Game Over, Pete Watson by Joe Schreiber (review)

On the day Brawl-a-Thon 3000 XL, the hottest new video game, is slated for release, Pete Watson finds himself a bit light on cash and decides to hold an impromptu garage sale to make up the difference. After he sells a vintage console of his dad’s to the neighborhood exterminator, though, his dad gets kidnapped before his eyes. Pete discovers that his father is a CIA agent and is now trapped in the gaming system, which also doubles as a database for government secrets. Aided by his geeky ex-best friend Wesley and Wesley’s attractive older sister, Pete must stop the supervillain bent on releasing a virus into most of the world’s computer systems by going into the game himself. Wacky comedy carries the day, and the breathless pace, short chapters, and frequent spot art (sometimes cartoonish line drawing, sometimes figures inspired by video game graphics) make this novel zoom. However, the silliness amps up to levels that will lead those playing along at home to incredulity by the end (a monetary amount that’s so large that the number will literally kill you without protection, for example), and the rushed conclusion gets lost in tired gags that even Pete’s conversational narration can’t surmount. Additionally, the characters remain as flat as their eight-bit counterparts in the game world. Nevertheless, the appeal to multimodality (Pete often refers to interactive features that a hypothetical “digital version of this book” will have) is going to have reluctant reader appeal, giving this a chance to see some play as a print followup to the success of films like Wreck-It Ralph and TRON: Legacy.