Da Vinci's Demons Review: The Adventures of Young Leonardo Jones.

Ambidexterity is so a super power.  You and your heat vision.

Starz is quite the hit and miss premium network. They have shows that seem to hold together from a distance, but if you look too closely, creatively they appear strung together with chewing gum and chicken wire. I mean sure, Spartacus did not suck, but I never went out of my way for it, and having your lead get hit by cancer and die? That's just a bad hand all around, and they stuck with it without seeming weird or callus. 8 Simple Rules couldn't pull that off. They kept at it, is my point, and that kind of workmanship will pay off eventually.

Which brings me to David S. Goyer's  Da Vinci's Demons and how it sucker punched me into loving it.  It's good. It is just flat out, a "good" show. If you are sick of the two year long strip teases from BBC's Sherlock like I was, D.V.D. is a welcome and satisfying amuse bouche. That's french for surprisingly well written and acted sexy action-adventure-mystery I'm pretty sure.

And it is all of those things. I mean, this should crash and burn while being insulting and trivial, but it doesn't and it isn't. It's fun, witty, well paced, and it knows where it's going. It juggles court intrigue, warfare, screwball comedy, and even tomb raiding with a deft and well funded hand. Sure, some aspects work better than others most of the time, but they all earn enough merit for the over arching story to matter.

"You know you were like, 60, when we first met right?"

 "Shh! I can't focus on drawing Lucrezia's side boob when you talk to me!"

This could have been so many different shows, and the amount of ground it covers in 8 episodes is commendable on it's own. I mean, I don't believe Di Vinci was ever a Medici spy trying to con Vlad the Impaler, but that doesn't stop DVD from being awesome pretending he did. I'm glad I only know the broad strokes of Da Vinci's biography. Like how Nico didn't factor in until much later in his life and that's about it.

If you fancy yourself an expert on the man I bet you've already written off this liberally ridiculous piece of historical fiction. Like I said, I don't believe Da Vinci invented the camera obscura in the 1400's, but I love the way DVD lies to me... and he could have, if you don't think about it. Seriously, you shouldn't think too hard about the historical logistics and instead focus on what the show does well. Which is the story, the script, and the characters. Buckle up, because I'm about lick so many actor's boots right now:

Tom Riley:

A show is usually only as good as it's lead and Tom Riley brings the pain. He's funny, eccentric, endearingly over dramatic, and does his damnedest never to play the same trick twice. Though his finger twitching may grind on your nerves if you binge watch it. He's the literal renaissance man a show like this would need to stay afloat. And he steers the helm well, even when it enters more questionable waters. Remember when I said Count Dracula shows up? That's a perfect example. You believe the world around him because he does...or his character does, who knows? Maybe there's some nutty Danial Day Lewis method under his hood. I don't care how Riley does it, he's seriously giving Cumberbatch's Sherlock a run for his money.

Laura Haddock

This is a "premium" show, so they know there's a built in audience for over produced soft core porn. So yeah, if all you want out of her character is a sex scene every other episode (or at least some causal nudity) you're going to get your money's worth, whilst making me very sad. Yes, she's part of a love triangle, yes her character takes some time to really get off the ground , and yes... her plot twists get pretty out there. But it's fun and in her capable hands, its also much more convincing than it would be if preformed by someone who was (and I hate this term) "just another pretty face."

Once her character has room to breathe after getting nestled comfortably into the Medici-Papal land war conspiracy, she shines. Her face in the last shot of the penultimate episode is brilliant. It's so haggard, yet surprised. It's the face of someone who thought they had nothing left to loose and then looses so much more. Its difficult to talk about her arc without spoiling things so just know she's worth it. DVD could have survived without such a three dimensional female character, but it wouldn't have been half as rich.

Blake Ritson


 Every good story needs a villain and Ritson fits the roll like it was personally tailored for him. He plays the sword arm of the pope and he's not afraid to swing it. On the contrary, he's only too happy to oblige. He may seem to be the quiet, plotting, sociopath that's gotten a wee bit overexposed these days and for the most part he is. But like all the other actors above, they find subtext in the material that may, or may not, exist and mine it for all it's worth. He's a perfect foil for Da Vinci and watching them pace around each other out scheming each other's schemes is the highlight of this season. He's a character that exits for a few episodes, just when you think you're getting tired of him, so you can steel yourself for the next game of cat and mouse.  






