Games Workshop City Walk Celebrates First Anniversary

SANDY SPRINGS, Ga.--Games Workshop City Walk celebrated its first anniversary Sept. 29 with cake and a gaming tournament.

Kenneth Meade, who operates the store, said the shop was part of Games Workshop's expansion in the United States. Games Workshop is a British gaming company known for its Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40,000, and Lord of the Rings tabletop games. The Warhammer 40,000 property have been adapted into books, video games, and even an animated movie.

"It's one of the better-performing one-man stores," Meade said when asked how business had been during the prior year. Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy are the two most popular properties, but Meade anticipated the Lord of the Rings games selling better as the release of The Hobbit drew near. The best-selling items were the "core sets" that introduce players to the setting and come with enough miniatures to allow two people to play. The store also stocks the many tie-in novels set in both the 40k and Fantasy universes, many of which will be released there weeks before they appear in more general bookstores like Barnes and Noble.


The event lasted from noon until 9 p.m. Meade described the turnout as "great." Part of the event was a gaming tournament using the newly-released sixth editionof Warhammer 40,000. By 3:40 p.m., 12 people had played a game using the Dark Vengeancestarter set. Meade expected more to play as the day went on.

In addition to the gaming tournament, the celebration featured miniature-painting, special items on sale,  giveaways of promotional items like backpacks, and even a cake from Henri's Bakery.

Hutch Jackson came up from his home near Emory University for the event. A 40k player, he has a Chaos Space Marine army he purchased with the sixth edition as well as Eldar, Dark Eldar, and Necron forces. During the three games he had played before 4 p.m., he played as the Chaos Space Marines. Jackson enjoys the game's extensive back-story and collecting and painting the models.

Jackson gets most of his Games Workshop materials from Games Workshop City Walk. If he needs something, there's a good chance Meade has it.

Paul Jarvis of Milton has shopped at Games Workshop City Walk since February 2012.

"I was online and I found there was a store in Georgia," he said. "I decided I would go check it out."

He said the people who frequent the shop are very friendly and helped him out. Because of that, he's come back for more.

Jarvis plays both 40k and Fantasy. In 40k, he plays as the Ultramarines and has an attached Imperial Guard unit. In Fantasy, he plays as the Dwarfs.

"It's fun to put [them] together, to make your own models," he said. "It's just fun playing around, meeting nice people."

Star Trek Eugenics Wars Timeline, With a Joke

On my alternate-history forum, the user whose handle is JSmith started a project to create a fan timeline of the Eugenics Wars from the Star Trek universe. Different board members contributed written material, with others (like me) offering suggestions.

Here's the link. Nobody liked the "secret Eugenics wars" book series written by Greg Cox, so it's a full-blown alternate history starting in the 1930s that builds to the Eugenics Wars as a nuclear Third World War (with another worldwide conflict a generation later as a spinoff) rather than a "secret history" depicting various events of the 1990s as part of a covert war by the Augments against the rest of the world. It's got some really interesting stuff, like excerpts from memoirs of the illegitimate daughter of one of Khan's inner circle (who can basically be described as an evil Bono) who was part of the Australian army fighting against the Augments and an explanation for why, although Khan is Indian, the other Augments aboard the Botany Bay were all white people.

I am seriously considering submitting original material of my own--in the show Enterprise, Captain Archer references a great-grandfather who fought in North Africa during the Eugenics Wars. Apparently he parleyed with an Augment commander to get a bunch of kids who were trapped in a crossfire zone out of harm's way. I know I'd vowed not to do anymore fan-fiction and focus on real work, but this wouldn't take very long.

(However, there's a short story in a Star Trek anthology depicting the incident, so maybe I won't.)

Now for the joke. One of the later posts is the prison memoir of a member of Khan's inner circle who was not sentenced to death--someone resembling Albert Speer of our own world. I disagreed with the assessment of Khan as a man who had no friends, only servants and rivals, based on how fiercely he became attached to Lt. Marla McGivers, the Starfleet officer who turned traitor out of love for him and eventually became his wife.

