Review: MegaDeath by Tory Quinn and Marie Vibbert

A thrilling addition to a subgenre that seems, if you'll pardon the figure of speech, done to death

In the deadly tournament subgenre, overcrowded with such memorable entries as Death Race, Tron, Rollerball, Battle Royale, Bloodsport, The Running Man, Mortal Kombat, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, The Hunger Games and Battle Angel Alita, it's interesting to see new stories are still being made. After seemingly every possible angle in this topic has been explored, an author who decides to create yet another deadly tournament story must clear a high bar to not be lumped along with thousands of mediocre imitations.

In the 22nd century where the novel MegaDeath is set, we find many of the same familiar elements: there's a globally broadcast athletic competition, with execution as the punishment for the losing team, and we're told that humankind has adopted this form of regulated mayhem as a cathartic substitute for international war. So far, so samey. Where MegaDeath distinguishes itself is in the extra building blocks of its world: if this sport is going to serve as a replacement for war, it needs to be attached to the same geopolitical consequences. In this world, the country that wins MegaDeath gets priority in setting the global agenda for the next four years, with decreasing amounts of power assigned to the losing countries in order of disqualification. The issues on the table are the same they've always been: trading privileges, taxes and tariffs, allocation of key resources. Whereas they were long ago decided by actual combat, they're now subject to the numbers on the scoreboard.

In a disturbing display of fervor that the novel uses very intentionally to blur the line between patriotic loyalty and hooliganism, the spectators and participants of MegaDeath honestly believe in this system. They'll defend its success at preventing widespread destruction by channeling the animosity between civilizations into a controlled environment that sublimates bloodlust into show business. One of the rules of MegaDeath gives the winning team the right to pillage the defeated territory for an entire day, a practice whose merits are repeatedly defended by some of the protagonists. The underlying assumption is that a mutually agreed period of supervised violence will prevent other, more explosive forms of it.

The stakes are further heightened by the revelation that fans have taken their patriotism to the absurd extreme of gambling their own lives upon the result of the tournament. A vicious circle of social pressure quickly forms because not betting your life is interpreted as not believing in your team's chances of winning. So the losing country will not only lose its top athletes, but also a sizable chunk of its population, which will bring the limited carnage of MegaDeath back to the massive casualties of conventional war. When one team discovers that the betting system might not be fully transparent, their already heavy ethical misgivings are multiplied by the millions of innocents who will die in another country if they win.

The main achievement of this novel, fitting for characters running for their lives before an audience, is the consistently breakneck pacing. The authors comfortably wield the rhythm and momentum needed to tell a nail-biting action story, although this intensity often carries over into other scenes of more reflective nature that needed a different treatment. Despite the minimal space dedicated to developing these characters, their desperation to win is communicated loud and clear. By the final rounds of the competition, their group dynamic resembles that of shell-shocked veterans.

MegaDeath is more enjoyable for the creative depictions of acrobatic violence than for any deep message contained in it. The big villain reveal isn't exactly compelling, and the ensuing discussion about the ethics of the game is held at the simplest level. This is not a book one reads for life-changing insights. This is a spectacle that demands to be experienced through primal impulses, in the blood and sweat of muscled idols whose shoulders bear the weight of the world. If the story is intended to convey any point about its themes, it may be that a replacement for war is no better than real war if it's used for the same ends and feeds the same darkness inside us. A civilization that enthusiastically sends its young to die is already a fallen civilization, and we need to ask ourselves who we're becoming when we cheer for our fellow humans' destruction.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +2 for the dynamic style used to narrate action scenes.

Penalties: −1 for clunky exposition, −1 for a less than gracefully executed ending, −1 because most of the transitions between scenes are too abrupt.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Quinn, Tory; Vibbert, Marie. MegaDeath [Level 4 Press, 2022].

Introducing Blaseball Mondays

We are now participating in the cultural event of Blaseball.

Hello, fellow nerds. This is going to be a post about sports.

