Nam Hien Nguyen

I can't take writing advice from someone like this

Revisado: 03-21-24

I thought this would be a fun listen, since I normally love breakdowns of characters in fiction like this, but within mere minutes, this author has already managed to offend me enough that I had to return a purchased book for the first time in 7 years. His first chapter is just a long winded explanation of why he wrote the book and how it differs from his previous book, which I haven't read, so this chapter was pointless to me. When he finally gets started in Chapter 2 with the book's main topic of examining how to write good characters, he instantly makes such a flawed assertion that I couldn't help but simply stop right there and give up on this book. He makes a simple minded blanket criticism of DC superhero characters, saying "Much has been written about everything DC does wrong," as if what he's assuming everyone already agrees with him, then he goes on to praise the Marvel Cinematic Universe as if every one of their character choices has been perfect, saying a big reason Marvel's heroes are better characters is because they have friends. This is such a shallow approach to writing characters, failing to recognize that for some characters, it actually makes perfect sense that due to the nature of their characters, they wouldn't have friends, such as the dark, brooding character of Batman, for instance, who I'd consider to be far more compelling than any of the Marvel movie heroes. After that segment, I'd already lost all trust in this author, so there was no reason to continue with the book.

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Narrator mispronounces every Vietnamese word

Revisado: 11-14-22

I am fluent in Vietnamese but often had little clue what Vietnamese words the narrator is trying to say, especially the names of people and places. This is an audiobook, so I am unable to see the text to verify what the words are, making it difficult to follow the events and the information he's talking about, since his pronunciations are so far off.

I don't expect someone who doesn't speak Vietnamese to be able to pronounce words of a language he doesn't speak perfectly - I don't blame someone for speaking in their own accents - but this narrator even mispronounces Vietnamese words that are entirely homophonous with syllables that are common in the English language that any English speaker should be able to easily pronounce, so there's no reason the narrator should mispronounce them except that he didn't obviously bother to consult with any Vietnamese speakers. I know native English speakers who've learned to speak Vietnamese flawlessly, so it can be done.

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Interesting topic, but numerous factual errors

Revisado: 08-01-22

I'm a lifelong Nintendo fan from the days of the NES, so I know quite a bit of Nintendo history & trivia myself. I found this book mostly entertaining, with the most interesting parts being the history of Nintendo's founders and how they made so many risky business decisions and faced so many challenges, especially in the early days, and overcame them to eventually succeed. The not so easy relationship between Nintendo's CEO and his son in law who ran Nintendo of America was also engrossing to learn about. Details of Nintendo's fight with Universal over the legal rights to Donkey Kong was a highlight of the book. The book shows its age though by the last chapter. It goes no further than the start of the Wii generation of gaming and proceeds to make poorly-aged predictions on the future of game consoles.

I do have nitpicks about the book though. For example, as many other reviews have pointed out, there are numerous little factual errors throughout the book. As a Nintendo nerd myself I caught a lot of them, such as saying Bowser is the last boss of Super Mario Brothers 2 (he wasn't, it was Wart) or claiming Mike Tyson was heavy weight champion when Nintendo signed a licensing deal with him for Mike Tyson's Punch Out (Nintendo actually took a risk by signing the deal even before he was champion). Also, Ray Porter's narration is generally good, but he mispronounces some names of characters like Samus and the game developer/publisher Konami as "Komani."

The other nitpick I have about the book is that author Jeff Ryan's fondness for constantly making random off-topic references can get distracting. This is a history of video games and Nintendo, but it's like he's deliberately trying to make his references to topics as unrelated to video games as possible, bringing up everything from Greek mythology, to Donald Trump, to the book Crime & Punishment, to the history of Napoleon, to old TV shows Mork & Mindy and Three's Company and the Brady Bunch. I get that the author's trying to be funny, and he's probably trying to show off how knowledgeable he is on so many topics, but since the topic of discussion is video games, why not make more video game-related references instead of such pop culture references as irrelevant to video games as old American comedy sitcoms?

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These guys are pretty bad at this

Revisado: 09-27-19

These reviewers don't care about films or art or stories or details or anything, really. They're just purely obnoxious and, for some reason, actually think that anyone would want to waste their time listening to their juvenile rambling and stupid laughter at their own lame jokes.

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Feels like the author wasn't provided enough notes

Revisado: 05-12-19

Feels like the author did her best to squeeze what she could out of limited notes provided to her by the movie studio, but wasn't provided enough to adequately work with, and also, as a big fan of the Battle Angel (Gunnm) manga, I get the impression the novelization's author either didn't bother to read the manga for research, or was told not to use it for reference. This leads to some contradictions between the movie and the novelization and almost everywhere where the novelization goes off on its own to try to flesh out something in this world or about these characters that were not explained in the movie, the original manga actually already had a much richer more interesting explanation that sadly wasn't tapped into here. I don't exactly know the process of how these movie adaptions work, but that's how I imagine it.

For an instance of a contradiction probably caused by the author not being provided enough information, the character Nova, as seen in the movie and the manga, wears funny-looking goggles, but when he takes off his goggles, he clearly has eyes. But in this novelization, he's described as having had his eyes replaced by the cybernetic goggles. It's like the author was given a picture of Nova with the goggles on and wasn't told much more about him, so she decided to make up a backstory where his eyes got replaced by a cybernetic enhancement, without realizing that in the movie we see him take off his goggles and see that he clearly has regular eyes.

I have other nitpicks, like this book making a backstory for the world saying that there used to be numerous sky cities, but they eventually all fell, leaving only one. What's wrong with that, you ask? Well this feels like it carelessly ignores the science behind the idea of suspended cities, because as explained in the manga, there's the suspended city we know, Zalem, on one side of the planet and it's counterbalanced on the opposite side of the planet by another city, a marine city actually, not a sky city. Both are suspended from orbiting satellites, connected by an orbital ring. Anyway, the point is, you need two of them to balance each other from opposite sides of the planet, so it doesn't make scientific sense to have a ton of sky cities all over the place.

But that said, this book is not all bad. For example, we get a fleshed out backstory of Ido's nurse assistant, who was merely a minor background character in the movie. If you wonder why she has a cybernetic arm, you can learn about it in this novelization.

Anyway, the book does what it could, delving into character's heads, so we hear what they're thinking that we don't get to hear in the movie and that's interesting, in a way, but it's mostly just a retelling of what you saw on screen. And it could have been a lot more interesting, especially if the author was allowed to tap into the rich source material of the manga.

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Hyperbolic ranting from a whiny old man

Revisado: 05-30-18

Joe Morgenstern represents everything wrong with professional paid film critics. His review contains next to nothing to suggest that he actually even watched the movie he's reviewing. Instead, he just mocks and scoffs, spews out insults that I'm sure he thinks are quite witty, hyperbolically comparing the movie to a terrorist attack or natural disaster, calling the movie an all out attack on the idea of entertainment, and so on. He's essentially a sideline heckler, not a legitimate critic, because he offers absolutely nothing resembling critique and nothing to prove that he has any understanding of any aspect of filmmaking as an art in any way. Instead, this is just an old man moaning and groaning that he was forced, as part of his job, to waste time watching something that he didn't care about, so now he's just gonna whine and complain, to let us all know how grumpy he is. In an age when we can so easily access on the Internet thousands and thousands of movie reviews written by regular movie fans, people who actually care about the movies they watch, it's more clear than ever that there is little to no value to these useless aging relics of the newspaper age who call themselves professional film critics, such as the worthless Joe Morgenstern. If there's anything positive to say at all about this, it's that the reader Paul Ryden speaks clearly, so I'll give him a good rating for performance.

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