Some of the other board members said the writing was from a limited point-of-view and like real history, it has its biases. McGivers' diary would paint a rather different picture of Khan.

My response: Would McGivers' diary, if published in book form, be titled...

(drumroll)

Fifty Shades of Red(shirt)?

For those of you who don't get it, Marla can be credibly described as a redshirt based on her uniform, her limited appearance, and her ultimate demise, while both she and the female lead of 50 Shades of Grey are both weak women in thrall to dominant, unusual men. I think it works.

Character Interview: The Wendigo

(I sit on a moss-covered log deep in the Canadian woods. Across the clearing from me, on another log, sits the Wendigo. He reaches into his mouth with a foot-long finger and picks some meat from between his fangs with a black claw. He greedily licks it off with his long tongue.)

Author: So, how are you feeling today?

Wendigo: Hungry, as always. You're lucky I've just fed and can talk with you without risking your safety.

Author: What is a typical day like in your life?

Wendigo: I don't sleep much. I spend most of the day hunting. I can run as fast as one of your, what's that word, automobiles, so I cover a lot of territory.

Author: You don't know what a car is?

Wendigo: When I was a man, people walked or rode horses. There were ships that sailed on the seas using steam engines, but these "cars" of yours were a distant dream. These "all terrain vehicles" even more so.

(sigh)

Someone actually got away from me on an "ATV." That was embarrassing. The authorities no doubt thought he was drunk, but I had to hunt elsewhere for awhile lest men with guns come looking.

Author: You fear guns?

Wendigo: Of course! What predator doesn't fear guns? Guns make even the smallest and weakest prey able to hurt or kill the greatest manqueller. There are only two ways to kill a Wendigo, and a firearm can manage one.

Author: What are those ways?

(The wendigo snorts.)

Wendigo: I was most assuredly not born yesterday.

Author: You're the boss. Are there any other creatures like you?

Wendigo: There were, once. Long ago, it was a lot easier to get snowed in out in the woods and have to feed on your fellow humans to survive. We can sense that. If we don't find you and kill you, there's a good chance you'll end up becoming one of us.

(Pause.)

Now there aren't many trappers or Indians left. A lot more tourists, but they don't stick around when the hard winters come. I doubt if there've been any new wendigowak born since that "Second World War" I've heard of. And even we can be killed or simply die of old age, even though we generally live many of your lifetimes.

Author: You said earlier you fear guns. If men with guns can kill you, wouldn't a body be proof of your existence?

Wendigo: We tend to crumble away quickly after our deaths. As you can see, there's not really much substance to us.

(The wendigo rises to his feet. Although he's around ten to twelve feet tall, he's absolutely emaciated. Each muscle stands out beneath pale skin and I can count each rib. Through his abdomen, I can see the faintest traces of his spine.)

If some lucky shot was able to bring a wendigo down, he'd fall apart when someone tried to drag him away.

Author: That would explain the lack of physical evidence.

(The wendigo steps forward. Drool trickles past ruined, chewed-away lips.)

Author: Could you please sit back down?

(The wendigo closes his huge eyes for a moment, then retreats back to his log.)

Wendigo: I would leave soon, if I were you. My hunger sometimes makes it hard to control myself.

Author: Thank you for your time.

Wendigo: You're most welcome.

The Wendigo is the protagonist of my short horror story "I am the Wendigo," which is available here from Amazon.com. I got the idea of a character interview from Malissa Thomas.

My eBook Experiment, Success and Predictions...

Per my earlier post, I posted two pieces of my short fiction on Amazon.com for the Kindle.

They are "Melon Heads" and "I am the Wendigo", both of which had cover art done by Udo Wooten. One of the reasons self-published works don't do well is because they often have really bad cover art, and thanks to Udo, that wasn't a problem.