Should you watch Da Vinvi's Demons? I say yes. Its one of the most pleasant surprises of the year, and among Goyer's best work. I love it precisely because its actually a lot better than Goyer's films in certain ways. I never knew he had such endearing characters in him judging from his past with Christopher Nolan. He helped make great films to be sure, but there aren't a whole lot of fleshed out characters in the Nolanverse. Because Starz has given such a talented feature writer room to breathe in TV land, they now have an extra check next to their name in my mental journal. And I know I'll be in front of the tube next year with bells on to see what happens to the gang that season. I hope to see some of you out there.

Why Douglas Tennaple's views on homosexuality are hurtful and why It doesn't change my opinion of his work.

Say it ain't so Doug.

So... *deep breath* remember how you felt when a personal hero turned out to be a lot different in reality than you'd imagined? While looking for material for my SAVE ARMIKROG article below, I came across something deeply troubling. A 2 year old article on GayGamer (an exceptionally well written site) covering a particularly nasty exchange between a homosexual individual and Mr. Tennaple on his blog. It's bad, it's...bad. I mean, he compares a homosexual relationship to a guy taking a dump in the ladies room. 

It's bad.

His work on The Neverhood changed me. It had me look at the interactive medium and made me want to "do that."  I didn't care what that meant at the time and the fire still burns. I once had a dream I was answering phones at the Insomniac Games branch twenty minutes from my home, and woke with a smile.

Usually rhetoric like that makes me angry, but now I'm just really really sad. It's one thing to be ideologically opposed to same sex marriage, it's another to be so mean about it. But you know what? He is in no position to stop any political ground gained on the movement and his work has never reflected any agenda of the sort. That is just what he believes and he is capable of producing worth while art divorced from those ideals.

So I find only my opinion of the man has changed and I'm still pleased as punch Armikrog is a thing that could happen. But now I'm just gonna... I'm... christ. I'm gonna make a drink and stare into the middle distance for a while.

This hurts.

Nintendo May Save Armikrog!

The Armikrog kickstarter is dying and I feel responsible. I know my $50 wouldn't have made much of a dent in their $300,000 deficit, but that doesn't mean I don't feel complicit in it's suffering. If ever there was a developer that earned a blind leap of faith from me, it's Douglas TenNaple.

Still, Polygon has broken the story that either way, Armikrog's ship may have come in. I'm not in the market for a Wii-U, but that doesn't mean I won't take back all the mud I've slung at their company in recent years. If they follow through, I will personally slobber all over Nintendo's ring. Because they would finally shine a mainstream spotlight on the progeny of The Neverhood. And that's something I've secretly always wanted. So keep on keepin' on, Pencil Test Studios. My fingers are crossed as tight as they possibly can.

So if you can, PLEASE GIVE.

Hannibal "Savoureux" Review: Chekhov's Fly Lure.

The board is set, the lines are drawn, the frame work of season 2 is now in place. Ladies and gents; Hannibal stuck the landing last night, deciding not to go with a shocking season end plot twist, but to subvert your expectations. This was a damn fine series of television and the most original detective procedural in over 6 years.  I couldn't have been happier with what I've seen and I prey to Bob that it finally finds an audience next year. Bob tells me I should stop doing that, but I think he secretly finds it flattering.

Ok, I'm sorry I made that fertility idol out of your old post-its. 

So to start, this season ends not with a surprise but with catharsis. Will's dreams of a dark foreboding elk finally make sense to him. Unfortunately his erratic and incredibly suspicious behavior  have put him on the wrong side of the law. Fishburne is once again aggravatingly grey in his role of Jack Crawford. He was the one that threw Will into the jaws of the el- ...um, lion, but he remains unapologetic about the quivering mess of a man Will has become. Thankfully Bloom is there to voice the audience's frustrations and rightfully call him out as the selfish dick he is. But Crawford's counter point about the lives Graham saved is still worth chewing over.

