Hell of a Game

Lemme set the mood:

I am constantly falling in and out of love with Civilization. I loved V and remain impressed by VI but Civ unlike any other piece of entertainment can absolutely wreck my day. There’s a feeling you get when you’re 4 hours into a game (about renaissance era) that you’re completely effed. Your army survived your protectorate war but was it worth blowing half your troops saving a city state that only nets you 17 gold? It wasn’t and now you can’t afford a settler to find oil and aluminum so you’re about to be shut out of the late game too. You put Civ down emotionally and intellectually defeated.

It sucks.

But then there’s the other side of the coin. When you out think and outplay everyone on earth. Civilization is the only game that can make me feel like an evil genius. Such a game was one I played last weekend with Gorgo. A military terror early on (love them hoplites) her greatest strength is her late game capacity for culture. Her theater squares become acropolises which can be built in half the time of everyone else. Thanks to one of the governors from the rise and fall expansion I can make it so I have a near monopoly of all great writers and artists.

This is how I can make pure diplomacy work. Usually when you make too many libraries and museums the less civil leaders tend to sniff around your weakest links and pounce out of nowhere. But if you can buy them off with a piece of literature or two and make them dependent on your spices and dyes you can come out on top with a profit. In this run I was trying to see how many alliances I could forge at one time. I managed to max them out, you can only have 5, and went on to have the most blissfully peaceful game of civilization I can remember. I was everybody's friend and if anyone picked on me or my buddies they were bombed into the stone age.

He shouldn't have laughed at me... he shouldn't have laughed!!!

I made a point to cross the sea before everyone else and cornered the market on aluminum. Which meant that I’m the only one with an air force worth a damn and since I’m everybody's “friend” no one thought to put up air defenses. The last kerfuffle with my cranky roman neighbor was as brief as it was hilarious.

Near the end the tension kind of went out of the game. I had built a massive empire over three continents making 700 gold a turn. Money was no object and I had everything lined up for a science victory. Two cities with two launchpads makes it so I’m 50-ish turns away. But then came the sabotage. My fair weather friends had been biding their time and making spies. Suddenly parking my own spies on launch pads and neighborhoods wasn’t enough to keep my victory projects from resetting and mini boss quality tanks (spy made partisans) from popping up in the middle of my capital.

If I was in any actual space race I would have lost… but the beauty of the culture victory is that I sometimes forget I’ve already got it made. Within 20 turns I was the tourist capital of the world and I posted my best score in Civ since 2014. Hell of a game. I don't get a whole lot of self respect out this hobby so when it does happen I need to document it!

Oh and does the gathering storm come out tomorrow? ...I hadn’t realized.

Russian Doll Review: Stop Hitting Yourself.

I’m jealous of groundhog day. I can’t be the only one who is. It's a unique concept executed perfectly. If you try to drink from the fountain of Bill Murray’s best movie (come at me) you best have a damn decent show in mind. Thankfully, Russian Doll does. It is both darker than it wants you to think it is as well as more complicated. Groundhog day was essentially a sardonic morality play. Boiling down to the message of “Hey! Don’t be an asshole.” Russian Doll has a bit more on its mind.

While at its core it remains a relationship drama it also sits a nifty science fiction puzzle in front of your nose and gives you 6 episodes to figure it out. I did not. For once I got a bit more than timey-wimey hand waving and was disappointed I didn’t piece together the rotting fruit bit earlier. That’s just one piece. You get your first real clue after the initial death. You’d have to pause a lot and take notes but you could do it.

That is how you get your cake and eat it too. Do you have a good relationship story? Maybe about how turning your terminal self loathing into a lifestyle is a sh*t idea? Then maybe sprinkle in some time travel shenanigans to prove that it would take divine intervention to get some people to notice. Basically it only uses time travel to tell a better relationship story and that’s what I respect most. You can be as story driven as you want but if your characters and their choices don’t make sense episode to episode (SHERLOCK) I’m not going to be happy enough with you to bother with a write up.

"Sweet birthday baby" is the new "Ned Ryerson"

I’m dancing around the story because I don’t want you to know anything going in. Are you a self loathing introvert or extrovert? This show is gonna say some things that might hit you in the gut. Stuff that’s quite a bit more heady than simply hating yourself is wrong. It’s also the rare netflix show feels exactly as long as it needs to be. The first few were so dense and delicious I wasn’t sure if they were 50 minutes or not. Not a second over 30 it turned out.

The best thing I can say about the writing is that every character has a point. Everyone. The jerks, the homeless, even a philandering jackhole has a point. Except the 3 minute scene where Nadia shows up to her programming day job. That was just a bad scene. A noticeably RARE bad scene, but there it is. It’s just nice to see a show about depression and self destruction where everybody's pain matters. Even the villain’s.

I can’t say you’re going to love Russian Doll. I sure as hell did, but it might get a bit dark for some and if you’ve never dealt seriously with depression it might be too navel gazy. But it’s got a good puzzle worth solving and if you start I’m confident you’ll finish it. You also may not like how it ends but again, I sure as hell did.