Here's what I've learned so far. Both sales and free giveaways were highest in September, the month they were released. I made 16 sales of "Melon Heads" and 6 sales of "Wendigo," gaining me $7.70 in total revenue, along with a combined 300-ish in giveaways. However, come October, "Melon Heads" sales had drastically declined, with one sale (and a refund) and "Wendigo" sales had vanished entirely. I've set them to be given away free today (Oct. 14) and tomorrow (Oct. 15), and so far I've given away five copies of "Wendigo" and eleven of "Melon Heads" (the latter mostly in Britain for some reason). Hopefully word of mouth would generate some sales after the free period ends.

My friends Jeff Baker and James R. Tuck both had offered advice on the matter. Jeff said people he knew who were living off self-published eBook revenues made money on volume. James agreed with his point--his advice on making money by Kindle-publishing short fiction was "churn and burn."

(I have seen at least one cross-purchase--someone who purchased "I am the Wendigo" also purchased "Melon Heads." I imagine the more I write, the greater this effect will be.)

I do have a fair bit of unsold short fiction inventory, although some of it is unsold for a reason. I've got a Lovecraftian Western called "Old Daniels' Mine," for example, which is a mess whose length makes it problematic to revise. I've heard short stories aren't really worth the time you put into them, so I would probably be better-served working on my longer stuff rather than tinkering with this even if I could make a few bucks in the short run on the Kindle.

However, I do have some unsold stories that are in much better shape.

1. "The Beast of the Bosporus"-The Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire decides to think outside the box after the Battle of Lepanto, and gets involved with the affairs of the Great Old Ones. I wrote the earliest version in 2004 and have been cutting it since then, removing excessive description--an earlier version was described as "Toynbee with monsters"--and even one entire character. Like "Melon Heads," although it's now a much stronger work, I don't have many places left to send it.

2. "Illegal Alien"-Also a college story, this one tells the tale of a group of undocumented immigrants who stumble into the middle of an alien war in the Arizona desert. It also shows off my propensity for awful puns. I've been revising this one for awhile and have been running out of markets to send it.

3. "Breeding Pair"-The title alludes to the practice of collecting male-female pairs of endangered species to ensure there's a safe, viable breeding population somewhere. As applied to humans, this risks venturing into rather raunchy territory, although since I have no interest in writing trash, things don't get very far. The story also ventures into the idea that Christ visited alien races as well, as expressed in C.S. Lewis's essay "Religion and Rocketry," which is contained in his book The World's Last Night, and Alice Meynell's poem "Christ in the Universe."

I've never even sent this to my critique groups, so this might be a bit premature. However, it is set in the same universe as "Illegal Alien," which I'm much more likely to Kindle-publish, and given the content and subject matter, it risks being too risque for the Christian markets and too Christian for the secular markets (on Critters, someone complained about "alien snake Jesus"), leaving self-publishing my only option.

To provide cover art, I may expand my repertoire of artists to include Alex Claw, whose work can be found here. Alex seems more focused on depicting human beings than Udo is, and I've already put some thought into what he might be able to do for "Illegal Alien" and "Breeding Pair."

Selling Online: Amazon.com and Half.com

When I was in college, I joined Half.com, using it to buy my textbooks more cheaply and sell them for more than I'd get if I relied exclusively on the UGA bookstore or the off-campus bookstores in Athens. This was largely a success, even with fairly obscure books like At Thy Call We Did Not Falter and 32 Battalion, which I used for my senior thesis on the end of apartheid and the role played by the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale.

Since then, I've bought and sold a few items here and there. Among other things, I've learned the lesson that if you want to keep more of the money Half.com gives you for shipping, ship as cheaply as possible. For small books, it's better to take a big manila envelope and pack the book into it with a lot of plastic grocery bags for cushioning rather than buy an expensive mailer from the Post Office. I actually lost money on shipping on my most recent transaction because of that.

I recently tried to post the BattleTech source-book Jihad Secrets: The Blake Documents, which I purchased in order to learn the (possible) fate of Clan Wolverine, a renegade Clan that was supposedly exterminated by the other Clans but in all likelihood managed to escape back to the Inner Sphere. Although I'm interested once more in writing BattleTech fiction, I'm not interested in the Word of Blake Jihad or the FedCom Civil War, so I figured it'd be better to make some money selling the book to someone who'd appreciate it more than letting it gather dust.