Wait. Hang on, that's not right. *clears throat*

This is a post about... SPLORTS. Specifically, about Blaseball.

Those who follow the weird world of online phenomena, and/or the Hugo awards, have probably encountered Blaseball: a text-based baseball game simulator that, through various weird game mechanisms and its overarching cosmic horror narrative, has risen to become much, much more. Blaseball games unfold as strings of text, with sets of whimsically named players on a weird, punny team (we've got the Hades Tigers, the Kansas City Breath Mints and the Canada Moist Talkers, among many others) playing against each other, but beyond those mechanics lie narratives created by both the developers and the players, as players vote to control their teams and the rules of the league, and the creatures in power respond accordingly.

So, at various points in its history, Blaseball has been a spo - a splort where players can occasionally be incinerated by rogue umpires during a solar eclipse; where a vengeful peanut god can encase players in giant shells and force them to play on an evil super-team; where players can disappear "Elsewhere" and come back days, or seasons later, with bits missing; and where becoming too powerful or winning too much can put entire teams at risk of being eaten by shark-like Consumers in the fifth dimension. All of these plot points play out over the course of Blaseball's regular seasons (a season is a week, in our concept of time), and while the narrative is unfolding, so too are fans watching in the hope that they will be that season's champions, nudging them along where the mechanics allow. 

So far, the history of Blaseball has taken place in two eras. The Discipline Era, characterised by a high body count, the discovery of necromancy and the fight against the Peanut, lasted from Season 1 to Season 11 and took place in 2020. After that came the Grand Siesta (i.e. several months of hiatus), followed by The Expansion Era! In the Expansion Era, the CEO of Blaseball (a coin) returned and showered us with items and rule changes, all in the name of increasing ratings. This made Blaseball very exciting - who wouldn't want a stadium filled with increasingly weird add ons, like subterranean tunnels and birdhouses and, uh, basketball hoops - but it also made things increasingly confusing and also, in-narrative, caused the league to start sinking into Consumer territory. After numerous twists and turns, the Coin put a new sun in the sky, using it to create more permutations of the scoring system. After several more twists (I'm skipping a lot here, including the entire season where the intervention of a Tarot god caused wins to became losses and the worst teams went to the finals instead) that sun exploded, creating a supermassive black hole which swallowed the entire league. And that, right now, is where the history becomes the present.

Anyway, the Expansion Era is the best because it introduced the most important team in Blaseball:, the Atlantis Georgias (no, be quiet, I'm writing this and your logic does not apply here). The Georgias, along with fellow breach teams The Ohio Worms and the Core Mechanics and returning ascended favourites, the Baltimore Crabs, appeared from a breach between worlds at the tail end of Season 12. Since then they have been a largely mediocre-to-solid presence in the Wild High league, with occasional flashes of being very interesting, like when we used weird items to become very buoyant and discovering a desert at the top of the fifth dimension. Officially, the Georgias players are just lines of randomly generated names: Flattery McKinley, Yurts Buttercup, Rigby Friedrich and Jan Canberra. But to those who follow along on Discord and Twitter, those names have strong (if sometimes diverging) presences: Flattery McKinley is a scientist with an octopus for hair and a tentacle arm, who plays Blaseball alongside her wife Niq Nyong'o. Yurts, depending on which dimension of Atlantis you're in, is either a sentient sea plant inhabiting an old fashioned diving suit, or a whale shark. Jan Canberra is an Australian skeleton pirate, and Rigby Friedrich is a goldfish inside an ice cube (and also one of the strongest players across the league, at the time of the exploding sun anyway). Our team is full of science and lesbians, and while we may not have lifted a trophy yet, we've certainly had some fun along the way.

Also, the Georgias were one of the few teams that didn't get eaten by a Black Hole or seek solace in the arms of the squid god of the underworld at the end of the last era. Instead, we are passing the time in a very nice, safe, not at all creepy vault, with the god of consumerism. We did it for science, and it's fine! Just fine.