Lector himself sheds some crocodile tears in front of his therapist after hearing the news of Graham's alleged involvement in the copy cat killings. A frame job he meticulously and brilliantly devised. That creepy break-in scene a month ago that showed Lector fiddling with Will's fly lures? That comes screaming back in a forehead slapping "of course" kind of way. I can't wait to go back and pour over the other little details of Lector's plot to drive Will crazy.

So instead of collapsing from exhaustion, Hannibal looks to be rolling up its sleeves. I'm left with the optomistic impression that the best this show has to offer is yet to come. The smell coming from Living Dead Guy production's kitchen is delicious...but I probably shouldn't eat it.

Salut.

.

The Last of Us: It's as great as you dared hope.

Today I planed on finally getting around to reviewing the first season of Da Vinci's Demons  (I loved it). But I also thought I could just pick up The Last of Us, get my feet wet and be able to think about something else for the rest of the day. That's not going to happen. Just when you think Naughty Dog is going to peak as a developer they do something amazing. I'm talking about Jak 2, Uncharted: Among Thieves, and now The Last of Us. Which, depending on how it ends and how many times I wind up playing it, I can clearly see myself calling it the studio's opus.

That's coming from the guy who's first video game ever was Crash (motherf**king) Bandicoot. As rose colored as my glasses are for this studio, I still didn't think they had something like the first 20 minutes of this game in them. I had tears welling in my eyes, and while I'll admit a similar character did that to me under similar circumstances last November, these are the only two times a video game has ever made me that emotional.

This is not a super fun game, in fact I find myself putting it down and walking away from it to write this blurb. It's almost...artful in it's tedium. It's characters are miserable, and you slowly take on their baggage. It's an exhausting game because it's so effortlessly sympathetic.

This isn't a review, but I urge you (the 16 of you) to pick it up if you have the means. If this isn't anouther touchstone moment in video game story telling then I don't know what is.

Except I do... and it is.

Why I won't be Seeing Man of Steel.

Weaponized handsome.

A lot of people I know loved this movie and I think the vast majority of negative reviews stem from a political agenda against comic book movies in general. At least I thought they were in Iron man 3's case. But I'm not going to see it. I do not want to prove my preconceptions wrong. I am a coward, I own that. But I am a very well reasoned coward, as I will explain.

My frigidity towards MOS came a lot earlier than the reviews and I'll get to that; but the most interesting thing about movies that appear polarizing on RT is how positive the positive reviews are. Because it can tell you a lot. Usually there will be loud proselytizing from at least a quarter of the positive reviews while the negatives will just come off as grumpy and indifferent. That's the best case scenario for a 50% movie.

This is not the case on MOS's page. Yeah there are about 10% that love it, but even the b-'s and the 3.4's sound browbeaten and bored. That's bad, not Phantom Menace bad, but remember when critics didn't hate it at first? A chilling effect like that could put this movie on a really dusty shelf if you know what I mean.

Don't be like that, Zach. All I'm doing is attacking your art and livelihood.

But again, the critic's opinions aren't close to the strongest reason I do not want to drop twelve bucks on this movie, its the director.

 Zach Snyder bores the living hell out of me and he has for years. He's not...bad, he's actually pretty good. But he never addresses his bigger faults as a film maker, in fact, given the chance he exacerbates them.

When 300 came out on DVD I didn't get a chance to see it and had heard virtually all of the lines shouted ad naseum by classmates for a good four months. I was pumped. So my sister and I sat down to watch it and aside from chuckling at how the only ethnic character we'd seen yet had been kicked down a well and all the prophet licking, we were having a good time. But about twenty minutes from the end we decided that 40 of the 80 some odd minutes we'd seen were in slow motion. You know what 40 minutes of slow motion is on a small screen (that isn't showing Dredd*)? It's boring. It's...really boring.

After a couple minutes of "I thought you wanted to watch this."
"No, I thought you did" We cut it off. A few years later his Watchman adaptation was looking really good; and while I'll defend that as his best film, I can't say I love it and I know plenty of fans of the source material that go into a mouth frothing rage when I bring up Nite Owl.