However, for some reason Half.com would not accept the ISBN number. Rather than let that get me down, I decided to post it for sale on Amazon.com.

Here is my seller page on Amazon. So far it's just Jihad Secrets that's available, but I might post other items that have been sitting on Half.com forever without selling. If you're interested in the Word of Blake Jihad and Clan Wolverine, I'd recommend buying it.

Back To BattleTech

This morning I ordered the Wars of Reaving BattleTech source-book from Barnes and Noble's website, finally remembering to use one of those e-mail coupons my membership entitles me to. Between the 20 percent off and the free express shipping, I saved $10. That covers around a fifth of the two years I've had a membership there, a lot more than 10 percent off an in-store purchase would.

Why am I discussing this purchase? Because I've decided to try my hand at BattleTech fiction once more. In 2009, I sold a short story entitled "Skirmish at the Vale's Edge," which covers one of the early battles of the Clan Wolf invasion of the Inner Sphere, to BattleCorps, the official tie-in site for BattleTech fiction. However, due to some matters I'm not going to discuss, I set aside some partially-written stories and focused on other work.

However, things changed and I decided to give one of those stories a look. The BattleCorps guidelines advise new writers to stay away from established characters and well-known areas of the BT universe, lest a good story be rejected for conflicting with established canon. "Skirmish at the Vale's Edge" describes part of the Battle of the Jallington Vale, which took place during Clan Wolf's invasion of the Oberon Confederation world of Drask's Den. That conquest is described in the 1990s Clan Wolf manual I own as being something resembling the Persian Gulf War--much of the Oberon army was destroyed from the air before ground combat even took place--and I'd researched the Gulf War a fair bit for other projects. There also appeared to be no mention of it beyond the entry in the Clan Wolf book, so it was fair game. And considering how they bought it, it all worked out.

My next story, "El Hijo de Hermano Abdullah," takes places in the Deep Periphery, in the wars between the Ummayyads and the Castilians. That aspect of BattleTech canon is also not well-developed, at least in comparison to the Inner Sphere. I pitched the idea to one of the BattleCorps editors, who suggested I purchase War of Reaving to see what's been going on in the Deep Periphery since then. Given how the Clan worlds are considered part of the Deep Periphery and I had heard there'd be some major doings related to the Ummayyads and the Castilians not mentioned in the Periphery source-book I bought for "Skirmish," I figured it would be a wise investment.

Plus the Wars of Reaving that ravaged Clan Space at the same time as the Word of Blake Jihad trashed the Inner Sphere could be a good source of stories. I am not a fan of the FedCom Civil War and WOB storylines and figured I'd center my BattleTech stories on the Clan Invasion Era in the Inner Sphere and the Periphery other times, but the WoR, which take place outside the Inner Sphere, would also work.

"Free express shipping" means 1-3 business days. Maybe when I get it, I'll review it here.

Book Review: "Earth Unaware: The First Formic War" (NO SPOILERS)

Just got done reading Earth Unaware: The First Formic War,the prequel to Ender's Gameby Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston. Here goes...

Overall, it's a pretty good book. It begins with a bang--the Formic starship is discovered in the first chapter. No slow buildup there. The initial battles between the asteroid miners and the Formics are entertaining. In particular a daring mission to the Formic ship realistically has things go wrong. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy after all.

The opening of the book also shows some of the limitations on personal freedom that would exist in a deep-space mining environment. In my opinion this wouldn't be enough to justify imposing legal limits on who can colonize space or claiming space colonization is fraught with ethical issues--I kid you not, some members of my alternate-history message board believe this--but it contrasts nicely with overly-idealistic frontier depictions.

