I've long been puzzled by my fixation on Destiny 2. I played it to death on ps4 for a year. When it was free on PC I shelled out $40 for it's dlc all for the privilege to play it again in the glory of 60 frames. I can't say I have any strong affection for it. It never made my game of the year list in 2017 and I've scarcely written about it. Yet I can't go a month without playing it. Why this game? Why not Overwatch? I could pal around with Chance even more than I do already. But that game bored me away while Chance can't stop finding new and interesting facets to talk about.
After a week or so of thought I think I have the answer. Destiny's loot is dynamic while Overwatch's is static. As much as I love my cthulhu zen, that skin will never fundamentally change the way I play that game. But say I get a couple days off and hunker down on a reasonably long and difficult end game quest. Say I get over my hatred of Destiny's multiplayer, say I get reasonably good at said multiplayer. I would then get a hand cannon that's 30% more useful than anything that could possibly drop anywhere else in the game. I frikken earned this gun and naturally I appreciate it and this game more for it. After all the behind the scenes BS and the rocky first year this is one of the best looter shooters in existence. Here's hoping Activision doesn't put a bullet in its back like it has so many other games and companies.
The game industry can be a funny thing. Sometimes the best games you've ever played don't meet their sales markers and are banished to the dusty nether regions of steam. Sometimes a crowdfunding miracle* happens and a game you've been waiting 13 years for looks like everything you could have wanted.
If you've never played Psychonauts, fix that. Wonky combat aside it's story and art style still holds up. If you have, it's good to know that A. Loboto survived long enough for Sasha's interrogation and B. It looks like we'll finally get to punch at least one member of the Galochios.
Mr. Mcconnell's score remains delightful throughout:
Netflix has fallen on some hard times critically. It's mediocre productions (Hill House, Adam Sandler's movies, latter Kimmy Schmidt seasons) has begun to outweigh it's successes. But then there's Narcos. Yes, it pretty much tells the same story every season. Yes, season 2 was 40% Escobar moping around his prison. Yes, it's female characters are either window dressing or haranguing wives. But... but if you can get past those details, no judgment if you can't, you'll see one of the most gorgeous and addicting Spanish language shows in the world.
If you watch only one season, I say make it Mexico. It's brutal honesty about Mexico's jaw dropping depths of corruption alone make it the best story the series has told. There's a civil war raging south of the border these days. The line between the military and the police no longer exists. You can draw a nearly straight line from the 120,000 deaths in the last 20 years to one man: Miguel Gallardo. Played admirably, though a bit too softly, by Rogue One's Diego Luna. I say softly because I don't buy the toughest drug lords in the world trusting his sheepishly boyish gaze with all their product. The real Gallardo has a more manic Charles Manson thing going on.
It's a good performance but it's firmly in the shade of Wagner Mora's coolly unsettling Escobar. I'm actually a bigger fan of his lieutenants Ernesto and Rafa. The both of them getting high at a safe house and giddily hopping up and down to test their state of the art CD stereo ("It doesn't skip! It doesn't skip!") is my favorite scene in the entire series to date.
Peña needs an emmy for this.
But what about the cops? As much as I love Pedro Pascal they've never been the stand out part of any season. But thanks to Michal Peña that has changed. He's a lovable prick with a nasty habit of getting in over his head. As bad as the Colombian drug war got under the Cali and Escobar they only ever managed to buy off a Judge or two. Gallardo eventually runs the table on Mexico's entire government. Even the American diplomats start giving the DEA a Chinatown shrug.
This is the secret sauce that makes it my favorite season. As an American I've become a bit sensitive to corruption in high levels of government. So I'm eager to see how the system... works so to speak. If I have one major complaint it's that Narcos: Mexico is very much a two-parter. Most of the major story lines reach a decent conclusion but it also has the most agonizing tease for next year. I want it right the hell now.
If you can avoid googling the names involved I promise you won't see where this story goes. That's a tall order being that Peña's Ki Ki Camerana was on the cover of Time and all that. But I was floored at several moments in the last quarter. Narcos knows the last season got wrapped up in a pretty bow for the most part and it's got some absolutely nasty surprises for you. The fact they were able to do this with what is 80% verified history (certain folks involved are still in the higher echelons of Mexican politics and are redacted) is nothing short of Olympic level story telling. I won't be canceling my subscription anytime soon.
