Slay the Spire Review: Three Aces

Thanks justaschema!

Card games. In all the many circles of nerdity in my brain none of them contain any of the card games that have popped up in recent years. Couldn’t even get into gwent even though I tore The Witcher 3 to shreds. Certainly couldn’t care less about Hearthstone and I’ve actively avoided Magic. Why?

No idea. It just isn’t my thing. Fighting games aren't my thing, card games aren't my thing. Which brings me to Slay the Spire. I played it months ago, got pretty into it too. But I didn’t love it and almost completely forgot about it. The art style was drab and uninspired. Also I was pretty sh*t at it. To the point where the game’s greeter (who appears to be an undead whale for some reason) was bemoaning the fact I couldn't even reach the first boss. Thanks Mr. Whale, I’ll try harder next time.

But then it got released for real and I thought to give it another shot. Maybe try out the other 2 characters and see how they feel. Well I tried out the rogue and came away a believer. For those in the dark as to what Slay the Spire actually is, it’s a card game. Kinda. Combat on the enemy's side acts as a classic turn based RPG. The player has a hand of cards. The biggest problem for me was trying to play it as another rpg instead of embracing it’s… cardiness?

In a word I was fighting too much. Leaving myself too open too often and dying halfway. I needed to embrace defense and let fights drag on a little longer so I could survive the bosses. I imagine this is where most of the press was won over. The boss fights are a showcase of game design where all the unspoken rules of combat are thrown out. Made it to the end with full health? You could easily be dead in 2 turns if you don’t keep your head on a swivel. You don’t need to read faq’s to figure them out, you just have to learn how to break a few rules of your own.

I give you my poison turtle deck. The silent character is able to pull hands of 6 cards or more with free cards that can help you shuffle in more useful ones should RNGsus forsake you. The trick to her is causing a lot of damage in one turn while biding your time behind shielding. She also has some interesting poison skills I've grown quite fond of. Say you have a card that can give a boss 6 ticks of poison over 3 hits. Say you have a relic that adds an extra tick for each hit. Then maybe you find another card that doubles that poison. Then you can just turtle up while the boss’s health bleeds away in 4 turns.

That ended up being my best run to date and the start of a beautiful friendship. Like the best rogue likes out there, you can’t guarantee success. But you can hold your own for a while when your luck turns just off of strategy. The only thing keeping me back are the relics. I have no idea how best to use the more common ones. Most of them have sentence long descriptions and seem too niche to be useful “the first time you lose hp in combat, draw 3 cards” great! I just pulled 3 cards I can’t use for the 4th time in a row. Thanks.

But I’ll get better. Most importantly I want to get better. I can finally parse its depths and find myself choosing it over most of my old favorites after work. I mean I liked it before but I get it now. I want to have a poison turtle equivalent for the other 2 characters and I won’t stop playing until I do.

Indeed it is, Mr. Whale.

Spider-verse Review: Miles Ahead.

This shouldn’t work. You can’t fit 5 main characters with 6 villains into one movie and expect it to make sense, let alone be coherent, and certainly not exceptional. There are countless examples of movies being watered down into sludge with too many plot lines. The best I can think of is the 3rd spider-man flick itself . And yet Into the Spider-verse is the most rapturously enjoyable movie I’ve seen this year.

One aspect of it that needs to be addressed out of the gate is its animation style. It’s a lot. Sometimes it moves at a traditional 25 frames a second, often a mere 12 frames. It may bug you at first but I stopped noticing around 15 minutes in. If it bothers you I suggest focusing on the film's finer details, which are scrumptious. The dot painting fluttering around the edges of everything, the onamonapia when appropriate, and the individual animation style for each universe. Spider-verse is a film I would jump at the chance to see again. On mute.

This is still essentially a coming of age story for one kid about how intimidating greatness can be. Miles is enrolled at a boarding school for the rich and “gifted” only to drown in the unfamiliar sea that is his homework. He resents his dad for throwing him into the deep end and not letting him go to his more comfortable (and mediocre) public school.