I did like the character of Lem Jukes, son and heir of one of the solar system's richest men and the commander of a corporate expedition testing out a prototype "glaser" (gravity laser). He seems decent enough deep down--and there are several, in TVTropes terms, "pet the dog" moments that show this--but his desire to prove himself to his father leads him to do some downright nasty things. And much of his inner monologue seems to devoted to finding ways to blame other people for what happened.

I liked how they made the mining ship El Cavador and its crew Venezuelan. That's pretty creative. I've never read anything centered around a group of Venezuelans in deep space, facing an alien invasion.

Finally, after a character goes to all kinds of trouble to get from the Kuiper Belt to the lunar colonies with information on the coming alien invasion, he promptly gets arrested for his highly-illegal method of arrival. The way it's handled is actually kind of amusing.

However, there are some problems. When Lem has to manipulate one of his employees into doing some underhanded but necessary (for him) task, he and another character hash out just how they're going to get him to do the job, then they call him in and it pretty much goes exactly according to plan. Exactly. It would have been better to have something throw Lem and friends for a loop, or skip Lem hashing out the plan. The text could have Lem saying something like, "I've got an idea..." and then we cut to the idea actually being implemented.

Also, when we first meet Lem, how they're going to interfere with the crew of El Cavador is pretty obviously foreshadowed. That's better than it not being foreshadowed at all, but was rather predictable.

Finally, we briefly meet Mazer Rackham, who will play a major role in Ender's Game. However, the focus is taken off him to follow a character who will probably play a major role in shaping Rackham into the man he will be later. It would have been better for Rackham to play a much larger role in the story than he does. There's setting up stuff for the sequel, and then there's pushing forward something that would be really interesting now into the sequel.

Still, it's an entertaining book and it sets up the trilogy depicting the first war very nicely. 8 out of 10. Here's to a trilogy covering the First Formic War and the Second Formic War.

Melon Heads Character Interview: Sarah Haley

Former member of my Lawrenceville writing group Malissa Thomas came up with the idea for interviewing characters in one's writing, which in her case is her serialized novel Finding Monsters. I've decided to borrow the idea, so today on the World According to Quinn, we'll be interviewing Ohio University sophomore Sarah Haley.

Author: So tell us, Sarah, where were you born?

Sarah: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, but my family moved to Chardon when I was three. They wanted a place quieter than the big city. I graduated from Chardon High School in 2010.

Author: What was it like growing up in Chardon?

Sarah (toys with her dark hair): Well, it is a small town where people know each other a lot more. That can be boring sometimes, although Cleveland's not too far away. On the other hand, it's easier to be a big fish in a small pond.

Author: What do you mean?

Sarah: Well, it was a lot easier to get on the track and softball teams when I did.

Author: Two sports? That's impressive.

Sarah: Not at the same time! Track and field and softball are during the same parts of the year. I always wanted to do both, but eventually chose softball.

Author: Why?

Sarah: Well, I'd played softball when I was little, but got into youth track in middle school. I kind of missed softball. Also, playing softball still gave me the chance to run, but doing track would never give me the chance to throw, if you understand what I'm saying.

Author: Did you play in college?

Sarah (shaking her head): I'm sure you've heard of the expression "jack of all trades, master of none." I wasn't bad at either sport, but wasn't good enough to earn a scholarship in either. Besides, when I was in high school, sports took up all of my time. I never even dated anyone. I wanted to join a sorority and socialize more. I still do intramurals though.

Author: How did that go?

Sarah: Well, I joined Chi Omega. They're a wonderful group of girls and do a lot of community service. We also do mixers with the fraternities and some of the schools on campus.

Author: How do those go?

Sarah: You meet a lot of interesting guys that way. Some are real stinkers, but others are cool. My Big Sister just got engaged to a man she met at a mixer with the law school.

Author: Are you dating anyone now?

Sarah: Yep. A nice boy named Ian Barnes, who grew up in the Huntsburg Township. It's not that far away from Chardon, actually. It's easier to hang out when school's out. I met him when he was doing a story on Chi Omega for the school paper and when I took an elective focusing on folklore, guess who was in the class?

