The Return of Jose: An Arsenal Fan's Perspective.

A quick look at Wikipedia shows that March 9, 2004 wasn't a particularly newsworthy day.  Your basic news diet of death, minor terrorist events and political maneuvering.  The Beltway Sniper, John Allen Muhammad was sentenced to death on that day if that's your kind of thing.  

For Jose Mourinho however, March 9, 2004 was the day he entered football's A-list.  It was the day he guided his team to a shock draw against Manchester United at Old Trafford taking an unfancied Porto team past the-then English champions.  Costinha scored a last minute goal to take Porto through 3-2 on aggregate.  Before this, Manchester United had been going through on away goals.  His exuberant celebration- running down the touchline, pumping his fists- brought him to global attention.  

If the result had gone with the way everyone expected it to go, there would probably be no cult of the Special One.  In England, where he is most loved, he would probably just be another crazy foreign manager with a penchant for good interviews.  Possibly the hipster's choice.  He would be a Latin Jurgen Klopp. 

However, it was not to be.  Fate had other plans for Mourinho.  Incidentally, March 9, 2004 was probably the last time the majority of Arsenal fans ever rooted for him.  At the time, Manchester United were our rivals and any misfortune that befell them was met with glee.  

If you look at the narrative that followed, we would probably have taken a United victory.  However we feasted and grew drunk on our excellent season.  While there was some bitterness in going out of the Champions League, and the FA Cup semi-final, winning the league unbeaten (and becoming Champions at White Hart Lane to boot) ensured that we weren't too bothered about that Mourinho chap.  We had Le Professeur.   We had a team composed of 5 or 6 World Class players, and promising youngsters coming up.  All was well at Highbury. 

The coming of Mourinho to England signalled the end of those good times.  His brutal, effective teams destroyed all before them.  This is a man who popularised the Makelele role in football.  His sides played football that was the antithesis of what Arsenal were doing (before we slipped into parody of ourselves).  It saw a change in tactics.  Football in England became more defensive.  Frequently we had no answer.   Wenger and the team would whine about the increased physicality and deep defenses, which probably led to the dumb 'don't like up them' tag that has been affixed to us.  

His 'voyeur' comments and his tapping up of Ashley Cole didn't endear him to Arsenal fans either.  Then there was the dominance.  Mourinho seemed to have the measure of Wenger.  Whatever the reasons, Mourinho engenders a feeling of antipathy and though they will be loathe to admit it, a fair bit fear in Arsenal fans.  

Next season was supposed to be our big chance.  With the top 3 teams changing their managers, and Spurs and Liverpool possibly improving their squads in the summer, it was looking like an open title race- one that we could have benefitted from assuming we had a good summer.  The appearance of Mourinho has to have cast a doubt in our minds.  But should it?

Mourinho comes back to a markedly different premier league than it was in 2004.  In 2004, Chelsea had the most money to spend, not just on transfers but on wages.  There was no Manchester City.  Outside of Real Madrid and Barcelona, who had their own projects anyway, there was nowhere really for the next big things to go to other than Chelsea.  

Not only did Chelsea buy the biggest talents- Drogba, Essien.  They also bought players on a level below that like Shaun Wright-Phillips for no reason except maybe to keep them from playing for other competitors.  Wright-Phillips is a case in point.  The links to Arsenal were there because of his dad.  There was talk of him replacing Ljungberg and getting the number 8 jersey.  All of a sudden Chelsea came in and offered more money than we could even fathom offering and SWP was a Chelsea player.  Maybe we dodged a bullet but there's no denying that Chelsea's transfer policy of stockpiling great players made things really difficult.  

This is not the case today.  Not only are Chelsea not the only rich team in England, they are no longer the only rich team in Europe.  PSG, Monaco and Anzhi can all offer comparable wages.  Ditto the Spanish Giants, though probably wincing a lot more.  And the likes of Bayern and Manchester United still make a lot of money and in the case of Bayern aren't afraid to spend it.  The 25-man squad rule also means Chelsea can't stockpile players like they did in the first Era of Jose.  

Then there's the whole aura about the team.  Mourinho introduced Chelsea to success, but its fair to say they got used to it and kicked on in his absence.  A double in 2010, the Champions League in 2012, the  Europa League in 2013.  These players are winners.  Lampard and Terry aren't wide-eyed youths anymore.  Where do they go from here?  Will his sometimes abrasive personality work, especially when rumour has it that Terry was reponsible for Jose leaving initially? Only time will tell.  

