Author Topic: PC025: Anywhere There’s a Game  (Read 21846 times)

ryos

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Reply #25 on: September 23, 2008, 05:45:31 PM
I am not a sports fan either :P and i wasnt a fan of that recent Basketball story over at Escape Pod, but i really liked this one, it was an interesting tale. One question, the girl in the last story was she supposed to be dead or just badly injured?

Zombified, without a doubt.



ieDaddy

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Reply #26 on: September 24, 2008, 08:09:08 PM
I am not a sports fan either :P and i wasnt a fan of that recent Basketball story over at Escape Pod, but i really liked this one, it was an interesting tale. One question, the girl in the last story was she supposed to be dead or just badly injured?

Zombified, without a doubt.
Yeah, I believe the point of the last character was that she really loved to play the game, even to the point not letting a little thing like death stop her from showing up for game time.



deflective

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Reply #27 on: September 24, 2008, 08:40:00 PM
i quite enjoyed this one. the creative structure of the story was engaging.



eytanz

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Reply #28 on: September 25, 2008, 01:38:50 AM
I liked this story. Basketball doesn't interest me, but the interaction of fantasy and sports was very well done.

Best PC intro so far, certainly.



Hatton

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Reply #29 on: September 25, 2008, 07:06:01 PM
I liked the story and enjoyed the connective theme, though personally I wonder if it wouldn't have done better as a series of flash pieces rather than a single episode.

Normal is just a setting on the washing machine.


Corydon

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Reply #30 on: September 25, 2008, 07:33:06 PM
It's comforting, in a way, that I'm echoing so many people who feel the same way I do.  I don't watch a lot of sports (I actually do enjoy basketball and baseball, just not enough to devote the time it takes to follow them), but I love reading about them.  There's a cliche that the best writing in the newspaper business is in the sports section.  Since what actually happens in a given game isn't all that momentous or exciting, the writers have to find ways to make it interesting.

Anyway, that's a roundabout way of explaining why I enjoyed this story so much.  It's not really about basketball as it about basketball as a reflection of aspects of the narrator's personality.  As he says near the end, you don't play basketball against the other team; you play against yourself.  In the same way, each of the players he describes illuminates a little more about his own struggles.  Good stuff.



sjg1978

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Reply #31 on: November 05, 2008, 12:35:36 PM
Well, I listened to this story very shortly after EP177 Usurpers, so I'm certain that colored my perception.
This is a much more enjoyable and readable story than Usurpers.

And the reader sounded to me just like he was a retired basketball player, except that he really didn't seem to be vain enough.
(I associate vanity with just about any retired sports star.) So, overall, this gets a thumbs-up from me.



Unblinking

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Reply #32 on: January 06, 2010, 05:56:48 PM
I liked this story, which in retrospect is a bit surprising.  I pretty much uniformly hate any story about sports, or even ones which use sport as the major setting, and a bunch of sequential stories like this would often have me complaining "this isn't a single story".

But I really liked it!  The fantasy elements made the game more interesting, and each of the stories hooked me in by introducing a new strange individual but gave themselves lasting value by revealing more about the protagonist through the other person's story.  This whole story is very solid, one I'd definitely listen to again.  I will say that van Eekhout has very consistent quality, I don't think I've disliked anything of his that I've read.