Freshly STEAMed: Darksiders II Review

 Wrote this one last august, but since steam has an 80% discount up until Monday (7/29/13) I thought "Hey, might as well try to get some more folks on the bandwagon." A bandwagon stuck in IP hot potato hell...but still, I love this game. I'll let my past self explain why (in tiny text I couldn't reformat):

Sometimes a remix can feel just as fresh and invigorating as originality. Originality can be strange and unrefined. Why not make something special by mixing in a ton of bits and bobs people already love, like trail mix. Then weave in diablo-style loot, prince of persia-style platforming, god of war-style combat and zelda-style puzzles and dungeons. . . unlike trail mix. Stir well for two and a half years and presto! Out pops Darksiders 2. And it all tastes great.

Over the course of twenty two hours or so, you play as Death, one of the four horsemen (and one woman) of the apocalypse. These guys had one job to do, and they couldn't even get that right. Someone, or something, rang the end times bell a little early and only War showed up to the party. Naturally War takes all the blame and is sentenced to purgatory. 

 

And they called him "Hookster McMurderface."

DS2's main story focus is on Death and his efforts to resurrect humanity to clear his brother's name. Anyone who skipped War's chapter is never let in on why the Apocalypse happened and rightly so. Darksiders was a damn fine game and anyone left scratching their head at the end of DS2 has only themselves to blame. you'd be surprised at how good the story actually is and you'd be ruining the little “hey it's that guy!” moments sprinkled throughout the game.

   

But either way, the story you get from this game is handled by a small troupe of fine actors. None of which take themselves too seriously and each always find the right way to read a line. A special shout out goes to Michael Wincott as Death. He knows how to be a raspy, no-nonsense, personification of loss. But you'll be amazed at the depth of character he creates with even simple line readings and I know he made me laugh out loud at least once. That's right folks, Death's kinda funny.

DS2 is the product of a rare and respectable kind of ambition. The kind kind that makes a sequel that at first glance looks identical to it's predecessor, but is actually almost a completely new experience. The first played at being non-linear, but the second time around, a good two thirds of the game are  entirely free roaming. There are side quests, there are secrets, and there is loot to be finished, discovered, and equipped. My hat goes off to Vigil Games as none of these activities ever feel like a grind. Find a ton of loot you don't want? You can sell it all for decent pocket money and always find something you can buy with it. Every activity feeds back into the other until you've had your fill and want to take on the main game.

Though you could have just stumbled onto one of the four or five “secret” dungeons and thought you were playing the main game. That's just the kind of mirror-sheen polish you can expect from this world. Even the side dishes feel like the entrée. 

 

That was the last food reference, hand to god.

I could go more into detail about the master class of animation and art direction on display here, but the linchpin in this already award worthy game is it's score. It always gives you what you expect, but in unexpected ways. You'll get a medieval choir for your trip into hell, but you'll also have a growling, otherworldly, techno-static baseline along with it. Some tracks are more overused than I would have liked, but when the music needs to swell to the action on screen, composer Jesper Kyd, of Assassin's Creed fame, moves in with a symphonic hay-maker. I mean blues guitar for an rag tag army of angels? It's f*king brilliant.

While I may have loved this game to pieces, it's not all puppies and sunshine. The final third of the game is a straight shot. No more hopping off your horse to go chest hunting anytime you want, you just gotta stick with the game's plan. Not to mention the end comes out of nowhere just when you think the finale was kicking into gear. But the New Game+ mode lets you bring all your loot and experience around for another ride. A feature that would have pushed my score to a perfect five, had the final moments not been so rushed and unsatisfying narrative wise.

As it stands, this is still one of the best games I've played in over a year, and you bet your ass I'll run through it again at least two more times.

Lets hear it for Rodney!

Shadowrun Returns, Why I think it looks Great.

If Terry Pratchett and Phillip K. Dick had a baby.

I'm a strange gamer. I love RPGs, but I hate typical fantasy tropes and design. I may have given New Vegas an 8 (initially) and Skyrim a perfect ten, but I've played Skyrim at least a third as much as I have the former. There are hundreds of reasons why that happened. One, Obsidian knows how to direct voice actors and how to build a character arc, and two, I'd seen practically everything Skyrim had to show me before in several other games. The fact that Shadowrun first appeared on the Sega Genesis is depressing. Cyber punk dwarves and elves? The additional fact that satire of the classic fantasy setting is that old makes me sadder than I can express in print.

It looks funny, the reviews are solid, the art direction is the perfect balance of somber and whimsical, and the animation is silky smooth. I want it. Simple as that. This kind of work deserves patronage.

Podcast Review: I wanna Live in Harmontown.

Why yes, they are schlitzed out of their minds.