Out of Boredom

I’m bored. I’m so bored I’m doing that thing I do every 2 years where I try to get into an MMO. It almost never works. I’m not a fan of the theme park vibe and I only put up with it in Destiny because the actual gameplay was sublime. Not so in Final Fantasy 14. It’s funny how much it has in common with 12 what with the arrow that spews out of enemies that target you and the floating blue dots denoting the edge of an area. I just wish it had 12’s art direction. Or 12’s score…

I’m an archer. I’m not sure if I’m in an area for archers specifically or if all the newbies wind up in this forest. The music is a lazy synth hodgepodge of Newman’s Shire stuff. I’m not impressed. But it IS pretty and I’m not not enjoying it. Runs like a dream too. Not that a game made in 2014 that's also on a PS4 is going to knock my socks off but its still impressively crisp.

I’ll stick with it for a month. I had to jump through enough free trial hoops to get this far. You bet your butt I’m gonna get my un-money’s worth. Hey, maybe I like it so much I feel compelled to pay $12 a month for it. Maybe in the same month I find the one and we get engaged after winning the lottery. In an infinite universe many things are possible.

February Doldrums.

Chamberlain had the perfect word for the last week: “doldrums.” I hadn’t realized how long I had been stuck in it until he brought it up. It was time to start asking myself certain questions. Questions such as “do I like this?” and "am I actually having fun?" I don’t ask myself that nearly enough about what I’m playing. My screen time these days are more vanishingly small than ever and I feel like I’m stuck in a rut. A loot rut.

If I’m not playing Destiny 2 I’m playing Diablo. If I’m not playing Diablo I might be in Borderlands 2. There’s a few slay the spire runs in between those but suffice it to say I haven't seen any games I feel like playing that are coming out in the next 6 months. Well that’s not true. I see you over there Civ VI. Can’t wait to have the United Nations back in a week or so. But still I can’t say I’m ITCHING to play it. Sure The Outer Worlds and Psychonauts 2 are coming but neither have nailed down a date and I sincerely doubt both come out in November, let alone this year. Tim Schafer scares easy, is what I’m saying.

So I shuffle off to my digital casinos. That’s what it’s starting to feel like. That I’m no longer an active participant but just stuck in front of a video poker machine for 2 hours a night. Am I having fun? ...Yes. Yes with an asterisk. There is still way more skill involved in staying alive in all 3 games then I’m giving them credit for. Sure these games might share some aspects with mindless gambling but I’m not exactly just sitting there. Though I’ve played them each so many times it is starting to feel that way.

It’s not like I don’t have a pile of shame to deal with. I could give monster hunter world another shot. There’s got to be something about that game I keep missing. Far too many people like it way too much for it to only be the exercise in frustration I thought it was. I got options, I guess. I’m sure the winds will pick up eventually.

The Terror Review: Save our Souls

Do you ever get the feeling when you’re watching, listening to, or reading something and think that this might be your favorite thing? I thought that a lot watching The Terror. It also scared me off writing a full on review. I liked it too much. It had so many things I loved in one place. Great English actors on sailing ships, 19th century exploration, paranoia thriller plotting, and a solid idea for a cgi monster with the budget to make it happen. This review will not be objective. This is the only box set I’ve bought in a decade. I’ve watched it more than 3 times all the way through. I love this show and hope some of that wafts off me in your direction.


Your experience may hinge on how much you enjoy watching English people in uniforms arguing life or death stakes. Can you deal with hours of that? Can you put up with that for fleeting jaws-like glimpses of a demonic polar bear? If you were sold on this by the formula of Ridley Scott + arctic + cgi monster = Victorian Alien, I have some bad news. This is way more about the hubris of Sir John Franklin (Ciaran Hines) and the infuriatingly optimistic way he gets every man in his service killed.

Slowly.

Over 3 years.

His doomsaying second officer (Jared Harris) is driven deep as he can go into the bottle after pleading for The Erebus and The Terror to take a slower, steadier, route away from the ice pack. Instead they press on, becoming part of it, never to be rescued. That's just the first episode. This is just how it all starts.




It’s the kind of thing you don’t see much of outside of HBO. A real cast of thousands. 10 episodes is a lot of time from the right perspective. This is another ingredient to the secret sauce. It’s a movie not a series. These are 5 acts in 10 parts. This was originally planned as a multiple season series and it shows. Every episode makes significant changes to the status quo. There almost never is a “status quo.” Instead there is faltering leadership, starvation, madness, and mutinous designs.

Should I keep going? Spoil the breakout stars, the mid season twists, and the tuunbaq’s song? I kinda want to. But seeing everything and everyone in it fresh is one of the best viewing experiences I’ve ever had. Just know that there is a through line for every story from the first episode to the last. I’ve looked for them. The Terror is so dense that there are some characters I forgot about the first go round that I made a point to focus on the second time.

Everybody gets a beginning, middle, and end. Some certainly more than others, but everyone gets at least a little spotlight. Even the guy who becomes comatose after being mauled by a demon bear. Know that Henry Goodsir is the BEST sir. You can’t finish it without loving that sonofabitch. Paul Ready knows how to perfect the goody two shoes character so that you not only like him but actively root for him. That’s as spoilery as I feel like getting. 

The Terror got effing robbed at the emmys. A year out and it seems everyone forgot about it. There’s a new series in the works set in the California Japanese internment camps which sounds neat. But this season was a miracle of horror film making and more people need to see it. I bet it pops up on nexflix or something before the new season but the $25 I paid is more than enough for a show that captures an absolutely brutal feeling of dread and sustains it effortlessly over 10 hours.


$17 at wal-mart. Just. sayin’.

The world didn't deserve you Mr/Dr. Goodsir.

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.