Wildermyth will fill the XCOM sized hole in your heart.

 

 

After only 3 hours with this already critically acclaimed gem, I smell a GOTY. This husband/wife team has absolutely blown me away. A simple, kid friendly, style belies fantastic turn based tactics and charming characterization. Like… imagine if your xcom sqaudies could talk and had procedurally generated character arcs with each other. I've logged an embarrassing amount of time in war of the chosen and I say these tactics measure up. Just make it through the first act, the training wheels will come flying off, I promise.There's only a couple thousand people playing this on steam and folks... we need to pump those numbers up. This deserves a modding second life akin to skyrim. 

It's dialogue is charming in it's earnestness and you'll love it if you give it a chance.

 

Invincible Review: Bleeding Gods

 

First off I'd like to thank wikipedia who, many years ago while The Walking Dead was still pretty good, kept me from overly spoiling myself for Kirkman's second biggest claim to fame. An ultra violent superhero deconstruction called Invincible.

The surface level of the comic, as well as Amazon's 40 minute animated treatment, doesn't give the sense that there's anything overly special about it. A teenage son of superman stand in, omni-man, gets superpowers and learns how to use them while navigating high school relationships. Synopsis wise it's been done to death. What can a little blood and emotional trauma really add to that sort of thing? For me, quite a damn bit.

 

I'm a sucker for a good inverted murder mystery and this first season revolves around a damn fine superhero Columbo caper. What's more is the cast is stacked to the gills both with guys you've known for years (Stephen Yeung, Sandra Oh, J.K. Simmons) as well as Saturday morning cartoon wrecking crew dudes (Grey Griffin, Clancy Brown, Kevin Michael Richardson). Holy balls do I love this cast. 

For one it shows that it, like it's source material, it isn't embarrassed of where it came from. It loves a good supervillain quip fest but it also has realistic expectations for the actions of teenagers put in charge of life and death circumstances. The innocent lives lost in a downtown laser gun fight are given the weight of a war movie and it just. frikken. works. Pile on some government intrigue with a healthy dollop of Walton Goggins and I'm in for the long run.

There are some sour notes, unfortunately. Some comedy bits work better than others, Invincible's gay best friend feels more like a ticked box than a human being, and a lot of the teenage romance dialogue falls uncomfortably flat. Though the slow disintegration of Omni-man's marriage really worked for me. J.K. Simmons has earned a black belt in passive-aggressive rage.

There's alot more I'd like to share, Clancy Brown's homicide detective for one and Jon Hamm's character for another. But the less you know going in the better. It's a solid "coming of age" superhero yarn first then it lets politics, biology, greed, and human error get in the way. I can't recommend it enough.
             

Put some pepper on the next one

Postcard from Vegas

 1

 

If you asked me 2 weeks ago if I'd ever play new vegas again I'd have flatly said no. There are games I've played to death and then there is the one game I own on steam with a play time clock in quadruple digits. Hbomberguy's video got to me, though. It made me think about how ridged my playstyle was and how I only ever played Lonesome road once. For years I'd get tired 20 hours into a run and bail. NO MORE.

I'm much more comfortable with the mod manager now and it wasn't long until I had all of the guns and most of the textures looking... well not AMAZING but pretty damn good considering. Since I left the mod community they added an incredible 300+ radio new vegas catalogue and a handy Fallout 4 style loot preview.

 

This.... changes EVERYTHING. Like at the end of the game it will have saved me HOURS in looting time.

All this adds up to me falling in love for the first time in 5 years. I'm staying away from stealth, speech, and medicine as well as sticking to the one perk every other level rule; which I've never stomached before. Suffice it to say... being a mealy mouthed dim wit instead of a silver tongued genius kicks me out of a lot of early quests and I've had to hustle 2,000 caps in other ways.

Yes, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of where all the best guns and skill books are but I've forgotten enough about NV's ingenious traps to get myself into trouble and I'm just... sucked in. I'm also sure I've never reached 2,000 caps this fast either. I'm both better and worse at this game than I remember and for a game I've practically memorized that's pretty remarkable. 

Damn, Lucky, you look good.

