Customer Reviews

California Voodoo Game

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This second followup to the cult hit "Dream Park" is not as good as its inspiration, but is mounds better than its predecessor, "The Barsoom Project". I'll save my Barsoom bashing for another review, though, and just talk about "The California Voodoo Game" in this one.

This novel has everything that was good about "Dream Park", but still manages to be a tedious, less interesting version of the original. Most of the familiar characters are back, Griffin, the tough-as-nails Security Chief with the heart of gold, Acacia Garcia, the tough-as-nails gamer with the squishy insides, Tony McWhirter, the hacker criminal made good. They're all tossed into the Dream park salad to play a game called "California Voodoo", which would be fine if not for the fact that - DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUUHHHH - someone get's murdered before the game and the Dream Park staff must infiltrate the game in order to catch the killer without setting off the alarms, spooking the gamers or losing their merchandising rights.

Just like the other two novels.

Sadly, this outing picks up a little of the creaky, world-weariness of the second book and keeps none of the rollicking, out and out fun of the first. The concept of Voodoo magick played out in a gigantic, ruined building is at once interesting and limiting. The authors, for all their bibliographic citations, show only a rudimentary understanding of <i>vodoun</i> and its many variations. The random appearance of loa is distracting and confusing.

The thing that was most fun about "Dream Park" was the fact that Griffin had to join a game as a player and track his prey from under cover; this meant the reader got to experience the game much as the players did. Here, the real focus is on the investigation. Too much takes place outside the game, too little explanation goes into the game and the authors don't really support the world they've created within the walls of Dream Park.

Frankly, the mystery just isn't that compelling. While the outcome may have cost Dream Park's parent company a ton of dough, I just didn't care. While the villain had murdered someone in the beginning of the book, I just didn't care about the victim or the methods used to catch the killer. What I DID care about was The Game. And there just wasn't enough game to go around.

The writing duo's prose this time around is more accessible than in The Barsoom Project and those reading the series for the first time will not be too disappointed to finish here instead of there. But overall, the magic feels like it's gone.

When science fiction like this emerges, it brings a sense of wonder, a moment of shock. "This Isn't Far Away!". California Voodoo Game tip-toes the fine lines of modern technology to bring a tale that is intriguing and imaginative. When role-players of our present meet and adopt the virtual reality technology of the near-future, then the world of this novel isn't far away.

The cast of characters is vast, and often we don't get a very indepth vision of them. The Game, which takes on a life of its own for the players, is the most fully fleshed of the "characters". The Game, virtually painted over a huge and somewhat hazardous real-world, is made even more risky when some of the players are playing for higher stakes and breaking every rule.

Okay, so the plot and the writing wasn't the greatest in Sci Fi Fiction today. The characters won't glow in godly pop-culturdom for years to come. But--the technology, the fantasy of this not-so-distant future is so compelling, it makes this book a near perfect escape.

Gaming geeks of the world..rejoice! This one is for you. To the future of gaming..closer than we imagine.

Dream Park was great, and California Voodoo Game even better. If the role-playing computer geeks ever conquer Disney World, it will be like this.

I would like to note that while Larry Niven can be seen in this work, the flavor is much more like Steve Barnes' work.

Starting with Dream Park, and ending with California Voodoo Game, Larry paints a fantastic picture of the future of entertainment and fantasy gaming, while keeping the action fast paced and the technology believable. This book is the best of the three and not to be missed.

If you're already a fan of Dream Park, this is a decent read. Don't expect it to be as good as the original, but it's worth the cost for a light, entertaining read.

Once again, Larry Niven proves himself to be a master of storytelling, weaving fantasy and science into a stunning tale of swordplay and circuitry, fencing and foul play. Definitely the best of the Dream Park series

The ending uses the torque of the climactic fight scene brilliantly; the beginning uses the Kama Sutra Gaming Society just enough. I'd like to see Niven use 'The Theory and Practice of Instant Learning' in his Internet scenes: a teleoperated World Wide Dream Park?

On a personal note on the progression of time, I remember picking up my copy of The California Voodoo Game from the second-hand section of Rainy Day Books (Fairway, Kansas) and reading it while my mom was at work. I was, at most, 13.

This was the first book I ever read in the Dream Park series - and it lead to some pretty wild speculation about my own future career. Somehow I parlayed my skills at math (awesome) and tennis (not so hot) to become a fearsome warrior the likes of which the world had never seen... Two decades later, I suck at math, Rainy Day Books is on Twitter and The California Voodoo Game is as wildly entertaining as ever.