I am not an anime guy. I've liked a few well enough but that was mostly in my insomnia laden teens where I was watching toonami at 3 in the morning. Bebop was great, Champloo too, but that's tourist stuff. For a genre that can barely afford to make mouths move or eyebrows twitch I find the vast majority of them unwatchable. I'm aware that this particular project is Japanese in style only, being written by Warren Ellis and all. Part of me feels guilty about that, but then no other anime has made me laugh out loud as much as this.
Castlevania's got jokes. Whedon style quippy jokes which I understand aren't for everyone; but you will never see them coming and that's what makes it work. This show is Gothic with a capital G but it still lets nearly every one of its characters be human. Even if they're slightly undead. This is key because if you're reaching for your phone every time this cast starts walking and talking you won't make it to the end. Lotsa' prowling around in the betrayal garden in season 2. Know that.
3 quid for a pint?! Bollocks.
But lets talk about the cast and how much frikkin' fun they're having. Richard Armitage has a high spot on my "hey, its that guy" list but I couldn't place his voice until I looked it up. I remember him from the end of Hannibal doing Ralph Fiennes proud as Dolerhyde. He lights up here as a vagrant demon hunting drunk. The dude can just say things funny. The biggest laugh from me for the whole run is just the way he reads the line "I like stories." Do you want to see an English Indiana Jones? Because that's what he accomplishes here.
Then we have Graham Mctavish as Dracula by way of King Lear. A immortal broken hearted mad man who is too self absorbed to kill himself before wiping out all life on earth. He's fantastic. His mopey monologues that boil over into barking madness are almost better than the script deserves. Its such a good performance I'd bet the man has wanted to play the big bat for a really long time.
Hope those of you out there aren't too catholic. Blasphemous doesn't even begin to describe the gore.
Oh. The action scenes are pretty good too. I'm sorry, they are crazy good. They aren't written so much as choreographed. No mindless clanging of swords here. Every movement from each character is trying to go for the kill. Big budgeted this show is not but all the action still has the tension of a boxing match. You're never quite sure who's winning until its over.
Fans of the games (hi there!) will get a kick out of the references to the series reoccurring levels. The laboratory, the library, clock tower, etc. One of Drac's maguffins is the weird polygonal save point from symphony of the night. The second to last episode even has a wall chicken if you look hard enough. Not that anyone would be lost if you're not in on the gag. Their Easter egg game is strong.
I'm glad I waited until the second season to hop in because it reaches a solid conclusion the first 4 episodes (season 1 is barely 2 hours long) couldn't even set up. It won't end there but it could have and that's the nicest thing I can say about the writing. The structure of the story is alloy steel. There are twists, turns, betrayals, and sucker punches all decently foreshadowed. It won't win any prime time Emmys but that's not what its going for. This is a bloody good time and I hope ya'll give it a shot.
Art posts are usually Chance's thing but more Discworld fans need to know about him if I'm not somehow the last fan on the train. In the last 2 years I have discovered and devoured Terry Pratchett's Discworld. I've come across the original covers of his books and they're... well... interesting. Its really busy and gives off a manic vibe that doesn't fit the author's voice at all. Pratchett is a lot of things but he's no more manic than a stiff cuppa'. I'd say I'm a big enough fan to want to hang a cover or two of his books on a wall but nothing seemed worth it.
Then I stumbled across Marc and his portfolio gushing with what is now the definitive visualization of Pratchett's work in my head. Compare small god's cover above with Marc's:
He says he's freelance and that's a tragedy. There's a city watch series in development and he's not making them concept art. A tragedy I say. I mean, they're calling it a "punk rock thriller." Its a show about high fantasy medieval cops so I don't know what the hell that means. I'd feel much better about it if they gave Mr. Simonetti here a call.
Destiny 2 is free on pc today. A game I've played to death that has finally, after a year, finally gotten rid of it's second job equivalent of a level grind. It's never been better and I've never seen it run in 60 fps. Or seen it load a menu in under 7 seconds. Those 7 seconds add up when you've been playing a game every 2 months for a year.
If only everything was for free... I paid $40 for it's last expansion in September, why would I do that again? Because the other dlc is bundled with it for a limited time? Oh, Bungie. This is evil and you know it. Evil.
Update: So seeing it in 1080 instead of 720 for the first time was like putting on a perfect pair of glasses. I knew I liked it before, but now? Now with twice the frame rate so aiming is twice as easy? Now I'm punching 20 levels above my weight screaming through the campaign in about 4 1/2 hours.
