Word: flashback
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...work getting done in novels. Sure, fictional characters eat, drink, have sex, drive around, and boy do they talk, talk, talk, but when it comes to putting in an honest day's hard labor, suddenly, whoops! It's time for a scene change, or a flashback, or a few pages of deep internal monologue. That's what makes Elizabeth Gaffney's Metropolis (Random House; 461 pages) and Thomas Kelly's Empire Rising (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 390 pages) so unusual. They don't push work into the margins: Their characters actually get stuff done...
...Lipnicki, the kid from Jerry Maguire. But these doubts are pulverized by the book's devastating set pieces, which are of the kind only a genuine talent who knows exactly what he wants to say can pull off. Foer's rendition of the Allied bombing of Dresden, in a flashback involving Oskar's grandfather Thomas, has the punishing, visceral vividness of the battle scenes from The Red Badge of Courage. "Rapid, approaching explosions" sound "like an applauding audience running toward us." After the first wave of bombs, Thomas rushes out into the firestorm to find his girlfriend: "I grabbed...
...downside, Flashback has more than 75% fewer games than Anthology, and its cheap-feeling joystick was hard to maneuver. Even in Breakout, where you just hit a ball with a paddle in order to demolish a brick wall, it was impossible to glide the paddle smoothly from one side of the screen to the other...
...More problematic was Flashback's rendition of Adventure, in which you must find a golden chalice and take it to a castle. The sounds were noticeably altered from the original, and the game's closing sequence was a poor imitation as well. Declared a tester: "This thing is a total rip-off. The only reason to play these games is for the nostalgia value, and it doesn't even have that...
...There were a few gripes. As with Flashback, it was hard to maneuver at times using the PS2 controller. And the sports titles have not aged well. "It's stick figures hitting ground balls," said a tester who played Home Run and Realsports Baseball. Still, for $20, Atari Anthology provides pretty good bang for your buck...