New Mandate Trailer

I've talked about The Mandate a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn't wait till the weekend to blog about this latest update on the Romanovs-in-space epic. Perihelion Games has released a cool new trailer for their game, featuring Brit David Bradley doing a kickin' voice-over as Admiral Suvarov for an incredibly enticing trailer for the in-development space epic. Now, I'm not familiar with David Bradley (I'm not a fan of Harry Potter or Doctor Who, and I'm too scared of fleshy bits to watch Game of Thrones), but apparently he's got about six miles of nerd-cred. For me, he sounds a heck of a lot like Adam Nicolson, British author of the book examining Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, Seize The Fire. (I absolutely love that book, and Nicholson's wry English consonants most recently accompanied me on a kind of creepy bus ride from Indianapolis to Chicago last summer.)


In addition to the awesome VO quality that we're going to get for this sci-fi gem, I just love the tone they establish in this game. This is going to be a game where NPCs aren't just faceless meeples that you stat-grind as a parallel leveling mechanic--they're an engaging, dynamic, and fragile element of the game. They're your friends and your resources, and nothing you do can shield them from the risk that entails. Your crew will suffer losses, and the way you manage that loss on a dramatic and tactical level is going to be a central gameplay mechanic. It is very Nelsonian in that way, which grabs me all the right ways. (Seriously, check out Seize The Fire--the author-read audio book at least.)

It also makes me think of how exciting and avant-garde Mass Effect was going to be back in the days leading up to the first game's release. In particular, there was this commercial spot that still resonates with me to this day:


The idea of having mutually exclusive, NPC-destroying, time-based decisions to make is so much fun, and we never quite got the pay off in Mass Effect that the above commercial promised. Each game had very specific set-piece decisions that would very transparently give you a choice to kill person X or Y, but it never made it a heavy, pressed-for-time, combat-based choice like you get from this 48 second commercial. The first Mass Effect came close with the Virmire decision, but that still was a very canned moment. No matter how many times your NPCs got railgunned to the face, they were immune to any real injury until the script suddenly decided they were mortal.

With The Mandate, though, they're repeatedly stressing that every time your ship's hull tears open, you're losing crew, and that loss will not only potentially kill off individual characters, but having to replace or evaluate crew will impact the character of your ship and your character. This dynamic will make it where even the most assured victories will still have weight, as you try to grab as much power as you can without losing critical crew.

Oh, man, if this game doesn't get funded to the moon and back, I will be so disappointed in you, internet.

Veterans Day at the Nerdery

Today is the ninety-fifth anniversary of the Armistice of Compiègne, which ended World War I, or at least the war between the Triple(or more, really) Entente and Germany, on November 11, 1918. Starting the next year, many of the Entente nations declared national holidays on the anniversary of the armistice. In the United States of America, it was known as Armistice Day until 1954, when Congress officially changed the holiday to Veterans Day, which has remained associated with the holiday ever since. Now, in the US we have a holiday in May for the remembrance of those who died in the armed forces (talked about first here and again here). Veterans Day, on the other hand, is dedicated to honoring veterans serving, retired, or passed away and to connect that honor to our everyday lives in a way that is distinct to the respectful rites of Memorial Day.

Today, I'm going to quickly highlight Veterans Day with a short list of great science fiction books. These books fall into the great tradition of what is known as the military sci-fi subgenre. Military sci-fi comprises story where military hierarchies, tradition, logistics, and/or tactics factor as heavily into the plot and setting as alien worlds and futuristic technology. What's interesting about these sorts of stories, when compared to traditional space opera, sci-fantasy, or social drama sci-fi, is that it respects the interaction of characters and traditions as somewhat timeless in the scope of how men and women conduct war. The three books I'm highlighting below, however, are not just really good pieces of military sci-fi; they're also all written by veterans, which allows a reader to analyze the book meta-textually. In so doing, these books aren't just great action-packed sci-fi classics, but they're an alternative way of approaching and analyzing some specific veterans.

They're also pretty quick reads, too.

Starship Troopers was written in 1959 and has remained one of the flagships of the subgenre of military sci-fi ever since. It's less of a conventional war story as it is part snapshot of a military oligarchical society and one teen's coming of age within that tradition. I've been a fan of this book since the fourth grade, and I think I've bought it at least a half-dozen times over the years out of a compulsion to always have one at hand. (Not unlike the way Jerry keeps buying copies of The Catcher in the Rye in the movie Conspiracy Theory.) Starship Troopers was written by Robert Heinlein, who graduated from Annapolis Naval Academy in 1929 and retired as a Naval Lieutenant in 1934, and is one of a smattering of not insane pieces of sci-fi written by him. I also recommend Space Cadet, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Red Planet for anyone interested in more of his books, but many of his others are really out there. But this one is a fairly short, fast-moving read that provides a good survey of the major themes of this category of fiction.

The Starfist series of novels is a great collection of 14 novels set in the 2400s. The premier entry in the series, First to Fight, was published in 1997, and presents the marines of the 34th FIST (Fleet Initial Strike Team) performing glorified police work on an inherently unstable world in the middle of yet another brushfire war. If you ignored the publication date, you might think the fiction is reactionary to early War on Terror military stories. The two things I really love about this series of books both relate to the elegance of the series' conceit: it all follows a specific company starting in a specific year. In the early installments, this means that the Confederation of Human Worlds has yet to make contact with intelligent (and hostile) aliens, and the conflicts of the first four books are about dousing political fires on the outskirts of human space. Secondly, the authors consistently draw characters and resources from a genuine military company, meaning that characters that are dropped as names in one book might become main characters you root for in later books, and that the politics of the unit's organization mean more to you as the series goes on. The series was written by David Sherman, who served 6 years in the United States Marine Corps before retiring as a Corporal, and Dan Cragg, who retired as an Army Sergeant Major after 22 years in uniform. They give the series a concentrated level of (US) military culture that sometimes comes off as a bit stereotypical but is always consistent and oozes bravado throughout.

Orphanage is the first of a series of seven (and counting) novels set in a near future interstellar conflict. The first book especially takes a lot of stylistic inspiration from Heinlein's Starship Troopers, though with a lot more action and dialed in characterization of the supporting cast. The first book begins with earth getting bombarded by aliens from the outer reaches of the solar system. As the entire planet reels from the devastating attack, they mount a suicidal expedition to counter-attack the alien presence on Ganymede. The mission is considered so dangerous that the powers-that-be declare that all soldiers selected for the mission must be orphans of the war, earning the book its title and setting a desperate, wounded motif for the series. Robert Buettner, who served as an Army intelligence officer, eventually takes the series into bigger themes, as the war forces humanity to reach out to other stars to battle the aliens throughout the galaxy. There's a lot of great sci-fi that plays intelligent homage to several other authors and series, though the focus and style of the action shifts greatly throughout the books as the nature of the war itself evolves. This is a great feature if you're prepared for it, but if you aren't it can be jarring as politics, logistics, and ethics quickly take the fore.