Now, the fun continues! Although not with the players we know and love. Having wiped the slate clean of the deliberately confusing rules of the Expansion era, Blaseball is returning today with Short Circuits, a series of two-week league events with the teams facing off against each other with lots of sets of new players. It seems, therefore, like the perfect time to combine my passions of Blaseball punditry and fanzine content creation with this new weekly column, detailing the ins and outs of the league and especially the Atlantis Georgias (although maybe some other teams too. If they win or whatever.)

So our new team has been announced and, well, we're playing in the "Solid Evil" league, which doesn't seem right given that there's also a Liquid league, but we'll accept that. More importantly, let's look at some randomly generated player names!!

The lineup are the players who will bat for us. This gang don't have the best star count Blaseball has ever seen, especially after the wildly inflated scores of the late Expansion era, but I've got a good feeling about those top three and I'm pretty sure Duck Falconer is going to outplay that single star, with a name like that.

And here's our rotation, the players who will pitch for us! Really strong names, especially Hawk Martyn and Carmella Baskerville, and I guess we'll see how they perform.

Our shadows might end up substituting in at some point, though under what circumstances we don't know yet. Gabriel Kim has the best stars (they're a pretty solid all-rounder, better at batting than pitching) but I'm more invested in seeing Mud Badguy play, or perhaps Jamaal Piazza.

We've got two weeks with these jokers, which seems like a nice amount of time to get attached to headcanons without getting too deep into lore and tragedy. If you've been thinking about joining Blaseball but haven't taken the plunge, that makes this a really good time to see what all the fuss is about! Go check out the site, dive into the Discord (seriously, it's nowhere near as fun without talking to other fans) and check back here next week to see how the Georgias and those other teams got on in the first Short Circuit season. We Are All Love Blaseball!

I have seen hell, and its name is Space Jam: A New Legacy

This production is an insult to the art of moviemaking and an act of violence upon the viewer

When I joined the team at Nerds of a Feather, the editors explained the blog's official policy to me as striving to stand "on the charitable side of honest." I've made my sincerest effort to keep that principle in mind during these months, as I analyzed stories that were great and others that were less great. In the case of Space Jam: A New Legacy, the charitable thing to do is to advise you to skip it. There's no possible defense of it. One cannot even entertain the case that its merciless stuffing of the viewer's eyeballs with one immensely uninteresting scene after another serves, as in the original Space Jam, to showcase the feats achievable with the latest advances in animation technology. That argument wouldn't hold here, firstly because digital animation is having a wonderful moment in the 21st century without the need for Space Jam's help, and secondly because telling uninteresting stories as an excuse to boast great animation is a niche firmly held by Love Death + Robots. This? This didn't need to exist. In a nutshell, LeBron James plays basketball and wins. There, I spoiled it. Now you don't have to watch this irredeemable pile of rubbish.

Space Jam: A New Legacy was not made for Looney Tunes fans, or for basketball fans, or for digital animation fans. It was made for Warner Brothers marketing executives. Somewhere in the corporate hierarchy, someone must have issued a memo demanding a boost of renewed relevance for properties that were fading from popular awareness. As if conceived from the segment of film discourse that believes spotting the reference to prove you're a "real fan" is an aesthetic category, we have a product, because calling it a movie is an insult to words, that in the years to come may remain bizarrely satisfying to people who enjoy cataloguing tiny faces in a crowd. And that's because its main selling point isn't even LeBron James, or Bugs Bunny, or Don Cheadle (you know, the world-renowned superstars who actually do something in the story), but the hundreds of obscure characters that are there just to be there. Possessed by the inexplicable urge to cheer in the general direction of a basketball game regardless of their individual personalities or even which emotional beat is happening, they invest Space Jam: A New Legacy with the incongruous property of being rewatchable only for the characters who have no role or purpose or reason to be in the story. This is the limit state of intertextuality: a text that only points to other texts, but lacks its own meaning. Meaning, you say? What's meaning? Look, there's Wilma Flintstone waving at us!