Borderlands 3 Review: Problematic Fav

There's a an obvious tell bad comedians have when trying to compensate for material that they either haven't thought through enough or don't even understand. They talk too loud and hit the punchline too hard. The vast majority of those guys wind up on morning commute radio. This is the tenor of the game and it's an albatross that hangs heavy over nearly every minute of it. It's not the worst written game I've ever played, that crown belongs to the ultimate flavor experience. But it has fallen hard since Bl2 and the prequel.

Borderlands 2, to me at least, was written by folks with a decent sense of humor. I love that game to death and it's with a heavy heart I condemn the entire crew of BL3 to comedy jail. Because they just don't get it and their desperation is exhausting. If you don't get the joke the first time they will beat you over the head with it again and again. I will totally understand people who play the first couple hours and walk away for good. That's a shame.

To be faiiiiiiiir, there are some rock solid side quests out there. Childhood's End in particular.

That's a shame because mechanically and visually this is everything I wanted and more. The last week has flown by in a glorious blur of gun fire and loot'splosions. The shooting has never been tighter. The weapons have never been more useful and varied. The skill trees have never been more clear and immediately impactful. This is Borderlands perfected and I god damn love it. If you never got on the Borderlands train in the past this definitely won't change your mind. What this game does best is a laundry list of tiny tweaks and improvements that slowly, but inevitably, bowled me over.

Your class mods now share the icons of the skills they affect so you don't have to remember all their  convoluted names. The map lets you know when a quest icon is above or below you by making them obviously bigger or smaller. Like, when you're right under a marker it will take up a third of the mini map. It's great. You can fast travel at any time to any FT station or to your vehicle which, on pc at least, is near instantaneous.

There's more I want to say about it's magnificent end game grind, but you should find that out on your own. The single best improvement to me is the loosening of the loot drop purse strings. In Borderlands 1 through the pre-sequel you would go hours without seeing anything purple and nearly entire campaigns without seeing anything legendary. It was an insultingly brutal grind meant, I think, to encourage co op play. What happened instead was that people cheated like hell. Strangers would vomit waterfalls of legendaries at you just so you could keep up with them. So I learned to cheat too. The loot tables for 3 are more generous than even I ever wanted them to be and it works. It works because you need to read closer to what weapons you actually like rather than the color. There may be blue sniper rifles more suited to your needs than gold smgs and it never stops being fun to experiment. Mostly because there are so many GD gunz.

A rifle most dashing.

That assault rifle may not look like much from it's bare stats but if I never gave it a spin I wouldn't have discovered it's cryogenic rocket alt-fire. Being able to switch on the fly between 2 different elements on a maliwan pistol was a godsend. Flipping a sniper barrel and turning it into a shotgun gave me so many ideas I cackled out loud. A revolver with homing bullets that lets you see invisible loot crates in it's scope was the only mission based weapon I've ever been sad to see whisked from my backpack. I haven't stopped being surprised for 30 hours and I probably won't for a year or 2.

And to finally throw the writers a bone, they made a damn good campaign. The story beats work, a handful of new characters hit (frikkin' loved Clay), the base idea behind most of the levels are fantastic. I also appreciated how the endgame discussions on how to save the universe were between 3 women. If you decided to play as Amara or Moze, it would be between 4 women. That was pretty neat. I'm not happy the entire ending of the pre-sequel was retconed out of existence but I did like fighting my favorite vault hunter to the death. I always thought she'd make a hell of a boss and I love being right.

All that and bunch of other showstopping fights save Bl3 from it's obvious shortcomings. But Anthony Burch should have still been there, David Eddings should still be claptrap, and Randy Pitchford should have stepped down. Pitchford is a pox on an otherwise talented studio. Eddings did damn good work on clappy for 7 years, for free apparently, and was let go when he wanted actor's scale. His replacement is insultingly sub par. Burch was a fun writer who gave the series it's best villain and if his sister Ashley's vanishingly small cameo as Tina is any indication; the parting was not amicable.What kind of self destructive jerk is responsible? The same genius who picks a legal fight with his own accountant.

I love this game but it cut off it's nose to spite it's face in the service of one man's ego. That's a tragedy and it infuriates me to think about what kind of good work we lost because of it. If you love this series, you're gonna get your money's worth, lord knows I'll be playing this sucker well into 2021. The galaxy map is suspiciously empty and I look forward to what this team comes up with even if they don't tighten up the dialogue. But seriously... they need to.

