Darkest Dungeon gets deeper on the 15.

Double D is a harsh mistress that won't let you forget her. It's a trial of nerves and heartless strategy. Managing to be both cruel yet voraciously addicting. Like playing black jack under a swinging pendulum. I actually agonized over what the right gambling metaphor for it would be. It's not poker because chance factors too heavily. It's not slots because you have a ton of ways to haul your bleeding viscera out of a bad situation.

It's already a great game, but it's several updates away from being finished, I mean... there better be at least a couple more dungeon templates cooking. Either way, we get a new hero with what looks to be a scruffy wolfhound in tow. Great! I'm gonna watch that dog die. So many times.

"It's all your fault! You let this happen!!!!"

The Zombie Simpsons: Everything you wanted to know about it's slow and painful death but were afraid to ask.

Harry Shearer is officially back on the Simpsons. Yay, Nay, or meh? The guy's done the same job for 25 years and wants out. He's 71 and has more money than god so I'm a little sad they wrangled him back. The poor guy. Though he never has to walk into the studio again, so that's a pretty baller move.

But it was in the comment section of the Birth.Movies.Death article that I stumbled upon a self published chronicle of how that show's spirit slowly became amantiago-ed. I probably shouldn't have tried to verb that, but seriously:

"Charlie Sweatpant's" manifesto is a spectacular read. 

It keeps it's editorial voice to a minimum* and acts mostly like an investigation piece, citing dwindling amazon reviews, and old writers talking out of school. You know what the answers are going in, Matt Groening lost interest, the great writers drifted away, the mediocre links in the chain achieved seniority, then... darkness.

But it's nice someone took the time to set the record straight. I just realized I lost 3 of the 4 disks of season four that I've had since middle school and it's breaking my heart.


*I'm further in and it's now very much an editorial. Still a dead on critique, though.

18 whole minutes of No Man's Sky!

Every once in a while a game comes along that promises the moon. This one promises the universe. A game so big your entire life isn't remotely enough to see it all. I want to believe in it so hard. A polygonal minecraft with laser guns and spaceships and jet packs and aliens and black monolithic robots... I'll let the game's creator take it from here. Clearly I need to lie down.

True Detective Season 2 is... awful, ok? It's really, REALLY, bad.

Taylor. f**king. Kitsch.

My HBO NOW subscription lapsed on Tuesday. Instead of feeling like I was about to loose an important part of my Sunday night, I thought "Good." Let's start with the new opening. Last season's was a soaring, yet bitter, country-blues ballad. I listened to it all the way through for every episode. Even my re-watch. But this year? This pretentious beat poetry B.S.? I had planned on giving S2 an unbiased shake, but immediately after a minute and a half of "I'm so dark and mysterious, you don't even KNOW!" I started making myself a drink.

Over the next 2 hours I would have 4.

Season 1 was interesting because it played around with the crazy outsider and abusive alcoholic cop archetypes. It didn't waste a second. Boom, here's a visually stunning serial murder site. Bang, our "hero" is a funny, nihilistic, wackjob. Bam, the central villain is called the Yellow King, he kidnaps runaway children and burns down churches. I DARE you not to watch the rest of that show.

The first episode slavishly sets up the 4 main characters, none of which are remotely interesting enough to carry the show on it's own. There is no Marty-esque straight man to react rationally to each character's $10 words and needless pontification. But even so, everyone is... fine. Ferrel's violent desperation to be a better father to his estranged son (who's clearly the product of his ex-wife's sexual assault) is compelling enough, but it feels like the story plays it's best hand too early and won't have anything left to say come episode 5. Oh, and Vaughn pointed him in the direction of the man who (possibly) did it 10 years prior. But now he's in too deep with Vaughn and... zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

McAdams is the hard line rookie detective who's got a screwy guru dad (David Morse!!!), way too much to prove to herself, and just pulled off a dead-end raid on what she thought was a prostitution ring. Again, she's fine, but has absolutely nothing to do for 2 episodes that involve emoting or reacting in any way. I was gonna give Vaughn his own paragraph but he has the same problems. Being the mobster turned legitimate business man, he's having trouble walking the line afte- zzzzzzzzz.

I'm sorry, but it's such a boring effing stock character. But I did love his monologue about his father locking him in the basement for 4 days. The show came alive for those 3 minutes.

