Hey, it’s been a while since we’ve sent one of these out. How are you?
We actually have a few pieces of news to share. Don’t worry, there’s a bunch of lil reviews and shit also.
First, an update on the Sickos Secret Project. Post-production is going extremely well. I would say “this part is the longest” but I actually don’t know, I don’t have the timeline in front of me. It just feels the longest since it’s the part where it’s out of my hands. What I have heard so far is crazy good. I truly cannot wait to release this.
Second, we are going to do some slight retooling of the Anime Sickos Patreon after Taylor Moore yelled at us about how we did it wrong. Overall it’s going to be the same. However: we will be removing the $1 tier. You can still pledge $1 if you want, but now we’re not suggesting it anymore. We are also introducing a huge money joke tier. We do not expect anyone to pledge this much. But if there does exist someone out there who would do it, we’d sure look like idiots for not asking.
Most notably, though, we will be introducing a weekly Patreon-exclusive miniseries. Do not fear that we are gonna be one of those podcasts that puts half the show behind the paywall. I want to be very clear, this miniseries is NOT AS GOOD as the main show. It’s still good. But it’s not as good.
The miniseries is The Anime Sickos Watch Yu-Gi-Oh. We will watch all of Yu-Gi-Oh season one (English dub, baby) and record 15-20 minute reactions after each episode. These are NOT EDITED. Totally live baby (we are not kidding about this being worse than the main show). These episodes will come out every Friday. Ideally, these will come out even on Sicko Break weeks, as when we record these we can easily bang out four or five at a time. They’re pretty fun, and hopefully give you an extra Sicko treat and keep “da Sickos” on your mind even when we’re not releasing a real episode that week. It also is actually about anime. What a concept!
TOM REVIEWS HI-FI RUSH
If you missed it somehow, they released this game Hi-Fi Rush in February in that way they do sometimes where they release the game the same day it’s announced. It’s a rhythm-based character action brawler where all your attacks and whatnot happen on the beat of the background music.
This game went over big-time because 1) it has an infectious, bubbly visual style that is so fun to look at. It’s colorful, vibrant, bouncy, all sorts of positive adjectives, and has so much fun blending animation styles and seamlessly transitioning in and out of gameplay. And 2) because it “feels like a lost PS2 game” by which they mean the game has a kinda kooky premise and is what it says it will be and it does not have RPG elements or servers or an open world or other bullshit filler and you can beat it in ten hours.
The game’s a big hit, folks, and rightly so, because it rules. However, I am going to whine about the parts I did not like.
First and foremost is an issue I’ve had with every character action game I’ve ever played. Namely, there aren’t enough fights and the fights are too short. This may seem odd in a game that’s seemingly only about fights, but hear me out. These games have tons of depth to their combat and require you to fully understand what you want to do and how to execute it in order to unlock the concentrated core of pure fun waiting at the heart of the experience. Until you master the systems, the “fun” is always in sight but just out of reach. You’re always like, ugh, no, this isn’t what I want to do. No, I’m not happy with how that fight went. No, I haven’t internalized this yet—how do I retry? Can I just do it again?
Anyway, the game begins and you have your first fight. You have no clue what you are doing. The fight takes 30 seconds to beat. You say, “wait, no, I didn’t know what I was doing, I didn’t do any of the combos right. Can I try again?” No, you can’t. You have to get through a shitty platforming section first that isn’t fun. Eventually you get to the next fight. It’s been long enough that you have completely forgotten everything about how combat works. Repeat a million times. You do not unlock training mode until the game is like half over.
Second is that more than half the game is those aforementioned shitty platforming sections. It’s insane how unfun these are. They aren’t like, actively bad, but they’re never more fun than sitting down and looking at the sea. I can see why you wouldn’t want the game to just be a series of combat encounters with nothing in between, but man! The jumping parts suck ass! There’s SO MANY! It’s to the point where it often feels less like a rhythm based action game and more like a crappy jumping game with a rhythm based action minigame you get to do some of the time.
Third is that I can’t fucking stick to the rhythm. You don’t HAVE to press the attack buttons on the beat, but doing so makes you do more damage and get a better rating. Well, no matter what I only do ~60% of attacks on the beat, every time.