Polygon really buried the lede when they told me about XCOM2's surprise dlc. I see that you get a couple one off missions where you fight the early stages of Advent's Orwellian state. I get that there's 20 new maps. I understand there's new weapon skins and other cosmetic clap trap. But what the people really need to know is that a re mixed homage to the 1994 original soundtrack has popped into the audio menu.
So synthy it hurts. Its cheesy, but like a fancy cheese. Cheese you ultimately respect because you can't stop eating. I would pay $8 for it alone.
When we were kids we never actually believed animals could talk but I never imagined them to have inner lives rich enough for a seal to hate a kayaker so much it hits him in the face with an octopus. Thanks to everyone on the planet having recording devices on them at all times we now know how petty seals really are.
So I finally checked out remote play. Now I can have podcasts in the background of destiny in my headphones instead of my cell phone. In a cup. The streaming is a little hitchy, but there's a lot to be said for being able to get blogging done while waiting for a match to queue up.
It works. Doesn't blow me away but its free and it works. Wouldn't play a new game this way. It'll keep me from getting the pc version, though. Possibly forever.
UPDATE: So plugging my ps4 directly into my router has had pretty drastic results. The hiss and pop are gone and everything's a lot smoother. I'm not gonna jerry rig this up all the time but it's nice to know it works.
Maybe it's just because I've been putting up with mediocre synth for the last 56 hours of my off time but I heard a piece of music in Destiny last night that is just so good. Share with my cello playing dad good. I had to tell him it was from an Israeli indie film or he wouldn't have bothered but he liked it.
I've been dieting. When I say I've been dieting I mean I changed everything about what I eat and drink for 3 1/2 years. It's been a long road to it's current incarnation but family members have hesitated to recognize me so I'd call that progress. My diet is as incredibly simple as it is agonizingly painful. 4 days a week I eat what I want. But the other 3 I stay under 800 calories.
Bad days where I'm at work I've found I can keep busy and thus I can keep my mind off things like bread. Sweet, precious, crumbly, toasted, bread. But bad days where I'm off? It's a more delicate operation. Sometimes I have stuff to do, friends to see movies with, furniture to rearrange, trails to run, but that only takes up so much time in a day. There will come a moment where my stomach cries for 12 lbs. of pesto sausage penne and I must drive the demon out.
I've been a fan of "loot grinder" games since the first torchlight; Obama's second year seems like a lifetime ago dosn't it? The best of them challenged me till I broke. They all had an end game that would always smoke my ass. It wasn't as discouraging as that sounds. I wouldn't give up on a Borderlands character until at least two full runs. I was ready to try something else by then but I could have kept going for twice as long and not run out of game. I'm always impressed by that. It proves you've made a loop so successful some people would choose to play it for the rest of their lives. Millions of people played Diablo II last year. That's from W's first term.
My point is these loot grinders whether they be an action RPG like Diablo or 1st person shooter in Borderlands transition to a zen experience if you play them enough. Something that's fun but only requires 40% of your attention so that you can listen to music and make a plan to get a better job. I sh*t thee not I got over serious emotional baggage by finally rolling the perfect critical chance stat for a necklace all my characters could share.
Maybe that sounds sad. But to me that was tangible progress in an indifferent and occasionally cruel world. It was a little project I worked on while mining a vein of John Le Carre audio books on youtube. Somewhere in the middle of our kind of traitor I looked up and noticed I'd maxed 6 characters in Diablo 3. I had cracked the end game while gaining 3 lbs. of lean muscle. The culprit of my pudge all these years ended up being sheer boredom.
In the time under my digital bodhi tree I've listened to nearly 80% of the works of Sir Terry Pratchett, everything by Umberto Eco, an embarrassing amount of Miss Marple and I bought a suit 4 sizes smaller that the last. I have meditated on myself, my writing, and my treatment of others; becoming a better person with a firmer grip on my dignity. I owe much to my mantra:
I've got it. I've paid for it. I want to see what all the fuss is about but... I know too much of the ending's broad strokes. It's a bummer to put it lightly and I don't feel like going through that. I find politics much more terrifying right now than a film could be. For once I see a horror film largely being called great, something that happens only once every 4 years, and I'm good. My past self is sucking his teeth at me, knowing I've become something I hate.
But I like how guacamelee makes me feel. I'm gonna stick with that!
But some days you try to use a coupon for what you think is for $11 off a $45 prescription and it turns out that's what it cost now. $11. For a year. Also my bosom podcasting buddy Chance gifted me Gucamelee! 2 an hour before I was going to buy it myself. On account of me magically saving nearly $400 a year. Remember that? I do.
