It was fun. I almost passed it up because some early reviews were poor, but then some later reviews were raves, so I decided to try it and judge for myself. For me it falls somewhere in the middle. It's a quite fun book but fluffy book. I'm just the right age to enjoy all of the '80s references, so that was enjoyable, I had a lot of laughs with it. Even though I'm not a huge geek, I probably picked up on at least 75-80% of the references. It might be pretty annoying to anyone who wasn't at least a teenager in the '80s or who doesn't have at least a passing familiarity with '80s TV, movies and games though, it's huge, huge part of the book.

But considering that the '80s frame of reference seems to aim the book at readers in their mid-30s and older, the almost young adult tone of the story was a bit odd. The main characters are all 18 and 19 years old and the book reads more like a young adult fantasy than like a serious sci-fi novel in most respects. There are occasional glancing attempts to deal with more serious themes like whether it's possible to really connect with people you only know online, but mostly it's a simplistic adventure story of the little man against the big, bad corporation. It seems pretty obvious from the beginning that the kids are the heroes, and pretty darn unlikely that they're the only ones who are suddenly so successful after five years of the contest going on and consistently so successful throughout three levels of the contest as well. It's as much a fantasy as it is sci-fi on that level. It's just a Dungeon's & Dragon book translated into a creative sci-fi format, really. The story is actually pretty shallow, but it's very entertainingly told if you happen to enjoy tons of pop culture references.  Even though there was really no doubt as to how things would turn out, the author still managed to make it quite the page-turner. So even though I might have liked a bit more depth to the character development or world-building, overall it was a fun book that I'd recommend.