I hope you take the chance to thank the service people in your life this Veterans Day, and definitely check out these great novels whenever you get the chance. Besides being enjoyable nerd-fodder, they just might encourage you to think differently about these issues next Veterans Day.

The Enemy's Gate Is Down

Nerdview: A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.

Last night was the premier of Ender's Game, the film adaptation of one of the greatest pieces of sci-fi literature of the past 30 years. Based on a book published in 1985, and long in production with the author Orson Scott Card serving as screenwriter and producer in the past, this movie had been in an interminable production for years. During that time, the series has expanded to include a dozen sequels, comic book adaptations, and short stories. And it's still growing, with at least one more sequel and another prequel planned to be released soon. But the most important question, now that the movie has been released and the inevitable talk of a cinematic sequel has already begun: is it a good science fiction film?

Expectations 'Odor': If you've read my blog for any amount of time, you know that I've been waiting for this for a long time. I first read the book fifteen years ago, and it's important to note that I helped work on a screenplay adaptation of Ender's Game within a year. It wasn't long after I worked on my script and read the followup The Speaker for the Dead trilogy that the first rumors of an Ender's Game movie surfaced. Originally Wolfgang Petersen, director of Das Boot, Enemy Mine, and Air Force One, was attached to the primordial movie websites. Later, several X-Men alum were rumored to be on the project. Ultimately, I stopped trying to follow the pre-production limbo of Ender's Game. It just hurt too much. But Ender's story has remained important to me, and with this movie I've been getting progressively more and more excited since that first full trailer's release. I even wrote a tribute to my grandfather's passing in a format very similar to a Speaker for the Dead.

So my expectations are high. Probably a little higher than most fans of the book. The casting choices, as they've been revealed, have been extremely exciting--Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff seems an unintuitive-but-perfect fit, as is Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham. But at the same time, the trailers have done very little to indicate how much of the book's psychological depth and exhausted desperation--key themes in the novel--will make it to the screen. With not much to go on, I think my expectations, my enthusiasm, my criticism, and my hope probably all meter out to something fairly optimistic in the end. We'll just see what the pay off is like.

Appreciation 'Beef': Ender's Game is very pretty and well-acted. I hope you can hear the negative conjunction coming from around the corner because I've got a big 'but' coming... Ender's Game is very pretty and well-acted, but the plot is rather clumsy and unfocused. There's a lot of strong elements and really polished performances, but in the end the narrative suffers from a lack of strong direction.

The general design and cinematography of the film is really stunning. Without cashing in on sleazy characters or cheap visuals like a J.J. Abrams movie, the look of the film is simply legit and epic. Particularly for a new sci-fi brand that can't rely on established designs for anything, the principal designs of the suits, the game arena, the battle school itself, and the ship designs are all distinct, top notch, and largely fit the limited descriptions of the book. What deviations there are from the descriptions largely make sense, too. The bulkiness ascribed to the game suits was a lot more relevant in the 80s, but the form-armor of the movie looks contemporary and still somewhat protective. The game arena goes from the book's description of being a formless cube to being a glass bubble floating over the planet, giving the Battle School matches a dizzying backdrop to help ground the audience's disorientation. These three-dimensional battles were really well done and did a decent job--though overly condensed--of intimating the tactical geometry of the book's fights. The ship designs were rather more utilitarian than the John Harris cover art I'd grown accustomed to, but the proliferation of Harris' covers throughout 80s and 90s sci-fi means that using his covers for direct inspiration might not have felt that authentic. Heck, I just discovered that the original Ender's Game cover art was re-purposed from an earlier novel called Drunkard's Walk. In any case, I ate up the special effects and visuals of the film.

The acting was really gratifying, and predictably I found Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff and Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham really stole the show as Ender's mentors. Viola Davis also did a great job as the military warmachine's bleeding heart, Major Anderson. I wasn't especially gripped by Asa Butterfield's performance as the lead, but Hailee Steinfeld as Petra did a great job of playing off of him and adding a bit more heart to their scenes together. And Moises Arias, who played Bonzo Madrid, gave one of the most convincing portrayals of childish maliciousness I've ever seen in this sort of movie. In fact, for a movie containing so many young actors, I was pleasantly surprised that every actor seemed suited to their roles and those who didn't stand out were at least capable. Even Abigail Breslin did a good job of realizing the mature-but-impotent philanthropist Valentine Wiggin. And that's from someone who really didn't like her in Zombieland.

But.

I understand that this is a movie and plays by different rules than a novel. I've always said that a strict adaptation is not necessarily a good one. But it seems every plot change the movie made was antagonistic to the themes that made the book popular and made the film's own voice dwindle. The timeline of the movie is a shambles. Apparently, the entire ordeal of selection, Battle School, and Command School takes only about 40 days. Literally, about thirty minutes into the movie they show a timer that says "28 days to alien homeworld." Not only is it eminently stupid to put a timer on a frakking third-act plot twist, but it is a slap in the face to much of the plot where Ender is being tested and refined. You have one month, dill-brains! Just start training him outright! They also overlook the second Bugger Invasion completely, which undermines the sociological and psychological topography of the threat. The whole point of the book is that the Formics first attacked with a scout force and then sent a proper invasion years later when they found a seemingly weak target.

One of the hurdles that Orson Scott Card has personally mentioned in an interview with Wired was that the book is very insular--much of the action is internalized within Ender's mind. The movie rather clumsily tries to flesh this out by vocalizing Ender's e-mails back to his sister, Valentine, but the correspondence is so bland it feels like a kid reporting on summer camp and doesn't really seem to fit the character or the setting--almost like he's self-censoring to avoid spilling classified info. If that was the case, it could serve the story, but it's a significant plot-point in the movie that Ender is being open with his bland, uninspired letters, and so it defeats the purpose of even including them.

Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy': I'm glad I saw Ender's Game, and I may even see it again in theaters. The battle scenes were gorgeous, and Ford's delivery of Graff's hardline strategy for saving the human race is engrossing.

But...

(minor spoilers ahead)

I can't say this is a very good movie. I'm not saying it's bad, but I find it hard to get into something that is so confused about what it wants to be. For a movie so rushed up until it happens, they take way too long to resolve the post-Command School plot. A part which I think would've been better left as a one minute post-credits scene, they draw it out more than any other scene in the entire movie when they didn't even build up to it properly.