It's not as immediately catchy as Groening's past projects but the more I hear it over the course of the season the more I like it. It's a gentle mariachi/klezmer swirl and it's a lot like the show. It may not blow your mind immediately but keep listening. There's got more layers than it lets on.
So as always I'm late to a party, or at least later than a vice puff piece on one of youtube's best kept secrets. It's a bunch of chill hip hop beats looped endlessly day and night while a studious girl with googly eyes on her headphones writes in her diary.
I wish I had an echo or something so that this played in my apartment all the time. The songs can get repetitive at times but after a while I started to dig it. They're like mantras and I hear them even when I'm not listening to them, if that makes any sense. It's audible prozac, is what I'm saying. I hope y'all can do chilledcow a solid and like and subscribe:
You don't make a movie like this and call it Arizona without evoking two of the brother's best movies and you know what? I'm all in on a movie like this written by comedy writers. Not that the Coens aren't funny but over the years (the tail end of eastbound and Vice principles) Mcbride got DAMN funny. And that's exactly what this looks like. Plus where the hell has David Allen Grier been?
Yeah no, you're fired. But I'm sure you'll... LAND ON YOUR FEET.
I'm not much for Japan's fixation on cute things, I tend to tolerate it more than anything. But the cats in this game are pretty great and that's coming from a dyed in the wool dog person. I was able to make mine look like a fox and foxes get you points from me. Lots.
I was on board until a conversation with my new mouse keep- I mean house keeper became wall to wall cats puns. Didn't get one sentence through with this guy before he dropped a "purrrr-fection" on the floor. Right in front of everybody.
I love puns but that's not what these are. This is technically assault, cat people. Cool it.
*Update:
I'm sorry, is this like a medical condition for you guys? Are you physically able to stop talking like a lazy writer?
I've been in No Man's Sky for a while now, enough to start a review. While I do very much enjoy and continue to enjoy it... I have notes. Chief among them what Miss Jackson so eloquently put today:
I've been having a breezily good time with no man's sky and couldn't help but take some pictures. You should all check out the review aggregate on steam's page. The recent positives are flying off the damn chart.
So anybody heard of the jakalope hoax?
The gallant star ship: Ernesto MK II. I honestly miss it's cockpit. I don't think the new intern is working out.
Time to make the doughnuts.
If you've been skipping most of the dialogue... stop that.
The way this thing walks is as biologically accurate as it is heart breaking.
So lately/4 months ago I plum ran out of things to talk about. Entertainment wise anyway. I went to a really dark place and video games were a cold comfort. Something I could gab about once a week with a couple good friends, but not something to write about.
I wanted to write about Kafkaesque fascistic nightmares.
But since it looks like our Vichy government is reaching the end game I'd thought I'd pop back in and let you know I've found my love for video based diversion again. I've had a lovely time with No Man's Sky and I'm diving back into New Vegas to see if my torch for it still burns as brightly. Stay tuned.
My car burned down the other day. Not sure how and since it's a cube now. I guess I'll never know. If the median haden't run out when it did, I had about 45 seconds from smoke to fire, I could have been cooked. Makes you take stock. Finding a decent used car has become it's own purgatory but it's damn good having all my limbs and eyebrows.
You can juuust make out make out my favorite pair of jeans.
I make a huge mistake in this episode. I thought, through hasty googling, that Maya Angelou was born in Winston Salem. She's a Saint Louis native. But she sure did die there though! Why am I proud of that? Weird.
Rise and Fall is an expansion that is frustrating to write about. Not that I think I wasted a single dollar on it, though. Civ VI continues to be my favorite Civilization to date but it remains difficult to prove it to be the best. This had happened with V before it had it's 2 expansions. No one was particularly happy with V out of the box but Gods and Kings then Brave New World made it the definitive Civ. I'm worried VI will never get there. Rise and Fall is a fascinating new direction but it feels much more thin than the expansions that have come before.
But not in the new leader department. It's a relief to see some new faces as the cast almost doubles with 9 more stunningly well animated leaders. Robert the Bruce and Poundmaker stand out to me (and not just because I have 3 c's in my name.) I prefer to play as an ivory tower. An impenetrable economic and scientific dynamo. Before these two guys (and Civ VI, really) this was pretty hard to pull off if you weren't Babylon. Poundmaker's outgoing trade bonus will make your enemies think twice before mowing you down and Robert is a first in that he's a surprisingly pleasant neighbor. The guy hates war and particularly the AI's strategy of burning down city states. In several different games we teamed up to take down megalomaniacal jerks and they were without a doubt the most fun wars I've ever been in.