Let’s get it out of the way: I’m white haha. Moving on: it’s unclear why this is so difficult for me. The songs in this game are all standard 4/4 tunes with very similar BPM. The Zelda reskin of Crypt of the Necrodancer was the same way and I never had trouble with that. I am competent in much trickier rhythm games like Rhythm Doctor and Rhythm Heaven. I fuckin play actual music for at least an hour every day for the last two years. This should not be a problem. The game has a bunch of visual cues (including a big optional flashing bar) that are meant to help you find the beat if you can’t otherwise. These are all useless because I’m looking at the enemies.
The issue is that staying on beat is not mandatory—my brain therefore can safely categorize it as a second-order concern and instead focus on not getting hit by bad guys and remembering what my combos are. As I mentioned in point one, I am so fucking bad at grasping the combat systems in these games. It is taking every brain cell I’ve got just to get through a fight. I have no brainpower left to focus on the beat. Most times I will forget there’s music playing at all (not helped by the soundtrack being out-of-this-world bland!). I think (and I’m only saying this because I’m insane) this game could take a page from Sekiro. In Sekiro, if you don’t parry at the right time you fucking die. I would like a mode where if you attack off-beat they play an ugly SKRONK sound and your guy doesn’t attack. That would make me learn, I tell you what!!
UPDATE: Dylan (@fioFiorello) informed me that the pro move is to turn down the sound effects/dialogue volume and keep the music volume at max. I followed his advice and turned SFX and dialogue volume to 50%. This instantly changed my average on-beat percentage from 60% to 80%. Turns out they fuckin’ mixed the audio wrong. Jesus christ.
I’ve been moaning a lot, but we must also remember: this game has an extended Xenogears reference for no reason, so 10/10 game of the year
JOE WENT TO A CONCERT
Last Monday, Winnie & I drove down to ISU to see a Noah Kahan concert. Winnie's big into Noah and he's grown on me. He sings about how much he lives in Vermont and that winter sucks. I would describe him as 15% Mumford and Sons with some barely detectable traces of Lumineers DNA.
ISU, or Illinois State University, is located in Normal, IL, the best named town of all time. It is so named not because it's Regular, but because the town contained a Normal School, a term we should have never stopped using for teacher-training institutions. My sister, a public school teacher, attended college here.
Anyway, the concert itself was great. Getting to our seats was Hellraiser shit though. Every college kid we interacted with who was working the event gave us wrong information or told us to go to the wrong place.
We walk into the Student Center where the show is and some kid pushes a wicker basket at us and tells us to put our phones in there. We do and we give him back the basket and he gets pissed because we are supposed to hold onto the basket while we wait to get wanded.
Well, we wait in line and get security wanded. We show the people our tickets and ask where we should go. They inform us we can't get to our seats from this security checkpoint, so we need to leave, go upstairs, and get wanded again. I start to leave but they yell at me to give back the wicker basket I do not realize I am stealing.
When we get to the correct floor, there are two security checkpoints. We ask the staff: if we enter on the wrong side, will we have to go through security again? They say “oh yeah, for sure.” We show him our tickets and ask him where our seats are. He says “I don't know.” We take a gamble that the security checkpoint we are currently at is correct. We guessed right, and our luck begins to improve.
I am doing a big lie about our luck changing. We enter the auditorium and there are ushers guiding people around because it's fucking dark. Very reasonable. We approach an usher, say our seat numbers, and then show him the ticket. He nods thoughtfully and then points to the very top rows in the balcony.
The problem is he just pointed wherever, seemingly at random, because it's not at all where our seats are. We are shambling around in the dark trying to read seat numbers and really fucking up the Zoomer's vibes.
Eventually we give up and return to the guy who loves to torture us. He looks at the ticket thoughtfully again and then does a very cartoonish oh my bad!! and points us off in a very different place that was, eventually, correct.
I am Hank Hill now. I will forever go on and on about how college kids lack work ethic and don't appreciate big band.