All I know is Jose Mourinho won't have it so easy this time.  So fear not.    

Too Much of a Good thing?

I had long since wanted to play a Swords-and-sorcery type game for a while, and as long as Skyrim was buggy, unpatched and unloved on the PS3, I wasn't going to be buying it.  Instead, I went for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, a game from the now defunct 38 studios.  38 Studios was founded by baseball legend Curt Schilling, an avid gamer, to create an MMORPG like World of Warcraft.

38 studios got onboard luminaries like reknowned fantasy writer, R.A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane, who created Spawn, on board and acquired the studio Big Huge Games, to produce an introductory game to the Amalur universe.  The single player game would introduce players to the universe before the launch of the MMORPG at a future date.

Sadly this would never happen as 38 studios and Big Huge Games had to file for bankruptcy in May, 2012.  Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is the only game they ever produced.

I got it at Christmas, and from then till about March it took pride of place in my Playstation.  However, in the end, I ejected it unfinished, with maybe a third to half the story left to be told.

The story is pretty interesting if a bit generic and maybe leans on the fourth wall a bit.  You play the Fateless One.  At the start of the game, you're dead, only to be revived in the Well of Souls by a scientist.  At this juncture, you are introduced to the wide range of customisation in the game.  I must have spent that first afternoon mucking about with my characters face.  In the end I got a rather scary looking black man.

In the world of Amalur, everyone is a slave to their fate till they die but since your character has already  been there, done that and got the t-shirt, you have no fate.  This apparently means that you can change the tide of the war that's been going on and maybe save the mortal races from the bloodthirsty and immortal Tuatha Fae who are feeling rather genocidal at the moment.

The story is pretty serviceable.  Salvatore was tasked to create 10,000 years of backstory for the world and some of it is pretty interesting if you like that kind of thing.  NPCs rush to give you all sorts of backstory and all around there are lorestones- magic stones that narrate the story of the land and those who have come before.   It would make a pretty decent series of books with prequels, interquels and sequels coming out the wazoo.   The art and world are bright and nice.  The combat is amazing, and there is a lot to do.  Loads.

And therein lies the problem with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.  There is too much to do, there is too much customisation, too much freedom.  I played, as I tend to do in these kind of games, as a Rogue- the game calls it Finesse, and it is one of three classes in the game, the others being Might (fighter) and Sorcery (Mage).   Despite this, I could use my level up points in any of the classes to unlock abilities in that class.  For instance, say I just reached level 10, I'd have 3 points to spend in any of those classes I wanted.  While I got some stat boosts from my class initially, I could soon wield greatswords and hammers like the best warrior, despite being a character more attuned to weapons like daggers and bows.

The weapons themselves are pretty neat.  You're allowed to carry two into battle, although you can pause and swap others from your pouch if needed.  Some of them are overpowered though.  Daggers and Faeblades may not do as much damage as greatswords, but are super fast, and in this game speed is everything.  Then there are the chakrams which are mid-range throwing weapons, that come back to you like a boomerang causing damage on both the departure and return journeys.  Almost gamebreaking.

Another thing the game allows you too much freedom with is skills.  there are a bunch of skills in the game but 3 stand out as really important to activities in the game.  Sagecrafting, Blacksmithing and Alchemy.  Alchemy allows you to make your own potions, blacksmithing allows you to make your own weapons, and Sagecrafting allows you create gems that you can then insert into your weapons and armour to give you various boosts as long as they are equipped.

Each of these skills can be allocated points as you level up, which eventually allows you to make better weapons, more complicated potions and better quality gems.  Even before then though, quite early in the game, you can make pretty decent items if you have enough of the easily attainable components.  Want to make a health potion?  get 2 of those plants, and 1 of this plant (both  of which were as prevalent as grass on a savannah) and bobs your uncle.

Early in the game, when gold was tight and health potions randomly dropped were low, death was feared and frequent.  By the time I stopped playing, I had become almost a death seeker in my playstyle, charging into hordes of enemies, provoking trolls that I used to run screaming like a chicken from.  Once I created about 30 health potions at the alchemy lab, and crafted a couple of restoring gems that basically regenerated my health each second, I was almost unkillable.

Perhaps if the designers had restricted each class to one craft it would, and made the other crafted items expensive it would have been better.

