.hack// Another Birth Vol. 4

.hack// Another Birth Vol. 4And so the story ends with .hack// Another Birth Vol. 4 . I suppose it is telling that I’m not relieved to be done with this series. After 4 books most tales start to get tired, at least to an extent. Of course these are all very short books. But I wish there were more available.

The ending was a lot quieter than I expected it to be. I don’t mean that as a criticism; I think I preferred it that way, since it better tied into the fact that the battles we’d been watching were being fought by characters in the game, and not the ‘real’ characters. Once the dust settled, they log out and have the rest of their lives to deal with, y’know?

This series was, for me, a joy to read. I’m not sure it would be for everyone, though. I think first of all you need to be an MMO gamer to really get how a game can become so important to you. Granted here they had the ‘hook’ of trying to bring people in the real world out of comas, but MMO players don’t really need any kind of real-world hook for the happenings in-game to become very important to them. In fact our struggle is just the opposite: how to keep in-game events in perspective.

I’m hoping the .Hack Project folks are hard at work on another series of books.

Books vs Games:
I’ve played the first PS2 game and while reading this series dug out the second one, and honestly I enjoy reading about The World more than I do playing the games. I own the 3rd game but not the fourth, which apparently is now something of a collector’s item, so I’m very glad to have been able to get the whole story without having to spend $100 or so on the 4th game. And just to be clear (something I should’ve mentioned much earlier): these books cover the same events/story/characters as the PS2 games.

Good Night, and Good Luck

I don’t often mention movies in this blog because I’m just not very good at critiquing them. For me, movies are most often an escape. Usually, I’ll watch a movie, like it or not like it, then move on without giving much thought to either the movie or why I felt the way I did about it. There are about a million bloggers better at covering movies than I am, so why bother?

But last night I watched Good Night, and Good Luck, a docudrama directed by George Clooney and starring David Strathairn, George Clooney, and Joseph McCarthy. Strathaim and Clooney played Edward R Murrow and Fred Friendly, respectively, and McCarthy plays himself. The whole film is in black and white; I watched it on blu-ray and it was amazing to watch. It’s weird for me to be saying that about a black and white movie, but seriously it was stunning.

Now most of the people reading blogs weren’t around during the ‘Red Scare’ and I’m no exception, but we’ve heard about the ‘McCarthy Witch Hunts’ and the black lists. We’ve seen the Twilight Zone episodes that were inspired by the paranoia of the day, and we’ve heard how everyone was afraid to speak out for fear of being accused of being a Communist.

We’ve heard about it, but seeing it was a whole ‘nother ballgame. Clooney didn’t cast anyone in the role of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Rather, he used actual footage from the hearings and from McCarthy’s television appearances. Joe McCarthy was brilliant in his role. 🙂 According to the Good Night, and Good Luck page at IMDB, Clooney said that test audiences complained “that the McCarthy character was overacting a bit, not realizing that it was the actual McCarthy through archive footage”. Now I wouldn’t believe everything you read on IMDB, but it’s a believable bit of trivia.

It’s easy to look back in this era and think “That could never happen today.” but of course it could and does, on both grand and micro scales. Well, I’ll hold back on the proselytizing.

But this was a damned fine film, and I urge you to give it a try.