TOM’S LITERATURE CORNER
I’ve been reading real books again, like for adults even. No pictures! It’s so wild. I’m gonna do some book reviews while I got the momentum. It won’t last, believe me!
HYPERION (Dan Simmons) - I heard this was a sci-fi classic and it was like 7 bucks at the store so I went for it. I always like a good sci-fi classic even if the writing and characters are a little wonky (case in point, I had a great time with the Foundation series until it became clear that some character who never got referenced before and that I didn’t care about was going to become the most important person in the universe).
I was reading this on vacation with Joe and he was like, oh, I’ve read that book. It’s the Canterbury Tales in space. A robot tries to bite off a guy’s glans when he’s fucking it. Well he’s right on both accounts. Hyperion follows seven pilgrims on a journey to the Time Tombs on planet Hyperion (this book is fucking bursting with sci-fi vocab words like “Time Tombs” and “farcaster” and shit that it doesn’t define, it just uses them casually and expects you to figure it out. This is my favorite shit of all time). Hyperion is a weird world full of fucked up mysteries in a universe where all other mysteries have been paved over by capitalist expansion. Most notably, there is a weird murder robot called the Shrike that hangs out near the Time Tombs for some reason. Very unclear what its deal is.
Anyway, the pilgrimage is complicated by a total galactic war starting at pretty much the same time, and a vague implication that this pilgrimage needs to succeed if humanity has any chance to avoid total extinction. It is, again, unclear what “success” means in this context. This is all table setting the book explains via exposition pretty early on. The meat of the book is the space Canterbury Tales.
All of the pilgrims have visited Hyperion before and had a life-defining experience there that has left them obsessed/broken/tortured/what have you. All of them MUST take this opportunity to come back and settle their score or die trying. In an attempt to try to glean the purpose of their weird pilgrimage, the characters all agree to tell their stories to each other. This is such a smart fucking move for a writer. You get to get nutty with the genre (the substories veer between horror, action, noir, romance, tragedy, etc) and can knock out a lot of worldbuilding in little digestible chunks simply by having the different characters know about different parts of the universe.
Joe is right about the glans. There is a part where the Colonel is having sex on Hyperion with this mystery sex woman who has been visiting him randomly over the years and who he’s obsessed with on account of her fat ass. But uh oh. She morphs into The Shrike and tries to snip off his glans. Using the word “glans” makes it a thousand times worse. Joe recognized that and thus remembered, years later even, that it was not a threat to cut his dick in half, but a threat to cut off his glans. What Joe did not remember is that the book describes the robot pussy guillotine missing the glans by a “moist millimeter.”
Turns out the book is obsessed with the poet John Keats. I need to read some Keats I think. The book whips ass overall, it is every inch the sci-fi classic. I realized midway through “wait, if this book is all just characters telling each other their backstories, they won’t have any time left to accomplish anything in the present.” Well, yes. I was right. I have been suckered into getting the sequel. Don’t think I’ll go for the 3rd or 4th book because it looks like in those, some character who never got referenced before and that I don’t care about is going to become the most important person in the universe.
THE FALL OF HYPERION (Dan Simmons) - It’s taking so long to get this newsletter out that I was able to read the fuggin sequel.
My topline review: every twenty pages or so I would put the book down, do a big WHEW!, turn to my wife and say “big things are happening on Hyperion!” to which she would reply “when are they not” to which I could only chuckle.
While this book exceeds the first in the “having events actually occur” arena, I do feel the absence of the fun central gimmick of the original. The structure here is just like...a normal novel. Oh well. I suppose it had to be so. And Fall more than makes up for the absence of gimmicks by having the events that do occur be fucking BIG time events. So many sci-fi/fantasy books are like “something is about to happen in the realm of Glimdar and things will NEVER be the same!” and I’m like uh yeah sure they won’t. Well. Some shit happens in this book. And I really was like oh my god. Oh fuck. Things will never be the same.
I still think I will abstain from reading the final two books in the series (Endymion and Rise of Endymion). My reasoning is as follows: among the forums and reviews I’ve looked up to see if they’re worth reading, the highest recommendation they seem to get is “they’re actually pretty good!” That “actually” is devastating. Second, the second set of books revolves around two characters I have never met and do not care about. This wouldn’t be so bad if the first two hadn’t spent so much time making me meet and care about a big ensemble cast. It is not fair to endear me to a big fun set of toys and then be like, all right the toys go away forever now. Here are some fucking Westworld figures I got at Walgreens while I was waiting the 15 minutes to see if the vaccine would make me go nuts. Have fun idiot.
Also the new characters (who are the most important people in the universe) includes one of the old main character’s kid. I can’t stand this shit where I am supposed to care about someone’s fuckin kid. If the kid is so important make them be the main character right away. If you make me care about their parents first, the kid will always be the kid, the second draft, the imitation. Bah! This reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars series. I gave up on that halfway through because I was sick of all the kids, plus the science stuff was too complicated for me.
Also also, this book ends on a relatively satisfying if open-ended conclusion. In short, after events make it so nothing will ever be the same, there is a nascent understanding that actually the Big Fucking Event is a good thing for humanity long-term, as it will free us from our capitalistic and technological addictions and allow us to evolve as a species. I’m like yeah, cool. I’m down with that being the ending. I buy that.
Trouble is, when sci-fi authors actually write scenarios like this, as Simmons must in the sequels, they tend to all devolve into very derivative hippie woo-woo sex shit on account of these guys are perverts. Once the techno-dystopia is transcended their only idea is uhhh everyone is poly now. This happens in the Mars series too. It’s like, “ah, now decoupled from ‘Earth’ and all its attendant limitations it becomes clear that the true path to human enlightenment is a big time orgy. It is very spiritual to do this.” It reads like nothing so much as the author, red faced and sweating, being like “uh, no, this is uh....*I* don’t want to have an orgy, personally, it’s just uhhh, it’s what this society would do.” Yeah well you’re the one saying the orgy society where everyone sucks off sci-fi authors is the enlightened one that has evolved beyond humanity’s intellectual shackles.
I’m not saying the rest of the Hyperion series does that. But I’m not taking chances. I remember “moist millimeter.”
THE PLOT (Jean Hanff Korelitz) - My mom lent me and my wife this book being like “it’s...fine.” I read it on the plane back from our vacation and I gotta say that was the ideal context. An airplane read if ever there was one—engaging enough to keep the pages turning but leaves you with no particular impression.
The main guy is a failed novelist who had one minor success and now just sucks. He’s teaching a writing workshop and meets an asshole student who claims to have a dynamite plot idea that will be a hit for sure regardless of the writing’s quality. First of all, no. The book’s universe fully believes this assertion is simply True. But like, uh. No. Like, what? No. No! That’s not how it works!
But whatever. The guy is like, I don’t even need to be here. I’m just here on the off chance I actually could learn anything but I doubt it. The plot’s good enough either way. Main guy is like, you’re fulla shit. What’s the plot. The guy tells him and the main guy is like fuck that is a good plot.
Years later, main guy finds out the plot-thinker-upper died tragically months after the workshop and he never wrote the book. So our guy writes it and becomes a literary megastar. Turns out uh oh...not all is well...there was more to this story than meets the eye...and we begin a mystery thriller. Whatever.
This kind of story is audacious because you have to actually come up with a plot that we are expected to believe is GUARANTEED to become a Da Vinci Code-level megasmash—but if you did that, why not simply write that book? Bah, whatever. At first I thought we were never going to actually learn the specifics of the “plot” it all revolves around—that could be cool if pulled off well. It could be a fun way to build tension, get the reader squirming like “what could it BE?” After all, we keep having characters comment that this plot is SO original, SO unlike anything else EVER written before—it doesn’t even map onto any of the classic story structures, it’s THAT original! Well turns out no, it eventually tells you what “the plot” is and it’s a pretty standard thriller plot. It’s like, fine. It’d be an OK airplane book and that’s about it.
Like the titular “plot,” the book also has a Big Twist that it is totally convinced is an absolute sure-thing haymaker no one can see coming. Well folks, I’m a huge rube who falls for every fuckin twist there is and I saw this one from a million miles away. Part of it is the pace is weirdly slow for a mass-market thriller. The protagonist is too stupid for words and is incapable of making any logical connections so he doesn’t ever internalize new information until he learns every possible relevant fact, by which point most readers will have been spending the last thirty pages going like, come on man! Make an educated guess here!