They only partially met the three expectations I listed in my earlier post anticipating this movie. The third invasion of the Formics was not even a lie in this movie because there was no second invasion, and they seriously drop the bomb of that lie at the earliest possible opportunity so that the steaming dud doesn't even really impact the audience. And when Ender ignorantly wipes out the Formic homeworld, the emotional content of the scene is so backwards as to defeat the impact of the twist itself (for Ender, because with the timer reveal any audience member should see the twist coming). In the book, Ender is supposed to be mentally exhausted and spent, ready to quit when he petulantly 'breaks' the game with a suicidal and genocidal attack on the enemy's base. The observing leaders, however, are supposed to be relieved, cheering and crying and congratulating each other at that moment of victory. That cruel juxtaposition, then, beats Ender when he was already low. The movie, however, depicts the kids cheering while the adults somberly conference and inform Ender of the dire truth.

It may seem like a nit-pick, but the changes the movie made to the mind game Ender plays throughout his training was also tweaked in a fundamental way. In the book, when Ender commands his mouse avatar to burrow into the giant's eye and kill him, the giant then rots and becomes a green, rich hillside. This is not only dramatic symbolism that foreshadows how humanity will suborn colonies originally terraformed by the Formics, but it also alludes to Norse creation myths and the death of Ymir. The movie's simple omission of this detail robs the mind game of its elegance and symbolic force that could have really helped to elevate the quality of the narrative.

The changes to the timeline were especially illogical and unjustified. And omitting the Second Bugger War altogether entirely defeats the plausibility of Graff's position. That can't be overstated. I really had to insert the movie Graff into the plot of the book in order to have him make sense, and in order to match Ford's dour defeatism he brought to life. And that's not only imaginatively over-complicated, but it's rather pathetic.

General Enjoyment 'Cheese': Fans of sci-fi who aren't terribly in love with the book--or haven't read it at all--might be able to get into this movie. I say might because the plot holes and weaknesses that gall me are still visible within the context of the movie by itself, but less obvious. Fans of the book will at best be pleased with pretty lights and great moments that do adhere briefly to the novel, but mostly they'll come away with a story that is more "inspired by" than "adapted from" Ender's Game. Fans may be able to enjoy it if they're sufficiently braced against such disappointment, but they need to really understand that no moment in the movie compares to a comparable part of the book in terms of dramatic and emotional content or social commentary.

You know, as a fan of the book's depth and someone who wrote a better screenplay in junior high, I'm not sure I was prepared for the plot to be the weakest part of this movie. I doubted the job the young cast might do. I worried the three-dimensional Battle School scenes wouldn't translate well to the screen. I thought they'd outright cut large sections of the book. Instead, they condensed everything without making the tough decisions to cut out some of the elements they underdeveloped and under-delivered, and everything else is rather more anemic because of it.

At the same time, in a world where World War Z was turned into a dumb action movie without real zombies, socio-political drama, or one recognizable element from the critically acclaimed novel and still get 67% on Rotten Tomatoes, I think Ender's Game deserves its chance. It's certainly closer to the text, more reverent, and more consistently respectful of the fans who made the book popular in the first place.

Kickstart: Rayguns, Space Frontiersmen, and White Russia in Space

Kickstart Your Weekend: A series in which I occasionally spotlight Kickstarter projects that are ending soon and deserve a little nerd love. Also, I'll highlight some past projects as well, as you never know when these enterprises are going to turn up again.

Today we're getting back into regular articles, with a laser-zap back into Kickstart Your Weekend. And these three are a particularly fun selection of games for fans of very different science fiction sub-genres. We've got a miniatures wargame-powered reboot of a classic pulp sci-fi series, a PC management game with a crude frontiersman angle, and finally a space epic computer RPG with a galactic empire inspired by pre-commie Russia.

Yeah, you heard me.

Before we dig into it, though, there were several awesome Kickstarter projects that wrapped in the past few months. And while you can't pledge, I thought I'd name-drop a few of them just in case you wanted to follow their development and release.

There were several interesting movies successfully funded this summer: Bound, a Lego brickfilm with a spiritual theme and made by a brother and sister team; the brickfilm Melting Point also funded successfully, and I can't wait to see this feature's take on the wry humor the creator, Jonathan Vaughan established in his other short films; Man vs. Snake, a quirky documentary based on a man trying to reclaim a video game record from the early days of arcade games, helmed by two editors from Battlestar Galactica; MMPR funded quite well, and so they'll get a shot at making a couple of episodes to snare all the grown-up fans of the original three seasons of Power Rangers. The Devil Walks in Salem looks kind of cheesy, but its remarkable distinction is that it's adapted from an RPG--not from the rules or setting--but from an actual play session between some honest-to-goodness role-players. Even if the end result turns out clumsy, I think it'll be worth a watch for anyone who ever looked around their gaming table during a really gripping session and thought "Why can't they make movies like this?"

(And if you don't know the feeling I'm talking about, watch this episode of Wil Wheaton's Tabletop. You're welcome.)

On the sad-to-see-it fail side of things, Stephan Frost, the creator of the intriguing and beautiful Mortifera graphic novel, failed to get funding to create the animated pitch for Hell Mary--a Weird War One-type setting about a redheaded femme fatale offing Black Hand goons and Kaiser Wilhelm cronies. It could've been great, but conventional animation still proves to be a big hurdle for Kickstarter projects--you have to raise a lot of money for relatively small rewards. Plus, Frost's offered incentive for success and stretch goals were probably too quirky and off-the-wall to serve their purpose--enough funds would have seen him get a second middle name of "Bonertown" and get a tramp stamp of two unicorns in...conjunction. I know I wouldn't want to inflict that on any man or beast, unless it was part of a really weird court sentencing.

And finally, probably the coolest film project I didn't report on this summer was definitely Fire City: Interpreter of Signs. A horror-fantasy story with a noir mystery flavor and really grotesquely interesting practical effects, Fire City feels to me like the sort of film I wanted the director of Pan's Labyrinth to make--rather than a thought-lite smash 'em up full of forgettable robots and monsters and with the only interesting characters thrown into the background while cardboard cut-outs subjugated them with their plot protection. (Oh snap: that dangerously run-on sentence really tore Pacific Rim a new one, huh?) Anyways, Fire City had the advantage of already having a really creepy short that shows off the subtly disturbing characters, and let them raise twenty grand over their one hundred grand campaign goal. That, and the sentimental daughter-focused thematic behind the production really gets to me as a father, and I'm really curious to see how this world of starving demons and dealers turns out. Just make sure the kids are fast asleep before watching it--even the sounds can make your skin crawl. Check out their webpage for more tastes of their unnerving aesthetic and eerie style.

Games, glorious games. Kickstarter is always good for game-nerding-out. The Long Dark, a first-person post-apocalyptic game with an emphasis on Grylls-esque survival, just recently finished a successful campaign. I love gritty survival games that aren't afraid to punish players with hunger, disease, and sleep dynamics, and the promised tension of making meaningful survive-or-social choices is too cool. Golem Arcana, a miniatures wargame powered by a tablet app and specialized stylus for rules and stat reference, squeaked by with full funding after a personal plug from Chris Roberts. Personally I'm not too keen on a wargame with forces composed of nothing but golems, but...Chris Roberts. (Blogger, how the frak do you not have golem in your spell-check dictionary?!) Alien Uprising, a cooperative sci-fi board game where players try to hold off savage alien natives while repairing their wrecked spaceship. I didn't pledge for it, but I'll be keeping an eye out to play it at conventions. Belle of the Ball, a card game with fantastic art and a princess-party-conniving-set-collection-gimmick, almost snared me into its grip, but I was much too masculine for such sissy stuff. That, and the game mechanics didn't seem as entertaining as the card art. Then I turned around and pledged for Marrying Mr. Darcy, a Pride and Prejudice card game produced by a Wisconsin local that has players trying to court the bachelors of the Austen book. My wife didn't even talk me into it.



Whatever. I don't mind your small-mindedness. I was excited for Marrying Mr. Darcy even before they hit the stretch goal that adds undead elements to the game.

Predictably, the music-powered fantasy MMORPG Anythmn failed to meet its funding goal. Which means that for the time being if I want to combine role-playing games and trumpet-playing, I'll have to find a very tolerant LARP group in the midwest. Fairytale Games: The Battle Royale funded with more than $100,000 over their original goal. I pledged for the project and want to play the game but my enthusiasm has been severely muted since they censored Esmerelda (of Hunchback of Notre Dame) to be an alchemical assassin instead of a gypsy assassin for some vague political correctness concerns. I mean, the game is Hunger Games murder fantasy with fairly cheesecake interpretations of many of their characters--and they're afraid of using the word gypsy to describe a character for whom being a gypsy is a plot point?! Gugh, I say. Plus by the end of the campaign the list of miniatures coming my way has gotten so confusing that I'm just trying to forget the project until I actually have everything in front of me. Massive Chalice did well by pulling in a cool half million more than their initial goal, but the controversy over Double Fine's previous game has me grateful that I passed on this campaign. I'll wait and see if they can actually deliver what was promised.

Projects I backed during the past three months

The summer also had a few neat print projects funded through Kickstarter. Men vs Cosplay was a 2014 cosplay calendar that eschewed boobs for biceps. I would've pledged, but I'm a jealous nerd. Also, you may recall I'm a big mammalian fan. Kids, Eh?, a web-comic annual print book, funded with triple it's $2,000CAD goal. The author is a stay-at-home Canuck dad with a one year-old and three year-old always providing comedic fodder for his weekly strip. Check it out. And FUBAR, the zombie alternate history comic series, funded it's most successful installment yet: Mother Russia. It's about a Soviet lady sniper in Stalingrad saving a toddler from uncounted Nazi zombies. I pledged on this one hard, as even my wife wanted to see more of the viscerally violent cutie-pie story.

On the mint-y side of things, there were two projects for nerdy numismatists. First, the Futuristic Metal Coins project from Minion Games brought us a great selection of uniquely sci-fi tokens for use in board games and RPGs. Between having these shiny creds to serve as cashy money and the upcoming Firefly RPG, I think I'll be doing some gaming in the 'verse in the next year. For more fantastic gaming, Conquistador Games funded The Best Damn Metal Gaming Coins Ever! Seriously detailed, high-quality coins, many of these pieces are inspired by historical examples. They're also non-denominational, meaning that they don't have a prescribed value printed on them, so if you want to throw odd pence-shilling-crowns around in your gaming, you can.

And probably one of my favorite projects of the past three months has to be the Hollow Earth Expedition: Revelations of Mars. Hollow Earth Expedition (HEX) is an RPG by Exile Games that I've followed for a while but never got into. Built on a cinematic system based on dice pools, HEX is founded upon Jules Verne and E.R. Burroughs imagery as they populate the center of the 1930s earth with a land full of weird science, dinosaurs, and savages. If you ever watched the Aussie show Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, you're on the right track. Revelations of Mars expands that setting to the red planet, with beautifully bejeweled alien princesses and big bug aliens needing stomping in grand E.R. Burroughs fashion. Since my wife and I enjoyed John Carter (of Mars!) so much, she actually mandated that I pledge on this particular RPG campaign. Well, who am I to look an RPG mount in the mouth? I pledged to receive Revelations of Mars when it releases next year and the preceding HEX books digitally right away. Wow. I'll do an in-depth article on HEX at some point, because I don't think I've had so much fun just reading an RPG sourcebook since the Serenity RPG came out.

So that's it for catch-up, but what's out now and worthy of a nerd's radar?

Mars Attacks

What it is: Mars Attacks began life in 1962 as a trading card series. A somewhat linear series of cards featuring alien invasion, slaughter, and torture before the eventual human counter, Mars Attacks was a violent, gory romp in pulp sci-fi, with rayguns, flying saucers, and swooning women at their mercy on a lot of the cards. Now, hot on the heels of their Kickstarter successes with Kings of War, Dreadball, Loka chess, and Deadzone, Mantic Games is producing a licensed miniatures wargame adaptation of Mars Attacks. The game is a lighter treatment to wargaming than their previous projects, evoking quick violent skirmishes between Martians and human resistance without a ten pound rulebook to slow things down. Even movement and ranges are based on a coarse 3-inch grid to eschew the all-but-ubiquitous measuring tape of other games.

Why it's exciting: This game, based on a well-known classic license by a seasoned producer of wargames products, stands poised to be Mantic Games' greatest hit yet. With three weeks to go, the game is already at $438,000 pledged out of their original goal of $50,000 so there's already dozens of stretch goals, updates, and add-ons unlocked. Being an old-salt and game snob myself, I tend to turn up my nose at rules that don't let me pull out my tape measure and have fewer than five stats per model, but I can't deny that the quality miniatures in this set--and the insanely good deals attached to the campaign's success--are extremely enticing. If nothing else, I might be seduced by the promise of their plastic US soldiers and flatbed truck-turned sci-fi transport/technical.



Rimworld

What it is: Rimworld is a sci-fi colony sim game for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Players must coordinate the survivors of a crashed colony ship on a procedurally-created world rife with natural disaster and other hazards. Colonists can be directed to mine, farm, build free-form buildings and facilities, and defend the colony from raiders. The game has developed a number of dynamic, interesting features that are coordinated by an AI director that can be selected to suit your play-style--whether looking for an exploration-focused game, a life or death struggle, or a relaxing buildup experience. Right now this is a one-man project with a lot of promise, but the campaign seeks to let the creator, Tynan Sylvester, hire a dedicated artist to add nice graphics to his ambitious game.

