Ready Player One

I finished Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, handed it to lovely wife and then watched her devour it over a couple days. Yeah, it's that good. It is indeed the book I've enjoyed reading the most so far this year. It concerns itself with a treasure hunt. World has gone to pot, everybody spends their time in OASIS - think WoW mixed with Facebook and a couple other things. Guy that created it kicks the bucket and leaves behind an easter egg somewhere in the virtual world. You need three keys to find the egg. Commence searching. Oh and the guy that hid it? Totally loved the 80s. So the search becomes a road trip through everything 80s nostalgia. So good. Now, if you didn't live through the 80s and more to the point aren't a geek to some extent, you will probably only like this book. He does a fine job of explaining most of the references (leaving a couple for the reader to suss out) so you're never completely lost, but if you fit those criteria you are in for a real treat.

Redbox now carries videogames. So as I was curious about Demon's Souls back when it came out and the spiritual (heh) successor Dark Souls is now out, I thought I'd give it a go. $2 is certainly a better try it out price than $60. It's an interesting game. They're both known for their difficulty - you can expect to die a lot. No really, a lot. No, more than that. Keep going. A little more, there you go, that's about right. You choose a fantasy based character type, start the game off dead and then proceed to become more dead. Except for those times when you manage to come back to life. But you'll die again, don't worry. Enemies are tricky and out to kill you. They succeed. So, why do people play this? It's an interesting question. I think some of it stems from the absolute rush you get when you manage to make it past them. Every so often you will find camp fires, they serve as checkpoints of a sort. If you rest at them, you regain your health and refill your flask that lets you heal while out and about, but it also resets all the enemies you killed. So it becomes a kind of tug of war - do you press on, knowing you might die, but hoping to get just that little bit further, or do you heal up, knowing you've got to fight your way through?

Honestly the most intriguing thing about the game is listening to people talk about it. For example, I was stuck in the middle of Undeadburg trying to fight my way to the next camp fire. I'd managed to learn how to make it to a tower. Climbed said tower, got super lucky when the guardian must have fallen off or something - I sure didn't kill him, and then was confronted by a dragon guarding a bridge with a stair case going down about halfway across the bridge. I was certainly in no shape to fight the beast. I got barbecued a bunch of times trying to make it to that stupid stair case. Not to mention the numerous times I still died just getting to the dragon. Curse those guys and their spears! But I'd done it. Made it to the stair case. Started poking around a bit and there it was. A camp fire. But wait, it looked sort of familiar. That's right, it was the same camp fire I'd been starting at, I'd just kicked a ladder down to it so I could access the bridge under the dragon. I'd gone in a huge circle. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or punch a hole through the tv. I seriously thought about returning that disc to the redbox snapped in half. But those moments when it goes right... I might have to pick it up when it gets cheap. For those times I feel like wondering why I ever play games.

Little and littlest sis are in town along with the rest of the crew. We sort of attempted the corn maze the other night. Between the rain making the ground a little too spongy and a late start causing it to be too dark to really see, we made it about halfway through before deciding bed time was the better part of valor and re traced our steps. The pig races were as enjoyable as always. G managed to win himself a pig nose thanks to Faith Squeal I think it was. We will get together some tomorrow and possibly again over the weekend for lovely wife's birthday shenanigans.

We've also been making our way through that first season of Supernatural. It really was pretty great. I liked it back when they focused on the monster a week formula. We shall see if it continues.