Pictured below: The protagonist of The Plot doing “detective work”
The whole time I was reading this I was reminded of Devil House by John Darnielle, a book with extremely similar themes (In short, *Hamilton voice*: who lives, who dies, who tells your story) that is done better in every way. A much more thoughtful and engaging book with a twist I actually did not see coming! Pretty funny that the book’s core conceit—that some plots are so good it doesn’t matter how it’s written—is disproved by the fact that the book is pretty lame and another book with a similar plot is way, way better on account of how it’s written.
Oh well, what do I know? They’re making a TV show out of this with Mahershala Ali in the lead.
20th CENTURY BOYS (Naoki Urasawa) - I know I made a big fuss about reading adult brain books and this is manga. The difference is that Urasawa writes manga for geniuses. I understood 20th Century Boys to be one of his masterpieces alongside Monster, which I read last year. Well, yeah! It’s good as hell!
Urasawa is rightly considered a grandmaster of the form. He has countless qualities to recommend him as one of the best mangaka to ever do it, but I think his real superpower as an illustrator is how otherworldly good he is at drawing recognizable faces in a semi-realistic style. Other artists can draw more flashy, jaw-dropping shit than Urasawa can, but few can come up with 30-40 faces and have them each be so distinct you can immediately tell who each character is at a glance.
More impressively, 20th Century Boys covers about 50 years of in-universe time and we get to see these characters as kids, young adults, middle aged, elderly—and you always instantly go “oh that’s [character name].” There are tons of Shonen Jump series drawn in anime house style where I see a face and go “uh...sure hope someone reminds me who this is soon!”
Anyway, the actual series at hand. Our main guy Kenji is a ne’er do well who wanted to be a rock star and washed out, now doing a shitty job managing his family’s failing store. Then, uh oh, it turns out that there is an ascendant cult led by an anonymous leader known only as “The Friend,” whose plans are matching up exactly with “The Book Of Prophecy,” a silly book of fantasies Kenji and his friends wrote 30 years ago as schoolkids, where they cooked up a story about a league of evil that would rise up and attack humanity on December 31st, 2000. In the story they were stopped by a league of justice—presumably, the kids themselves cast as badass adults who did NOT turn out to be fuckups. Well, turns out the Friend is doing it for real, and the kids turned out to be fuckups.
The first half of this series is close to perfect. It is a hypnotically compelling thriller that begs you to keep turning the pages as the tension builds and builds. The plot revelations come in a tantalizing drip. You will turn the page and go absolutely nuts at the reveal and go AHHHH!!! HOW CAN IT GET CRAZIER THAN THIS!!! And then two chapters later you go, AHHHH!! THAT IS HOW!!! AHHH!!!!
The second half is not close to perfect, but it’s still really good. Urasawa runs into the issue all long-running mystery/suspense series have (see Lost, Battlestar Galactica, even Urasawa’s own Monster). When you spend so long teasing out a mystery, you’re adding more and more pressure for the final reveal to top all of the mini-reveals that came before. But that is an impossible task. By the time the end rolls around, there are simply too many plates spinning for any ending to resolve them all in a satisfactory way, and even if you pull it off, it can’t compete with the surgical strike power of a focused mini-revelation. With those, you can control all variables, choose only a handful of plot threads to be relevant, and formulate a development that aligns with them all. An ending does not afford that luxury.
Oh well! I couldn’t have done it better and it doesn’t change the fact that 20th Century Boys is a triumph. Its reputation as a masterpiece is well earned and everyone should read it if you can.
You absolutely nailed the Endymion books, it does indeed get into some hippie woo-woo sex shit. There are some wildly good ideas in there but the last 100 pages of the last book end so weirdly and limply that it soured me on the whole series a bit.
If you're looking for another book full of sci-fi vocab words, have you read Neuromancer?
And Hyperion just shot to the top of my "next to read" list, so thank you for that!