Oh look, the greatest branching narrative of all time is under $4.00

The "game" of Alpha Protocol isn't terrible... it's just cheap as cheap can be. Same with the animation, it looks like guards are walking on conveyor belts. There's quality to the work, it's just really hard to appreciate. But the story is so good, it's honestly the best espionage story in gaming, that the actual game doesn't matter as much.

I can appreciate people who didn't like it and I can understand people that absolutely despise it. But it's under $4.00. It's worth the gamble. Tell Tale still has a lot to learn from it.

The Xcom 2 patch is out!

Come on.... come on.... this better f-in work.

*2 hours later*

Sh*t, SH*T!!! This is so much worse than before. My CPU is groaning like a gale force wind and the frame rate hasn't improved at all. Man... I am bummed out.

Everyone refuses to make eye contact in the new Daredevil poster.

This is a show that shouldn't be as good as it is. It isn't interested in converts. If super heroes (even grounded ones) turn you off... well this ain't Ibsen. But it's damn proud of what it is, which is a show with great action and design choices. I'm looking forward to it.

I decided against the poster.

I was gonna frame that Bioshock poster. I was gonna hang it above my bed. But I chickened out a bit. Gaming has always been something I didn't like wearing on my sleeve. I'm always cautious about any unspoken statement I could make. I'm a mumbler and people have a nasty habit of misunderstanding things I say.

But I love nerd sh*t! So much. I have a lovely claptrap figurine atop my PC tower right now. I have a shirt that's my favorite background gag of all time. A shirt that uses Bioshock to make fun of the Big Brothers-Big Sisters logo. A shirt that just looks like the Las Vegas sign.

Things that have an inherent beauty or sense of humor that most people could appreciate. Because if I make a statement with things I wear or carry around, I want the right message sent. I'll be a gaming cultural ambassador. Inviting, not off putting. Plus, I've found it's a great way to be able to talk about New Vegas!

So yes. Borderlands phone case today... poster I'll have to explain to future lady friends, later.

I don't usually post about posters I want...

Andrew Glazer!

But uh... yeah. I'd hang that above my bed. The real question is, should I?

I hope House of Cards is good this year...

ssssssssubtle.

It has it's ups and downs, but damn if I haven't seen all of it. All Netflix is to me this days is a subscription to Parks and Rec and American Dad. I kinda need one or the other to sleep if I don't have a book that's any good. It's hard to turn down Kevin Spacey at the worst of times. If the story isn't worth it, the performances usually are.

That's enough for me sometimes. An actor showcase.

Allright Chance, I'll see your Iron Sky...

I never knew about President Palin, I'm totally on board now.

...and raise you Southbound:

It's trying to get into the neo-horror anthology club, but quite frankly, it's a cut above those guys. It's way more Twilight Zone than Saw and I've already seen it twice. None of the segments dragged, at least for me, and there's a stone cold masterpiece in the middle of it. Plus my favorite comedian cameos as a middle aged satanist. It'll scratch your horror itch good.

Oscar Coverage? Nah. I'm good.

 

I'm just not feeling it this year. I don't have a real dog in this fight, in that I don't feel strongly about any best picture in the running. The Revenant was, at the very least, gorgeous and well acted. I'm pretty irked at the folks who say Di Caprio simply grunted his way to the Oscars. I've seen how people get when they're that cold. I'm actually not sure he was acting, I felt for him almost the entire time. That dream sequence in the ruin was some pretentious time filling garbage I Will. Give. Them. That.

Everything else is fine. It wasn't a really good year. But you want my butt in the seat you should have put Inside Out in the brass ring. That really was the best movie this year, and don't give me that look Anomolisa. I mean... where the hell was I supposed to watch you?! Though I do think it's pretty funny that Charlie Kaufman made this with Dan Harmon and Dino Stamatopoulos. I seem to recall that Community had the single greatest take down of Kaufman's work to date.

But yet again, the ballots are simply stuffed with safe bets. Just like last year. And also just like last year... I got better things to do.

You ever have one of those movies?

One of those movies that always gets you? I honestly don't know why anyone would try to make a superman movie after this. Brad Bird perfected it.

The Year of the Kraken.

