Review Day

There are no spoilers in these reviews.

Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story:
This is the latest game in the Mario RPG series, which includes Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, and Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time -- two of my favourite games. Bowser's Inside Story brings nothing new to the mix, but it's well-done and fun to play. Mario and Luigi accidentally get inhaled by Bowser, and spend the game running around his insides playing mini-games while Bowser travels around the overland map. Bowser's innards are not literally represented, so you don't have to play any minigames in his colon.

Improvements over the old games include being able to practice your special moves in a sandbox mode, although there are far too many tutorials that you have to skip over if you're an experienced player: a cut-scene is not needed to learn that the Hammer is the B button and it breaks stuff. The last dungeon also drags on a bit too long, but none of the game is too hard so it's a good investment of about 20 hours of play-time.

Final Grade: B+

Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica:
Part-memoir and part-expose, this humourous book about a career waiter in an upscale restaurant is well-written and engrossing. He starts repeating himself a little towards the end, but this seems to be a problem with any book that evolved out of someone's blog.

Final Grade: A-

The Brothers Bloom:
I like con/heist movies with intricate plans and twists, and this one was light in tone and easy to follow. The side character, "Yueng Ling" steals the spotlight as an explosive expert who almost never says anything.

Final Grade: B

Mental by Eddie Sarfaty:
This (like Waiter Rant) is one of Rebecca's books, but I burn through books so fast that sometimes they aren't even published yet by the time I'm done. I turned to this one on the plane back from Hawaii -- it's autobigraphical, but told in a series of non-chronological humour essays. Easy to read and easy to enjoy.

Final Grade: B+