Maybe they could have also reduced the number of quests.  Quests make up the gameplay of Amalur. there are story quests, which advance the plot, guild quests, which are a series of related quests that make up a small self-contained story, side quests and tasks.  Each of these gives you loads of experience.  And they are all accessible.  If you're a completist like me, you'll want to do everything and halfway through the game, you will probably be the most powerful being in the area.

I stopped playing at the Battle of Mel Senshir.  All through the lead up to this key event in the game, characters talk in despair about a Creature of Mass Destrutction the Tuatha are going to unleash on the fortress (Mel Senshir is basically all that keeps the Tuatha from overrunning the mortal lands.).  I fought the monster, having moved the difficulty to hard a few hours earlier, and maybe died once.  I was just too powerful.  My weapons too nifty, my armour too restorative.  The monster barely hit me and only messing up on the execution Quick Time Event gave me any difficulty.

Of course there are ways to avoid this.  Avoid doing some quests, ignore that person with the exclamation mark above his head.  Refuse point blank to do some.  I'm actually curious as to what the NPCs say when you select 'I have better things to do' on the conversation wheel.  If you do that, you won't have levelled up as much, and hopefully the game will remain a challenge.  It also means you can  replay the game without doing the same quests over and over, a fact I just realised as I wrote this *facepalm*

I really enjoyed my time playing the game, and I'll definitely play it again sometime.  I'll go about doing quests and owning the crap out of any enemy man or beast that steps in my way.  Maybe I'll even finish it.  It's a great game, I just overindulged.  I was gluttonous.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is like going to an all you can eat buffet and really trying to eat all you can.  At the end, you're almost like I never want to see food again.  However, if you don't pig out, you try a bit of everything your experience will be infinitely better.  

YA Fiction Reviews: A preamble.

I'm a huge fan of YA (Young Adult) Fiction. I'm not the only one. Gone are the days when people would tut and shake their heads when they glimpsed an adult reading Harry Potter or something similar. Adults reading books aimed at younger people is not as taboo as it used to be. Perhaps it is because it has gotten a lot better in quality. YA fiction when I was growing up would have been Sweet Valley High, maybe some Point Horror if you wanted to feel a bit older- it had more gore and Adult Situations, dontchaknow. Let's face it, they were pretty formulaic and not great.

 Jessica did something stupid, Elizabeth rolled her eyes (the colour of the Pacific). Elizabeth was 4 minutes older, but sometimes it felt like 4 years. Blah, blah, blah. No matter what, it was always resolved in the end (mostly). Sometimes it dragged on for a few books but the plots (evil twins, ancient romances, earthquakes) were more day-time soap than blockbusters like Harry Potter or the Hunger Games.

Somewhere along the line, YA fiction started to improve. Maybe it was because of Harry. Maybe it showed that young people could expect more from their fiction, and their success showed publishers that they could look out for, and promote weightier and better quality books than the ghostwritten stuff they'd been peddling for years. While the earlier Harry Potter books were very good children's books, as the character grew so did the target audience of the books. The last four are definitely YA fiction in my opinion. Since 2000, when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire came out, and the series hit puberty and became a bit darker and edgier, young people have had their fill of great stories and characters. The Hunger Games, Noughts and Crosses, The Gone series, even Twilight. Where a young person had to re-read their copy of Are you there God, It's me Margaret till it fell apart, if they wanted above average stuff to read, they suddenly had shelves upon shelves of stuff to read.

 New worlds, new ideas, new characters; YA fiction is not afraid to experiment, to set stories in worlds far removed from ours, all the while still dealing with topics that are relevant to young people, and that older readers can appreciate. It's not War and Peace, or 100 years of Solitude, but not every movie is The Seven Samurai or Citizen Kane. I'm young at heart. The heroes and heroines of these books allow me to relive my childhood and the triumphs and mistakes without actually having to go through any of the consequences.

I guess that's why I'm a fan and why in the spirit of writing more this year, I've decided to start reviewing them. Hopefully, you might pick up something you didn't know about, or you might just be pushed to tell me I'm a blithering idiot with my opinions. Either way, it should be interesting.

Back from the dead.

Let's keep this short and sweet. It's a new year, so what better time to start writing again. As a writer, my output is disgraceful. It's time to put what sits in my head on paper, or rather, in this case, in cyberspace. Happy 2013 to the 5 people who read this.