you get heart pieces around the world and a heart container when you beat a boss, but in this you get half a heart container whenever you beat a level. And it's the same for boss levels. All they really do is unlock the next area. There also aren't any dungeons, or side challenges to complete other than a few in the towns which just earn you money. Now, on to a few more things before I close out this weeks article: There's a garden with cherry trees in it that when you dedicate steps that you take while the 3DS is in sleep mode they bloom. The reason I'm mentioning this is that one of the villagers (Each village has exactly the same people and shops in it, just rearranged to make it harder to find the inn and shop) mentioned that when the evil warlord who kidnapped Princess Cherry Blossom is overthrown it would be nice to have something to look at. Now, I take long walks. And that means that I usually have almost 3,000 steps a day to dedicate, but only 30% of a single tree bloomed when I dedicated about that much to it. My thinking is that maybe I'll get a bad ending or something if all the trees aren't blooming, so I'll do my best to shoot for the best ending I can and see how that turns out. All in all the game needed to spend a while longer in the planning stages before being released is my opinion of it so far, but then again I really don't like sub-par Zelda clones. Zelda clones I don't mind, because I really like the Harry Potter And The Philosophers Stone game, but ones that dumb down the formula don't satisfy my action adventure cravings. It's not a bad game by any means, but it's not as good as it could be. See you next week, I've got something special planned!

Star Wars: Wild Space

Star Wars Wild Space is a Clone Wars tie-in novel that was written by Karen Miller and came out in 2008. It's situated during the missing R2-D2 arc in Clone Wars, and follows what Obi-Wan Kenobi was doing during that span of time. It's also one of my favorite works of fiction, right behind Ready Player One and right before Pendragon Book 6: The Rivers of Zadaa. I'll get to Pendragon someday, and I'll do Sakura Samurai soon, but today's May The Fourth so I figured I'd review this book. I'm not a major Star Wars fan by any means, I haven't watched the movies in years and I've only ever seen one episode of The Clone Wars. I was a fan of the books for a while, but the New Republic era's writing quality spiraled further and further downwards the more I read of it to the point where I stopped reading it. Plus I couldn't figure out which books when where in the timeline since they're not numbered in any way aside from the timeline which is either in the books or isn't. Anyways, the book is three-hundred and forty-two pages long and I listened to the audiobook version myself. The first thing I have to mention is that the audiobook version is amazing. It adds a lot of emotion to the journey and it makes for an entertaining experience. The book starts off after the first battle of Geonosis, and shortly before the end of Attack of the Clones, and provides for a great deal of character development between Obi-Wan and Anakin despite the short length of the scene. It also provides expanded development on the part of the Jedi, making them seem less heartless and allowing for them to seem like actual people. It then skips ahead a bit to after the events of Star Wars: Clone Wars, where Obi-Wan has received information regarding an attack by General Grievous. The following scenes provide for a great deal of interesting character development for everyone involved. Yoda, Obi-Wan, Anakin, Mace Windu, and Padme. It also makes fleshes out the whole universe of Star Wars so that it becomes more three-dimensional, and it's done in such a way that it's relatable to real life, in a way that I felt like I knew what the characters were feeling. This book does a lot to make Revenge of the Sith a better movie, although it also does a lot to make Anakin's face-heel turn towards the end of the movie (And that's not a spoiler because Star Wars Episode V has been out for almost thirty-five years now and everyone pretty much knows Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.) a lot more perplexing.
While he would do anything to protect a certain someone, he also has a lot more reasons to hate and distrust the Sith and everything they want to do then he does to be annoyed by the Jedi, and that was moot by that point in time. This book pretty much just piles on to the reasons as to why Anakin wouldn't trust the Sith, and features absolutely amazing storytelling.
Seriously, a lot of the book is spent with two characters on a planet with nothing else there except local wildlife and it's absolutely astounding how it's written to be riveting. It helps build Obi-Wan up as a character and it also builds up another important character who was barely mentioned in either trilogy, yet who died a tragic death at the hands of the Empire.
It's absolutely beautiful how well this book is written. Everything, from beginning to climax is perfectly paced, and by the time the book ends it seems like you spent a horrible, wonderful and exhausting eternity with the characters from start to finish. The struggle of a man to overcome his obstacles is portrayed so perfectly and so entertainingly that it will leave you wondering why this didn't have a movie all to itself. They could get Ewan Mcgregor and the rest of the original trilogy cast back just to make a movie or maybe even a miniseries out of this and it would be amazing.
From start to finish this book is paced so perfectly and everything is described in a way that left me with a picture of the scenes in my head that was as clear as seeing it in pictures. It's a great book that not enough people have read, and all in all I'd say it deserves a 10.0* rating. I'll see you all next week with another review.