Never met a photo mode I didn't like.

Fix your Borderlands 3 framerate problems with this one weird trick.

This one time on Eden-6...

That title started out as a click bait joke but I think it may be, in fact, click bait. Either way, a frick ton of PC players are having framerate issues with a game that reeeeeeeally shouldn't have any. When you knock a game down to PS3 fidelity and you still can't get through a firefight without any chugging, it's not you, it's the code. But I fixed it. It wasn't because of nvidia tweaks, it wasn't because I turned off core 0, or any of the other of the arcane hoops message boards have you jump through. Though ending the Epic client did help a fair bit... curious, that.

I activated directX 12 and waited 12 minutes for the damn thing to boot up.

See I like most people assumed after 10 minutes that dx12 just didn't work. It does! But it's in beta, covered in warning signs, and yes it's the same wait to get back in every time. BUT IT WORKS. Buttery smooth 60 fps with high settings. That's all I wanted and I can finally look down a scope without my target escaping through dropped frames. That was driving me absolutely apesh*t.

After 15 years in hell, Terry Pratchett's The Watch, is finally getting casted.

Hi! How are you? I've drifted away from the blog pretty consistently for a year now and I'm sorry. I have no explanations, only excuses. I thought I'd make a fresh start with some good news. For the first time since his death we're getting another stab at the adaptation of Pratchett's best work: The Watch series. We've gotten the odd BBC film here and there (none of which I'm particularly fond of) Going Postal was actually not terrible and it was even casted pretty brilliantly in places. Ingrid Berdal was a damn good Sgt. Angua and they need to give Charles Dance whatever he wants to be the Patrician again.

But out of all the films they've never dared give Samuel Vimes the disservice of a one off cameo. He's the most lovably sardonic character of one of the most lovably sardonic writers who ever lived. Now he'll finally have a face. Richard Dormer's face. Or the guy with 9 lives from Game of Thrones. He had a flaming sword? You remember. This is not a bad plan and I'm on my knees praying this is, in return, not a bad show. I still believe Disworld needs to be a Groening level animated series to really click but there's no reason it can't get to Dr. Who levels of recognition. Right? Anywho, here's the rest of the cast so far.

Lodge 49 Season 1 Review: Shell Game of the Gods

It takes talent to make a brutally honest point without talking down to anyone. Lodge 49 is like a low level LSD trip at your own intervention. I can't remember anything in print or film skewering my life choices as deftly as this. The kicker is it does all that while never being a total downer. It's a tight, intense, hug of a show. But you gotta jump in with both feet and roll with it.

The death of his father and the demise of the pool shop they ran together puts Dudley in a state of denial. His sister isn't any better off emotionally what with her hooters-esque waitress job and her dad's crushing debt. This sounds like it should be either boring or depressing but there's just something about the characterization and the way every scene flows that keeps you hooked. Plus once Dud stumbles into the lodge The gears shift into the rest of the season's comfy and occasionally terrifying groove.

The series branches off into two distinct halves. One with Dud and Ernie (plumbing salesman and Luminous Knight of the Order of the Lynx) trying to keep the place afloat in the wake of a leadership vacuum. The other is Liz's soul flaying journey of self destruction. This show is clearly written by service industry veterans and it all hit so close to home I jumped ahead more than once out of sheer PTSD. Dreaming I was at work was my last straw too.

Her story didn't arc the way I expected it to. Nothing arced the way I expected it to. Each story thread ends like a shaggy dog only for a new thread to pop up to make you forget about the other one. Then, If you really pay attention, answers you had for questions 3 episodes ago seep through almost like background gags.The Lodge's restraint from ever going full Twin Peaks is awe inspiring. It's got some fun mythology but it knows everybody is showing up for the character drama. A scene involving someone telling their mom that they hate her is the most brutal 2 minutes of acting I've seen all year.

 

The Lodge might be too weird for you and that's ok. There's a lot of purposely weird and dreamlike dialogue. I get that some people need to be in the right kind of mood for that. Or at least the right kind of inebriation. Do it. Fill that tumbler to the brim and ponder the eternal with Dud and the gang. You're gonna see some weird, messed up sh*t, man. Then you're gonna see those characters go straight back to work the next day. I frikkin' love it and hope you give it a shot.