Which brings me to MOS and Superman. He's a hero I've never really got into, except that animated series theme is incredible, I should do something on Shirley Walker... but uh, I'm getting sidetracked. You ask me if I want to see the most boring action director tackle one of the most historically boring superheros? No. I'm sorry, but I'm gonna pass.



*the last two minutes of that clip is the end of Dredd. So, SPOILER.

10 Reasons I Both Love and Loath Dark Souls.

"And me without my ghost harmonica..."

I'll admit I got on the Dark Souls boat pretty late, but as a guy who put down Demon Souls halfway through, I had quite a bit of cautious skepticism to to deal with first. The glowing praise for Dark Souls was, in itself, untrustworthy. The trick was parsing what was genuine appreciation for the game and what may have actually been stockholm syndrome. Give me another piece of art that can induce that.

So after finally buying the game and collapsing breathless on to Gwyn's bonfire a couple times, I thought I'd finally get around to writing a review. But what I had to say then wasn't kind, nor objective. It's only now, about two months later, that I feel I can finally articulate my thoughts on why Dark Souls is a masterpiece...that I want to see hung by the neck until dead.

-1. It really isn't fair.

"Should have made a ranged character, dumbass." -dragon rib cage

The critics lied. The prevailing mantra in all reviews I read was that it was a ridiculous, rage inducing, experience that was tough but fair. I'm calling bullsh*t. Not only is there a story quest where you have to die, not only are there several places where the game's awful physics engine has your life in its hands, but if your nose isn't glued to a wiki you're not going to have any idea what what to do for your character's equipment.

I love hard, unfair, games. Devil May Cry 3 may actually be one of my favorite games ever. But that sucker barely clocks in under 13 hours start to finish. Both DS's are RPGs and are at least twice that length. In DMC, when you hit a really rough spot, you blame your skill. In DS you panic and wonder if you've spent the last 25 hours building an absolutely useless character.

+1. It's an unforgettable experience because it isn't fair.

I'm gonna say something that's gonna make all the DS vets smack their heads on their desks: Londo Sniper. They are the worst, the worst, part of the game. This is everything that's awful about DS  boiled down to about 50 feet:

HIS BLOOD STAIN'S RIGHT TH-  awwwwwww.

That part of the game made me curse my birth and the half baked physics the devs were torturing me with. But you know what you feel like when you finally, finally, get past him? When you parry his sword and pimp slap him into a thousand foot Disney villain death? Invincible.


-2. You will have no idea where you have to go and what you have to do.

There's a fine line between holding a player's hand and throwing them into the briar patch. In DS the briar patch is made of razor wire and its on fire. It's easy at first to know where you have to go. If you wandered into a well full of knifey ghost gals on your first run, I'm very, very, sorry. But after killing, say, the two gargoyles and ringing the bell... what then? I didn't know. There is no hint, nor rhyme, nor reason to tell you to go to the depths, to get the key, to walk through the valley of drakes, to find Blight Town, to kill the fire spider chick, to ring the second bell.

Critics give adventure games all kinds of hell for goals a fraction as obtuse as these. Saying you need to read the wiki is crap. What are our children's children to do when the robots take over and destroy the internet? How will they even know the painted world of Ariamis even exists?! It's rushed, callous, game design successfully spun as "challenge."

+2  The secrets upon secrets upon awesome.

Getting turned around in DS is literally a slow, painful, death. You've probably just killed a boss after two hours of trying, you have run out of homeward bones, (don't ask) and BAM! a mosquito just threw a puddle of blood over your life bar's last leg. Congratulations, that was six levels of xp. After that episode, I was in a fit of rolling rage (when you mash the dodge button out of directionless fury) and soon I rolled through a invisible wall and found a entire set of armor that was perfect for my character. A set that was equal to the value of souls I'd just lost.

DS is unquestionably the greatest "metroidvania" since 1997. It's a giant, terrifying, labyrinth that is constantly feeding back into itself. That is, when it isn't  revealing massive secret areas that are as well made and intricate as the story's path. The aforementioned painted world isn't some one off easter egg.  Its not an interesting little place you can just leave after ten minutes. No. Its at least a good three hours of content with new enemies and a really fun boss. She's invisible and you try to catch her sneaking up on you by her snow prints, god, it's a wonderful fight.