It's no secret I'm a huge fan of NBC's Community.  And when that  bubbling crock pot of drama that is the twilight years of said network got the show's creator kicked off his post, I was left with a few questions about it. Mostly, what was Dan Harmon going to do next?

A podcast... yeah I wasn't sold on it at first either. Professional stand ups have a hard time keeping a podcast funny for over an hour, how could a writer/show runner pull that off? I love his work, but what would I think about his uncensored id in front of a live audience? The simple truth is that he's actually much funnier in some respects than Chris Hardwick or Marc Maron and if you can get past his increasingly awkward freestyle raps about mother f**king (along with the "toddler dance"), this is one of the best podcasts I've ever heard.

NOT safe for work. Look at me, both eyes. Not.

Turns out, a drunk Dan Harmon and Jeff Davis are more articulate and funny than I could hope to be at the best of times. Whether Dan is reading from his vaguely sociopathic teenage journal or Jeff is recanting how having his name gets him free stuff in South Carolina, these guys rarely have nothing to say. Or they'll make having nothing to say funny somehow. Its fascinating to see the ways in which they make talking about nothing marginally profound. Marginally. Dan has a habit of making sh*t real out of nowhere, yet always manages to bring the room back almost immediately. Took me a while to realize that's exactly what I loved about Community in the first place. A perfect marriage of tragic honesty with a gleeful sense of humor. Did I mention they're drunk off their ass for most of this?

The man really knows how to work a room, its a room full of avid fans, but still. The audience is always as much of a part of the show as either Dan or Jeff or Erin McGathy if she's feelin' it. Though there is this one dude called Adam that rushes the stage more often than not. I personally think he's funny in a David Sedaris kind of way, but you do get the sense he's constantly riding Jeff's last nerve and neither host is ever convinced of his sanity. It's never as much of a buzz kill as I must have made it sound... but you do feel like Dan's worried about the guy, and I'm not gonna pretend it doesn't put a damper on things sometimes.

It's called "Pringles Dick." 

Wear some headphones if the thought hasn't already occurred.

Normally I'd tell you about the best jumping on points in its 60+ library, but the show has a fair amount of continuity and in jokes, mostly due to it's long running D&D campaign run by Spencer Crittenden. It's like drunk kitchen but with rage dwarves and a bored Ryan Stiles that one time. Lets just say its my kind of game of D&D, where its taken just seriously enough to make sense and that's about it. The name Sharpie Buttsalot tells you all you need to know.

So I say start at the beginning, but if you're still unsure/disturbed by the rap, start with Turtle Panties.  Patton Oswalt scares Dan and Eric Idle pops out of nowhere and sings a song. Its glorious. I'm happy I've come across Harmontown for all this alone, but you do finally get a satisfying peek behind the BS of the Harmon/Chase feud. I don't remember what episode that was, but the way he tells it, they're both bigger men than I thought... and Peirce is a carbon copy of Chase's sense of humor, apparently (I had a feeling).

So try to swing by Harmontown, you might not want to leave.

Ha Ha! Rowsdowr.com, adventure!

Rockstar Plants a Flag on Agent

Yeah right, I'm holding my breath.

The day after Cracked.com writes about 5 games you'll never get to play Rockstar renews their trademark on the #1 spot. An open world espionage shooter called "Agent." The question is, do we hope for the best here? Is this a sign of life, or do they just not want anyone else using their title? It's a very simple and effective little title. I mean, you hear about a Rockstar game called Agent you know exactly what its about.

That's something worth protecting even if you have absolutely no plans to throw several million more dollars at a project. But for me? I think this is something they still want to do. I think this will be their next Red Dead. The thing they do in between GTA to keep from losing their minds. I'd say the sordid story of Alpha Protocol must have put a damper on things, but Agent stalled out long before that. But hey, remember L.A. Noire? that ran silent for at least as long as this. So again, I think this is gonna happen.

Ryan Reynolds isn't famous, and that's ok.

Someone just had a very very bad weekend. Both Reynold's vehicles Turbo and RIPD bombed miserably to what is essentially the best horror film in about a decade. Normally I'd be pretty pleased with those numbers, but this is still spectacularly unfair. Is RIPD as bad as they say? Probably. Was a movie about a formula 1 snail the result of some sort of executive dart board/madlib concoction? Again... probably.

I like Ryan Reynolds, I think he gets a lot more crap than he deserves. I also think any unknown actor saddled with The Green Lantern would be begging for change on Hollywood and Vine right now. How does he do that? How does he keep getting these golden tickets? I have no friggin' clue. It wasn't to make a competing Ryan Gosling, he showed up later and even he doesn't hit the mark most of the time. Damn, where's celebrity death match when you really need it?