And now, Kitsch. I've had a bone to pick with him ever since Friday Night Lights. He's not "bad" but in that show he was completely surrounded by actors miles out of his league. So was Minka Kelly and I skipped every scene they had together (You're the best, Netflix). This isn't the case here. Every main actor is meticulously set on the same level of pensive brood. No one stands out, so he isn't... exactly out shined. But when his character impotently begs to get back on his highway patrol bike, I believe him. This is his best work yet, but it's not enough. Not even close. I don't know how he landed this, but here we are.

The murder! Right, there's a murder. The guy had his eyes burned out and he was a keynote speaker on a proposed light rail constru- zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

You guys, I am so sorry. I promised I'd stop dozing off. But BirdMan is no Yellow King. The first season was always driving home themes of obsession and madness. Every character dealt with them in ways worth exploring. Rust Cohle was a dick, but I cared about him almost immediately. I don't give a flip what's happening to anyone in season 2. I haven't even bothered to look up their names on IMDB. This is all a sleepy modernization of Chinatown with nothing to say. Yet. I'd love to retract all this months down the line if it ever gets "gud." But... that's silly. That would be insanity.

S1 had a framing device and a driving, biting, mystery. 2 has no momentum whatsoever. I think Pizzolatto had years to write 1 and what's airing on Sunday nights now is a middling rough draft. It hurts to say that almost as much as it is draining to watch.


UPDATE: Oh! Oh! I forgot all about this little gem. Be more on the nose, True Detective soundtrack.

I dare you.

How do you feel about making blade runners affordable?

If you've seen Kingsman, you know those amputee blade runners are rad as balls. But the radness is unfortunately in equal proportion to how expensive they are. And also how unlikely an insurance company is to spring for them.

They don't. Not ever.

 Fortunately there's a non profit that feels for amputees that just need to go for a run again.

Help out, guys. There's nothing on earth like a runner's high.

DONATE!

Arkham knight: Patch one. It's... better. There be miles to go, however.

The PS4 has better textures than this. The PS4 is a glorified 6 year old gaming PC. Sorry Chance, but it is.

The regularly scheduled freezing hitches are gone, but gliding and dive bombing still tank the FPS on a GTX 780. Which without high textures (which still don't exist yet) is goddamn ridiculous. WB was right to pull it, the thing isn't finished yet. Though those fancy smoke and flying paper effects look great and are stable at 30 FPS. But I'm a 60 fps man and that's just not good enough yet. Oh and apparently the rain effects never worked  so now I get to enjoy watching water slide off bat's helmet for the fist time. *Checks* yes... that's lovely.

So I've been treating it like an early accesses and it's been more good than bad. I seem to be in the minority that actually like the batmobile. I love Riddler's races and the stealth sequences (yes, stealth batmobile sequences) are both tense and tactical. I've already gobbled up the main story and I have only a few quibbles. The identity of the Arkham Knight is telegraphed harder than Peter's denial of Jesus. Of Nazareth? You know the guy.

But Scarecrow's ultimate plan to destroy Batman's mystique and reputation is wonderful. John Noble just owns it, you guys. His milky eyes and facial necrosis never gets old. Though the more and more I think about it, the sillier and sillier the idea of a mercenary army EVER agreeing to attack an American city is. What the hell is their end game, exactly? How are they ever going to see the outside of a CIA black site after the army takes them out? At least they sure are fun to punch.

So while they should have suspended the PC release for at least a couple weeks, I am glad I got to play it. In spite of all the vitriol 10,000 people are doing so  on PC right now. That's ten times the people playing Beyond Earth! It was a botched launch, but clearly a ton of people are still having a good time. Myself included. 

Tales from the Borderlands, still the most enjoyable game this year.

There's an argument to be made that Telltale doesn't actually make games anymore. There are no puzzles to solve or objectives to complete. But there are narratives to subtly direct. But the simple fact is I've had more fun picking dialogue choices for Rhys and Fiona's increasingly bloody and hilarious caper across the Borderlands than any other game this year.

Every character has gotten a laugh out of me, twists have genuinely shocked me, and I'm DYING to know what the Atlas corporation was up to before Hyperion snuffed them out. Die hard Borderlands fans (YO) are going to get the most mileage out of these episodes, but the acting and writing is so sharp I'd recommend it to people who actively hate video games.