Why it's exciting: With over $140,000CAD raised of an original goal of twenty grand and two weeks to go, Rimworld is definitely going to be a success. Creator Tynan hasn't set any stretch goals for the game, wanting to work on it organically without imposing artificial goals leading to development bloat. That's a promising, healthy attitude for a small indie game, especially since so many games that succeed on Kickstarter fall victim to development bloat (Double Fine being the flagship example of this pitfall).



Mandate

What it is: Mandate is a sci-fi PC RPG with an epic scope. Set in a galactic empire inspired by 19th century Russia, Mandate is going to place the player in command of a Mandate ship at the outbreak of a civil war, giving the captain tactical control over their crew and boarding parties and maneuvering their ship in battle as well. Apparently, the game's campaign will grow from commanding a single ship to controlling outposts and stations and building up to having a subordinate fleet of their own. It's being developed on Unity engine, which means that not only is the game going to support Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, but they're already releasing preview modules of the game on their website for fans to sample--right now they have a build-a-ship module that allows players to customize and then destroy a flagship of their very own.

Why it's exciting: I have a few different buttons that can easily cinch my support for a Kickstarter. Sci-fi role-playing game with tactile elements? You got me. Cross-platform support planned? Nice. Preview modules of the game? Cool. Dynamic choice-based gameplay? Yes yes. Russian space empress voice-over for the intro video? Easy buddy, you've already made your sale. I'm in for this game, and I haven't been this anxious to see a Kickstarter succeed since Interstellar Marines (mentioned in a previous post here),  which was another cross-platform Unity-based sci-fi game. At $135,000 right now, Mandate has a long ways to go to reach their half million goal, but they also went for a longer campaign and so have well over a month to get there.

Holy moly. Not only did I just touch base on more than twenty Kickstarter projects in one post, but this is also the third article this week, which means that it's knocking off a point from my 31 post deficit.

ODST Corpsman, Outbound

So here's the finished product of the Extra Life 2013 ODST. It's packaged up and on its way, first-class, to Steelheart of Grievance Gaming, along with a little note to whomever will be the lucky recipient of this fun decoration.

You’re the recipient of a 3D printed model. This model is composed of a composite plaster powder, 3D printed in color, which has been bound and cured in a cyanoacrylate (similar to super-glue) bath. The parts were then sanded, assembled, and painted by hand to achieve a finer finish before finally being waxed.

The composite material should be about as resilient as modeler’s resin. It can withstand a moderate amount of heat without any issue—temperatures of less than one hundred fifty degrees should not be an issue, and higher temperatures for short periods of time can be withstood—so keeping it on a desk beneath a normal desk lamp is perfectly fine.

For a cursory and humorous overview of 3D printing, feel free to visit my blog on the subject here.

Thank you for helping Grievance Gaming support Extra Life and help the Children’s Miracle Network of hospitals. Doing good for others isn’t always easy, but sometimes it can be fun.

Ben’s Nerdery

I really hope you'll support Extra Life. As a father, I'm really sensitive to the mission of the Children's Miracle Network, and it's a pleasure getting to do something, however small, for them this year. To help you appreciate this piece, here's an overview of the work that went into this miniature.

The computer data related to the miniature has to be prepared and transferred to the right format. In most cases, there's a lot of cleanup to do, and this was no exception. Fortunately, I'm a big Halo fan--or was, before the dark days of Xbox One loomed over the franchise (and seriously, a mobile game!?). Anyways, that meant that I'd already spent a lot of time tidying the data into something easy to use and modify. This particular data is also highly accurate and high-resolution, being able to be scaled up to life-size just fine, so I didn't have to fill in or add any details, which is unusual for such parts. The base I designed in Blender (a powerful, free app for drafting, rendering, and animating 3D data), including the Grievance Gaming logo and a label commemorating the event itself.

The data cleaned and reformatted, I hollowed out the data to make the part lightweight, faster to print, and a little more secure. It's a counter-intuitive truth that models like these can be too thick to be resilient: it's easy for a thick part to become too heavy in relation to its tensile strength, since interior volume is printed with lower density binder.

Okay, you should probably just skip over those last couple of sentences. Might be a little too much information. I make data good to make good miniature.

Once the model was printed, I dipped it into an infiltrant of cyanoacrylate (CA), a thinned out superglue that gets into the sandstone-like pores of the model and cures quickly to make the part stronger and watertight. This is also the fun chemistry moment of building a part. All adhesives result in a chemical reaction that generates heat. The faster and stronger the chemical reaction, the more heat is generated, usually. So if you take a baseball sized model in hand and dunk it in CA, you might burn the holy feldercarb out of your digits--cheap-ass gloves or no. Chemical burns are unpleasant, kids.

When the fume-bombs are done throwing around their migraine-smoke, you have a sturdy part that feels even rougher than the sandstone part with which you started, so then you sand. Sanding cuts down on the gritty feel of the powder-based model and helps to reduce the layered-cake effect of 3D printing, without reducing the detailed accuracy of the part--if you do it right.

With that, I decided to re-prime and paint the parts. Priming a 3D printed miniature helps only slightly to cover the layer effect I mentioned, but most importantly it adds the slight grit to the part that you need to paint--otherwise a well-sanded print will be too smooth to take paint nicely. Now even though the 3D print was in full color, there's a couple of reasons why I wanted to hand paint the part. First, a full-color print can have color streaking and inconsistency in the color matching. Hand paints eliminate that. Secondly, the paint used on the visor had a slightly metallic glossing effect that you can't get with 3D printing.

After painting came assembly. I'd made the base and helmet as separate parts to speed up build time, make painting easier, and to ensure that if anything broke in the process I could reprint and replace it. Once everything was painted, I glued the base and helmet together again and stuck it in a hot wax bath to give it that nice, fresh-off-the-lot feel. The final part weighs 163 grams (about .36 pounds), and is about 4" wide x 4" deep x 5" tall. The base is hollow, so you could conceivably weight it or insert a little goodie of some kind in the cavity. The material itself is about the same strength as a thin, dense hardwood, meaning that if you ever find reason to modify it you can always dremel it to suit yourself.



So that's my little contribution to Extra Life 2013. And if any of you are interested in Grievance Gaming, check out their impressive list of represented games. They also have a wide-ranging series of Youtube videos that feature guild news as well as general gaming news and hype. And Grievance Gamer Girls is a subset group that focuses on the ladies, which is always nice.

Nerd Citizen

Today's been a fairly lazy day on the Nerdery front. I've been working on several gargantuan blog posts that will take a good deal of work due to either the tremendous writing/editing load necessary or due to editing media I want to attach to the associated blog posts.