Author: That's pretty funny. What are you majoring in?

Sarah: Secondary education and teaching. I'd like to be a high school teacher and coach either track or softball.

Author: Those are worthy goals to have.

Sarah: Thanks!

What will happen when one of the "stinkers" Sarah refers to decides to take revenge on her and her new boyfriend? Find out in my short horror/dark comedy story "Melon Heads," available on Amazon.

"Melon Heads" Available Now

I have just dipped my toe into the waters of self-publishing.  I have made my short story "Melon Heads" available on Amazon.com for the Kindle.

"Melon Heads" is based on an urban legend I read about in college.  The gist of it is that back in the 1950s, a doctor in Ohio offered to treat some hydrocephalic children in his rural home.  Unfortunately for the kids, he was an abusive sadist who experimented on them.  One day they rose up against him, killed him and ate him, and fled into the surrounding woods.  They've been living there ever since, killing animals and (according to legend) attacking people.

I figured nobody had actually done a horror story based on the legend and started writing.  It's gone through many drafts and although still a horror story, now has some touches of black comedy.  I'm writing a screenplay based on it now.

I've set it to be free for the Kindle today and tomorrow, sacrificing two of my five Amazon Prime free promotional days.  If you could read and review (definitely review, even if you don't like it), that would be awesome.

This probably won't be the last one either.  I sold a short story in college called "I am the Wendigo" to a webzine that paid me $20 and then went under a few months later.  Now the original market is gone, I can do with it what I'd like, but the market for horror reprints isn't that strong.  Amazon.com provides a perfect solution.

Movie Review: "Starship Troopers: Invasion" (2012)

The other day, I drove up to North Fulton's last Blockbuster Video store and rented the new animated film Starship Troopers: Invasion.  Going to return it soon, but figured I'd review it first...

The Plot

The (surviving) major characters of the live-action film--Johnny Rico (now a general), Carmen Ibanez (a ship captain in her own right), and Carl Jenkins (an intelligence and ESP bigwig)--are brought back together when Carl requisitions Carmen's ship for a classified purpose he claims will win them the war.  When the Federation loses contact with the ship, Carmen and some Mobile Infantry have to get it back.

The Good

*It was a straight-up entertaining animated bug-blasting festival and was pretty fun to watch. Not necessarily all that thoughtful (see my comment on the politics), but it was still entertaining.  When I was a lot younger, I watched the animated series Starship Troopers: Roughnecks and this was a good reminder of that.

*It's an animated movie intended for adults. In the United States, animation is generally considered stuff for kids, with many attempts at using it for more mature audiences failing miserably (the awesome Titan A.E.) comes to mind.  However, outside of the U.S., animation can be used to tell more adult-oriented stories.  The movie was actually made in Japan, which is very well-known for that sort of thing.  In this case, there's much more violence (with blood), more realistic military cursing, nudity, and sex.

*It stayed out of politics entirely. The book depicted a society where one had to serve in the military (or some other dangerous sort of public service, although this is less clear) in order to vote, with the idea that if one had to sacrifice for something, one would appreciate it more and use it more wisely.  Paul Verhoeven, who was in charge of the first film, did not agree and depicted the Terran Federation as being some kind of fascist-ish regime that regulated how many children one could have, televised executions, may have tried to pass off a natural asteroid impact as an alien attack for its own purposes, and then bungled the military "response."  I don't agree with limiting the franchise in this manner ("no taxation without representation" should be reason enough), but that isn't fascistic.

Verhoeven could have made his point about fascism, war, propaganda, etc. by making an original movie and not trashing one of the best science fiction writers of the 20th Century by depicting his ideas as faux Nazism.  Thank God (I mean that) they're remaking it, and they get the bloody point.

*The movie is largely centered on Carmen, who was secondary to Johnny in the original film and is only referenced in the direct-to-video live-action sequels.  Johnny is there and he plays a pivotal role later on, but it's mostly her show.  I really wasn't expecting that.  Sci-fi action movies are generally a boys' club, but this is rather different.