Daniel X

this series is downright stupid. a study in cliches. worst of all, you can tell when Patterson's (good) writing stops and Ledwidge's (terrible) writing begins. James Patterson can (and might i add, should) go back to the beginning and rewrite this whole thing. ALONE. the entire series is filled with the same repetition and some bad jokes. i don't mean distasteful. i mean TERRIBLE. one more thing wrong is some of the interaction and response doesn't even make sense! in one chapter Daniel is taking a taxi to some place and the guy asks him why he's there and he say's it's his job, "lettuce shredder at taco bell." he'd have done better by having him say "I'm an alien hunter!" usually you see continuity from one book in a series to the next. not in this. the continuity from chapter to chapter doesn't even fit! normally when going from book to movie they leave out stuff that needs to be in, or else change things for the worse. not for this. i don't think they could make this series any worse. in my opinion they can only go up! (seeing as they started at the bottom, there is no place else to go) i got the first one in audiobook form from my library. some of the filler and stupidity didn't come off so bad but in the book it just seemed stupid! the thing that got me interested in this was the first chapter being printed in the back of Maximum Ride Manga. the library didn't have that so i got the audiobook. after listening to the book i got a hard copy from the library and found that what just seemed odd in the audiobook was actually cliche after cliche! i tried to read the second one but found that even with a different co-author it wasn't any better! this series is not recommended unless it is rewritten by Patterson. ALONE. it gets a 0.7* rating. when i find the  manga novels i will probably rate them better.

one more thing, in the necessary rewrite, make it so that Daniel's sister escapes with him, it would make more sense. also, make the other alien kids so they all find each other on earth, and maybe make the gun that #6 uses the actual gun used by #1 to kill Dan's parents! as well as not swapping out non graphic swearing for crap that makes no sense!

Star Wars: The Old Republic

off topic, blogger changed it's interface, which is annoying. on topic,
                                         Star Wars: The Old Republic:

i bought a brand new PC a while ago, 1TB HDD, 3GB RAM, 2.40GHz AMD CPU, pretty good deal for only 300 (i plan to upgrade it when the warranty is up). it runs World of Warcraft without a hitch. can't say the same for SWTOR. i had to download for at least two, three weeks to get the fully patched client. it takes up about 40, 50 GBs on my hard drive. i have been signed up for this thing since before it was in beta test. i was signed up to be a beta tester and didn't make the cut. oh well, i moved on. then i got an eMail in my inbox offering me a seven day free trial for the game. ok, i downloaded the main client (25GBs) and then it wanted to patch. i have DSL, so speeds are better than dialup, slower than cable internet. it took me over three weeks to get the client patches downloaded. i had to call customer support to get them to reset my trial until i had the download finished. then the real trouble started. first i get kicked from the server while designing my character. then, when i do manage to enter the game, it's so slow i have to change the settings. then i wind up with a choice: crappy, choppy graphics and readable text. or crappy and choppy graphics, and illegible text. my PC more than meets the minimum system requirements, and i have a decent internet connection. why then does this game that is supposed to be the greatest star wars RPG manage to make it feel like my PC is a windows 98 trying to run a windows vista program on maximum settings? this game is only free for a week or three days depending on how you got the trial. WoW (amongst others) is free to play up to a level cap or (for some others) completely free! i will not recommend this unless they make the game easier to play graphics wise, and free to play, as well as a smaller download/patch size. they could isolate the RPG format and use online play for PVP and dungeon/boss fights, but they probably won't for now this gets a 1.7* rating. if i had actually bought the physical copy of the game when it came out (which i was sorely tempted to do) i would have been very unhappy. the only redeeming quality is the opening cinematic's (amazing picture and sound, better than some movies) which is why i kept it above a 1.0*, but below a 2.0* this game will not be worth playing for the average consumer, or RPG lover until they start on some major patching. this game reminded me why i do my heavy gaming on my consoles! if they port it to Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360 i might buy it as long as they do not charge me to utilize multiplayer gaming. when this is completely F2P i will upgrade the rating and when this has a better way of managing it's graphics i will upgrade it again, but for now, it get's a low rating. i hope that KOTOR 1&2 were better, cus now i am ticked off at bioware for this game. it might not be bioware's fault and completely EAs, butfor now, i will shy away from bioware until i find a reason not to. Electronic Arts has a bad rep with a lot of gamers so it could just be on their end.