V.E Schwab

This past month has not been kind, but I have since made considerable efforts towards kicking it's ass. I've stopped drinking, I'm running 30 minutes a day, switched to fish n' chicken, and! I've started writing that novel I'm working on.

And if that processes has taught me anything about my writing... it's that I need to start reading more. My pitifully small library has been an issue in the past. I mean, I hear my mom's voice right now being all "how can you write if you don't READ?!" I actually spend 2 hours a day reading. Though it's mostly cracked and news. Too much video game news, but still, I read.

But if it's a novel I want to write it is novels I will have to understand. But where to start? Something close to what I hope to write? That seemed like a solid plan. So I tried Johnathan Strange and I treated it like it was printed on sandpaper.

I'm glad I actually sat down and watched the whole mini series the BBC did (it's really good). Because it has egregious third act problems. The final act spends way too much time setting up a sequel that will apparently never happen and it ends on a semi-tragic note I felt it didn't earn. If I actually read the whole thing I might have been soured on writing for a couple more months. Even the show; which covered the Napoleonic war, a literary wizard feud, fairy folk, and sand horsies, felt like it was constantly starved for sh*t to do. So the lesson here is don't have 2 characters hate each other for the sake of drama if that drama isn't half as interesting as a friendship would be.

Imagine a scene where Johnathan tried to be Norrell's wing man at a dinner party? Imagine Norrell trying and failing to make a friend. Imagine that in the place of one of the hundred times he moans about how much he haaaates Jonathan Strange. 

Huh... I didn't sit down to review JS+MN. I'm actually here to talk about A Darker Shade of Magic. It's wonderful. It's a hokey premise (an 18th century wizard has a magic cloak that lets him travel to 4 alternate magical "Londons") and has fun with it. It's so much fun to read it's inspirational. Which is what I really needed from a book. Story structure and grammar improvements,(I'll need to ply my college editor friend with some serious liquor), were the practical goals. This is actually putting my mind at ease.

For so long, nearly my entire life, I've kept my favorite stories to myself. Because every time I sent a decoy out into the world, for a class or what have you, it was occasionally stamped into the dirt. Seriously, I once took an intro to play writing class that traumatized the ever living shit out of me. Here's my professor's IMDB page. On the first day of class I said I really liked state of grace, I'm a huge Mae Whitman fan to this day. She thought I was a kiss ass and never let me forget it.

I was the first person to finish their one act play, everyone else was either checked out or part of the theater nerd cabal. Thus my work was set upon by both pithy disgust and frozen indifference. For 2 weeks all that seemed to happen was a slow motion autopsy of my creative short comings.

Two. F***ING Weeks.

I've already droned on too long about ancient history, but I can tell you this... I'll never write an elevator scene for the stage again. Jesus, I guess I needed to get that off my chest. I've haven't brought that up in 5 years.  This must mean I'm subconsciously serious. I hope this means I'm going to write a high fantasy novel that's a satire of stagnant story telling with the tenor of a PG-13 Pixar movie.

*breaths deeply* Ok, let's do this!

I have a rule.

 If something makes me choke on my coffee, I have to post it:

I'm gonna need a Nathan Fillion one. I'm gonna need it.

The best part of Rogue Nation is the first 60 seconds.

Finally got a round to watching MI: Rogue Nation. It was just ok. I'd put it a teeeeeeeny bit above  Spectre in that RN manages to be slightly less incomprehensible. But I'm not here to talk about the actual movie. Today I'm all about the production credits!

Joe Kraemer is a man deeply in love with the Mission Impossible theme. That's a love I can understand. If it's not the greatest heroic theme ever written it's at least in the top 5. And since it took at least 4 companies to get that puppy in the air, he had a lot of room to build to it. By the time I learned China's answer to Amazon makes movies now, I was ready to love this movie.

Warming up a crowd is a thankless art and this man knows exactly what he's doing:

Admit it. You wanna see Ghost Protocol again now.

Crackpot Theory: Location+nonsensical noun=sexual poisition.

Ever done a Dallas Panini Press? What about a Polynesian Soup Spoon? 

Watch Stephen Colbert partake in a glorious 10 minute train wreck.

What... what is happening?!

