VIDEO GAME: What the Car? (2023)

by benmweilertNo Comments
What the Car?Year: 2023Rating: ETime Played: ~5 hours By this point, I expect a certain amount of silliness from the What the... series of games. From the highly referential humor of What the Golf? to the awkward control scheme of What the Bat?, I expected something ridiculous with What the Car? As half a racing game and half a platformer, What the Car? has tons of puns (a staple of the series) but lacks a little in the finesse of its controls. The standard set of levels in What the Car? have particular themes that then play off the unique movement style of the car. This was quite similar to some of the gameplay mechanics in What the Golf? There were also levels with greater challenges and, of course, each level had its own collectables and goal times to meet for a bronze, silver, or gold ranking. Casually playing through the whole thing didn't take too long, but I suspect that's why...
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BOOK: The End of the World (2013)

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The End of the World Year: 2013 Author: Don Hertzfeldt Length: 224 pages I was first introduced to the works of Don Hertzfeldt via his Oscar-nominated short film, Rejected. The bizarre humor immediately struck a chord with me but the simplistic animation style (with a 4th-wall-breaking ending) made this short a classic that I still quote to this day. Since then, I have still mostly kept up with the little animation projects Hertzfeldt has done over the years. As a graphic novel, The End of the World seems like a logical step for the animator, and it works, but only in a few spots. Despite Rejected being mostly silly, his other works (which retain his signature stick-figure style) are silly but with a profound message that seems out-of-place coming from someone who animated a character screaming of the woes brought on by a bleeding anus. The End of the World has a lot of one-off jokes that don't quite land, but the longer narrative bits...
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BOOK: Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones (2008)

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Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones Year: 2008 Author: Brandon Sanderson Length: 425 minutes / 7.08 hours Earlier this year, I read Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians and absolutely loved it. Consequently, I had high hopes for the next book in this series, Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener’s Bones. While there was still the same amount of self-awareness and humor in this book, it felt a little…off. Perhaps I should have read these two books closer together, but I had some trouble coming up to speed in the beginning and wasn’t entirely sure why the “goal” of this book was to find Alcatraz’s father. In any case, Sanderson’s world-building is still in top form here. Of course, the “cute” way that this series was self-aware when I read the first book was a bit more annoying this time around. It almost felt like every chapter had to have a soliloquy, even if it didn’t link itself to where the plot was at the time—which often broke the...
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