Making references is not bad in itself. But the reference needs at least to be understood. Remaking Rabbit of Seville with only the barest musical resemblance and without the meticulous match between melody and action is to miss the point of what made Rabbit of Seville the masterpiece it is. To make a Road Runner joke where it is Wile E. Coyote who succeeds at using the paint-on-the-wall trick to mislead and trap the Road Runner (instead of the other way around, as God intended) is to catastrophically misunderstand the dynamic that defines these characters and to blaspheme against seven decades of cartoon history. Wile E. Coyote's whole shtick is that he never captures his prey. If you don't get that basic fact, you shouldn't be making a Looney Tunes movie.

In a crude resemblance of the way the first Space Jam managed to insert some critique of itself (Daffy Duck illustrating how much Warner Brothers likes to kiss its own ass, Bugs Bunny dreading the prospect of being used as a mascot to sell tickets), A New Legacy comes surprisingly close to denouncing its own existence. The plot starts with LeBron James being invited to let Warner Brothers use his image in movies. This fictional version of him understands that athletes generally don't make good actors, and refuses. The pathetic characters meant to represent Warner Brothers executives are appropriately despondent at their dearth of good ideas—they're so uncreative they literally let a computer write their corporate plan. But before a terrible movie and a digital abomination can be prevented, the soulless evil at the heart of Warner Brothers captures LeBron James and forces him to play. To highlight the violence of the whole production, he then kidnaps thousands of viewers from the real world. A New Legacy knows too well that we're prisoners begging for the show to end.

But this is not the full extent of how much A New Legacy despises itself. When Bugs Bunny flies through the Serververse (which I guess is how we have to call the DCEU from now on) to recruit the rest of the Looney Tunes, we find them already integrated into the plots of better movies. When the legendary cartoon stars would rather be doing more exciting and fulfilling things somewhere else, and even LeBron James is playing a version of himself who would never have agreed to be here, what we have is a story that is almost crying for help, aware of its own absurdity and unable to stop.

Nothing matters. Nothing has meaning. No story has value except as a brand. What did Road Runner want in the Mad Max world? What motivated Foghorn Leghorn to ride a dragon over Westeros? What was Speedy Gonzales looking for in the Matrix? Why did Lola Bunny feel the need to train with the Amazons? Well, who cares? Those scenes are purely irrelevant. Entire worlds are dragged into this monstrosity for no purpose. They're there just to be there. They're there for you to point and say, "I get that reference." They're there to remind you how much Warner Brothers owns. During the climactic match, the screen is filled with face after face of famous extras and the viewer's attention is at a loss. Where are we expected to be looking at? In any given frame of the game, our athletic star's graceful moves compete with Pennywise hiding behind Agent Smith hiding behind the Penguin in the background. No part of the screen is meant to occupy the main focus, because the studio wants you to notice each and every last of its properties. The established conventions of visual storytelling go out the window, as do the narrative principles of logical worldbuilding and clearly defined stakes (why did the villain even need to make a bet when he could just keep his prisoners?) and the rules of basketball (what happened to the three-second rule, or to running with the ball, or to blocking fouls, or to not kicking the ball, or to consistent scorekeeping?).

In 1996, Michael Jordan won his Space Jam when he realized he could use the rules of the cartoon world. It's a form of fantasy, but an internally consistent one. In this new version, the day is saved by the infinite use of cheat codes. Rules? Narrative expectations? Emotional investment? Realistic parenting? The implicit pact of respect between creators and viewers? Nah. All that matters is that Warner Brothers invented a shiny new way to rob the graves of a dozen movies to dress up the ghost of one. Space Jam: A New Legacy is a repugnant exhibition of the most vulgar kind of self-congratulation, unworthy of the classics it cannibalizes and with no right to claim two hours of your time. Just like the Looney Tunes, you're better off in other movies. You were never the audience this thing was meant to please.

Nerd Coefficient: 2/10. Seriously, comprehensively, profoundly bad.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Thursday Morning Superhero: Holiday Gift Guide

As we inch closer and closer to putting 2020 behind us, I thought I would wrap up my Thursday Morning Superhero posts with my annual gift guide.  I wanted to include a variety of items that would be appropriate for a variety of nerds, so here goes!