In particular, I've been stalled by the release of the addictive State of Decay, which came out on Tuesday on Xbox Live Arcade. I'm currently in the research and evaluation stage of writing a review for it (ie, I'm playing the game as much as my spazzy, tow-headed spawn will let me). That should be forthcoming within the next handful of posts, if all goes well the next few days.

The big news in the Nerdery, though, was a small package I received in the mail. Tearing into it, I dropped my engraved metal Citizen's ID Card, a beautiful little reward for most Star Citizen backers. Featuring my planned character's name, my founder and pledge status, and a really neat engraved circuitry design along the top and bottom, this is a first class bit of totally superfluous game bling. And I love it. I love getting collector's editions of games specifically because of these sorts of baubles. In the Fallout New Vegas collector's edition, for instance, you get a neat case with a starter deck of Caravan cards, a graphic novel, and a handful of poker chips from the casinos featured in the game. The Dragon Age: Origins collector's edition came with a fabric map of Thedas. Which is awesome because I can now say I've literally caressed Ferelden to my cheek. I love you, you hound-loving nation of malcontents.

Now Star Citizen is fast joining those noble ranks of uber-sexy nerd add-ons that make me unjustifiably enthused for the game beyond the promised gameplay experience. Plunking this plate down on my laptop keyboard, I then snapped a few pictures and threw together the following image. Later tonight I'll be reviewing my character's crew contracts, which will totally be used as an in-game charter for anyone wanting to serve aboard my Constellation-class merchant ship. Oh yes, I'm serious. In the coming weeks, I'll probably share my multi-page crew forms at some point in the future, as well as my detailed thoughts on space-mining as a potentially deep gameplay feature for Star Citizen.

In other nerd news, I've been taking baby steps towards cosplay ever since the euphoric epiphany that was the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo. I'm still at the point where I'm just testing stuff out as I research options and pick the brains of much more experienced and talented cosplayers. Most of the stuff I'm actually doing right now is helping out some other fine folks with a project of theirs while also using that effort as an opportunity to sponge up their methods and talents as best I can. But, I'm not just working on other people's stuff. You could say I've got some nerdy projects in the works.

I'm hoping to have something relatively wearable ready for my son within the next week, so if that happens as I hope you can bet you'll get some more images of it in the next few days. The idea is to present him with this as a novelty consolation prize for being ousted as the cutest thing in our household once his little brother is born. Of course, I think this makes him even cuter than any merely human son could ever be--he's not just cute now...he's supercute!

Mother's Day, Nerdery-style

It's Mother's Day today, a day to honor that special lady who gave birth to you, nurtured you as a youngster, and then nagged you until the day you escaped moved out on your own. Mother's Day in the United States dates back to 1908 and the specific efforts of Anna Jarvis to get the day recognized as a national holiday a few years after her own mother's death. Her work bore fruit in 1914 as the USA recognized the day nationally, but by the 1920's she began campaigning against the commercialization of the holiday--which is a real peach of a thing of her to assert since she had trademarked the term "Mother's Day" and "second Sunday in May" two years before it was even a US holiday. Chief amongst her complaints about Mother's Day observers: printed cards and chocolates. Yeah.

A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment. -Anna Jarvis [from Wikipedia]

Ouch. Feel that burn. So grab a card and try to write something heartfelt in it to try to convince her you didn't phone it in this year, or you can share something meaningful to you both by sitting down and watching a couple of good, long movies together. Maybe you can share a box of chocolates, too, since you were probably lame and got her something like that anyway, right? Plus, the movie marathon has the double bonus of keeping her occupied quietly while giving her plenty of time to reminisce over when you were cute and precious. Granted, there are a lot of chick-flicks you can probably select that fit your mother's particular tastes, but here are three classic movies that are sure to make your maternal unit feel appreciated and give you both some mutual quality time before you flee back to your own place before the baby stories get their annual rehearsal. Spoilers ahead, but if you don't already know these movies you deserve it.

The first film is about a young waitress stuck working in a crummy diner and living a shallow, day-to-day existence. Living with a free-spirited roomate and her overly expressive hunk boyfriend, the main protagonist is stuck in a world where she lives on the meager thrills of her friend who has it all. Until she meets a brooding, intense man with urgent passions and a destiny to fulfill her. The two fall in love and awaken new emotions in both their lives, only to have another man from their past take away everything they have in a night of violence and loss. The waitress survives, but her love is lost, leaving her with a new sense of life's preciousness as she moves to a new life with a baby to remember him by.

The second film is about a single mom and her estranged son. The mother is the victim of a miscarriage of justice and has had to watch her son grow up from afar. Despite having been separated by social services for years, the mother's love is stronger than ever when the son's long-lost uncle comes into the picture and helps re-unite mother and son. Chased by the police and one overzealous officer with a steely determination, the battered family is forced to live on the road and deal with their past demons. The mother realizes that it's never too late to hug her son and tell him just how much he means to her, and the son learns that it's okay to cry. A real heart-warmer.

The third movie on the Nerdery's Mother's Day list is about the legacy of one mother on her son's life as he moves into adulthood and full maturity. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, this mom fights the prognosis for years to ensure that her son is provided for and equipped for the future. Even years later, the son marvels at his mother's fortitude and foresight, giving him a template for living his life. One of the film's most emotional scenes comes at the site of the mother's coffin, where he has to confront the contrary forces of being his own man and honoring his mother's plans for him. It's a moving drama of revelation and emotional breakthroughs as the son learns that some women are just two-faced hussies out there to hurt you. Eventually, he comes to appreciate that mother always knows best, and her preparations help him to meet the woman of his dreams--who just so happens to be just like his mother.



Sounds like a wretched afternoon of Lifetime original movies, doesn't it? Don't worry, these movies also happen to be 100% Nerdery-approved sci-fi classics. They're Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Terminator 3, respectively. Huge, mega-emotional chick-flicks in which women have the corner on all the plot's power with just enough sci-fi budget injected into them to pose as action movies. So cuddle up with moms and watch the first three Terminator movies today. She might complain about the violence and liberal gun-toting, but you'll know that when she gets quiet during Kyle and Sarah's deep connection or Sarah's love for John that she appreciates the truth--Terminator is Mother's Day gold. Plus, I bet she won't be complaining during the time-jump scenes in the beginning of the first two movies.

Just sayin'.

Terminator 1, 2, and 3: total chick-flicks

*Oh, and yeah, Terminator 3 closes the circle on John Connor being the most Oedipal hero since Oedipus himself. In the future, he selects his own father for a mission he knows for a fact to be a suicide mission, and he fosters the love between his parents with a picture he's had his entire life. Later, he doesn't really connect with his own bride-to-be until he identifies her strength as reminding him of his mother. Yeah, Oedipal analysis on Mother's Day... classy.

Hype Alert: 2013 the Year of the Browncoat?