*The sniper girl Trig is apparently a human from a non-Earth human colony, since she lost her family and hometown to a Bug assault. The first film depicts an asteroid strike on Buenoes Aires but otherwise it doesn't seem the Bugs have actually attacked Earth. Although in the book the Terran Federation included multiple planets, the film barely touches on human colonization of other worlds (a Mormon attempt to colonize a Bug world goes predictably badly) and although the animated TV series depicts other worlds, I don't recall any human settlements.

*Powered armor.  That was one thing they left out of the first movie (so they could depict people wearing SWAT gear getting massacred to make an antiwar point I suppose), but finally managed to bring in for the third.  In this one, like in the animated series, most of the soldiers wear roughly human-sized power suits, with the book-style uber-powered armor of the third film appearing in the climax.  On the DVD commentary, one of the people involved said by making it animated, they could depict stuff like the powered armor that would be too expensive to do live-action.

*The movie in general has some really good visuals like mangled bodies floating in zero-gravity, ship-to-ship combat, etc.  See my last comment about how you can do some stuff with animation you can't do live-action.

The Bad

*The completely gratuitous Carmen shower scene was ridiculous.  They start at her feet, pan up to her behind and come around for her breasts, all while this soft sexy music is playing.  Then she starts banging on the wall of the shower and cursing Carl for stealing her ship.  The latter is a character moment--it shows how fixated she is on the ship she commanded and getting it back--but in context, the whole scene is just aggravatingly dumb.


*Carl wasn't that much of a jerk in the first movie.  The only remotely jerky action I can recall is him telepathically prompting his ferret to bug his mother, which isn't especially jerky. In fact, even though he did dress like some escaped Nazi, it's strongly implied he used his telepathy to help Johnny rescue Carmen when her shuttle crashed in Bug territory, which is actually rather nice. One could argue that power corrupts, but Carmen flat-out tells him "you always were an asshole."  Granted, it's been years since I saw the original, but I don't remember any friction between the two of them back when they were in high school.

*During a briefing, Johnny asks Carmen out on a date, which she responds to by walking out of the briefing room.  Depicting Johnny pining after Carmen ten to twenty years after she Dear John'd him is kind of pathetic, plus since he's a general now and giving her orders, that would be really inappropriate.  It does play an important role later in the film and in context I suspect it was intended to be funny, but still.

*One of the characters has extra-sensory powers but didn't have them in the strength needed for the ESP program so he ended up a grunt.  One of the female characters gets all hot and bothered and says that this must be why he always knows when she's in the shower.

(They retain the coed showers present in the first film.)

The character's (weak) telepathy is a Chekhov's gun that should have been fired.  Given how the Bugs seem to run on the same frequencies as human telepaths (we see this to a degree in the first movie and it's a big plot point here), I would have loved to have seen this actually used somewhere. Perhaps in some key fight scene he manages to set the Bugs against each other?


*When Johnny orders the soldiers to investigate Carmen's missing ship, the soldiers agree to do it only if they let an officer who was jailed by Carl (for reasons I won't get into due to spoilers) lead them. Johnny agrees, but said this will not be prejudicial to his court-martial. The attempt to impose conditions, especially the way they did it, comes off as borderline insubordination.  It would have been better if one of the soldiers had asked more respectfully, citing said officer's record, and Johnny considered it and agreed.  THEN he can make the "this will be in no way prejudicial to his trial" comment.

*Since Casper Van Dien, who played Johnny in the original, executive-produced the film, it wouldn't have been that difficult to have him do Johnny's voice-acting.  Consider it something in the same vein as Peter Cullen always being the voice of Optimus Prime. I didn't mind the main characters being voiced by different actors than the ones who played them in the film (with the exception of Carl, who came off as really prissy at the beginning), but still.

*It was difficult to tell some of the lesser characters apart.

The Verdict

A fun romp that could have been a bit better, but I liked it better than the first movie.  7.5 out of 10.