First published in 1992, The California Voodoo Game is the third and final book in Niven and Barnes' Dream Park series. The overriding premise is that, in the 2050s, the ultimate spectator sport is Live Action Role Playing (LARP). The geeks have successfully inherited the earth.

"Gaming" is a combination of physical skill, strategy and some pretty phenomenal holographic technology. Players wear special lenses that let them "see" things based on their character's powers and skills. Holographic special effects abound, but there's also a lot of climbing around, leaping off of things and whacking at props with foam-rubber blades.

The lion's share of the trilogies entertainment value comes out of these scenes. Not just watching the characters crawl around being chased by tentacle-monsters, but also seeing how those tentacle-monsters were brought to life. The California Voodoo Game goes a step further than the other two books in the series: the teams in the Game are competing against one another - something like the SuperBowl of Swords n' Sorcery.

If there's a flaw in the series, it is the heart-on-its-sleeve charge to promote LARPing. My 13-year-old self may have glided past the heavy-handed messaging in search of more action (or the sex scenes), but my 30 year-old self didn't. Like with Piers Anthony's Killobyte, the authors of the Dream Park series aren't happy to let an entertaining concept sell itself. Showing that fantasy/sport sword-gaming will be COMPLETELY AWESOME is a very easy pitch. Showing LARPing as the means to send people to Mars, get nerds laid and end terrorist conflicts... that's over-egging it.

More skillfully done, each of the novels combines a murder mystery with a Game. Although using a Game to cure eating disorders is a stretch (seriously, that's book two), the combination of fantasy escapism & professional sporting is a fantastic foundation for intrigue. The California Voodoo Game is a particularly well-crafted mystery - the reader knows whodunnit from the early pages (hell, everyone does) - but the "why" is a tangled mystery that isn't revealed until the very end.

Of the three books in the Dream Park series, Voodoo is perhaps the most entertaining - but also has the weakest characters of the lot. The series protagonist, Alex Griffin (the theme park's head of security) is almost a background character. A host of other characters return from the first book in the series, including the man-eating Acacia Garcia (don't worry, man-geeks, she's swiftly put back in her place).

If anyone shines through, it is Nigel Bishop, the book's villain. A recently-reinstated Gaming legend, Bishop literally wrote the book on Game strategy. A villain and a genius, the majority of the book is spend with his intellectual inferiors (the good guys) trying to figure out what he's doing. He's also a gourmet chef, a ninja warrior, an umpteenth-level wizard and a tiger in the sack. If it weren't for his sociopathic tendencies, he'd be a fantasy reader's aspiration. As it is, he's still the most compelling character in the book.

Although it is indefensibly cheesy, The California Voodoo Game is now even more entertaining than ever. It is also a two-decades old, charmingly optimistic look at a geektopia future, where nerds of all descriptions have come up with a way to be publicly lauded for their geekery. It is an undeniably appealing future - and that's part of the book's escapist appeal.

Alex Griffin is back as the intrepid Chief of Security at the theme park of tomorrow, where the adventures are scripted but the gamers are on their own. Welcome back to Dream Park - Niven and Barnes' not-so-futuristic getaway resort, where a combination of animatronics, live actors, holograms, and computer-aided design allows well-heeled patrons to participate in the fantasy adventure of a lifetime. Once again there's been a murder at Dream Park, and once again one of the gamers must be the culprit, so once again Griffin has to join the game to try and identify the killer.

You don't need to read the other books to enjoy this bi-leveled adventure-ride, although it might be best to read Dream Park first to get to know the characters better. As the title suggests, this time around the game deals with a uniquely Californian brand of voodoo, but Griffin has his hands full keeping his eye on the five competing teams of fanatical gamers who seem willing to go to any length to win. As in the previous novels, the Game really steals the show, so this book is recommended for gamers more than for sci-fi readers, who won't find much in the way of scientific innovation here. But there's plenty of action and strategy both in and out of the Game, so despite the feeling that we've seen it all before, this may be the best of the three Dream Park novels. This volume's mystery gets a much neater resolution than that of the original novel, while the book as a whole possesses considerably more meat than the lightweight Barsoom Project.

Again, a murder is committed in Dream Park, and this time the deceased is Alex Griffin's girlfriend. That was probably a mistake.

The California Voodoo Game is massive, involving several teams of top class players, and five Gamemasters, including Tony McWhirter.

Griffin again has to join the game, but this time as a NPC guide. Eventually they discover a complicated, very clever game of industrial espionage is being played within the Voodoo Game itself.