Alright, so that's a stupid name--sounds like an embarrassing continence problem. But for Browncoats--those are fans of the tv series Firefly and the movie sequel Serenity, keep up--this could be a simply awesome year. Or it might stink. Which would be just like any other year for a fan of Whedon's best work-that-isn't-The Avengers.

Firefly: the Role-Playing Game

First on the list of things to be excited about is a throwback to an old favorite of mine. Margaret Weis Productions is once more flyin' back to the 'verse and giving us a new role-playing game based on the television series this time around. MWP had made the original Serenity RPG which was based on the film, and as you probably recall from my personal RPG history, that was the first game where I really dove into being a full-time GM. I have a lot of nostalgia for that system and its cinematic quirkiness--especially coupled with the gritty house-ruled mechanics I tried to shove down its throat. ("You will have a fully-realized orbit-based map of the 'verse, and you will like it!") There were some parts of the system that were rough around the edges, admittedly. The Serenity RPG was actually the proto-form for MWP's Cortex system, and nowadays all their games are based on the Cortex Plus system, which essentially takes the mechanics one step further away from familiar RPG stats and tropes into systems more directly tailored to mimic the values and actions of the shows. For instance, the well-reviewed-but-recently-defunct Marvel RPG by MWP only gave its characters three universal stats: Solo, Buddy, and Team. The rest of the games mechanics were built around unique skills and powers, meaning that a much larger portion of a character sheet was essentially unique than in most other systems. The Firefly RPG promises to be based on the Cortex Plus system, meaning that my old Serenity books will probably be about as useful as Jayne's hat in Nandi's ranch*. That makes me a little sad, but that's the way of RPGs that aren't GURPS, I guess.

How it might suck: I really don't think that the game itself will be bad. Even though the Serenity RPG had a few bits sticking out that should've been edited, reviewed, or playtested out more, it was a solid set of mechanics that really delivered what it needed to, and failed to flesh out only a few interesting side bits that I was more than happy to house-rule. But what might suck about it is the fact that MWP is a small publisher and they seem to get bigger ambitions than they can deliver at times. For instance, they had originally planned on at least two more major expansions to their Battlestar Galactica RPG, based on a revised Serenity system, and those never came to fruition before their license expired, leaving only the core book and a handful of small pdf freebies online. More recently, MWP lost the Marvel RPG line quite abruptly, giving fans less than a month's notice to try to snatch up their books before they got pulled. And that series had actually started taking pre-orders for another future expansion that would never come. Now, in Marvel's case I'm sure that the issue became that the small publisher couldn't afford the license fees a post-Avengers Marvel demanded, but it still makes me a little afraid of loving this game when it comes. Longevity is the best friend of an RPG, and I'm going in expecting the Firefly RPG to have official support for a maybe year.



Firefly: the Board Game

Twentieth Century Fox must really be low-balling the franchise rights (and they should since they hated the original series so much, right?), because yet another company is getting even more sweeping franchise rights from the network. This time it's Gale Force 9, perhaps best known for making game aids for Dungeons & Dragons. Now, I'll tell you right now that I am a sucker for ship management as a concept. When I ran my friends through our Serenity campaign together, I really had a lot of fun making them agonize over purchases, picking up crew, and selecting jobs. Having a spiffy board of planets all laid out for me to whoosh my firefly-class transport over, also fun. Having fake money, crew cards, and what looks like upgrades to one's ship? Yesyes. In my personal gaming group, nearly every game we play consists largely of me shouting out threats like I'm coping (poorly) with Tourette syndrome and everyone contributing to a litany of whatever nerdy movie quotes we deem reasonably relevant to the current game. Since this is based on the 14 episode Firefly show, I can tell you that we can probably collectively manage at least  16 hours of quotes (extra time allotted to account for me correcting my friends' quotes). This is pretty much a mandatory buy. The only question is if it will be good enough for everyone else in my gaming group to buy their own copy after playing mine.

How it might suck: Oh, I really doubt it will be good enough. Granted, Gale Force 9's other board game, based on the show Spartacus, has received some generally positive reviews, there's just so much in this game that could go wrong. If it was being masterminded by board game veterans like Fantasy Flight Games or even Days of Wonder, I'd be a little less wary, but as it is I'm shifting in my seat when I think of all the ways this could go not smooth. And things never go smooth. The biggest thing is that all signs point to this game being a competitive upgrading game--between crew and ship components--where you can boost success for bigger heists with the right combination of upgrades. This sub-genre can be a bear to balance and keep interesting, and when a company new to board games has so much ambition both in terms of the scope of a game and the importance of the franchise...well, I start to feel like every dad on America's Funniest Videos ever. I protect my junk.

Protect your junk.



Firefly Fan Film "Browncoats: Independence War"

This is a neat project that just popped up on Kickstarter two days ago. It's an ambitious little fan film that wants to tell a war story from the trenches of Serenity Valley itself. They're aspiring to make a half-hour short film in some of the very same Southern California deserts that Whedon et al used for the original flashbacks from the show, and their approach to the costuming looks completely legit from what we saw in Firefly. The general plot is focused on a detachment of Independent soldiers who are tasked with evacuating civilians before they get caught in the crossfire of the Alliance assault. The story sounds interesting, if a little contrived, but in half-an-hour revisit to the most important bit of backstory to Firefly, contrived is almost essential.

How it might suck: The number one impediment to this campaign is that it's still being crowdfunded, and on a short cycle of only three weeks, too. That's why I've decided to make this fan film the first in-progress Kickstarter project I'll mention on the blog. Now, they're off to a fantastic start, having raised more than three grand in two days out of a goal of $16,000. I really believe they can raise the funds in that time, which makes the biggest question how you're going to see it. As a fan film it won't be on television or in theatrical releases. Fan gatherings will doubtless show it as part of charity events of "Can't Stop the Serenity" where the movie Serenity and various fan films are shown to the gathered fans to help raise money for "Equality Now". But pledgers will be able to get digital downloads or DVDs of the film, to ensure supporters can watch it at any time. I have other concerns about this project, but the fact is that I think they deserve the chance to make the mistakes I think they'll fall into. Support the campaign, get them in the air, and then we'll see what's what.



*"My John Thomas is gonna pop off and fly around the room there's so much tasty here." -Jayne Cobb, "Heart of Gold" Firefly

Ender's Day

The Next Greatest Day

In the past decade, I've had a lot of lifelong dreams realized in a big way. The Lord of the Rings was realized in a hugely successful film trilogy. I got some seat time in a Tesla Pod. Captain America and the Avengers came to the screen in pure cinematic bliss. There's this little game called Star Citizen coming out that you'll hear (a lot) more about in the future. And while I'm sure there are several other unrealized things left on my nerd bucket list, the only one I can think of now is going to be checked off soon, too. Ender's Game is finally coming to the big screen. And today they are releasing the first trailer for it via a Google+ hangout and then adding it to Youtube.

