Angry Birds Star Wars and Me

Although I've definitely slowed down in my video game playing in my last month of Grad School, there has been one key exception, I've been playing Angry Birds Star Wars on my iPhone.

The game, which works exactly like classic Angry Birds (funny I use the word classic for a game that is not even five-years-old yet), allows you to destroy pig-filled structures across Tatooine, the Death Star, Hoth, Cloud City, The Moon of Endor, and the second Death Star, with all the things you've come to love in Angry birds, a fine sense of humour, great easter eggs and the consistent urge to do the level again doing just a little more damage or using maybe one less bird.

I finished the game yesterday, but am now going back to random levels and working at them until I have them all done at a three-star rating (the game rates each level you complete based on how many birds you use and how much damage is done), and still have many levels to finish before I can say I've finished the game completely.

In fact, while typing this blog I've just competed one more!  I've now got 423 stars to my name!

Genre Character of the Week: Willow Ufgood

 So back in 1988 I was twelve-years-old and my mother took my three sisters and me down to Edmonton’s historic Princess Theatre (pictured left) to see the new movie, Willow. The four of us stood in a pretty long lineup for about half an hour waiting to buy our tickets, and then the manager comes out and starts counting people in the line.

The show was almost sold out and we were either going to just make the cut or have to come back and see the movie another day. Luckily for us, we made it, although we ended up sitting scattered throughout the two floors of the theatre, and I ended up in the very front row, head craned back and nervous about the group of older girls I had to sit beside to see the film.

The next two hours of my life then proceeded to fly by, as I saw my first really great live-action fantasy film. Now I know, Star Wars and E.T. can both be fit clearly into the fantasy genre, depending on your point of view, and the early 80’s had a lot of great Fantasy classics like Ladyhawke, Time Bandits, Conan the Barbarian, Legend, and Excalibur, not to mention one of my favourite films period, The Princess Bride. But the thing is, I saw all of those on home video, rather than in an actual movie theatre – so for me Willow rightly takes its place as my first Fantasy film experience in a movie theatre.

For those of you who don’t know, the film follows this little guy, Willow Ufgood, a member of a race of little people called Nelwins, as he becomes the protector of a baby, and ends up having to save the world. For many people the movie is a sort of forgettable, pre-Lord of the Rings fantasy film also filmed in New Zealand and that’s about it.

For me, however, the story of this young husband and father going on a grand adventure and learning to trust in himself and his abilities totally resonated with me.

I’ll be quite honest here, I’m a pretty huge fan of the film – I read the novelization by Wayland Drew and played both the NES game and the Arcade version when I could. Although not a fan of the sequel series of novels, I think I may be one of the bigger fans of this film in my hometown, or at least in my neighborhood.

The film has recently been released on Blu-Ray, and if you haven’t check it out yet, it is definitely worth a look.

Things I’ve Noticed: My introduction to ‘70s SF was pretty awesome

So for the last few years I’ve been working my way slowly but surely (and sometimes a little surly) through the book Science Fiction: The 100 best novels an English Language Selection, 1949 and 1984, edited by David Pringle. Right now I’ve read the first 63 in order (from George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) to Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero (1970) and 68 overall. With Tau Zero I have finally left the ‘60s and moved into the Science Fiction of the 1970s, which for me was the decade of some of the more influential SF films (Star Wars) books (Rendezvous with Rama) and television (Mork and Mindy) of my childhood.

Ahead of me I have 24 ‘70s-era science fiction novels, (excluding The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, which I read a few years back) and event though I’m not familiar with all of the titles or authors, this list has treated me pretty well so far, giving me a number of books that happily sit in both my top ten list of Science Fiction novels and even one that sits in my top ten favourite books list (Flowers for Algernon).

My first entry into ‘70s science fiction from the list was Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero, which focuses on a colonizing ship (crew of 50) travelling to a nearby star system in an attempt to see if the planet will work as an Earth Colony. The book is great, I don’t want to wreck it with any spoilers – simply find this book and read it.

I know that for my BFF Mike the ‘70s were not his favourite era in SF (he was reading his way through the Hugo Awards), but I’m hopeful that I’m going to be hitting a lot of good stuff.

BTW, if anyone out there has read any of my next five books: Downward to the Erath (Robert Silverberg), The Year of the Quiet Sun (Wilson Tucker), 334 (Thomas M. Disch), The Fifth Head of Ceberus (Gene Wolfe), The Dancers at the End of Time (Michael Moorcock) or Crash (J.G. Ballard) be sure to let me know what you thought.