Someone out there clearly wants this man to be a bankable movie star, and the frustrating part is he's talented enough to pull it off. But you can't force these things all the time and you definitely can't run two of his films in the same damn weekend. I don't care that one's animated and one isn't, you could argue it's after the same audience. I mean, I saw Men in Black when I was in second grade (god, I loved it).

Yet the saddest thing of all is even if you put both of those movies together you wind up with a middling profit. Ryan Reynolds does not draw a crowd. It's as simple as that, I wish it weren't true, but there it is. But then again, Will Smith couldn't this summer, neither could Tom cruise, even Brad Pitt's taking a hit on his liberal interpretation of World War Z. Maybe I'm coming at this at the wrong angle. Maybe stars have less to do with the box office than we all thought.

Or maybe we're just sick of interchangeable Dreamworks cartoons, MIB ripoffs, and pretentious apocalypses.

The Newsroom, Season 1 Review.

Not as bad as I feared, not as good as I'd hoped. If I had never seen a Sorkin show before last week I would have been completely enamored by The Newsroom. But I've been following him for years and while his formula is one of the best there is, its still a formula and I know all the ingredients. I was constantly playing a drinking game in the back of my mind (female pratfall!). I didn't want to, but its like those magic eye posters, (awkward shouting match!) when you see it once, you're always squinting to see it again (awkward shouting match fallout!).

But after a while you ease into it like a hot tub and just roll with it. You're in Sorkin-land and worst case scenario, you're gonna get some good monologues. Jeff Daniel's first as firebrand news anchor Will McAvoy is a barn burner. He's a decent character, you know he's an ass, but it takes a long time for that to register because he's pleasingly three dimensional. The first couple of minutes alone do a great job of fleshing him out.

McAvoy's played the moderate for too long, he's become the second highest watched cable news anchor, but at what cost? He's inconsequential at best and a phoney at worst and after being asked to explain why America is the greatest country on earth, he finally snaps. That snap gives his producer (Sam Waterson) the excuse to make McAvoy matter again. By being more editorial, by reporting news that matters... and by hiring his ex girlfriend to oversee the whole thing. Waaaaaaait a minute, isn't that how the West Wing started too?

Is it an unnecessary love triangle contrivance? Yes. There's actually going to be a couple of these, but in the moment, each of them work. McAvoy's with Emily Mortimer is the best; but you've also got the one with Alison Pill (Maggie) between the go getter 10:00 show producer Jake, (jock) and the passionate editor/puppy dog, Jim...(nerd). It gets better as it goes along but a good 30% of the show is sacrificed on the alter of these office romances. The biggest problem is Jake doesn't become anywhere near relatable until halfway through the season. You have no reason not to hate him, he abandons McAvoy professionally, he abandons Maggie romantically, and he openly tells Jim that he hates him at least four times. Its a mess.

Thankfully the news stories, as revisionist as they are, do a great service by simply reminding you of what happened 2 years ago. I had forgotten almost every story they covered and the rhetoric attached to each was viscerally satisfying, but unapologetically one sided. But that doesn't bother me, McAvoy constantly name dropping the fact he's a registered republican does. I mean, I know moderate republicans, McAvoy is no moderate. There isn't a single word that falls out of his mouth that a democrat would disagree with, in other words, its a wasted trait that only serves to make him a less interesting character. He's a liberal Sorkin, stop trying to eat your cake too.

But I gotta admit one story they worked on got me good. They made a connection I had never thought of before. Remember the bill that allowed corporations to give unlimited funds to political candidates? It also extended to unions. What happens immediately after that passed? The Wisconsin teacher strike. I'm sorry, that's good journalism.

I haven't even mentioned how much of a joy Sam Waterson is, I avoided Law and Order like the plague so maybe he's always been this funny. Olivia Munn wound up being much more enjoyable than I thought, her Fukushima sub plot was one of the highlights for me, but she's still really stone faced. Fun though, she would kill voice over work.

So there. It's patchy, hits a lot of sour notes, women rarely talk about anything other than the men in their lives, and the two black characters just don't have anything to say other than exposition. But those are my problems, objectively its a "good" show. If you liked the West Wing, you're gonna like this. If you were hoping for Sorkin to alter his vision slightly or shake things up (like me) you'll walk away disappointed. But I want to keep watching it and that's not nothing.

Oh, and this one time Terry Crews showed up out of nowhere and it was awesome.

There's a Licensed Firefly MMO...

...That's shackled to IOS devices and is more than likely a bald faced cash in.

Ok, show's over people, nuthin' to see here. Just my shattered hopes and dreams of the possibility of Firefly: The Next Generation (which is totally not a spec script I've written). I'd love for there to be something here and I have no right to doubt the conviction of the folks working on it. But it would have to be the big damn savoir of the MMO to make me think about buying an I-pad. I just don't don't have the scratch.

But man, if they did the impossible... wouldn't that be shiny?