For those of you haven't heard of Ender's Game, it's a psychological action-drama in a near-future science fiction setting, written by Orson Scott Card. Its title character is Andrew "Ender" Wiggin, who at the age of five is sent to Battle School--an orbital military academy for child prodigies training to become the next crop of commanders to lead humanity in an imminent war with an alien race. The Battle School is full of bright-but-aggressive kids trained to have analytical and violent minds, and so a good portion of the book's drama revolves around how the students increase the stakes to their war games in their efforts to eliminate rivals.

Ender's Game is a great, introspective space epic, even though the actual physical space of the book occurs in claustrophobic, personal corridors and rooms. The descriptions of the Battle School's war games is well thought-out and described in gratifying detail, making a series of training exercises a tense part of the book's action as the school's administrators increase the academic and bureaucratic stakes of the games and the students increase the immediate peril itself. Friendships and concepts of personal identity are paramount in this book, though, as Ender is driven to the brink of severe depression and sociopathy by the trials he has to face, only to be dragged back by the wonderfully defined supporting characters. And Ender's older siblings, Valentine and Peter, develop into king-making politicos in a sort of vengeance against a society that passed them over for assignment to the Battle School. It's dense and yet full of visceral moments that keep the book moving along. And the ending is depressing, raw, and cathartic like a full-body scouring with a pumice stone.

When I was twelve years old and first read Ender's Game, I was immediately affected by it. I moved on immediately to the sequel trilogy, which was much more metaphysical melodrama than psychological military action-drama, but I still devoured the rest of the series. I moved on to a thematically parallel series known as The Seafort Saga, which is one of my favorite book series ever and is terribly difficult to find since the author's passing. But Ender's Game remained fondly fixed in my heart--when Starcraft first came out my Battle.net sign-on was Ender, and later I moved on to Homeworld 2 and became Mazer Rackham, Ender's predecessor from the book. When I first met my future wife, I was singing the book's praises to her in our second or third conversation. Heck, I even helped my junior high science teacher--who had originally recommended the book to me--write a screenplay based on the book.

"...the ending is depressing, raw, and cathartic like a full-body scouring with a pumice stone."

Which was itself in response to the first rumors of a live action movie adaptation of Ender's Game. Way back in 1999. Since then, the movie has been in production limbo that should be painfully familiar to former Duke Nukem fans, but at one high point Wolfgang Petersen was slated to direct Ender's Game. And then came delays, and I grew tired of farming rumors as Petersen fell out of the project's future. But now we're looking at a vividly realized film, set to come out November 1 of this year, and I'm hearing that same old music. Directed by Gavin Hood (whatthefrak?! Mr. X-Men Origins: Wolverine? Please no), with a James Horner soundtrack (hell yeah!), and the author Orson Scott Card co-writing the screenplay. Oh, there's so much mixed feelings going on in that one sentence, but if Gavin Hood can forgo the dumbing down of characters and conflicts we saw in Origins, then perhaps this movie might not only be a fantastic adaptation of one of my favorite novels, but the best full-fledged sci-fi epic we've had in years.

And on the subject of casting: Harrison Ford is going to be playing the Battle School's commandant, Colonel Graff, lending the film full of young unknowns some much-needed star power. And aiding Harrison Ford's character in the role of Colonel Graff's assistant? Han Soto. Damn straight. Not to knock Mr. Soto as an actor, but I guarantee you at some point the casting director just threw his hands up in the air "oh co'mon! It's Han Soto and Han Solo! We gotta hire this guy..." I'm also sure that after a week of constant Solo/Soto jokes on set, the whole thing got old real fast.

Ben Kingsley is playing Mazer Rackham, guaranteeing that between this role and playing the Mandarin in Iron Man 3, he is the nerd-daddy of 2013. The young stars making up the principal characters look promising, though casting actors so young and then throwing an entire plot behind their believability as military savants is a novel problem that Ender's Game faces. Whatever the case, Ender's Game promises to be big enough to get a whole new generation of readers picking up a great piece of genuinely thought-provoking science-fiction.

In the end, though, there are some things I absolutely require from this movie. And some of them involve minor spoilers to the book. If you're sensitive to spoilers I suggest you stop here, but at the same time Ender's Game is still a fantastic read and re-read even when you know all of the major plot-points. But I'm warning you anyways.

"oh co'mon! It's Han Soto and Han Solo! We gotta hire this guy..."

Still here? Good.

1. The Third Formic Invasion must be a lie. This is a big one, and it's one that the writers could easily be tempted to change. For most of the book, the characters all believe that the Formics--advanced insectoid aliens who nearly wiped out humanity twice--are on their way to Earth for round three of the Bugger Wars. In fact, it turns out that they've been preparing for Earth's counterattack. Ships in Ender's Game are slower than the speed of light, and so trips to nearby stars are a matter of years. So while the government has been proclaiming that the Third Formic Invasion is on its way to them, they're actually trying to prepare their potential commanders for the day they will have to remotely lead far-flung fleets in assault over alien worlds. This deception is key to the central trauma of Ender's life, and if they opt to glitz up the storyline by making the Third Invasion legit, the entire theme gets muddled and lost.

2. The kids must be kids. This is a tender requirement, because Ender's Game features kids from the ages of 5 to 12 committing some pretty brutal acts, and that generally only gets represented in shock dramas and horror movies, and Ender's Game will not be either of those. The cast is a little older than their book counterparts--in the book, they ranged from 6 to 14 years old throughout in the lionshare of the plot, and the movie's youngest principal is 14 years of age--but this goes back to storytelling more than casting anyways. The actors need to walk the razor's edge of portraying children who are fragile and prone to youthful excesses and assumptions, but still capable of acutely violent and tactical action.

3. Peter needs to be twisted. Peter Wiggin, Ender's older brother and a frightening childhood sadist, needs to be fully realized in his disturbed state to sell Ender early on as a frightened boy. Ender's Game and its parallel novel Ender's Shadow both revolve around making its protagonists spiritually stripped and abused in order to help shine a light on their own survival-based dependence on violence. For Ender, that motivating force is Peter, and he needs to be sick to be effective. Now, the flip side is that Peter grows up into a mature man who seems to have overcome his demons even as he assumes greater and greater political power. Because Peter, as twisted as he starts, is never supposed to stray outside the extremes of a child who can't get the love he needs.



So those are my first thoughts on Ender's Game. Be sure to watch the trailer, airing on Google+ and Youtube shortly.

UPDATE 5/7/2013, 3:53PM CST:
And now here you go. The trailer in all its teasing spectacle.