Subtler emotional stakes than I expected from a movie with a talking pig-spider. What’s more is that his arc perfectly captures that agonizing feeling that comes from when a group of people collectively decide you’re just not “good enough.”

As character driven as it is, this is still an action movie. No fight ever devolves into a blur. Everything is crisply choreographed from web swinging, to dodging punches, to chuck jonesian mallet smashes. Credit is also due to each character design. The sinister 6 especially has been rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of being animated. Norman Osborn has scarcely ever been this… cave trolly. Toss in a few earned character deaths and a eye melting art show caliber climax and you’ve got a film they’ll say was robbed of best picture down the line.

I sh*t thee not. Movies that are this fun, this dark, and this honest almost never get made let alone gross over $300 million. Good job America! Feels good to say that. If you choose not to see this in theaters you may well regret it. I’ll certainly respect you less. Just let go of that $12 wad in your pocket and I promise you’ll have a good time.

First Man Review: Good at Funerals.

If the internet was burning down and I could only save one thing I would choose the video of Buzz Aldrin in his 70's decking a 40-something moon landing denier. First Man is the only film about the Apollo missions that captures how singularly terrifying they were. I didn't think the moon landing kooks could make me any angrier but damn it if this movie didn't help me understand Buzz's righteous fury even more.

Neil Armstrong's life was hell. He lost experiential pilot friends as often as if they were in front line combat. He watched his 3 year old daughter wither and die from a brain tumor. I can't think of an actor more suited to capture his silent suffering better than Gosling. I've been back and forth on the guy for years. I used to think he slept walked through Drive but I've learned to appreciate how much he can do with someone as deceptively bland as Neil. If you're still hating on the man and you haven't seen The Nice Guys you should do yourself a favor and get googling.

The earth bound parts do sag a little. Claire Foy doesn't  get  much to do as Neil's wife/therapist. Though its something to see the emotional crow baring she has to do to coax a damn sentence out of her man. Dead daughter or no, First Man isn't afraid to portray its lead as a self involved ass. Speaking of, I really like the way the film handles the kids. They're fidgety, inarticulate, and always want to be somewhere else. They feel real kids. Also shout out to composer Justin Hurwitz for his sci-fi waltz score. Bonus points for his unironic, full-throated, use of a theremin. If you're not gonna bust that out for a space race movie then when goddammit?

What makes this Damien Chazelle's best film is his grasp of not just tension but horror. The fact he wrote 10 Cloverfield Lane was not lost on me when the Gemini spin out sequence made me physically ill. The score almost becomes a psycho homage with shrieking synth strings. It's amazing how much it grabbed me even when I knew exactly what was going to happen.

The moon mission itself is beautiful if a bit more relaxed than the rest of the movie. It pretty much went off without a hitch, not much for a screenwriter to do there. I'm also disappointed Michael Collins, as in life, gets no attention.  "If they fail to rise from the surface, or crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide," he wrote in his book. "I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know it." You're telling me you couldn't get some compelling screen time out of that existential crisis?! Booooo.

If you're into biopics and the space race in general, then you need to see this. Its different enough and masterful in spurts. If this isn't your bag it may come off as just another love letter to a dead white guy. Its not and it shouldn't but I can see how some could feel that way. First Man doesn't land smoothly, but it lands.

TV Drinking Game: You're Fired.

I've been flitting around some of my old favorite shows, Parks and Rec, Brooklyn 99, etc. It struck me how many times I found myself yelling at the screen (possibly drunk) "How did you not loose your job just now?!" I get that comedy has to have hyper personalities playing against the straight but almost every plotline about Gina from 99 involves her actively starting sh*t with her bosses.

So drink anytime a character should realistically loose their job! The Office should be a blur now.

The Smoking Gun.

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.

Hitting the Mother Lobe

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:

*crowd funding miracle AND shadowy fig investors.

Narcos Mexico Review: "You f**ked up, man."

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.