Android Games Reviews: Amazon Underground “Actually Free” Games #5 - Ducktales Remastered

In 1989, one of the best games for the NES was, surprisingly, a media tie-in game called Ducktales, in which Scrooge McDuck used his cane to pogo-jump on enemies and retrieve treasures. 25 years later, an updated remake of that game was released.

( Read more... )

Overall: This is a very fun bit of nostalgia and still a particularly strong platformer game. But play a console version, not the Android one—your thumbs will thank you.

Book Mini-Reviews

The Anti-Anxiety Toolkit by Melissa Tiers - A very straightforward collection of exercises to help deal with the “brainweasels” sort of anxiety, when it either doesn’t have a clear cause or it has a cause you can’t do anything about. I feel like it’s in the same vein as cognitive-behavioral therapy, though this is in bite-sized “tricks” rather than an overall plan of attack. I suspect you need to actually pick a few and practice them when you AREN’T having severe anxiety before they’ll do much, though. Many of them rely on a willingness to let the anxiety go, and like depression, when you’re in the throes of it, you don’t want to let the anxiety go.

The Odds of Loving Grover Cleveland by Rebekah Crane - Setting: Camp for emotionally-disturbed teenagers. Characters: Assorted damaged teenagers, standard Breakfast Club references included. Observation 1: Grover is an asshole. Granted, he’s the sort of snarky, boundary-pushing asshole that we as a society have decided should be the male lead in teen romantic comedies, but he’s still an asshole and the fact he’s never called on it irritates me. Observation 2: Cassie is a justifiable, abused asshole; but it shouldn’t be Zander’s responsibility to “save” her. Observation 3: This book loves the classic YA “adults are useless” narrative, though I suppose a softened reading of that would be “adults are broken people too.” Observation 4: Nobody gets “fixed” so much as they go into remission, which is refreshingly realistic. Theory: The author was once a kid like this and at least some of the characters are based on real people. Conclusion: I don’t think I actually like “put a bunch of broken people together with incompetent supervision and they’ll fix each other” stories. It fits a certain anti-intellectual theme that pervades our society, writing off professionals and systemic help in favor of bootstrapping. This wasn’t a bad book, but left a bad taste in my mouth in retrospect.

Good Intentions by Elliott Kay - I lost track of where I heard about this, but it’s the story of a man who accidentally gets an angel and a succubus both bound to him. The thing is, it’s clearly a wish-fulfillment fantasy (as the number of sex scenes would indicate) and it goes on FAR too long with too little interpersonal conflict and too few jokes. As the wit was lacking and the story dragged, I only made it a third of the way through before giving up.

Dear Cthulhu Vol. 1: Have a Dark Day and Dear Cthulhu Vol. 2: Good Advice for Bad People by Patrick Thomas - Heavily influenced by the classic Dear Abby and Ann Landers columns, including bits about mailing her $4.95 for a pamphlet of advice. The second book actually gets stronger as it goes on, as he stops leaning on the Cthulhu responses as the entire joke and makes the people writing in progressively more terrible. This was sold to me as “bathroom reading”, and that’s accurate—reading a couple of columns at a time is amusing, but marathoning the books gets repetitive…just like reading the archives of ANY advice column.

Hidden Youth ed. Mikki Kendall & Chesya Burke - Definitely has the “anthology problem” of the stories being wildly uneven—a few are genuinely clever, but many are ho-hum paranormal stories (and historical fiction paranormal stories, at that) that happen to have minority/marginalized characters. I bought this (via Kickstarter) because ecmyers had a story in it, and his Chinese steampunk mech story didn’t disappoint. I was also amused by K.T. Katzmann’s golem story, “The Bread-Thing in the Basket” and Alec Austin’s “The Paper Sword.” Overall, though, I was unenthused.

And as a bonus graphic novel, Unmasked Seeking Same was one I picked up at Philcon, about superheroes attempting to have love lives. Amusing concept that I’d see elsewhere, very sitcom-esque, credit for diversity, enjoyable but forgettable.