The point is, a lesser developer would have chopped that off and sold it as day one dlc. A less, lesser dev would have openly advertised it with a crazy old man you can't help but run into who forces a treasure map into your hands. What From software does is madness. Wonderful, overly intricate, madness.

+3 You are an Unstoppable Killing Machine. 

When you get in a groove with your favorite weapon and load out in DS *record scratch* you'll feel good. You'll feel amazing. Going back to areas that used to give you nightmare sweats and clearing out monsters with a flick of your index finger is a rush few other games can reach...let alone replicate. You'll need that confidence to get through to the end game and I love how nothing scales to your level. Because nobody seriously thought that was a good idea, oblivion.

-3 You are a porcelain sack of potatoes.

Everything is a double edged sword in DS. A weapon that works wonderfully against one enemy is a disaster against another. A dodge that saved your life in one boss battle will send you flying off a cliff in another. Some armor load outs are... you get the idea. You are mortal, DS never wants you to forget that. Its depressing.

-4 The story is a complete afterthought...

Everyone dead, one zombie chosen... fire good. That is the story of Dark Souls if you infer absolutely nothing about the world around you. This wouldn't be a knock against the game if there wasn't a narrated intro droning on about a bunch of folks you don't know or care about. Then there's another when a giant crow scoops you up in the beginning explaining where you are. That's it. Its really crappy story telling. It would be one thing to be left completely in the dark about where you are and what you're doing. Shadow of the Colossus did this and I thought that was pretty good. Because it slaps on a traditional narrative arc in the beginning and does absolutely nothing else with it, when I killed the final boss I sat back and mumbled "that's it?"

That is the absolute worst thing that can be said by a player at the end of a game.

+4 ...while the setting is absolutely hypnotic.

The most frustrating thing about the story is that its setting is scrumptiously mysterious. Why are some undead chosen to be revived ad infinitum while others are condemned to homicidal madness? What's the deal with the sentient slime in the depths? What's the deal with Blight Town? What's the deal with those adorable little mushrooms and why are they in such an adorable little hurry? These questions don't need answering, yet they burn in the back of my head whenever I play. They say you should show more than you tell and no one does that better than DS.

-5 The online aspect is obtuse, more irritating than helpful, and is literally deadly.

To be honest, I like the little flaming text messages DS players can send each other. I like how there's a spell you can learn to make more of them appear. I like how you can only choose from a mad lib list of objects and phrases so you can never give too much away and the immersion never breaks.

"Try holding with both hands" ...dude. Come on guys.

But when some overpowered punk invades the friggin' crystal caverns and just ... pushes you. I don't, I just, grrr. Maybe I'm a sore looser, maybe I'm really bad at this game. But I know that no one has the right to rip me out of the game when I'm just a single sword stroke away from killing those bosses. That's right, those bosses. Welp, guess what GFWL does every time it has a conniption fit? And it does it constantly. It usually drops me right where I left off, but it only needed to to heal Ornstein once to get a spot on this list. Good. Lord. Not cool.

+5 But there was this one time...

After GFWL had slapped the almost victory out of my hands I was dumbstruck. I had had it up to more than here (my hand is like, so far above my head right now) with DS. I was ready to put this sucker down for good...until my game had been invaded by someone named Pixlerazor. And he was about to get so rage-rolled. I was a heavy armor guy and he was a light guy, so every time I got close he just sprinted away like a maniacal pixie dream man. This went on until I had him pinned against a fire place (he was so gonna get it) ...and he rolled through a secret door and showed me how to get the best heavy armor in the game.

I was dumbstruck.

We chated, friended, killed some giants together, he dropped some green tantinite I desperately needed, and we went our separate ways. Pixlerazor restored my faith in the game. Not just equipment wise (Ornstein wouldn't know what hit em') but personally. DS players can be a violent, occasionally political bunch. But in a game so callous and uncaring, they can bare a different kind of soul: a bright one.