Poke & itch.io
Six years later edit (April 20, 2019): You can no longer download Poke from itch.io. Sorry folks
Item one: there is now a Mac OSX build for Poke, the game I mentioned in my last post.
It can be downloaded from item two, which is my profile up at itch.io. Itch.io is a web site made by another Ludum Dare person. It’s designed to just be a place where indie game developers can host their game files. The site supports pay what you want models, with the minimum price being set by the developer and $0.00 being a viable minimum price. It’s a neat site.
Ender’s Game Trailer
Then there is item three, the first trailer for the Ender’s Game movie adaptation.
The book and I have a history. When I was 9, Ender’s Game became the first book so engrossing that I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning to finish reading. To this day, it and its inseparable sequel Speaker for the Dead are, together, my favorite book. I’ve waited many, many years for this movie adaptation to come to fruition.
If I love this book so much, you might ask, why would I look forward to the adaptation? Aren’t they usually bad?
Hear Me Out
Often, yes. But I also know that part of the reason it has taken so long is that the author owned the copyrights and wouldn’t let anyone adapt the movie unless he was confident that they wouldn’t butcher it. He wouldn’t let them age the main character and add a romance. He even wrote the first draft of the script himself, using his playwriting experience and putting in the parts he thought were most important. This movie adaptation has happened with the input and approval of the author, and when you combine that with how well The Hunger Games was adapted (what a pleasant surprise that was) you see an optimistic me.
Trailer Analysis
Now, the trailer itself is interesting to me. If I didn’t know anything about the book, the movie wouldn’t look like much of anything special. It’s pretty damn generic. Aliens nearly destroyed us, and now we need a hero if the human race is going to survive. This is a valid summary for the basic premise. It does not, however, capture the essence of the story, that which makes it amazing and touching and special.
However, for those in the know, for those who have read the book many times, there is a lot more in the trailer. We see the barracks the first time Ender gets assigned to an army, we see him eating with Petra, we see him at the lake with Valentine. And we see Ender’s defining moment. They managed to put a huge spoiler in the trailer without spoiling anything for people who haven’t read the book, and it looks cool.
So I like the trailer well enough. It does its job, reaching out both to newcomers and old fans alike. It doesn’t increase my anticipation for the movie any… but to be fair, that’d be kinda hard to do.