For the nerdy sports fan:

Defector subscription - Like most of the sports fans I know, I was heartbroken when a change in leadership caused a mass resignation at Deadspin.  While fake Deadspin is still up and running, it is filled with imposters and no longer has the editorial freedom and heart that made Deadspin such a special site.  There has been a void in my internet browsing that has finally been filled with Defector.  The authors who left Deadspin recently launched Defector and its creator owned model is worth applauding. I subscribed prior to its launch and am delighted that the writers that I have enjoyed for so many years have a platform to amplify their voices.  Sports coverage is best when politics and humor are sprinkled throughout.   Despite working in sport, I enjoyed the NCAA and NFL getting called to task on issues like their handling of COVID and the treatment of NCAA athletes.  This is literally a gift that will keep on giving all year.  

For the nerdy gamer:

Gods Love Dinosaurs - This title puts you in charge of the food chain as you attempt to dominate the board with a combination of dinosaur eggs and actual dinosaurs. You will populate the game board with prey, predators, and of course, dinosaurs.  Dinosaurs need to eat prey to survive, and predators to lay eggs. Gods Love Dinosaurs is a terrific middle weight game and will appeal to a wide range of nerds.  If the sale is still on, you can also snag it as part of a bundle with the cooperative puzzle game Mental Blocks, and the pattern creating Passtally. 

Funko Games stocking stuffers - I am a sucker for licensed games that are actually fun to play.  When Funko entered the game market I wasn't sure what to think, but after spending over a year playing the addictive Funkoverse series, placing my workers to secure routes in Pan Am, and collecting ghosts in the Haunted Mansion, I am confident in the product that Funko games produces.  This year they have a wealth of licensed games that are asking to be put into stockings.  I already picked up the Christmas Vacation Twinkling Lights games and enjoyed it, but there is a Frosty the Snowman game, an Elf game, and more! 

For the nerdy comic book fan:

Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio - Having previously recommended this title earlier in the year, it should not be surprising that is the book that I recommend gifting to your comic book reading friends.  Or better yet, your literary friends that don't currently read comics.  This book is an example of how the medium of comic books can effectively educate readers from first hand accounts surrounding this tragedy.  Derf Backderf is masterful at immersing himself in a topic to really inform the story with a personal touch that is often missing. I recommend anything by Backderf, but his newest offering is one that should not be missed.

Locke and Key pendants - If you are looking for a classy comic book themed gift, you cannot do better than the new Locke and Key pendants from Skelton Crew Studios.  I already have a few pins and replica keys from Skelton, but these sterling silver pendants are truly stunning.  I am not much of a jewelry person myself, but you might catch me wearing a head key necklace once the convention scene reopens. 

POSTED BY MIKE N. aka Victor Domashev -- comic guy, proudly raising nerdy kids, and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012.

Madden NFL 25

[Madden NFL 25, EA Tiburon, EA Sports, 2013]

Buy it

 A vast improvement

To start off with, I'll admit two things. First, I'm not the biggest sports gamer on the planet. I love going to live sporting events and I'm a die-hard Oklahoma State Cowboys fan (My alma mater), but the games normally don't do it for me. Second, I haven't played a Madden game since 2008. That game was so bad that I swore them off for quite a while and this is the first one I've picked up since. That said, I'm really glad that I did. It's been a fun change of pace from my normal sci-fi titles and wasn't a huge disappointment like my last experience with the franchise. 

So what's new? 

As I said before, I haven't played Madden in several years, but this game has several new additions from the last iteration I experienced. First of all, you can choose to play as a specific player, a coach, or lead the franchise as an owner. I chose the coaching option as it is the closest to the traditional Madden format. You can switch between players on defense and take over for running backs and receivers when they get the ball in this mode. I tried the player mode and it just wasn't as fun to be stuck in the shoes of a single player. I didn't have time to experience the owner mode, but I really like playing the game itself rather than acting as a front office manager, so it didn't interest me as much as the coaching mode.