This is either the best thing or the best-est thing Colbert's Late Show has ever done.

Welcome back, Orphan Black!

 My dear clone club, it's been far too long. April 24th it is.

Firewatch Review: Hey there Delilah.

Interactive drama. I've wanted it for so long I'm not sure how to feel now that I've got it. I can't speak for anyone else, but for my taste, it's about time a game was all about understated loneliness. The kind of loneliness your conscious mind never registers. The kind you might take a job out in the middle of nowhere to stop thinking about.

I couldn't have played this game at a better time. As a guy who was just on the receiving end of a text breakup, I could do with a virtual hike alone in the woods. A virtual hike alone in the woods set in a time before cellphones? All the better.

Moving on... you play a man who's had a years long relationship fly into the sh**er and he's taken a job at a Firewatch station to eat up his summer. For the next few months you've got no one but a fellow Firewatcher miles away to keep you sane. Your objectives are boiler plate at first. Stop a couple teens from setting off fireworks, clear trail heads, etc. But don't worry, things get weirder. 

Rich Sommer (the tv guy from Mad Men) nails the nonchalant despair a guy running away from his life would need. He's a delight and I can't wait for more VO work from him. Cissy Jones's Delilah suffers from an introduction that tries too hard. Ever notice when a writer NEEDS you to like someone that everything that comes out of their mouth in the first chapter is forced, unfunny, sarcasm? The first hour She grated on my nerves a bit, but before long she had me chuckling out loud. Their budding romance is the single greatest relationship I've ever seen in a game. That's your $20 right there. If that's the sorta thing that's worth that kind of scratch to you.

It's certainly worth it to me.

This game nnnnnnnnnnAILS sunsets. I mean, my god.

Please go into this game looking for a drama, not a mystery. Though there is one, and it's pretty good, it's not the point. Folks are griping that the end comes out of nowhere. It absolutely does not, it ends precisely when it means to. I cooked up several high-drama thriller plot twists that I'd muse about on my way to the next objective. I'm relived the game never acted on them. It played on my expectations brilliantly and left a lot up for interpretation.

I ended up liking Delilah. I almost got a crush on her. But like a lot of women I've met and was momentarily into... I'm sure she told me a bunch of lies to keep from hurting my feelings. That was my read on the character. Just do me a favor and take some pictures with that camera you find. And stick around for the end of the credits. There's no extra scene or a shocking revelation. There's just a perfect way to end a first person interactive drama.

Make of that what you will and please buy Firewatch. Though looking at steam's top sellers, that doesn't seem to be an issue. They certainly deserve it.

Happy Valentines Day from all your Fallout 4 companions.

Thanks, Jillian Bakos!

I uh... I got nothing today.

Still clacking away at my Xcom 2 review. Here's a preview: "It's goooooooood." Now while I work on getting a little more nuanced with that opinion, here's what Stephen Tobolowsky would look like if he were a Disney Princess.

Thanks PeterBanning!

This fictional ad from NASA seems a smidge dystopian

Where the air is free? Guess we never crack terraforming, huh?  But seriously, these space tourism ads are just the best.

YEAH!

F**k YEAH!

Anyone else wanna high-five an Art Deco statue right now?

What's the most shockng thing about XCOM 2?

It's got a good yarn. The aliens aren't just a paramilitary threat anymore and their motives aren't  resigned to some some throwaway lines at the end of the game about them finding the perfect warrior.

There's a mystery at the heart of XCOM 2 that's way more intricate than Advent simply processing humanity into food. The dialogue can be hammy and the performances don't always hit (Shen sounds pretty sleepy sometimes) but the act of freeing earth takes scientists and engineers. Not just better guns and soldiers. There's some half decent drama to be found hacking away at alien corpses in the lab, surprisingly.

Advent is a puzzle just as much as it is an enemy. In other words, the last thing I thought I'd find compelling about XCOM 2 was it's story.

"Well it's damn good to BE back, sir."

.Apparently rag-tag resistance fighters are also shockingly accomplished interior decorators

 

Ever go back to an old game and strike gold?

Just thought I'd pick up a magazine in Concordia, then bam!

 Damn funny meta-joke staring me in the face. I guess canonically none of the vault hunters ever actually die and how do you actually display plot inconsistencies? Love it. Love everything about this gag.

Digital Chicken Soup Part 2

I'm not a Thrones fan who reads the books, that's a personal failing. I never read as much as I should Still, I don't know why "Hardcore Game of Thrones" is so compulsively listenable. It's an audio history tour of Westeros by Alex Berg... played entirely straight. Like a WWI documentary.

I submit that the histories are all the rough drafts Martin went through before settling on the time period so interesting that I bought 2 months of HBO Now to binge it. Because the history tells a damn good story. No better application of writing = re-writing that I can think of.

Digital Chicken Soup.

I bought Final Fantasy XIII-2 (Jesus, look at that hyphenated number.) last December foolishly hoping it was ported. But it was an unoptimized mess brought to hideous second life. It was rough watching it constantly lurch back and forth between 60-30 fps and I dropped it like a stone.

Fast forward a year and a month and... well I'm having a rough go of it. FF's time traveling claptrap is actually soothing to me now. For lack of a more elegant phrase, I needed something both intense and inoffensive to devour my weekend's waking hours. Something new, without spending any more money. In other words, no reaching for the dusty ol' copy of Requiem for a Dream for Alex. No sir.

But it's a damn good game! The actors are actors dedicated but the script spouts the most laughable drivel I've heard in a looooooong time. But that's a good thing when you want to turn your brain off so hard it's practically meditation. It's also secretly a Pokemon game and I'm all for that at the moment.

 I finally realized in order to appreciate what Square Enix has been up to these past 7 years you have to be at least a little drunk.

Heres the cracked podcast live:

 

So that's what they look like.

Long dark night of the Kraken soul.

...Life, huh? You never seem to be able to stop putting yourself out there. Time to hit the gym harder, I guess.

Darkest Dungeon Review: Gambler's Ruin.

This is the first game I've ever reviewed that I didn't finish. I don't think I ever will. But I have played it, shall we say, enough?  I had to bum a ride from a friend the second day after I bought it and this was maybe the third week of it's early access. I hadn't really spoken to him in week or two and after stumbling into his car, bleary eyed and anxious, I barked "HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT DARKEST DUNGEON?!" He gave me the exact look I deserved.

I was completely enraptured. It's loops of bitterly difficult turn-based combat, worthwhile loot, town building; and the slow motion heart break of watching one wrong step gradually sending your favorite band of mercenaries into early graves made me manic. This game hurt me and had me begging for more.

I'll let the art speak for itself. And if you do experience the art actually speaking for itself, well... I'd light another torch.

There have been accusations that this game is too random, too cruel, and I'll get to my many caveats in a second. That specific charge is simply not true. Darkest Dungeon does not cheat. It demands perfection and that is not possible all of the time. Sometimes you try a buckshot method instead of a surgical strike, the game raps you hard on the knuckles. "Again!" It screams in an otherworldly screech without even moving it's lips. And you listen... for a while. But you will fall back on bad habits eventually and it will be none too pleased about it. The next time you put a toe over the line it will throw hours of progress into the proverbial hearth and force you to watch it all twist into ash.

You can't keep all your tin soldiers. Some will go mad, others will die too soon, and there are those who were just worthless from the start. This game is about learning your place in it's eldritch universe and that includes adapting to seemingly impossible odds. Once you realize you can always start over, often times with superior facilities, the heart of darkness is yours to reach.

Yeah, surprise motherf*&#ers!!!!!

But I do have serious misgivings. I watched this game grow over a year and I did not like everything I saw. Red Rook loves their fans... but they listened to their lunatic fringe a little too closely. They started adding features that had no business being outside of an "iron man mode" to name check another wonderful and notoriously difficult strategy game.

Enemies started leaving corpses. Barriers between you and the ranged enemies in the back of the row. Killing these freaks once was enough of a struggle and for a while the game forced me to kill them all twice! You can turn that off in the pause menu but it's on by default. Near the end they were designing the game for people that had been playing it for months already. They were all bored and wanted a harder mode. Instead of actually doing that, they catered to the reining champions and left those that were already struggling (this guy) in the dust. That was a huge mistake in my opinion. Especially with their stalwart "no easy mode" approach.

...but I digress.

Darkest Dungeon is a wild, wonderful, and original work of art, make no mistake. It's visual design is so evocative it barely needs to be animated. It's menagerie of eldritch horrors are so lovingly crafted they're hard to look at. Seriously, years down the line you'll hear people talking about how they walked in on their dad one night as a small child while he was fighting "the flesh." Kind of like the way we talk about Penny Wise the clown. Even if you never beat it (yo.), even if you barely tolerate turn based strategy, if you stick with it for at least a couple hours you will have had an experience worth your time and money.

Darkest Dungeon is truly unforgettable.

Just... look at it!

You're goddamn right Kotaku. You're goddamn right.

I know, I know, boo! gawker empire, BOOOO! Look, journalism was a cut throat business before it became completely free, and thus, impossible to live off of. I'm not bitter about my degree choice at all!

But more to the point, Hot Fuzz is a masterpiece and my most favorite movie. It's reversible murder mystery notwithstanding; I'm still laughing at it and I will never, EVER, stop trying to get my girlfriend to watch it. If she doesn't at least... tolerate it, I may have to do some serious thinking about our future.

Happy Endless Day!

It's Amplitude's 5th birthday today, and they are just the bestest little studio I ever did see. Each of their 3 games have this fun little shared universe that comes together over a three day period (an Auriga day lasts three earth days *pushes glasses back up*) Each game has fun little extras you can only grab during that window.

I can't stop singing the praises of Endless Legend and Dungeon of the Endless. The first, a game so rich in originality both mechanically and artistically it's screaming close to a Civilization killer. The other a fun, sardonic, 16 bit, sci-fi dungeon crawler.  I love them both and I only want the best for this studio.

I've bought an expansion for EL I haven't really played, just out of a sense of duty. These guys are force to be reckoned with and with a new EL expansion on the way, I couldn't be happier for them. And Endless Space 2! Forgot about that...

Blow this up full screen. It's worth it.
  

I wasn't sure I was going to see Deadpool...

But these little one on one ads Ryan Reynolds has been doing are just too much. If nothing else, he truly, madly, and deeply believes in this movie/character. It's more than a little infectious.

See if you can find the crew laugh. I fuggin' LOVE crew laughs, they're like laugh tracks with a soul.

Layers of Fear: This looks like the real deal.

Jump scares. Cheap and effective, despite what most horror critics will tell you. Even the most hardened cynic gets got by a good jump scare after a while. But, like the fart joke, you never respect it.

Which is why this Lovecraft trend in the "vidja" game space has me so jacked. Because eventually we will see an RPG or a so called "walking simulator" that really nails psychological horror. They say Silent Hill 2 did it first. I don't know... I have problems with it's story. The point is, layers of fear got under my skin with a 30 second trailer. I think it's got the right mood to just stick with me for a couple days. The imagery form a couple screenshots already has. And it's overwhelmingly positive reviews from 2000 users has forced me to prick up my ears.

I'm gonna give it a shot. I am ALL about creepy oil paintings.

I got your attention now, huh?

Yeah, no. The Oscars are too white.

Thanks, Dydyrock

I hate to get political here, that's not what this blog is about. But this is in defense of good art getting it's time in the sun. The fact Samuel L. Jackson isn't nominated for his Hateful 8 Monologue is a bushwackin' nut-shootin' travesty.

I mean, I love Bryan Cranston. And the idea his Walter White performance was so good it got him an honorary Oscar tickles me pretty pink. But he did not deserve to be on that list. And Redmayne won last year!

I'm with Spike Lee on this one, that so rarely happens in context of his own films. These awards have been cooped up in their porcelain tower long enough. It's time to dust up their voting process.

Kraken Recommends: Dragon's Dogma.

I've just dipped my toe into this 40 hour affair and I'm reminded of another JRPG gem. Rogue Galaxy. That game... that game made me turn the voices off. It was constantly vomiting trite, D grade, Saturday morning cartoon drivel from the word "go." But under all that, beyond it's charming anime ascetic, was a truly marvelous action RPG. Why no one's tried to spin a decent yarn under it's template since remains a mystery.

But here we are with Dragon's Dogma. It's very much the same scenario. It looks like a slightly upgraded 360 launch title, but I can roll with that. The opening area looks like your everyday fantasy fishing villige with just a touch of Mediterranean flair to keep it from being too traditional. The acting is fine, the dialogue awful, but that's not why we're here.

Everything Dragon Age Inquisition tried to do this game did better 2 years before. It's more Devil May Cry than DA:I's real time strategy. And it's soooooo much more fun. I had a blast before I realized the grapple button pretty much made this "Shadow of the Colossus: Skyrim." You can climb all the giant baddies and stab them in the eye.

This is the Shadow of the Colossus RPG. Why... why didn't they lead with that?!

It doesn't matter, because while the game is great, most everything else is crushingly mediocre. This is a western RPG by a Japanese studio, I feel, really didn't want to make a western RPG. But they gritted their teeth and turned in exemplary work all the same.

... but I'll probably turn the voices off eventually.

Would the Remaining Luminaries of English Entertainment please stop Dying of Cancer?

You should all try to watch Blowdry toady. It's not a great movie, but he's having such a great time in it.

That'd be great, thanks.

He's waiting in the sky now...

I honestly don't know what to say here. This... sucks.

X-COM 2 feels like a Masterpeice.

I can never play 2012's X-COM ever again. I'm stuffed. I've never been anything braver than a save scrubber ( I reload every time a I loose a soldier) so I've gotten all I can out that game. And what I got was a year and a half of positively sublime white-knuckled strategy.

X-COM 2 is coming down the pike in less than a month and every last bit of information about it has me giddy. First of all, there's been tons of it. Last Tuesday, it seems like every major outlet released original game play footage over 2 hours each. Most games aren't allowed in the sunlight a fraction as much before the drop date. The marketing strategy oozes so much confidence and the material looks so good... I think, that they think, they have a game of the year on their hands.

I'm inclined to agree.

One, I'm a sucker for solid animation and the solders this time around act far beyond what I would reasonably expect. Look at that screen shot up there. Look how perfectly nonchalant their faces are! That right there is hard goddamn work almost no company bothers to spend money on. I've seen footage of a berserker throwing a soldier into a truck windshield (not a cut scene but actual gameplay) and she rolls off the hood and curls up into a realistically painful-looking fetal position.

They know the greatest thing about this series is your attachment to your little tin men and women. They threw millions of dollars at them so you could relate to them even more. That alone tells me their hearts were in the right place from day one. Every time I swear I'm not going to spend 20 minutes watching a let's play I haven't seen... I break.

I submit to you, the gaming public, that at the very least this is going to be in 2016's top 3. I think this is going to be a masterpiece.

But don't just take my word for it:

Take a deep breath.

Relax. Realize tomorrow's always a second chance. Now watch some guy futz over the X-COM 2 soldier customization settings for 20 minutes.

Balance.

So I planed on writing a fallout 4 review...

I am not amused

But! I found a but so big it caused me to rethink the whole affair. Once again, a game's choice of endings is forcing me to reconsider my previous gushing enthusiasm. They're just all so reductive and terrible.

 You know how we're all sick to death (I'm actually pretty medically sick at the mo') of "go here and kill that?" Every single ending boils down to it. Find a faction you like, then kill everyone else. This... is a nightmarish interpretation of what made New Vegas great. Making the New California Republic surrender to you is ten times more satisfying than actually mowing down it's high command. But you need to do that twice to beat the game.

I honestly don't know what else to say. It'll be up this week though. And you bet your ass I just rolled another character too.

Kraken Recommends: Making a Murderer.

Nothing is spoiled past episode 2!

This is the best true crime documentary since The Thin Blue Line. That was a documentary so crazily convincing it got an innocent man out of prison. MAM is a lot like that, except the happy ending. Though redditers are desperately trying.

I'm only halfway through this legalese mouth of madness and I'm already floored. Steven Avery was wrongfully convicted of rape, which he served 18 years. Then he sued the Manitowoc Sherrif's departmen for $36 Million. Then he stayed in Manitowoc county.

The rest will fill you with a righteous fury. If that sounds like something you want to feel, binge my friends. Binge.