Mitchell Loughlin’s Reviews > Armada > Status Update

When he sits down for orientation he sits with the hot chick because of course he does. Despite her being atleast 5 years older she has no qualms with flirting with a high schooler. A bit icky. She is a super nerd

More ready player one parallels
The main characters name is Z.
Lexi is just a reskinned Artemis. They interact with the main characters the same exact way
Cynicism about humanity

Everything in armada is real except the names. This secret government organization has been funneling money into the game industry as anti alien propaganda for years (ironically our own government does this with call of duty and war movies)
He enters the base and is given a futuristic smart phone that doubles as a gun and drone control
He is being recruited along with many of the other highly ranked game characters

The first mission in space does not go well. They get about halfway through the mission before the icebreaker that is trying to punch a whole into the planet, is destroyed and everyone loses. Zak passes out in his Star Wars sheets.
The next morning his mom makes dinner for breakfast and they exchange I love yous. when he gets to school He is engaged by his bullies, but threatens them with a tire iron.

A chapter dedicated to how hot his mom is and how that’s makes his life harder. She’s also nerdy, smarty, and caring but has been spending less time with him as he gets closer to his father’s age when he died (assassinated) and he looks just like him.

He’s is #7 in the world at armada. Tonight’s mission is the first to attack the alien planet.

Hard not to make connections between ready player one and this game both characters are on the edge of graduating high school obsessed with a decade that their male idolize role models grew up in. references a lot of the same movies and video games. There is a rush band reference, which is in ready player two
Fun book so far this game is definitely going to be used in income against aliens unless he’s just crazy

He goes to “work” which is a game store with a Rich and eccentric owner that doesn’t care about turning a profit and just wants to hang around with like-minded nerds. The man is also obsessed with this game developer who made Armada, but is instead of playing one of the earlier versions of the games that instead of dog fighting drones is focused on ground combat drones. Two are both very skilled.

Zak idolize his father from the ages of 0 to 10 until he found a manuscript hidden in the attic that outlined his father’s theory that the military was using video games to train every day people to find against alien invaders
He had kind of repressed this memory, but now I was putting the strings together between his favorite game Armada and this theory. This game is a drone combat style alien invaders game

After seeing this, he realizes that his class bully is picking on a kid again and retaliates. Him and this bully have a long history including getting into some kind of altercation back in middle school that earned him the name Zak attack. Before you can get any further storms out of the classroom and head home, terrified that he has developed schizophrenia like his father.

Zack Starman, who is essentially Wade Watts with a 80s obsession instead of a 70s is sitting in class one day when he sees a UFO out the window except it’s the exact model seen in the video game Armada that he has been playing obsessively for months. He quickly determines that he is hallucinating partially because of his obsessive playing and partially because his late father seems to have had schizophrenia