There were all sorts of new gameplay additions, more than half of which I probably didn't use. I had enough trouble just picking out receivers without learning all of the new jukes, spins, and leaps that were available to ball carriers, but they were there for the die-hard Maddenite. Choosing plays was made up of a well-oiled mechanic that gave you an initial option for a single play right off the bat. If you didn't like that, you could choose "Ask Madden," which would give you three options for plays that fit the scenario. If none of those were to your liking, you could choose plays by type or formation. I'm not a football guru so I used Madden's suggestions about half the time. The rest of the plays I chose by type, often going with a play action pass or shotgun formation. The options of play type were plentiful with something like 70 different run plays, 90-plus passes, and multiple special formations including QB kneel or quarterback sneak. Whatever your style of play, there was a quick and easy way to choose the option you preferred. 

truly gorgeous

As you can probably tell from these actual screenshots, the game itself was a sight to behold. The graphics are easily the best I've ever experienced in a sports game. While that may not be saying much as I'm not a huge sports game buff, they were easily the equal of some of the more attractive other games out there like Assassin's Creed or Tomb Raider. Even though this game came out last summer and is just a port to my Xbox One, they obviously upscaled it somewhat to the new generation of consoles. Even though I may not be a sports game aficionado, I am a real-life sports fan and some of the replays looked as good as the real thing. During load screens they showed various previous versions of Madden's last 25 years and, although sometimes laughable, it gave a good impression of how far the game has come in its quarter century of sports game dominance. While 2008 felt like EA was just resting on its laurels, Madden NFL 25 made me believe that Electronic Arts really put a lot of effort and money into their silver anniversary edition. 

So, how'd you do?

Being a relative amateur when it comes to the sports game oeuvre, I chose to play the season on Easy so I wouldn't get frustrated and give up halfway through. That's likely the reason I ended up 19-1 and a Super Bowl Champion. I chose to play with the Dallas Cowboys, mainly because of Oklahoma State alum Dez Bryant and his on-field acrobatics as well as their close proximity to my home state. I'll freely admit I don't care for Tony Romo and I'm a college sports fan who generally ignores most pro sports other than the NFL. That said, Madden's ability to use the actual player names and playbooks makes it superior to NCAA in this gamer's humble opinion. Some of the awful names they come up with for "amateur" athletes that appear in college sports games just drive me nuts. I understand the necessity of it, but that doesn't make it an easier pill to swallow. 

My only loss in the game came at the hands of Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos. Peyton is rated a 97 in the game making nearly every ball he threw up a strike on a frozen rope. However, I was able to get my revenge on him in the snow in New Jersey at the Super Bowl, winning 24-21. Although it didn't give me quite as much pleasure as defeating Handsome Jack in Borderlands 2 or Glados in Portal, it was still a nice little endorphin rush when I managed to overcome the seemingly invincible quarterback in the ice bowl. 

Final Thoughts

I realize this is a nerd blog, so even though its a game the very fact that this is sports-related makes it a stretch as subject matter for Nerds of a Feather. However, if you're looking to get a sports game for a nice change of pace, I can't think of a better place to start than Madden NFL 25. Pro football has overtaken baseball as America's game of choice and Madden is the video game equivalent of its crown jewel. Although it may have slacked off a bit in recent years, Madden 25 brings it roaring back. I can easily recommend it to either the casual sports gamer or die-hards that own everything from FIFA to NCAA 2013. I was a bit skeptical when I decided to give the franchise another try, but I'm glad that did. While I probably won't continue on into a second season, the game was well worth playing through the first. If you haven't played a sports game for some time like myself, give Madden NFL 25 a try. You won't be disappointed. 

the math

Objective Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for being a superb sports simulator. +1 for surpassing my expectations completely.

Penalties: -1 for not really fitting into the "nerd" mold, since it's sports-related.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. Well worth your time and attention.