No I love you more.
Here I'll start to pull on a thread that will take us through everything new worth talking about. Cites now project influence. The more influence on a tile (the closer you are to another civ's city) the more loyalty you'll lose per turn. When you run out of loyalty, your city revolts and becomes less of a city state and more of a... pirate nest? Nassau, I guess. Back to my ivory tower style I'm loving how much more personal space the AI now gives me. Before if there was some oil juuuust out of my reach it wouldn't be long before the enemy had a new city all up in my business. This simply does not happen anymore and it. Is. Awesome. But now the race to the new world has even higher stakes because once someone gets a real foothold it's almost impossible to stretch out. Unless you have the right governor.
Over the course of your culture tree you will now earn "governor" points. You'll never guess what you spend them on. Every player has access to the same roster of 7. Each focusing on either loyalty, faith, science/culture/production, and you get the idea. Most of their skills won't tip the balance of the game either way, but they all have their uses. Though there are a handful worth bending over backwards for. 2 points into the defense guy and you have a city that cannot be put under siege. Yeah, holy sh*t.
And another from the educator, with some help from the Oracle, lets me run the table on nearly all the great people for pretty much the whole game. He can double your great person points in one city and the Oracle slaps another 20% on top of that. The AI has started 9 different wars with me over my sure to be nerfed strategy. But that's the thing. I've never had a strategy in Civ I thought needed nerfing and I love how smart Rise and Fall has made me feel.
Oh yeah, well the only thing people know your folk music from are Wes Anderson movies!
But about the whole "rising and falling" thing. It's a nice idea, carving up the game's eras into mad dashes for points. Get enough and you stay in a normal era. Get twice that and you get a golden age where your cites positively spew loyalty and you choose a passive bonus (like invulnerable trade routeseeeeeeee!!!) for the whole age. Fail to get enough points and you wind up in a dark age. Get enough points for a golden age in a dark age? You earn a heroic age where you can choose 3 golden age perks. So how do you get points? Difficult to say. Building unique districts gets you some the first time. Killing units in the company of a great general does as well. But if you're down to the wire and you're not sure how to get those last couple points to stave off the darkness... well...
It would be neat for your advisor to suggest the best way to get more points as it's hard to remember what you have and haven't done game to game. Mod community? Get on it. Until then, I say it's a good idea that is obtuse and punishing. And the golden filter over everything gets old pretty quick.
So I really enjoyed Rise and Fall. It needs some work but what Civ game doesn't? Unfortunately while most previous expansions were as great as they were necessary this is something I could see some people skipping. That's a shame, but there it is. But the changes that were made in service of the less violent civs made some of my most enjoyable games possible. Not only that, but I also hit my highest score ever and that can't be a coincidence. I cannot say whether VI will eventually receive the accolades I say it deserves but I am certain it will always be my favorite.
When early access games start getting 9/10 reviews and cost less than $20 what do you have to loose? So I got it... and I played it. And I absolutely goddamn love it. After blood borne I didn't think a randomly generated souls game could work. That the level design was integral to the combat somehow. Dead Cells has spent 3 hours showing me how wrong I was. If you ever loved Castlevania this is worth your time and money.
In the wake of The Incredibles Ralph loses a bit of thunder. Both being the only two animated films I can think of that actually deserve a sequel. Getting John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman to be the leads in anything deserves sequels.
It's been 5 years, with Zootopia by Rich Moore made in the interim. That was the first CGI Disney film that can go toe to toe with Pixar's best and while I have high hopes Ralph Breaks the Internet delivers; I'd be happy with it being just ok. But who knows? Maybe this is their Toy Story 2 moment where the laws of sequel gravity are defied. That "bunny gets the pancake" bit is f*%ing gold.
I'm playing a lot of Civ VI. Which means I'm listening to a lot of Civ VI. Which means I'm still gushing over Geoff Knorr's soundtrack. Vocals are one of the most radical departures for Rise and Fall and I was wondering if actual members of the Cree sang for Poundmaker's theme. According to Knorr's Facebook, several of them were even part of the man's extended family.
It gets neater. They all refused money and insisted on a unique form of payment, Poundmaker souvenir jackets:
