tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54484929226557792962024-03-13T22:12:36.136-05:00Ben's NerderyA place for nerd enthusiasm and rants. Book, movie, and game reviews, critiques of current events and developing news, and advice and tips for wargame and role-playing hobbyists.Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.comBlogger151125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-72324207451701805892013-12-13T09:38:00.000-06:002013-12-13T10:06:39.815-06:00Myth Campaign: October 5 through 10, 166 Sword Age<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>The Road to Ywrmasr</b></i></span><br />
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[Update: Blogger tried to eat this post, so I had to republish it. This was originally posted yesterday, before the Desolation of Smaug review.]<br />
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<i><b>Myth, The Shield Age</b>: A dramatic synopsis of the tabletop RPG campaign I'm currently leading my friends through. It's a variation on <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2011/07/nerd-butter-gurps-start.html" target="_blank">GURPS</a>, built up from and inspired by the excellent computer game <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2012/02/remembering-myth.html" target="_blank">Myth</a>.
In it, the player characters begin as a selection of relatively
ordinary folk in an unremarkable town. Their adventures grow, the
dangers swarm, and the PCs? They pretty much just have to deal with it
without serious power progression. It's gritty, it's deadly, it's
fantasy with a political and social edge and an emotional timbre: it's
Myth: The Shield Age.</i><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Last time I introduced the plot of
my GURPS Myth campaign. Today's entry is going to continue Alrid Hock's
account of the events at the beginning of the adventure. One of the
really fun things about (some) tabletop RPGs that you can't get from a
video game is dramatically emergent gameplay. This is purely a function
of the interaction of the game and the improvisation of the GM, and in
this write-up the improvisation allowed the players to take the reins of
the quest and do it on their own terms in a way that genuinely
surprised me.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now as a GM you might be tempted to
view this in an adversarial way, like the players are out to destroy
your plans. Don't. View this as an opportunity to expand the story to
encompass your players' goals. Then twist and corrupt those plans with
the harsh reality of consequence and adaptive antagonists. Or use it as a
way to create an endearing, tragic NPC that the players not only
welcome into their party, but also protect diligently.</span><br />
<br />
<i><b>Note:</b> This segment begins with a pretty awful implication as
the party finds Giselbert about to be set upon by the leader of her
captors. This part is very important and also a pretty delicate topic.
The
threat of sexual assault here was something I carefully weighed against
my group's love for Rob Roy, Braveheart, Game of Thrones, etc. where
such deplorable acts are inciting plot events. The players' actions in
quickly finding Giselbert that night, however, allowed them to prevent
the worst of it.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Even so, Danlyra's player's first
reaction was "Oh, maybe I don't have what it takes to play a woman in
this setting afterall..."</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>In addition to being a
non-traditional and emotional start to a fantasy RPG campaign, this
session set up a tenuous balance where the characters constantly abuse
their despicable prisoner even as they have to take him in for justice.
That's a huge running theme throughout the first leg of this campaign.</i><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">A
man was in the cave partition with Giselbert. Tall, hale, and dark of
skin, this man looked like a Gowern by Ten Green Gem Vine's estimation</span></b><b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">.
He sneered at the intruding blacksmith and Heron Guard, even with his
armor and sword set aside. Giselbert had clear been abused.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">The
brigand went for his sword, a curved eastern blade, and drew it on the
two men in a flash. But the young Heron's blooded fangs struck out, one
carving into the man's forearm whilst the other divested him of his
weapon. Keagan's hammer fist struck out and bandied the villain about
the head. The fight done and out of him, the man surrendered to the tips
of Ten Green Gem Vine's swords.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">With
boot and gauntlet, they got a name from him--Guy, if his blood-bubbling
words could be believed. The party might have questioned him further,
but four bandits lay bleeding and pleading in the front of the cave. Out
of mercy and prudence to bring captives to village justice, Ten Green
Gem Vine plied their injuries with his Heron ken, and saved three men.
While the Heron tended his enemies, Guy began to heckle the distraught
Giselbert. Keagan quick had enough, and put Guy's face to the cave wall
and boot to earn them all a swift silence.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">Donovan's
daughter recovered her senses shortly after Guy fell to Keagan's blows,
and even helped staunch the gored spear-wound in Crow's side. For all
the beating the girl had surely taken, she seemed intact. I have Ten
Green Gem Vine's testimony to that fact. He offered to swear as much to
Regan, but I declined it. The vow of a Heron Guard is a terrible thing.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">There
they were, four now made five with Giselbert, and four prisoners under
hand. Guy's wounds would leave him in darkness for hours, and one of the
bandits that had lost an arm had passed out as well. Crow's wound was
well-tended, but the walk back to the village could tear open his wound
and leave him dead in his own blood. And too many hours had passed into
the dark autumn night, cloaking rock and pit in shadow. So they stayed
the night in that den and broke for Misty Downs in the morning.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">With
the morning's fog the party developed new questions. Guy spat venom and
invective at them, and it soon became apparent that Keagan would beat
the man to death before he gave useful answers, so Vera gagged him. The
bandit who lost his arm, one called Muck or Mook by Guy, answered every
question put to him. Apparently, Guy was a deserter from The Legion who
had become an infamous bandit in the Realm over the past year. The
Gowern had hired Muck and the other bandits with a purse of shillings
for a very specific job, plus whatever they could take. At the time none
of the bandits knew what a fiend Guy was, but they soon learned. That
was all they got from Muck before his arm's feverdreams got the better
of him.</span></b><br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">Before
arriving at Misty Downs, the party oriented themselves to the Craw farm
to most swiftly deliver her to her father and brother. The girl ran to
her family in tears, while Donovan eyed the group's prisoners. Innocent
Giselbert, though, dominated her father's attentions and insisted they
take care of Crow, who'd been wounded fighting her captors. Donovan
agreed and sent his son Laanor to help with escorting the prisoners to
the village.</span></b><br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">It
was near midday when the party ambled into town, and the cry amongst
our village was great. Laanor immediately began telling an exaggerated
tale of the bravery of his sister's rescuers, and as I assembled the
village council the matter was made fodder for the gossips. Nara Pugh,
however, insisted on calling upon the divines before passing her
judgment. Over the next day, our village recovered and celebrated, while
the four prisoners awaited their fate in the cellar of the Flooded
Downs tavern. When Nara called the council the next day, she related a
vision of stars converging around The Great Comet and of a blood moon.
We agreed it was a sign that these prisoners were part of some greater
plot, and so they needed to be brought into higher scrutiny.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">But
first, they needed to be saved. Ten Green Gem Vine's knowledge of
medicine may have patched wounds and staunched bleeding, but Muck and
another of the bandits were bleeding out, and Guy had been pressed with
questions to the point of death. Afraid their portent would pass away
with them, we ordered a company of our village's men to escort them to
Fort Ywrmasr on the frontier of The Barrier, a day north.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">Before
the prisoners were brought up from the cellar, Ten Green Gem Vine
addressed the village in the square. In my years in The Legion, I have
fought and served alongside many Heron Guard. They are all valorous and
inspiring. Ten Green Gem Vine rallied our village like a commander
marshaling his standard. Of our village's seventy houses, thirteen men
stepped forward to see the task done. Amongst them were Vera the
huntress, Crow the vagabond, Keagan the blacksmith, and Danlyra the
Gowerna. At Danlyra's volunteering, my hot-blooded grandson, Baith,
pledged his mettle. And at the end Laanor Craw, brother to the girl
Giselbert, stepped out from his father's side and bound himself to the
task as well. But most surprising of all was when Tiernan Seithkarl,
Magistrate of Misty Downs, pledged to lead the expedition.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">The
Magistrate is a good man, but his ways are quite unlike ours. He rips
the clouds with his nose, wearing fine clothes in the spring fields and
glutting over every meal. To see him pledge to lead the expedition was a
surprise to all the council. But his authority over our village would
extend to any requests made of the garrison at Fort Ywrmasr. He packed
up several books into a fine leather traveling bag and threw an extra
week's worth of provisions onto the blacksmith's donkey as they headed
out.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">Traveling
to Fort Ywrmasr takes about a day for a man with light burdens. For the
Magistrate's assembly, bringing four wounded captives, it would take
longer. The blacksmith's donkey pulled a simple two-wheeled cart along
for Muck and carried much of the group's provisions. The Gowerna Danlyra
profanely rode her horse for the duration, acting the maggot in our
country. In all, it took two days of slow progress to reach the fort,
and it was not uneventful.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">In
the middle of the night, with but one of the farmers on watch, the
party awoke to the sound of nuzzling followed by shrieks coming from the
cart. A wolf had wandered silently into the camp and was worrying open
Muck's bloody legs. The crippled bandit lay sobbing and panicking as the
party threw themselves upon the beast. Keagan Na Anyon ran the beast
through, spitting it upon the thrust of his broadsword, and Ten Green
Gem Vine tended to Muck as his blood muddied the soil anew. He needed
the attention of Journeymen now more than ever, and of the band of
captives he deserved it most. In the morning, Keagan had Seth Drafend
skin the wolf and prepare the hide in exchange for letting the huntsman
keep the meat.</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">Misty
Downs' expedition reached Fort Ywrmasr in the cooling light of the next
afternoon. Crossing a military foot bridge, the group took great care
leading Keagan's burro across. Legion engineers make carefully-designed
foot bridges surrounding their frontier forts. They are designed to
permit only a few men wearing heavy armor at a time, enabling the bridge
to crumble under the weight of massed hordes or easing sappers'
deconstruction of such edifices in battle. And while the ass pulled the
near-dead prisoner across the small bridge amicably, Danlyra's fine-bred
horse balked at the creaking timbers of the flexing construction. I am
told she had to coax the beast like a mangy dog to cross, much to my
villagers' amusement.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">They
arrived at the fort late on the ninth of October. Ten Green Gem Vine
quickly conducted Magistrate Seithkarl to treat with the fort's
commander, an older Heron Guard named Seven Eagle Falling Sun. Quickly
making the matter plain to him, the fort commander dispatched the fort's
Journeymen to tend to the prisoners.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">Magistrate
Seithkarl didn't come forward with his account of the Journeymen's art
and none of the others bore witness to it, but in my time in The Legion I
have seen senior Heron Guard treat similar wounds. They intone a deep
throaty song, lost words in deep sonorous notes that shake your core.
Then they break roots of the mandrake over the men, from which blue
smoke pours and falls onto the men's wounds. The cut and festering flesh
sizzles and burns, filling the nostrils with the acrid stink of burning
men--an odor that parches my blood to this day. The patient feels
everything as the magic peels back skin and dissolves torn sinew,
devouring the flesh until the original wound is replaced completely with
a new one. It is only then that the curative magic knits the newly
exposed muscles and tendons, drawing the meat to grow and fill the
gouges and gore of battle. The blessed arts taught to the Guard by Regan
himself can even reattach limbs under the right circumstance. But the
healing magic is never complete--only time can sponge away the last
injury. The wound is always left as a raw, tender sore that is inured to
infection but susceptible to re-opening. The scar that remains is clean
and distinct.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">With
the prisoners tended to, the Magistrate worked with Seven Eagle Falling
Sun to determine the fate of the prisoners. With three companies under
the Oghre Standard beneath his command, the fort commander could not
spare men for our village's quest, but he did offer to judge the three
bandits and allow the Magistrate's party to keep custody over Guy to
bring him before the Emperor. Despite Muck's willingness to help the
group, Tiernan had no more use for the crippled brigand. Ten Green Gem
Vine supported the decision, but Keagan, Vera, and Danlyra all pointed
out that the fort commander would surely summarily execute the brigands
within a week. Tiernan reminded them that he who pays the piper calls
the tune, and thereby sealed the bandits' fate. They would be left at
Fort Ywrmasr.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">On
the following day, the party set out to return to Misty Downs with a
restored Guy in their thrall, though with his health largely restored
they decided to gag the brigand. They made good time that day, but still
they had to make camp before reaching home. That night was a restless
one of ill-omens and poor sleep. Ten Green Gem Vine stood the second
watch along with young Laanor Craw, though it seemed more than the
suddenly docile prisoner merited.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">Ten
Green Gem Vine rousted the rest of the party with a terrible start. And
they quickly discovered that not only had Guy somehow slipped his bonds
but he had also spirited away with Laanor Craw. As the final hours of
October tenth waned, the party assembled in darkness and set out to hunt
down the villain once more.</span></b></td>
<td valign="top" width="100"><b>Gowern:</b> a man of Gower, a hilly kingdom to the east, part of the Empire. Fem. is Gowerna.<br />
<br />
Gower is superficially similar to a medieval Middle East: defined by
steppes and scrub-land, with dark creatures frequently wandering out of
the far east and attacking their settlements.<br />
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Keagan will be freely beating Guy quite a bit in this campaign.<br />
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<b>Regan:</b> the Heron god, patron of the Heron Guard. Protector of wisdom and longevity.<br />
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"The vow of a Heron Guard is a terrible thing." -That's called foreshadowing, kiddos.<br />
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<br />
This first post-battle sequence was my chance to remind the players of
how deadly combat was, and to also give them a chance to see how
difficult first aid would be in a combat situation.<br />
<br />
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I also wanted to establish here that the players could expect to get
sympathetic portrayals of characters they'd be tempted to label "bad
guys". Muck proves to be helpful, but things don't pan out for him.<br />
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These first few sessions of the campaign were extremely emergent in
terms of the players helping to guide the plot to delve into certain
themes. Characters that had originally been throw-away NPCs to
illustrate the dynamics of the game and setting, both Laanor Craw and
Baith Hock become important figures in the campaign. My players like
Laanor quite a lot, but I'm a sucker for the idiot romantic in Baith.<br />
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More emergent gameplay: Ten's player made a great speech calling the men
of the village to action, then made a great roll on top of that. Bam,
all of a sudden they have a party of commoners helping them along. That
can only be a good thing, right?<br />
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<b>Rips the clouds with his nose:</b> he's arrogant. An expression of The Realm.<br />
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One of the core features/mysteries of my take on the Myth setting is
that Emperor Alric has never ridden a horse or used cavalry in any way.
No one knows why, but in the patriotic Realm everyone assumes that
riding horses is bad in some way, or at least unpatriotic.<br />
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<b>Acting the maggot:</b> behaving foolishly. An expression of The Realm.<br />
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Wolf attack! I love wolves, and this was a great chance to let the
players know that random events would also be present. Of course, if the
party had been smaller, an entire wolf pack would've attacked them. But
as it is, only one was brave enough to sneak past so many people.<br />
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Sketch of Fort Ywrmasr scribbled out by me during player character
creation. Inspired by Roman motte and bailey forts used to fortify
barbarian Europe.<br />
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Yes, all Heron Guard have funny names. And it is an insult and bad omen to give them nicknames. So nyah.<br />
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<b>Parches the blood:</b> to make afraid. An expression of The Realm. (I told you I gave everyone a colloquialism and culture sheet, right?)<br />
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I hate healing potions. I want players to have scars, to favor bad legs,
and to fear the long-term effects of wounds they survive. So even
though the Heron Guard have miraculous healing magic, I wanted the cost
of that magic to be somewhat horrific. If you have a minor wound, you
certainly don't want a Journeyman to look at it. (Description inspired
by a foot incident I had back in my college days.)<br />
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<b>He who pays the piper calls the tune:</b> he who has the gold makes the rules. An expression of The Realm.<br />
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I told you things didn't pan out well for Muck. It gave me a sadistic GM
happy to see my player grimace as I revealed the helpful NPC they'd
saved had no life worth saving. Good times.<br />
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<br />
Wow, so congratulations on making it this far. I know that was a pretty
mammoth wall of text, but a lot of the details of these early sessions
are really important to later characterizations and themes. This covered
a little more than two game sessions, too. And yes, that means that one
session featured no fun violence except for a little wolf-slaying.
That's how I roll as a GM, yo. Deal with my thespy nerdiness.<br />
<br />
And as you should be well aware, tomorrow is the release of <i>The Desolation of Smaug</i>, the second installment in <i>The Hobbit</i> trilogy. Accordingly, I've got a crazy few hours ahead of me. Here's and overview:<br />
<br />
<b>8-10PM crash period.</b> Nerd poppa needs sleep, occasionally. Or at
least time laying down and mopily surfing the net on my Powerbook while
watching kids' programming.<br />
<br />
<b>10-11PM critical caffeine period.</b> Mountain Dew goes here. Just like being a punk kid all over again.<br />
<br />
<b>11-12AM go to movie theater.</b> As a bonus, I use this pre-show time
to creep people out by bringing a notepad to the movies. Few things are
as disturbing to movie goers as to bring writing utensils to a film.
"What're you going to do with that?" "I'm gonna manually bootleg the
script, fool."<br />
<br />
<b>12-3:30AM watch Desolation of Smaug.</b> This is the phase where I watch the film. Gripping, no?<br />
<br />
<b>3:30-4:30AM hangout and post nerdview.</b> Just for the heck of it,
I'm going to put up a link to a Google Hangout while I work on my
nerdview post of the movie. If you're insane enough to want to join me
in a little red-eye post-movie discussion while I type out my thoughts,
watch my <a href="https://plus.google.com/+BenVara" target="_blank">Google+</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BensNerdery" target="_blank">Facebook</a> pages for the link to be posted.
Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-43272045616998237702013-12-13T07:13:00.003-06:002013-12-13T20:24:32.489-06:00Desolation of Smaug<i style="background-color: white;"><b>Nerdview:</b> A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.</i><br />
<i style="background-color: white;"><br /></i><span style="background-color: white;">Oh my, it is late. I'm not talking about the hour either. I'm talking about the crushing realization that I didn't do a nerdview of last year's <i>An Unexpected Journey</i>. Whatthefrak, nerd? Well, last year's failings aside, here's a toasty nerdview of the second film in <i>The Hobbit</i> trilogy.</span><br />
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<i style="background-color: white;"><br /></i><span style="background-color: white;"><b>Expectations 'Odor'</b>: I was not blown away by the first installment of <i>The Hobbit</i>. I didn't hate it, but the fact that I wasn't rushing to review it last year is really damning evidence that the movie just wasn't that spectacular. (Did I really not review it?! What planet is this? Am I just losing it after one midnight showing too many?) <i>An Unexpected Journey</i> didn't have the same heart as each movie of <i>The Lord Of The Rings</i>, and too much of the story felt compromised for flashy additions to the world and total BS action sequences. The skiing derrick down the rock face of the goblin caves was especially eyeroll-inducing. I didn't like the abundance of CG baddies--especially the <strike>George Lucas</strike> Goblin King that was just outright gross. And they didn't include "fifteen birds in five fir trees", which <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2012/01/happy-nerd-year-2012.html" target="_blank">I had already said</a> I really really wanted to see included.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">But this next movie stands to include so much more that I'm excited about. Mirkwood and Thranduil's creepy elves. Laketown and Bard <strike>the badass</strike> the bowman. Erebor revealed. Mega Nibelungenlied imagery. The battle with Smaug over Laketown.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">And, if I'm honest, I'm intrigued by the inclusion of an auburn-haired elf-maiden. And by intrigued I mean, intrigued…</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">But seriously, I expect Bard to really shine as a common man hero in this film, taking the spotlight completely from Thorin and maybe even Bilbo. I want Smaug to be intelligently scary. But I want them to tone-down the over-the-top BS of the first Hobbit film and stick closer to believable, visceral action. <i>An Unexpected Journey</i> had very few action sequences that weren't cartoonishly unbelievable. And while you could say that this is deliberate because the films are actually a recreation of Bilbo's book, that's not highlighted as a theme of the movie and is a poor excuse to make such ham-handed glittery special effects pieces instead of real hands-on fights like the ones that made <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> popular. Overall, I want a film guided by a more controlled and focused plot than last year's film.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white;"><b>Appreciation 'Beef'</b>: Well, frak that feldercarb.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">No, seriously. Bad bad badness.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">First let me begin with a non-spoiler spoiler alert. This movie is pointless. I am totally going to spoil the crap out of this movie in the course of this review because none of the so-called plot movements actually matter and there's no real dynamic--no change--to the characters or setting in this film. It is seriously just a long piece of exposition to get us to the third movie.</span><br />
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Before I really let into the movie, though, let me get the good stuff out of the way. The opening of the film is interesting, showing a scene based on Tolkien's notes that shows Gandalf was the one to strong-arm Thorin into starting his quest for the Lonely Mountain. That's followed by a nice bit with Beorn, a shape-shifting bear/Liam Neeson type. But the film starts to dip with the spiders of Mirkwood sequence--it's well-done, but it's too long compared to how rushed most of the film is, and the fighting begins to get implausible here. Characters repeatedly free-fall from hundred-foot tall trees only to be conveniently caught by spider webs, just-right branches, or outright plot protection.<br />
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Bard is cool, and is probably the only character in the film that is worthy of his depiction in the book. That's not to say that he's faithfully adapted from the book--not even close--but he is at least as cool as the literary Bard the bowman, and just what I'd hoped from him. I do think that Thorin, Bard, and Kili look way too much alike, though, and considering Thorin should have like at least one foot of beard this is just salt in the wound. Luke Evans plays Bard perfectly and he looks the part, but coming in alongside Thorin the visual similarities tend to wash him out as a tag-along.<br />
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Let me spell it out: Thorin Oakenshield uses his beard as a measurement of masculinity in the books. He wishes people well by saying stuff like "may your beard grow ever longer". We should have no clue what his cheeks look like because it should be underneath three pounds of beard.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Of course, Bard is also mired in the middle of one of the dumbest settings in the movie: Laketown. Rather than being a hardy bastion of men living in the wet blindspot of Smaug, the Laketown of the movie is a frigid derrick of the same Tudor-style buildings we saw in Bree except suspended over water. The culture is soulless and the people accordingly bland to the point where no one even seems to register that they're living under the tyranny of the most toothlessly impotent mayor ever. I might consider this a dramatic criticism of society if the police state imagery was consistently realized, but the town guards only come out to prolong the plot of a film that is mostly filler. Bard makes a big deal out of needing to smuggle the dwarves into Laketown--which was no problem in the book--and the sequence of him bringing them in is good for a little tension. But later in the movie, a band of thirty orcs in armor and two elves just show up in Laketown without any mention of how they did so or any recognition from the rest of the town at all. Seriously, with orcs jumping across the rooftops of the town for like twenty minutes in the middle of the night, no one seemed to notice. When I'm in my basement and my toddler's running around in his room, I hear it above me like a sack of potatoes being bounced around a port-a-potty. I think thirty armored orcs would be slightly less stealthy than my two year-old son, as hard as that may be to imagine.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Evangeline Lilly as Tauriel is hot without showing any skin. Here endeth the nice part about her character. Tauriel is the dumbest, least articulate, reactionary, over-powered Mary Sue sleaze I can recall from any movie ever. An "original" character forced into the plot of the movie, they decide that in order to make us like her she should be better than everyone at everything. She out-BSes Legolas in terms of absurdly super-powered shots and moves. Like shooting an Orc's arrow out of the air to save Legolas. She also heals Kili from a Morgul wound with so much ease that it makes Elrond look like a stuttering poseur rather than a three thousand year-old sage. And when she meets Kili, she immediately puts on the googly-eyes at him and proceeds down a clumsy romance sub-plot that ends with her being the worst person ever.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Before I explain that, though, let me spell out another gem of truth from Tolkien's Middle-Earth: elves and dwarves do not get along. Gimli and Legolas' friendship is supposed to be a historic exception by a wide margin. Let alone romantic compatibility--labradors do not mate with spaniels, so to speak, in Tolkien's books. Heck, human-elf pairings are so rare in the setting that every one of them is well-known and eminently proven to be a bad idea. That's the whole subtext of the tension in Aragorn and Arwen's relationship--which was a century-long courtship that was still awkward for them.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Anyways, back to how Tauriel's randiness ends up making her the worst person ever. So after getting all oo-lala over Kili, Tauriel meets with Thranduil, Legolas' d-bag lush of a father. Thranduil, tells Tauriel that Legolas wants her bad, but he won't let his son get his elf on because Tauriel is a common elf. She acts hurt by this even though she was just checking out the dwarf meat she tossed in the dungeon. Later, when Kili is wounded while escaping Mirkwood, she abandons her home to try to catch up to him and help him. When Legolas, too dumb to know better, follows her she immediately smirks and wiggles her nose at him, saying she knew he'd follow her and help. <i>Yeah--she leads on the prince of the elves to get him to commit treason all in an effort to save the dwarf hunk she met one day before.</i> Then, when they finally catch up to the dwarves, Tauriel ditches Legolas in the middle of a fight to go play doctor with her favorite beardy-boy.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Worst. Person. Ever. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh included her as a tack-on character to try to give the film some grrrl power, and instead they made a cliched slander against the entire female sex.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">There are more BS moments throughout the film, but one of the biggest is molten gold apparently having a melting temperature of Hershey's chocolate. First, century-old kilns full of gold are melted faster than defrosting a Thanksgiving turkey. Then Thorin rides a river of molten gold on a metal bucket with his bare hands inches from the molten ore. Finally, Smaug gets completely submerged in it and hops out as easily as a kid getting out of a hot-tub.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">What began as a hopeful improvement on the first film quickly slides down into every mistake made by the first movie. The drama is drowned out by over-the-top posturing and wide angle shots, ensuring that you can't even see the actor's expressions during the most tense moments. There is no close up face-twitching drama of Denethor's hall in this flick, just shouting in front of beautiful backdrops. The fight sequences are dazzling displays of special effects with no practical integration to make it feel real or plausible. It's so bad that Gandalf's encounter with the Necromancer is literally him standing still, staff upraised while putting out a Sue Storm shield of white light while a shadow shrinks his personal bubble.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Really.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><b>Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy'</b>: Oh man, I think you can guess I did not enjoy this flick too much. Amongst its many flaws, this film indulges in way too many Byrne holds for any one plot to bear. A Byrne hold, named after comic artist John Byrne, is when a character holds another aloft by the throat. It's a moment of abject helplessness, where the victim is spared from death only by the capriciousness of the one holding their throat. And usually the only reason the villain doesn't snap their neck then and there is because of bad writing--the writer needs the victim to survive, so the victor hesitates for no good reason.<br />
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In this movie, we have 13 dwarves, Bilbo, Gandalf, Tauriel, and Legolas who all directly fight bad guys throughout the movie. The antagonists have Azog (the white orc), Bolg (his strapping son), Smaug the dragon, and the Necromancer. All of them engage in personal combat at least once in the movie. Bolg several times. None of these characters die in the course of the film. Twenty-one principal characters all actively fighting and trying to kill each other in a three hour film: no one succeeds. And when you remember that most of these characters were in <i>An Unexpected Journey</i>, you have the worst kill ratio of all storytelling time. And that's not for being able to. For fully one half of the movie, Azog and the Necromancer could easily execute Gandalf but don't because of the Byrne hold effect. The dwarves dump a dwarven statue of liberty's worth of molten gold on Smaug, and he not only isn't wounded by the attack but he also doesn't kill them as he so easily could at that point. Smaug's entire conversation with Bilbo is twisted from the casual biplay of the book to be "I am totally going to kill you, but I won't just yet…cuz." It's infuriatingly stupid and I can't comprehend how we're supposed to be engrossed in this action when every character is plot-protected anyways. Heck, a mortally-wounded Kili falls down a circular staircase with an armload of swords and axes and he even makes it to the ending credits. It's an absurd lantern hanging on the fact that these characters are invulnerable to stupid flashy plot twists until the third movie, at which point two-thirds of them will die. The only character they could have been killed off in this movie, but wasn't, was Tauriel. And she's never in any peril in the film because she's superwoman.<br />
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I've got a lot of other issues with this film, many of them relating to comparisons between the book and the film, but these ones are just issues of a clumsy movie itself. The film has no natural arc--no beginning, middle, and end, no development of the characters. Though we did get some of that in the previous film, this one just throws "action" and scenery at us until it ends in the most unforgivable manner possible--in the middle of a fight.<br />
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This movie was supposed to be about Smaug, yet he wasn't in half of it and he survived the non-climax of the film. Not to be dramatic, but I wouldn't blame anyone wanting their money back.<br />
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<b>General Enjoyment 'Cheese'</b>: <span style="background-color: white;">This film stretches my goal as a reviewer--I'm not sure someone reading my words would decide to see the movie. Unless their mind was already made up, of course. And I think I'm happy about that. This is the sort of big-budget clusterfudge that I use to weed out bad reviewers in my own reading. See someone who liked this film? Idiot. Complimented its pacing? Hack.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Now, I'm not saying you can't enjoy this film. I'm really not. I think people with no love for the book and a sort of Harry Potter expectation of events could enjoy what they see. But for people who love the first trilogy and even merely like the books, I don't see how they could enjoy it. And I don't see how anyone at all could honestly look at this movie and say it was really necessary for anything more than introducing a few elements that could have been elegantly fit into the other two movies.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Then again, Peter Jackson doesn't seem to know about elegance anymore. Like Guillermo Del Toro's <i>Pacific Rim</i> or George Lucas when making his prequel trilogy, he seems lost in a sea of funding and yes-men glad-handing along his bad ideas.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white;">So not worth an all-nighter.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span>Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-34655838358919493772013-11-23T22:14:00.000-06:002013-11-23T22:14:53.435-06:00It's a-Me, Stereotype-io...In 1993, one of the very first, and worst, video-game-to-movie adaptations were made. That movie was <i>Super Mario Bros</i>. And boy, was it a pile.<br />
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So I should start off that this isn't a Nerdview. My Nerdviews are meant to be exemplars of professional reviews, and a key trait of them is that anyone should be able to read one of my reviews and come to a contrary opinion of the movie. A fair, well-explained and contextualized review should allow for people who have opposing tastes to mine. A review should not tell people whether they should or shouldn't enjoy a movie, but whether they're likely to enjoy it or not. That's an important distinction, as nuanced as it is.</div>
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So this is not a review, because I'm going to flat out say it: you should not see this movie, unless you need to cure yourself of optimism for the video-game-to-movie franchise. In that case, Dr. Ben will prescribe 200cc of Super Mario Bros after eating--because it will ruin your appetite.</div>
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First of all, the plot of the movie was a mess. Inspired by the cartoony idyllic landscapes of the games, the plot naturally transplants the protagonists in a formless cyberpunk world of super-pollution and made Dennis Hopper King Koopa, the sleazier-than-usual president of a parallel dimension where humans descended from dinosaurs. Mario, played by the awesome Bob Hoskins, is dragged along by his brother Luigi, played by the toothy John Leguizamo, as they chase Luigi's best-girl Daisy across the ick-dimension. Daisy, played by Punisher-wife Samantha Mathis, turns out to be the long-lost princess of the suck-dimension, and for arbitrary reasons that makes her the key to Koopa uniting the dimensions and make him the de-facto ruler of both worlds. There's a lot of cheap fights with the most ridiculous little-headed goons of all time, a devolving-weapon that reduced Daisy's father into a fungus and other political enemies into goombas, and the super-jump gimmick of the game is a pair of jump-jet boots that elicit some of the worst wire work in the genre.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The awkwardness of this screenshot is seconded only by the film's total fail.</td></tr>
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Just reviewing my recollection of the film, I'm asking a dozen why's all over again. Why is Mario the punk of the plot? He's not initiating the action, central to the plot's conceit, or even getting the girl in the end. Why make King Koopa the president of a dystopian bolthole of retarded dino-men? How is that more plausible than a naturalistic fantasy land of colorful critters? And president, really? Way to make the story more accessible to the 7-12 year-old age range you were shooting for with your film. I'm sure they'll appreciate the mock election posters and "environmentalist" message.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAwOb4AXhyS8VV-GgG4Izgrcj3Rs6WU1jooh01pGuyOCamT5ylip9PsFkNY4k-c92XlmNzeANCVIrEErEMyp8TpdkkevekiXAJ9tKcwX7ndoQOaAGBhtiggf441NypvNg70v5CVZzT3V8/s1600/SMBMovie-Dinohatten.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAwOb4AXhyS8VV-GgG4Izgrcj3Rs6WU1jooh01pGuyOCamT5ylip9PsFkNY4k-c92XlmNzeANCVIrEErEMyp8TpdkkevekiXAJ9tKcwX7ndoQOaAGBhtiggf441NypvNg70v5CVZzT3V8/s1600/SMBMovie-Dinohatten.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">See that "elect Koopa" poster? That makes it edgy.<br />
Being edgy distracts from the stink, right?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Probably the biggest travesty of this film is that Bob Hoskins is actually good. As far as the cringe-worthy script and head-poundingly dumb directing lets him go, that is. He pulls off the swaggering of a Brooklyn plumber-turned-reluctant-attache-to-the-hero with his natural aplomb. And with this coming two years after his role as Smee in <i>Hook</i> and five years after starring in <i>Who Framed Roger Rabbit</i>, I think he was positioning himself to play more kid-oriented roles. And then this was inflicted on his resume, the poor bastard. The production values around his veteran performance are just staggeringly bad when you bear in mind that this movie came after <i>Terminator 2</i> championed early computer-generated effects and <i>Aliens</i> showed how effective purely practical effects could be. Not to mention that a little over a year later, <i>Jurassic Park</i> would be coming out and really rubbing our noses in how pathetic this movie's effects were.</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2ZmEZc-roAbjms-wzfupt1BxW4-KQL0FBN93sr-RX6Oai99uMhTeQkOy8uqp3q8lNOYEExEOeekO5GBALm4OM6fH3YcddSACU8X-sNB-C_CzkT1s58PLjHmros98NWoH4FGa30yxv-ng/s1600/SMBMovie-Goombas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2ZmEZc-roAbjms-wzfupt1BxW4-KQL0FBN93sr-RX6Oai99uMhTeQkOy8uqp3q8lNOYEExEOeekO5GBALm4OM6fH3YcddSACU8X-sNB-C_CzkT1s58PLjHmros98NWoH4FGa30yxv-ng/s1600/SMBMovie-Goombas.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The uber-intimidating badguys</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div>
Now, at the time, I'm sure every decision to deviate from the source material of the games was made on the assumption that literally depicting the game would be unbelievable to audiences. But in moving away from a surrealistic world that was already completely familiar and plausible to the target audience, the inept filmmakers made something that highlighted its own stupidity and failed to live up to the consistency of a cartoon world.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Yeah, burned.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
But you can make something that starts with a familiar, real-world palette and then successively introduce fantastic elements that bring it even closer in line with the source material. And in so doing, you could make a <i>Super Mario Bros</i> movie that is both fairly faithful to the games and yet still accessible to non-gaming audiences.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
As an example, and to apologize for dredging up bad memories of <i>Super Marios Bros</i>, I present to you: The Four Players.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/jBRVSdwpjzo" width="480"></iframe>
</div>
<div>
<br />
I love this video, which depicts Mario as a gruff everyman who sort of goes through a more mundane Mr. Incredible workout routine to become the block-smashing bruiser of the game's stories. Just the label of 'the fixer' evokes many of my favorite hero tropes. Mario isn't just a happy Eye-talian--he's a hard-nosed man you count on to snake your toilets and rescue the princess.<br />
<br />
Heshyeah.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/yPRK1ZW8Y3U" width="480"></iframe>
</div>
<div>
<br />
Alright, I'm not crazy about Luigi going full pyro at the end there. If he would've stuck with breathing fire, or even just being a nutso pyromaniac loading up a rucksack of flower-powered molotov cocktails, would have felt much more natural to me. That said, I love the juxtaposition of Luigi as the strung-out bad brother who only reluctantly gets his act together when straight-shooter Mario comes a-calling. And who doesn't love the blunt characterization and drama of a well-done support group confession?<br />
<br />
I need to watch <i>You Kill Me</i> sometime soon.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/1c5qVSyMxUo" width="480"></iframe><br />
<br />
So I'll admit, that when Peach started singing, I was ready to roll my eyes. But cutting between the idealized club setting of the song and the <i>24</i>-worthy torture scenes was genius and by the time the music crescendo'd, I was digging the song both on its own merits and for being so epically moving given this woman's circumstance.<br />
<br />
Although regaining the fingers was kind of a cop-out, in my opinion. I like consequences in my story-telling, and I think an eight-fingered Peach would subvert the classic princess trope completely. When flesh-eating piranha eat your fingers off, they stay ate.<br />
<br />
(Alright, now I'm getting sissy-weepy re-watching the video…)<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Sr24-EMV84Y" width="480"></iframe><br />
<br />
Toad here as the soldier, is one of the most game-accurate visions of the character, but at the same time he's totally rocking the Guillermo Del Toro vibe. I could just see him riding a giant frog from beneath that tree in <i>Pan's Labyrinth</i>. Yoshi, anyone? Anyways, I'm a big fan of underpowered characters that get brutalized by their own heroism, so giving him the green mushroom (which gives an extra life in the games) is a great way to characterize the fanatically loyal soldier.<br />
<br />
So there you go, cynics. You can make a video game adaptation from a really sparse, cartoony game and actually make something with film-worthy drama and consistency. It just doesn't happen. But at least we have awesome fan trailers to give us hope every once in a while.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Have a good weekend, nerds.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEUti3klicMiSJMs5oW37_bLRvU3rD7B_n3_Lg9vxAvjrWvEeadTNv83kHwUhSbR0CRxM8T_h9__zRTp0ehkStjDI5znLNtdBVqg-RcwK-OBT_XEL1TtdOok5X0UeL0URiLtey4O_gw_o/s1600/SMBMovie-MarioLuigi2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEUti3klicMiSJMs5oW37_bLRvU3rD7B_n3_Lg9vxAvjrWvEeadTNv83kHwUhSbR0CRxM8T_h9__zRTp0ehkStjDI5znLNtdBVqg-RcwK-OBT_XEL1TtdOok5X0UeL0URiLtey4O_gw_o/s1600/SMBMovie-MarioLuigi2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">So so so wrong</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
(Oh, and Luigi should have a mustache. Nerdery out.)</div>
Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-23266318746518420932013-11-18T14:47:00.001-06:002013-11-18T22:55:29.252-06:00New Mandate TrailerI've talked about <i>The Mandate</i> <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/10/kickstart-rayguns-space-frontiersmen.html" target="_blank">a couple of weeks ago</a>, but I couldn't wait till the weekend to blog about this latest update on the Romanovs-in-space epic. Perihelion Games has released a cool new trailer for their game, featuring Brit David
Bradley doing a kickin' voice-over as Admiral Suvarov for an incredibly enticing trailer for
the in-development space epic. Now, I'm not familiar with David Bradley (I'm not a fan of <i>Harry Potter</i> or <i>Doctor Who</i>, and I'm too scared of fleshy bits to watch <i>Game of Thrones</i>), but apparently he's got about six miles of nerd-cred. For me, he sounds a heck of a lot like Adam Nicolson, British author of the book examining Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, <i>Seize The Fire</i>. (I absolutely love that book, and Nicholson's wry English consonants most recently accompanied me on a kind of creepy bus ride from Indianapolis to Chicago last summer.)<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/F_phtOt14Do" width="480"></iframe>
<br />
In addition to the awesome VO quality that we're going to get for this sci-fi gem, I just love the tone they establish in this game. This is going to be a game where NPCs aren't just faceless meeples that you stat-grind as a parallel leveling mechanic--they're an engaging, dynamic, and fragile element of the game. They're your friends and your resources, and nothing you do can shield them from the risk that entails. Your crew will suffer losses, and the way you manage that loss on a dramatic and tactical level is going to be a central gameplay mechanic. It is very Nelsonian in that way, which grabs me all the right ways. (Seriously, check out <i>Seize The Fire</i>--the author-read audio book at least.)<br />
<br />
It also makes me think of how exciting and avant-garde Mass Effect was going to be back in the days leading up to the first game's release. In particular, there was this commercial spot that still resonates with me to this day:<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/4UJVZTJaz5I" width="480"></iframe><br />
The idea of having mutually exclusive, NPC-destroying, time-based decisions to make is so much fun, and we never quite got the pay off in <i>Mass Effect</i> that the above commercial promised. Each game had very specific set-piece decisions that would very transparently give you a choice to kill person X or Y, but it never made it a heavy, pressed-for-time, combat-based choice like you get from this 48 second commercial. The first Mass Effect came close with the Virmire decision, but that still was a very canned moment. No matter how many times your NPCs got railgunned to the face, they were immune to any real injury until the script suddenly decided they were mortal.<br />
<br />
With <i>The Mandate</i>, though, they're repeatedly stressing that every time your ship's hull tears open, you're losing crew, and that loss will not only potentially kill off individual characters, but having to replace or evaluate crew will impact the character of your ship and your character. This dynamic will make it where even the most assured victories will still have weight, as you try to grab as much power as you can without losing critical crew.<br />
<br />
Oh, man, if this game doesn't get funded to the moon and back, I will be so disappointed in you, internet.Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-87323377475823408392013-11-12T23:54:00.001-06:002013-11-13T17:25:28.122-06:00Agents of SHIELD (First 6 Episodes)<i><b>Nerdview:</b> A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the Nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.</i><br />
<br />
This is my first <strike>review</strike> Nerdview of a television series, and as such it's perfectly appropriate that I weigh in on the latest Marvel media property: <i>Agents of SHIELD</i>. I've got several other more important projects on the blog-burner right now, but this is probably the most immediately timely, as I can actually sound off on the series in the middle of its first season.<br />
<br />
<b>Expectations 'Odor'</b>: If you read my <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/05/agents-of-shield-hyping-up.html" target="_blank">blog post</a> earlier this summer, then you know that I've been looking forward to <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> for some time. I love the way SHIELD stories interweave the greatest characters and plots of the Marvel universe into a coherent story, especially in the post Civil War continuity (which at some point in the future I'll probably cover for those who aren't Marvel-fans). <i>Secret War</i> in particular was a great mini-series that showed how SHIELD and The Man push around superheroes to make the world safer--whether they like it or not. In particular, I like the SHIELD stories that expound on the ways mundane or low-powered agents of SHIELD are able to stand on the same field as Hulk and Iron Man. Sure, individual SHIELD goons don't last, but as an organization it pulls the strings of many of the heroes in the Marvel universe while still being a fundamentally mundane organization. As a fan of watching little guys push big guys around, it resonates.<br />
<br />
So with <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> I want to see at least a bit more development of that theme: what place do NSA-types in suits have in a world of girder-grinding, lightning-throwing, super-sonic super-humans? But I also know that what we've got here is also a Joss Whedon series, and with that we're pretty much guaranteed several specific elements. First, that means a women-heavy cast of primaries, women warriors, and not necessarily in in believable roles or casting. I mean, Eliza Dushku kicking more butt than Tahmoh Penikett in <i>Dollhouse</i>--the heck?! Second, it means that disestablishment themes are probably going to either erode this version of SHIELD, or the team will be some sort of Black Ops splinter group to maintain Whedon's happy for rogue heroes. Third--and this is really something to be excited about--it means that the show will probably have different ages played on-screen and in the plots. <i>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</i> had Giles' personal life and character growth become a significant plot thread while also making us endure Buffy-as-waitress type plots. <i>Firefly</i> had Book alongside Kayleigh and River. Even <i>Dollhouse</i>, which revolved around brainwashed youth themes, showcased a lot of drama amongst the middle-aged conspirators being mocked by their own vapid creations. In <i>Agents of SHIELD</i>, then, we can look forward to Coulson and the youngest agents having distinct characterization and focuses in the meta-plot of the series.<br />
<br />
But do I think <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> will be good? Yes. Great? Honestly, maybe. Just maybe. Because there's one element that I think could make a SHIELD show superb that I don't think Whedon would ever touch: the procedural. The thrill of investigation, of plots having certain core steps repeating to represent that the characters are in fact doing their jobs and not looking for this week's interesting thing. <i>The Mentalist</i>, <i>Law & Order</i>, and detective classic shows like <i>Columbo</i> are all great procedural series. In those shows you're guaranteed certain steps to get thrown into the matrix of a new mystery for nearly every episode, and it works. The most critical procedural to compare to <i>Agents of SHIELD</i>, of course, is <i>The X-Files</i>. Even though <i>The X-Files</i> featured outlandish plots, special effects monsters, and conspiracy theories, most of the episodes fell into a procedural format that established that even in the BS-filled land of <i>The X-Files</i>, they were still part of the FBI, which was a job and an organization that stretched beyond the cast of the show. Heck, they even had a petite warrior-woman mismatched with a physically uninspiring nerdy guy, all the better for Whedon to take notes.<br />
<br />
But at least it won't be <i>Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD</i>.<br />
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<br />
<b>Appreciation 'Beef'</b>: Bumbly bumbly bump. What's that? Oh, <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> is on? I mean, we're six episodes in and I'm still waiting for it to get started<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">. I feel like these first six episodes have been part of a long, exceptionally badly-paced</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> pilot episode. The writing is weak with only brief commercial-length moments of good scripting. The cast </span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">ranges from sublime to bland all the way down to absurdly annoying.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span">"</span>As a fan of watching little guys push big guys around, it resonates."</span></i></div>
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">In terms of the greater plot of the show, they've introduced a good number of elements from the greater Marvel universe, with Extremis, (proto-)Graviton, and the Chitauri being featured in the show so far. I'd probably suggest they slow down with their inclusion of these diverse elements, taking their time to establish more drama and mystery around them, but for the most part these kinds of Easter eggs are the most exciting thing in the show for Marvel-philes like me.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The action is fairly well-done, with Ming-Na Wen pulling off the physicality of warrior-woman Melinda May capably. Brett Dalton as Agent Grant Ward definitely does a better job of selling his stunts and action, but that's to be expected. So far two of the six episodes aired ("Girl in the Flower Dress" and "FZZT") have not featured much traditional action, and that's a positive trend I'd like to see emphasized in this series. In a world of superpowers and eldritch gadgets, combat should be brief and deadly, and there's a very real trend towards inserting bland fist fights to pad out the show where drama and actual investigation should sit.</span><br />
<br />
Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson is great, and when he's actually placed in a scene where he gets to chew the scenery a bit, it's awesome. His moment with the terminally ill firefighter in FZZT was a gripping bit of drama that helped shed a little light on his seemingly spastic behavior--he's a man crushed by his own brush with death. I think the mystery around his revival/resurrection/reboot is a bit over-played, but since it is the only real over-arching mystery of the show right now, I guess I'll have to take it.<br />
<br />
The rest of the roster, though, makes very little sense. First of all, six principal characters always feels light to me. (Heck, if you include Zordon and Alpha Five, the Power Rangers show started out with seven.) And that tiny roster is exaggerated by the red shirts of this show who are so paper-thinly developed that names and characterization are hardly ever given. In "Eye Spy" and "Girl in the Flower Dress" there are way too many scenes where there's no one on screen except two or three main characters, which is silly when you stop to consider the enormity of these plots, SHIELD itself, or even the density of SHIELD personnel in the movies. You can try to justify it by saying they need a small independent team or whatever handwaving goo-gawing you want, but in the end it's just a way to cheap out on production costs with a smaller cast, and it shows. Heck, half the episodes don't even show an actual flight crew for the massive plane they fly around--and if that bird can be managed by a lone pilot and no flight crew, then I'm a body double for Chris Hemsworth.<br />
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(I'm not, by the way.)<br />
<br />
Setting the light weight of SHIELD in the show aside, though, the simple composition of the team is ridiculous, both in a contextual sense for the purpose of the team and in a meta-textual sense for the purpose of the show. They have a combat-competent leader in Coulson, but his almost petulant need to flout the regs is pretty vain since the show doesn't seem to have a boss for him to report to and have conflict with. As it is, having Coulson as leader constantly have to explain himself to basically all of his subordinates is not only tiresome, it's eminently stupid. Agent Ward is pretty strait-laced for a SHIELD agent type, but in a group full of recalcitrant misfits he ends up being either a sullen by-the-book regs-thumper or broody pretty boy by way of compensation. Melinda May is also very capable in combat, but reluctantly so due to her unexamined backstory. And in any case she's the only character we've seen piloting their plane, so the lady should be sitting in the plane most of the time anyways. Fitz and Simmons are a victim of their own silly premise--both annoyingly interchangeable, mutually-dependent, and inept at combat. The plot of "FZZT" revolves around the two characters being plot clones of each other, highlighting how they're doubly tiresome. So all in all, we have a SHIELD roster of a six person team with only three combat effective members, two of which do not ordinarily want to be in potential combat situations, and two who are incredible liabilities in combat situations.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: large;">"...we're six episodes in and I'm still waiting for it to get started."</span></i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">And then there's the sixth member of the team: Skye. Skye is a former info-terrorist hacker the team brings on…'cuz. Normally a television show brings an outsider into a team of specialists to give the audience--also outsiders--a sympathetic window into the specialists' world. I call this a schlub (see my <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2011/06/movie-web-monday-gerard-butler.html" target="_blank">post on Gerard Butler</a> for another example), and </span><span class="Apple-style-span"><i>Agents of SHIELD</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> has no need for a schlub, because everyone is largely ignorant or obtuse to each other team member's area of responsibility. So what does Skye bring to the team? Smug uselessness and pathetic attempts to be sexy with a smoker's voice? At first I thought they'd use her to introduce a sinister traitor meta-plot to define the first season, as it was clear she was maintaining contact with her Rising Tide info-terrorist group. Instead, that betrayal plot gets ham-handed four episodes in with the revelation that she was just doing it for her boyfriend, and that her acts of treason </span><span class="Apple-style-span"><i>that got federal agents killed</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> were mitigated by her stupid hormonal love connection. Not only do Coulson, Fitz-Simmons, and the plot itself give Skye a pass on her crimes, but the cast collectively tells Agent Ward to just get over it by the next episode. What was the point of introducing the betrayal and treason plot if the end result was to ditch it at the earliest and clumsiest opportunity?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Ugh. I can rant about Skye all night, but I won't. I will just sum up with this thought. The crew of the Serenity, assembled by luck and lowest-bidding to accomplish odd-jobs of the criminal underworld, was better selected, more disciplined, and more capable of addressing most SHIELD-oriented threats than the team in </span><span class="Apple-style-span"><i>Agents of SHIELD</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">. They had four combat capable crew (five on River's good days), a dedicated pilot, tech person, medic, and a seductress who could stay in character long enough to actually pull cons off.</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; font-style: normal;"><br /></span></i></span></div>
<b>Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy'</b>: <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> has got me going through the motions.<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> Don't get me wrong, I'm still watching this show every week, and I</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> honestly
believe there's potential in the show they've created, but so much of
it is bumbling along right now that I feel like a Marvel-holic getting a
watered-shot of a simulacra of the stuff to which I'm actually
addicted.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">Now, it may seem like I'm being a little harsh in light of the excellent Marvel movies, but wait: I'm going to get even more acerbic as I dial in my disappointment. We're six episodes into this series. Let's put that into perspective. By this point of screen-time (using show chronology, not airing chronology), <i>Firefly</i> had introduced Niska in "The Train Job", developed the entire crew's fabulous rapport in "Shindig", and blown everyone away with "Our Mrs. Reynolds". <i>The X-Files</i> had already given all of us the uber-willies in "Squeeze" with a boneless super-malleable cannibal serial killer, and established a good procedural investigative style and partner dynamic with "Conduit" and "Shadows". And <i>Agents of SHIELD</i>'s stumbling is made even more unforgivable by the fact that <i>The Blacklist</i>, which started the same week, has been superb--especially in the ways that the Marvel show fails. They've got a great team that is diverse-yet-plausible, fantastic writing, good pacing, and several interesting meta-plots.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">I'm waiting for <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> to come into its own, but I'm not holding my breath.</span><br />
<br />
<b>General Enjoyment 'Cheese'</b>: As it stands, I think <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> will only appeal to a very small section of fans of the Marvel cinematic universe. I'm not going to assume everyone is going to get annoyed by the same elements the same amount as me, but there are just too many compromises to something that needs a very focused formula to work as a show. It still has too many superhero and genre elements to appeal to viewers who don't like the movies or comics, but those elements are so watered-down and subverted by the cliched action of the show that the movie and comic fans are going to feel let down at best or outright alienated at worst.<br />
<br />
I hope that people will, like me, give <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> a chance to fix their problems, but even more so I hope that the creative team behind <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> will actually take the effort to fix these problems to make a series worthy of <strike>Mordor</strike> five or more seasons.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">After <i>Avengers</i>, Joss Whedon is the magical summoner of comicbook fans.</td></tr>
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(Fourth post this week, so the deficit is down to 3 out of 31)Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-31217677002643548972013-11-12T00:08:00.002-06:002013-11-12T00:15:05.395-06:00Movie Web Monday: Alan Tudyk<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
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<b><i>Movie Web Monday:</i></b><i> Each
article in the web, I'll look at a specific actor's roles across three good movies.
The third movie will in turn tie into the first movie of the next week's
actor, whose third movie will continue the pattern. I will go through
actors and movies at this rate, with the following limitations in mind:
every movie(or television show) invoked will be one I either own, or
wish to own; no movie or actor will be invoked twice. So sit back and
enjoy as you fall into the nerdery's movie web. (Oh, and I'll try to
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Alan Tudyk:<span style="font-size: large;"> Probably Won't Sur<span style="font-size: large;">vive <span style="font-size: large;">This Post</span></span></span></span></div>
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<b>Movie:</b> <i>3:10 to Yuma</i> (Own it. Minor spoilers ahead)</div>
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In <i>3:10 to Yuma</i>, Alan Tudyk plays Doc Potter, one of the supporting townsfolk who gets wrangled into joining the posse seeking to deliver Ben Wade into the hands of justice. (Man, that sounded a bit like a line from <i>The Tick</i>, didn't it?) He's a minor character, but in true Alan Tudyk form, he instantly charms the audience. While digging into a shot Pinkerton named Byron McElroy (played by Peter Fonda) to prise free a bullet, Byron notices that the doctor's wall is decorated with skinless sketches of horse and dog musculature. Byron of course asks what kind of doctor Potter is, to which the only slightly shaken doctor replies wryly:</div>
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Doc Potter isn't an imposing character--neither very outspoken nor terribly useful in a fight, but he sets himself up as stubbornly moral and reliable. In this western, the protagonists stand shoulder-to-shoulder with bullies and cowards, and it's fitting that two of the bravest men in this band end up being the crippled Dan Evans and the soft-spoken doctor. And of course, he ends up dying right in the middle of a punchline.<br />
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<b>Movie:</b> <i>Serenity</i> (Own it, several times over. SPOILERS SHALL FLOW)</div>
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Oh <i>Serenity</i>, how you move me. Between the short-lived television show <i>Firefly</i> and the spin-off movie <i>Serenity</i>, the adventures of Malcolm Reynolds and his crew are some of my favorite fourteen hours of media. The characters are likable, charming, and quirky. The world is worn and eclectically appealing. The events are pure in their anti-classist nobility. And Wash, the ship's lovable pilot played by Alan Tudyk, is completely emblematic of Joss Whedon's beautiful tableau. He's sarcastic and pliable, stubborn and witty, and totally in love with his wife even to the point of embracing a lifestyle you definitely get the feeling he wouldn't otherwise lead. Even in the climactic ship-scramble of the movie, when his superb piloting skills shine for all to see, he reminds us how unsuited to this violent business he is with his simple calming verse:</div>
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It's a tremendous contrast to the destruction and danger all around, and it sort of highlights how out of his element he is. And the glory of that moment--and his crushing, sudden demise in mid punch-line--really encapsulates the kindness and childish devotion of his character. Wash was probably too principled and soft to be part of Serenity's crew, but he was also too loving and devoted to ever leave them. It's a really nuanced characterization for Alan Tudyk to bring out in a character we didn't even get to know for a full season.</div>
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<b>Movie:</b> <i>A Knight's Tale</i> (Rent it)</div>
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<i>A Knight's Tale</i> is a anachronistic teen-oriented fluffy movie about a squire who lies his way into becoming a knight's tournament champion, while picking up an allegedly hot noblewoman along the way as a spare. Now I'm not a huge fan of <i>A Knight's Tale</i>. But that boils down almost completely to the fault of the two main characters and the runny-eggs sloppy romance between Heath Ledger's William and Shannyn Sossamon's Jocelyn, because I love the supporting characters and antagonist. Rufus Sewell doing what he does best with a smirking, sadistic streak cloaked in the velvet of classism as Count Adhemar. And Alan Tudyk as the fiercely belligerent, barely conversant fellow conspirator in the group. He's stutteringly insecure and defensive on his own behalf and that of the group, as is made readily apparent when Chaucer joins their group and Wat decides to threaten the naked wastrel:</div>
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His delivery of the line is so energetic and committed to the moment of realizing a barely literate friend raging that it's pretty much impossible not to consider this one of the best moments of the little movie. (Alan Tudyk doesn't buy it in this one, either, so there's always that.)</div>
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Oh, and this is the third post this week, which means that's 2 out of 31 for my blog post deficit. And we're only two days into the week, too.</div>
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<b><i>Movie Web Monday</i></b><i> will continue next time with a new actor, picking up with some other prolific player from the last movie listed above.</i></div>
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Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-35553377166550213062013-11-11T20:38:00.001-06:002013-11-11T20:38:56.082-06:00Veterans Day at the NerderyToday is the ninety-fifth anniversary of the Armistice of Compiègne, which ended World War I, or at least the war between the Triple(or more, really) Entente and Germany, on November 11, 1918. Starting the next year, many of the Entente nations declared national holidays on the anniversary of the armistice. In the United States of America, it was known as Armistice Day until 1954, when Congress officially changed the holiday to Veterans Day, which has remained associated with the holiday ever since. Now, in the US we have a holiday in May for the remembrance of those who died in the armed forces (talked about <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/05/memorial-day-reenactments.html" target="_blank">first here</a> and <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2011/05/belated-memorial-day-at-nerdery.html" target="_blank">again here</a>). Veterans Day, on the other hand, is dedicated to honoring veterans serving, retired, or passed away and to connect that honor to our everyday lives in a way that is distinct to the respectful rites of Memorial Day.<br />
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Today, I'm going to quickly highlight Veterans Day with a short list of great science fiction books. These books fall into the great tradition of what is known as the military sci-fi subgenre. Military sci-fi comprises story where military hierarchies, tradition, logistics, and/or tactics factor as heavily into the plot and setting as alien worlds and futuristic technology. What's interesting about these sorts of stories, when compared to traditional space opera, sci-fantasy, or social drama sci-fi, is that it respects the interaction of characters and traditions as somewhat timeless in the scope of how men and women conduct war. The three books I'm highlighting below, however, are not just really good pieces of military sci-fi; they're also all written by veterans, which allows a reader to analyze the book meta-textually. In so doing, these books aren't just great action-packed sci-fi classics, but they're an alternative way of approaching and analyzing some specific veterans.<br />
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They're also pretty quick reads, too.<br />
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Starship Troopers was written in 1959 and has remained one of the flagships of the subgenre of military sci-fi ever since. It's less of a conventional war story as it is part snapshot of a military oligarchical society and one teen's coming of age within that tradition. I've been a fan of this book since the fourth grade, and I think I've bought it at least a half-dozen times over the years out of a compulsion to always have one at hand. (Not unlike the way Jerry keeps buying copies of <i>The Catcher in the Rye</i> in the movie <i>Conspiracy Theory</i>.) <i>Starship Troopers</i> was written by Robert Heinlein, who graduated from Annapolis Naval Academy in 1929 and retired as a Naval Lieutenant in 1934, and is one of a smattering of not insane pieces of sci-fi written by him. I also recommend <i>Space Cadet</i>, <i>The Moon is a Harsh Mistress</i>, and <i>Red Planet</i> for anyone interested in more of his books, but many of his others are really out there. But this one is a fairly short, fast-moving read that provides a good survey of the major themes of this category of fiction.<br />
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The Starfist series of novels is a great collection of 14 novels set in the 2400s. The premier entry in the series, <i>First to Fight</i>, was published in 1997, and presents the marines of the 34th FIST (Fleet Initial Strike Team) performing glorified police work on an inherently unstable world in the middle of yet another brushfire war. If you ignored the publication date, you might think the fiction is reactionary to early War on Terror military stories. The two things I really love about this series of books both relate to the elegance of the series' conceit: it all follows a specific company starting in a specific year. In the early installments, this means that the Confederation of Human Worlds has yet to make contact with intelligent (and hostile) aliens, and the conflicts of the first four books are about dousing political fires on the outskirts of human space. Secondly, the authors consistently draw characters and resources from a genuine military company, meaning that characters that are dropped as names in one book might become main characters you root for in later books, and that the politics of the unit's organization mean more to you as the series goes on. The series was written by David Sherman, who served 6 years in the United States Marine Corps before retiring as a Corporal, and Dan Cragg, who retired as an Army Sergeant Major after 22 years in uniform. They give the series a concentrated level of (US) military culture that sometimes comes off as a bit stereotypical but is always consistent and oozes bravado throughout.<br />
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<i>Orphanage</i> is the first of a series of seven (and counting) novels set in a near future interstellar conflict. The first book especially takes a lot of stylistic inspiration from Heinlein's <i>Starship Troopers</i>, though with a lot more action and dialed in characterization of the supporting cast. The first book begins with earth getting bombarded by aliens from the outer reaches of the solar system. As the entire planet reels from the devastating attack, they mount a suicidal expedition to counter-attack the alien presence on Ganymede. The mission is considered so dangerous that the powers-that-be declare that all soldiers selected for the mission must be orphans of the war, earning the book its title and setting a desperate, wounded motif for the series. Robert Buettner, who served as an Army intelligence officer, eventually takes the series into bigger themes, as the war forces humanity to reach out to other stars to battle the aliens throughout the galaxy. There's a lot of great sci-fi that plays intelligent homage to several other authors and series, though the focus and style of the action shifts greatly throughout the books as the nature of the war itself evolves. This is a great feature if you're prepared for it, but if you aren't it can be jarring as politics, logistics, and ethics quickly take the fore.<br />
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I hope you take the chance to thank the service people in your life this Veterans Day, and definitely check out these great novels whenever you get the chance. Besides being enjoyable nerd-fodder, they just might encourage you to think differently about these issues next Veterans Day.Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-52577247469613248992013-11-11T11:55:00.002-06:002013-11-11T15:58:38.903-06:00Nerdview of Thor: The Dark World<i style="background-color: white;"><b>Nerdview:</b> A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.</i><br />
<i style="background-color: white;"><br /></i><span style="background-color: white;">This past weekend was the US release of <i>Thor: The Dark World</i>. As you could probably guess from my two reviews of <i>Thor</i> (<a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2011/05/thor-good-needs-more-archaic-smack.html" target="_blank">regular</a> and <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2011/05/thor-god-of-thunder-on-movie-thor.html" target="_blank">Thor-speak</a>), from <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/05/avengers-reviewed.html" target="_blank">my glowing praise</a> of <i>Avengers</i>, or <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/11/marvel-hype-cinematic-universe-phase-two.html" target="_blank">my general love</a> for Marvel, I have been anticipating this film for some time. What's more, the trials of parenting two babies demanded that I see the movie twice this weekend: once in 3D with my Friday gaming group, and once in 2D with my wife on Sunday. (Spoiler alert: I liked it)</span><br />
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<i style="background-color: white;"><br /></i><span style="background-color: white;"><b>Expectations 'Odor'</b>: As a Marvel-phile, I had a lot of expectations for seeing Malekith brought into the cinematic universe. In the comics, he's a magically-grounded half-dead dark elf, but based on the primordial narrative of the movie trailers, I imagine the film's origin for the dark elves would be more primordial, which can be a fine and elegant way to bring comic book issues to the theater. The first Thor movie had a bit more deliberate pace, with the most exciting combat front-loaded and the later action much smaller-scale skirmishes. Without the burden of origins and introductions for so many characters, I expected <i>The Dark World</i> to feature more evenly-paced, epic action sequences. Coupled with that, since the first movie already introduced us to so many Asgardians, I wanted to see the supporting cast develop and get their own moments to shine. Except for Jane Foster. I wanted her to get killed off and free up Thor for his true love: Sif.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white;"><b>Appreciation 'Beef'</b>: The first observation to make of <i>Thor: The Dark World</i> is that it has a definite sci-fi flavor to the action, as the opening sequence throws you into a fight that is part Battle of the Last Alliance, with fantasy-flavored Asgardians wading into dark elf laser fire while their dagger-like ships loom over head. The myth-as-science-fiction was established in the first movie, but in <i>Thor </i>it was more of a token explanation to make it easier for Thor to relate to Jane Foster. In <i>Thor: The Dark World</i>, however, that motif is brought to the foreground, as the bad guys use energy weapons, point-singularity grenades, have spaceships and agile fighters. Even the Asgardians show off some artillery and their own boat-like fighter craft. That, of course means dogfighting, and they actually do it quite well for a movie where such aerobatics aren't even expected.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ornate and manufactured, but with a serial-killer sinister feel as well.</td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white;">The overall aesthetic of the movie is just as well-done as <i>Thor</i>, with Asgard fleshed out a bit more this time around in its golden beauty. There's also glimpses of most of the other Nine Realms, but nothing to really evaluate other than variety. Though I must say that Svartaflheim (the titular dark world) was a really neat realization of that realm: blasted with ash and black sand, sky a sick not-quite-illuminated sickly mellow yellow with clouded veins giving the alien sky a thoroughly distinct look, and at the same time alluding to the twisted base perceptions of the dark elves themselves. Malekith and his people stand out against the fantasy look of the Asgardians with baroque sci-fi designs that reminded me of the Necromongers in <i>The Chronicles of Riddick</i>, which I really enjoyed. The dark elf foot soldiers in particular wear expressionless pale-faced masks with black eyes that I found really eerie and elegant at the same time.</span><br />
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Minor spoilers in the next paragraph.<br />
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I was pretty massively disappointed in Jane Foster as a character. And considering I was expecting, hoping, and needing her to die in this movie, that's saying a lot. To start with, she doesn't die. But we get teased as she comes oh so close to dying. What's worse, though, is that Jane Foster is by far the worst, most uninteresting character in the movie. She's snippy and childishly petulant for no reason, she drags down her scenes with cardboard delivery, and she's in general just a plain old plot cow. It's so bad that at one point in the film she's so useless she faints for no good reason other than to let Loki and Thor riff off each other while she kindly stays out of it.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6SgvhGZQnIHy-bBa7TyW7Qb_nnQj-tYN75c5qNh32DPGUrNPpVd6RvGWk3ogsqN2OGuR5wDTWbtVT15-r306ApdCd1m6lk40M66xQK2i7wZWRE_xb2JNzF0HMHv-bWF-QHPgSM1jCRjQ/s1600/Thor2JaneFosterPsychlo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="290" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6SgvhGZQnIHy-bBa7TyW7Qb_nnQj-tYN75c5qNh32DPGUrNPpVd6RvGWk3ogsqN2OGuR5wDTWbtVT15-r306ApdCd1m6lk40M66xQK2i7wZWRE_xb2JNzF0HMHv-bWF-QHPgSM1jCRjQ/s400/Thor2JaneFosterPsychlo.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That's right, I saw <i>Battlefield Earth</i>, and I haven't even purged it from my memory.</td></tr>
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Foster's big fail notwithstanding, the rest of the cast is terrific. Chris Hemsworth is as at home and mature in the role of Thor as ever, showing genuine growth from the previous two movies. Tom Hiddleston as Loki reminds the audience of his chops, modulating between impishly mischievous comic, brooding schemer, and jealous brother. Plus, you'd have to be blind not to get lost in his smoldering stares in the first act cell-block scenes--just saying. And once again, Jaimie Alexander as Sif dramatically outshines Jane Foster on the screen. Physical, decisive, witty, and intuitive in her relationship with Thor, Sif in thirty minutes completely outshines her mortal competition for Thor's affections, and only the plot spares Foster from being shown up completely. Finally, Christopher Eccleston as antagonist Malekith gives a searing performance even through the hefty face prosthetics and voice distortion. Even when he's speaking in the dark elves' language, I got a kick out of his resonating, careful enunciation and the vile sneer he carries with his voice alone.<br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><b>Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy'</b>: Having seen the movie twice in its opening weekend, I think it's fair to guess that I enjoyed this movie. It's got most of the elements I wanted, and in greater quantities. Odin gets some token raven-time (important for us mythology enthusiasts), Idris Elba gets a bit more screen time to be awesome and thunder great Heimdall lines, and Darcy returns and has a slightly expanded role. (If Jane Foster has to come back, then so should Darcy. Although in order to avoid upstaging Portman's Jane Foster, Darcy is in three layers, a scarf, and a wool cap for about 90% of her on-screen time. And she's still more watchable than Jane.) Thor is mature in both his powers and character, and yet there's still a sense of growth in both areas, which is especially apparent in his interactions with Loki. And Loki....oh Loki, you're so awesome. I can't really think of anyone I'd rather see staring down a Kursed Algrim.<br />
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But Jane Foster! Grrr, in a movie that grabs me by the nerdlies so easily, it's very frustrating to have to endure her throughout another film. Expect a more in-depth, spoilerific rant about it in the future. Suffice it to say for now that she is, at best, a non-entity in the movie and probably the only thing I can pick out as an outright flaw.<br />
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I want to make a note here: I don't think this movie is worth the 3D up-charge. I rarely noticed it even when I tried, and those times when I did notice the 3D effect was normally in foreshortening shots. There it created a powerful depth of field, but I don't think it enhanced the movie as much as <i>Captain America</i> of <i>Avengers</i> did. I mean, subtlety in 3D is nice, but if you don't consciously notice or get at least thirteen bucks' worth of wow out of the experience, you might as well enjoy the movie in its 2D format.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://morethanjustreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Thor-The-Dark-World-Sif-Poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://morethanjustreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Thor-The-Dark-World-Sif-Poster.jpg" width="268" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Seriously, how the heck is this not the leading lady?!</td></tr>
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<b>General Enjoyment 'Cheese'</b>: <span style="background-color: white;">Anyone who enjoyed <i>Thor</i> should enjoy <i>Thor: The Dark World</i>. It does almost everything just as well if not better than the first movie. And for those who didn't like the first movie will likely still find stuff to enjoy. The action is much more kinetic and spread out, the emotional content is dialed in even more in this movie as it doesn't have to deal with stranger-on-earth tropes as such, and there's a lot of great performances spread out throughout an excellent cast.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">Who definitely won't like this? People who don't like the juxtaposition of mythological figures and science-fiction elements. This seems to be a common cry amongst professional critics--I guess they weren't listening to Thor in the first movie.</span><br />
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After the disappointment of<i> Iron Man 3</i>, it's nice to see <i>Thor: The Dark World</i> getting it right. They change Malekith quite a bit to fit him onto the screen, but he's still riveting and adroitly meets all the thematic demands set by the comic book version of himself--unlike the Mandarin in the last Iron Man flick. Everyone other than Jane Foster shows growth in this movie and is an improvement over their earlier portrayals, while Portman's character is a dull cloud in the middle of an otherwise sterling film. Regardless, though, she can't sully this movie for me, and it's definitely set the bar high for the next Marvel movie. It's doubtful I'll get to see this again in theaters, but if the opportunity came up I'd definitely accept. In the meantime, I'm counting down the days to Winter Soldier.<br />
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144Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-42326377714160110342013-11-09T23:16:00.000-06:002013-11-10T22:58:41.673-06:00Marvel Hype: Cinematic Universe Phase Two<span style="font-size: large;">(...And Maybe A Little Bit of Phase Three?)</span><br />
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I'm not sure how necessary this is to constantly reiterate, but for those of you just joining or with the attention spans of Labrador Retrievers: I am a Marvel fan. I love the comics, I love the cartoons (erm...animated features, I mean), I love the movies. I love Marvel.<br />
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And right now, I am excited.<br />
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Why am I excited? Well first of all, this past week was Thor's day. No wait--that's not just a terrible pun/allusion to the etymological origins of the word Thursday--it's the night of the US release of the second Odinson movie, <i>Thor: The Dark World</i>. Apart from being a mega awesome sequel title (woot for sequels without numbers in the title!), the trailers for this film have had me totally stoked. I really liked <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2011/05/thor-good-needs-more-archaic-smack.html" target="_blank">the first movie</a>, and this one looks poised to amp up many of the elements I loved about the first. Plus, with Jane Foster getting thrown into the thick of things for this movie, odds are good she'll get elf-kacked and replaced by Lady Sif--booyah! Either way, expect a movie review to be posted early tomorrow.<br />
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Most importantly, though, is the revelation that 3D screenings of Thor: The Dark World will have an exclusive peek at <i>Captain America: Winter Soldier</i>. Not only does this movie look poised to hit all the right notes in <a href="http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/marvel/captainamericathewintersoldier/#videos-large" target="_blank">this first trailer</a>, (Robert Redford?! Booyah!) but Winter Soldier is one of the coolest Cap-related storylines, and one of the greatest overall plots in the Marvel Universe. If you haven't read it, you owe it to yourself to check out the story arc--it's the first twenty issues or so of the Captain America series that began in 2004, written by Ed Brubaker--fantastic plot that brings back classic elements of Captain America and brings them to the fore with a shiny new appeal. It's like meeting your first crush years later and finding out she's just as cool as before, only now more clever, passionate, and into yoga. All-round win.<br />
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Throwing further fuel onto the fire of my enthusiasm, Marvel cinematic news is that James Spader is going to be portraying Ultron in the Avengers sequel, <i>Avengers: Age of Ultron</i>. What?!<br />
<br />
Whaaat?!<br />
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I mean, first of all, I want to throw a Marvel-fan hissy-fit over Ultron being the main villain in the next Avengers movie, which will come out before <i>Ant-Man</i>. I mean, Ant-Man is the creator of Ultron, and a lot of his (really really compelling) character quirks as a villain are directly precipitated by Ant-Man's personal character. This is totally putting the cart before the horse. (I wanted to say 'literally' there for emphasis, but the grammarian butt-hole living in my head wouldn't allow it) So clearly Ultron isn't going to share a remotely similar origin story to the comics, but does that mean that Hank Pym is going to be fundamentally changed as a hero in <i>Ant-Man</i>? Pym is very much defined by his world-threatening failure in Ultron's creation, and it's often as depicting his more self-destructive character flaws. The suggestion, then, is that those demons won't exist. What's next, are they going to make him a decent guy who treats his woman nice, is loyal, and always takes it slow?<br />
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Bah, who am I kidding? This is Joss Whedon we're talking about. You can say what you like about his creative choices, but he makes really interesting bad guys. Heck, if they made a Whedon Villains special like a Disney Princesses video, I'd buy it. And James Spader, too? I mean, they've already let slide that they scanned his face for VFX, so it's safe to say we're going to see some awesome acting from the man who is the pillar of Blacklist's early success. But I also used to be a big <i>Stargate</i> fan, so the role I'm really wanting to see him channel is Daniel Jackson, the rambling archeologist outcast.<br />
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Most recently, Marvel <a href="http://marvel.com/news/story/21476/disneys_marvel_and_netflix_join_forces_to_develop_historic_four_series_epic_plus_a_mini-series_event" target="_blank">announced</a> last week that they'll be partnering with Netflix to create four 13 episode serials over the next two years. Focusing in turn on Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage, the four mini-mini-series will culminate in a cross-over mini-series that will be called <i>The Defenders</i>. I already jumped the gun getting excited that Luke Cage would feature in <i>Agents of SHIELD</i>, so getting to see Power Man doing his street tank thing will be awesome. Not to mention the prospect of Daredevil being redeemed from the Affleck treatment he got in 2003. If they feature the lawyer aspects of Matt Murdoch, the Daredevil serials should be really engrossing--that pseudo mundane aspect of his character has always appealed to me. Same goes for Jessica Jones' wry private investigator angle and the post-tights drama that defines her. And Iron Fist's handwaved wushu business should be a fun splash of highly choreographed action to contrast the other three.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>"Heck, if they made a Whedon Villains special like a Disney Princesses video, I'd buy it."</i></span></div>
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Oh, the next phase of Marvel's cinematic universe is already shaping up nicely with <i>Thor</i> and <i>Captain America</i>, and even Phase Three should be killer with <i>The Defenders</i> adding a lot of street-level mysteries and small-screen drama.Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-15793642920308323292013-11-05T22:12:00.000-06:002013-11-14T12:41:55.573-06:00Myth Campaign: October 4, 166 Sword Age<i><b>Myth, The Shield Age</b>: A dramatic synopsis of the tabletop RPG campaign I'm currently leading my friends through. It's a variation on <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2011/07/nerd-butter-gurps-start.html" target="_blank">GURPS</a>, built up from and inspired by the excellent computer game <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2012/02/remembering-myth.html" target="_blank">Myth</a>.
In it, the player characters begin as a selection of relatively
ordinary folk in an unremarkable town. Their adventures grow, the
dangers swarm, and the PCs? They pretty much just have to deal with it
without serious power progression. It's gritty, it's deadly, it's
fantasy with a political and social edge and an emotional timbre: it's
Myth: The Shield Age.</i><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I've recently been watching a
number of videos on YouTube depicting other people's role-playing game
sessions, and it's really gotten my Game-Master juices flowing, so to
speak. Wil Wheaton's Tabletop has chronicled two very fun RPG sessions
in the past: the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-61i3R5y9Y" target="_blank"><i>Dragon Age RPG</i></a> was a fun and more traditional hack-and-slash adventure that got me to nerd-out to Sam Witwer's gaming style; <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXJxQ0NbFtk" target="_blank">Fiasco</a> </i>was
a sublimely dramatic RPG without so much mechanics and direct violence,
building a tableau of tragedy and drama and then setting it all on
fire. Both are a lot of fun, and could merit detailed posts on their own
(or more, if you know me). I've also been watching a series of
recordings of a group that livestreams games using
Skype and Roll20 to play an RPG set in the <i>Warhammer 40,000</i> universe. Called <a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-oTJHKXHicSxBj2DMq_zmJ0QALrhKzVg" target="_blank">"Rollplay: Dark Heresy"</a>,
that group's fun antics almost lured me back into the grimdark dumb
setting before a horrific boondoggle scared me right the heck off of the
Games Workshop website (filmatleven on that).</span><br />
<br />
But as much as these games have inspired me, they also leave me cold as a role-player and GM. <i>Dark Heresy</i> is based on the <i>Inquisitor </i>system
which was my first love in the role-playing genre, but they add a rigid
class system to it that makes me want to vomit in terror. The Rollplay
group is fun, but also irreverent and obtuse towards the story in that
power-gamey self-conscious way. I'm a thespy, snobby GM I guess, because
as fun as it is to watch I know I would hate that in a campaign I was
leading. Similarly, the <i>Dragon Age</i> episodes of Tabletop were a
really entertaining watch, but the contrived elements of the class
system is a turn-off to my gaming tastes. <i>Fiasco </i>is dramatically
around my sweet-spot in terms of harrowing player characters without
violence or fakey game progression being necessary, but it doesn't touch
upon combat or traditional adventuring the way I would like.<br />
<br />
What does? <i>GURPS Myth</i>, baby. Or at least the way I play <i>GURPS Myth</i>,
it does. I'm actually in the process of returning to this campaign
after more than a year off--I think we've played one game of it since my
family and I moved to our current place. This synopsis is going to be
focused on a fast summary of the story rather than highlighting the
GURPS mechanics in action, though if any questions about the
nitty-gritty come up, I'd be happy to answer them either in comments or
future posts as appropriate.<br />
<br />
<i>Note that I'll be pretty careful to track dates, seasons, and holidays in my campaign. The passage of time is an important element of the game. Not only do I use time spent training in lieu of traditional game experience, but I try to keep world events on an independent timeline from player action--whether they dawdle or hasten towards their goals is up to them, but the forces of evil act out their own plans at the same time.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Also please keep in mind that I tend to run more R-rated or at least hard PG-13 games. You won't get too much bad language--at least not much bad contemporary language--but there is some more mature subject matter in the run of the plot. And I tend to cut loose with my descriptions of violence.</i><br />
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<td width="420"><b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">The twelfth of November,</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">One hundred sixty-sixth year of the Sword Age.</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">Here taken to script is the account of Alrid Hock, founding elder of Misty Downs, warrior of the The Legion. Tiernan Seithkarl, the Magistrate of Misty Downs for these past two years, has bid me record the dire goings of our village this past moon.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;"><br />Misty Downs is a small village of perhaps three score families in Umbra, the region immediately east of Tharsis, the great billowing mountain at the center of the Cloudspine. The Cath Bruig village is honorably distinguished in The Realm as furthest north and west in the region. To the north just past Lake Ywrmasr lies The Barrier, filled with Myrkridia and soil now damned for one hundred and sixty-five years. Founded a generation ago, Thom Etteryn, Ostler Farris, myself, and two other brothers in The Legion were awarded these lands for our years of service in Alric's Legion, fighting in the First Myrkridian Campaign.</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Quintessential', cursive; font-size: 16px;">Having sheathed our swords, the five of us farmed the land and beat back the wolves and catamounts of the region. We have broken the earth and planted crops in the shadow of the last war, and as our families joined us we made the cursed soil fertile and built two generations in the fog dripping down from Tharsis.<br /><br />But every good Bruig knows that peace is fleeting, and the wolf waits for its prey to slumber. For Misty Downs, it began on the fourth eve of October. I awoke from the harvest mind to a cry raised in the center of the Downs. I stirred my house and summoned the rest of the council to join all in the village square, before the Flooded Downs tavern where we always held town meetings.<br /><br /><br />"Giselbert Craw is gen missin'," the village crier reported. Giselbert was Laanor Craw's sister, daughter of Donovan Craw. Her father and brother stood by, eyes red and torches in hand. She was but a dozen and one years old.<br /><br /><br />Thom, Ostler, and I seized upon the townsfolk there assembled to get their witness. She had disappeared from the pastureland along with her father's small herd of fourteen cattle. The last of our assembly to have seen her was a Gowerna from the east named Danlyra. She was known to me already, as any Bruig Elder worth his teeth would meet any horsemaster entering his village. We quickly put the test to her. She had not touched Giselbert nor shared many words with her but to take directions to our village tavern as she rode in on her fine Gowerna riding mare. That was least two hours and spare before the crier rose the alarum amongst the town, but Danlyra saw nought else.<br /><br /><br />We mustered the men of the village to find Giselbert Craw. By this time, much of the entire village had put themselves under our cause, and so we parceled the men to range afield for her, while the women and children stayed close to home to keep fires lit for her swift return. Danlyra stayed at the tavern, tending to her horse and distracting my grandson Baith with her lilting words and strange expressions. Were her clothes less refined I'd have called the whore her true name, but she had the bearing of one beyond my station and all were pressed to find Giselbert.<br /><br /><br />By Wyrd's sight, we had a Heron Guard tending our Temple of Wyrdras for that season. We called him Ten Green Gem Vine, a name strange to those who never served with the Heron Guard in The Legion. He was young, even measured by my short span, but he quickly divided us and led our group into the dark. Tall and strong as all his blessed brothers are, he donned the glittering armor and twin fangs of his station and sallied into the hills.<br /><br /><br />The young Heron Guard selected a falconer from our village to lead the search, a huntress named Vera Wealwa. With her bird and bow, Vera led the men of the village to sign of young Giselbert. They found only a bloody patch of ground where someone had split ope one of the Craw farm's cattle and strewn its entrails about the field, knotting the gibs together here and there. The search parties ranged in small groups from there, forced together by darkness, fog, and wolf as the night deepened.<br /><br /><br />Vera led the Heron Guard, following a trail of what she scryed to be a single cattle into the scrub to the west of our village. Joining him was Keagan Na Anyon, our village blacksmith. Soot-browed and meade-bearded, he could swing his fists like many men swing hammers, and were he less fond of drink and brawling he'd have left Misty Downs years ago. Indentured to our last smith as a boy, Keagan clung to Misty Downs, though, and he was blustering to find Giselbert at the first cries from Laanor Craw.<br /><br /><br />Also joining their number was a wandering vagabond of perhaps thirty years. Named Crow, he carried himself unlike any beggar I've met in my two score and ten years. He held a stout quarterstaff, bound at the haft with leather strips, the mark of a staff used to striking more than leaning. A gourd hung from his belt, but his eyes were clear and acute. I saw him for a soldier even in the midst of the tavern, but on that night I thought to say nothing.<br /><br /><br />The four moved through the dark for hours, scrabbling up slopes and gutters torn by Tharsis' great eruption two ages ago. While many of our hardiest villagers turned back in exhaustion, Ten Green Gem Vine urged them forward, making every clue Vera found into a certain promise of Giselbert's well-being and proximity. Then they were suddenly set upon. Stones in the darkness whistled to crack against the Heron Guard and torch-wielding blacksmith, breaking the redheaded smith's nose and tumbling him. Drawing his twin swords, the Emperor's Twin Fangs, Ten Green Gem Vine charged into the stygian hills and let his blades find the guts of a bandit with a sling while Vera's arrows hobbled another as he fled into the night.<br /><br /><br />Two more highwaymen witnessed the slaughter and the armor of a Heron Guard and retreated into a cave nearby. As Keagan drew his sword and caught stride with the Heron, the group strode into the cave to find a nest of eight men waiting for them. Keagan, Ten Green Gem Vine, and Crow waded into the fight. Crow's staff broke bones and whistled teeth, but a spear threaded his ribs and he fell even as his cohorts' blades cut into the rest of them. The Emperor's Fangs gutted a man and twisted the leg off another, leaving the man screaming and bathing in a pool of his own blood. Keagan's sword threw a bandit down to ruin as well. While Ten Green Gem Vine tended to Crow's wound, Vera saw three more bandits returning to the cave, the one she'd earlier hobbled among them. Arrows answered stones, and the bandits tumbled into darkness and screams.<br /><br /><br />Inside the cave, three of the villains had the strength left to scream and beg for their lives, but the party ignored them. Keagan followed the path of the cave deeper to find signs of an encampment of sorts. A fire and spit, bedrolls for a dozen men, and a gutted cattle close at hand. And a heavy foreign curtain draw across a smaller tunnel to create a room. With the Heron Guard stepping beside Keagan, the curtain was cast aside, and they found Giselbert.</span></b></td>
<td valign="top" width="100">Major events since Soulblighter's defeat, about fifty years ago:<br />
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-Muirthemne and The Realm of the Cath Bruig are slowly being restored.<br />
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-Emperor Alric orders the Myrkridian Campaigns, periodic assaults on The Barrier to try to weed out the Myrkridia infesting the ruins of the last age.<br />
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-The Province in the west establishes its own king, beneath Emperor Alric.<br />
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<b>The Barrier</b></div>
The Barrier is a wild area, cursed by the gods. It fills the land north and west of Muirthemne, and is in turn teeming with beasts and foul creatures, the greatest of whom are the Myrkridia. A scorching desert filled with ruins nearly two centuries silent, every farmer knows that The Barrier’s soil radiates heat both night and day and will not permit seed to take root.<br />
<br />
The Barrier is the scorched remnant of the heart of the Cath Bruig Empire. When Balor sacked Muirthemne in the last year of the Wolf Age, the winds carried the sorcerous blaze across the rest of The Realm, hastening the death of the towns in that region as their crops withered and fell even before the Dark laid proper siege to their walls. After Soulblighter’s defeat, the hordes of leaderless Myrkridia he let loose upon the world swarmed to The Barrier, drawn to the sites of massive carnage. As Alric and his Circle of Mages have begun pushing back the curse of The Barrier, he has also installed a dozen forts along the edge of the wastes, each supporting a company or more of the Legion’s soldiers, helping to keep the monsters within at bay.<br />
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<b>Misty Downs</b></div>
Misty Downs is one of the smallest and most remote villages of the Umbrage region, consisting of perhaps a hundred families. The nearest settlement is a Legion border fort, nicknamed Foggy Bottom, about a day’s travel to the northeast. Misty Downs benefits from frequent rains and mountain streams rolling down from the Cloudspine, and so most of the farmers in the area have a goodly number of cattle. The area is named for its hilly area that frequently clots over with fog banks.<br />
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The small, remote village of Misty Downs has roughly four hundred residents, most of whom rely on wheat and cattle farming. A day’s travel to the northeast is the Legion fort Cwmasr, nicknamed Foggy Bottom. Fog rolls into the hills around Misty Downs with regularity, especially in their wet autumns. Few travelers make their way into Misty Downs, due to the fact that it is so far from the roads and passes of the south. The nearest town is more than a day’s journey to the southeast, as is the Emperor’s Highway. The village, like many others in The Realm, was founded about forty years ago by retiring soldiers of the Legion. A few years ago, the veteran elders sold their holdings to an affluent noble named Tiernan.
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<b>Council of Misty Downs:</b> elders Alrid Hock, Thom Etteryn, and Ostler Farris; Magistrate Tiernan Seithkarl; Seeress Nara Pugh.<br />
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<i>This initial session was meant to turn the typical fantasy RPG on its head. Instead of everyone meeting inside a tavern before their call to adventure, the characters were scattered about the village as they experienced the village's building panic in their own ways. Then they were called to the tavern and asked to meet. Also, the concept of the men of the village meeting and pushing the female player characters out of the tavern to do so was a fun way of helping to establish that this would be a socially grounded medieval setting.</i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Danlyra, Gowerna noblewoman</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ten Green Gem Vine, Heron Guard</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vera Wealwa the falconer</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Keagan Na Anyon, Blacksmith</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Crow, Wandering Adventurer</td></tr>
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Cliffhanger, that's right! If you guys enjoy this, I'll post more. This
first entry roughly summarizes the action of our first night's gaming
session, but since this one involved so much exposition too I think
future Shield Age articles will cover more than one session at a time.<i><br /></i>Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-57295158222257920352013-11-02T00:49:00.000-05:002013-11-02T00:49:56.127-05:00The Enemy's Gate Is Down<i style="background-color: white;"><b>Nerdview:</b> A good review is
hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive
review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated
reviewers. Fortunately, the nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each
review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will
have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and
general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and
cheese.</i><br />
<i style="background-color: white;"><br /></i>
<span style="background-color: white;">Last night was the premier of <i>Ender's Game</i>, the film adaptation of one of the greatest pieces of sci-fi literature of the past 30 years. Based on a book published in 1985, and long in production with the author Orson Scott Card serving as screenwriter and producer in the past, this movie had been in an interminable production for years. During that time, the series has expanded to include a dozen sequels, comic book adaptations, and short stories. And it's still growing, with at least one more sequel and another prequel planned to be released soon. But the most important question, now that the movie has been released and the inevitable talk of a cinematic sequel has already begun: is it a good science fiction film?</span><br />
<i style="background-color: white;"><br /></i>
<span style="background-color: white;"><b>Expectations 'Odor'</b>: If you've read my blog for any amount of time, you know that I've been waiting for this for a long time. I first read the book fifteen years ago, and it's important to note that I helped work on a screenplay adaptation of <i>Ender's Game</i> within a year. It wasn't long after I worked on my script and read the followup <i>The Speaker for the Dead</i> trilogy that the first rumors of an <i>Ender's Game</i> movie surfaced. Originally Wolfgang Petersen, director of <i>Das Boot</i>, <i>Enemy Mine</i>, and <i>Air Force One</i>, was attached to the primordial movie websites. Later, several <i>X-Men</i> alum were rumored to be on the project. Ultimately, I stopped trying to follow the pre-production limbo of <i>Ender's Game</i>. It just hurt too much. But Ender's story has remained important to me, and with this movie I've been getting progressively more and more excited since that <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/05/enders-day.html" target="_blank">first full trailer's release</a>. I even wrote <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-speaker-for-grandpa.html" target="_blank">a tribute</a> to my grandfather's passing in a format very similar to a Speaker for the Dead.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white;">So my expectations are high. Probably a little higher than most fans of the book. The casting choices, as they've been revealed, have been extremely exciting--Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff seems an unintuitive-but-perfect fit, as is Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham. But at the same time, the trailers have done very little to indicate how much of the book's psychological depth and exhausted desperation--key themes in the novel--will make it to the screen. With not much to go on, I think my expectations, my enthusiasm, my criticism, and my hope probably all meter out to something fairly optimistic in the end. We'll just see what the pay off is like.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><b>Appreciation 'Beef'</b>: <i>Ender's Game</i> is very pretty and well-acted. I hope you can hear the negative conjunction coming from around the corner because I've got a big 'but' coming... <i>Ender's Game</i> is very pretty and well-acted, but the plot is rather clumsy and unfocused. There's a lot of strong elements and really polished performances, but in the end the narrative suffers from a lack of strong direction.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white;">The general design and cinematography of the film is really stunning. Without cashing in on sleazy characters or cheap visuals like a J.J. Abrams movie, the look of the film is simply legit and epic. Particularly for a new sci-fi brand that can't rely on established designs for anything, the principal designs of the suits, the game arena, the battle school itself, and the ship designs are all distinct, top notch, and largely fit the limited descriptions of the book. What deviations there are from the descriptions largely make sense, too. The bulkiness ascribed to the game suits was a lot more relevant in the 80s, but the form-armor of the movie looks contemporary and still somewhat protective. The game arena goes from the book's description of being a formless cube to being a glass bubble floating over the planet, giving the Battle School matches a dizzying backdrop to help ground the audience's disorientation. These three-dimensional battles were really well done and did a decent job--though overly condensed--of intimating the tactical geometry of the book's fights. The ship designs were rather more utilitarian than the John Harris cover art I'd grown accustomed to, but the proliferation of Harris' covers throughout 80s and 90s sci-fi means that using his covers for direct inspiration might not have felt that authentic. Heck, I just discovered that the original Ender's Game cover art was re-purposed from an earlier novel called <i>Drunkard's Walk</i>. In any case, I ate up the special effects and visuals of the film.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">The acting was really gratifying, and predictably I found Harrison Ford as Colonel Graff and Ben Kingsley as Mazer Rackham really stole the show as Ender's mentors. Viola Davis also did a great job as the military warmachine's bleeding heart, Major Anderson. I wasn't especially gripped by Asa Butterfield's performance as the lead, but Hailee Steinfeld as Petra did a great job of playing off of him and adding a bit more heart to their scenes together. And Moises Arias, who played Bonzo Madrid, gave one of the most convincing portrayals of childish maliciousness I've ever seen in this sort of movie. In fact, for a movie containing so many young actors, I was pleasantly surprised that every actor seemed suited to their roles and those who didn't stand out were at least capable. Even Abigail Breslin did a good job of realizing the mature-but-impotent philanthropist Valentine Wiggin. And that's from someone who really didn't like her in <i>Zombieland</i>.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white;">But.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white;">I understand that this is a movie and plays by different rules than a novel. I've always said that a strict adaptation is not necessarily a good one. But it seems every plot change the movie made was antagonistic to the themes that made the book popular and made the film's own voice dwindle. The timeline of the movie is a shambles. Apparently, the entire ordeal of selection, Battle School, and Command School takes only about 40 days. Literally, about thirty minutes into the movie they show a timer that says "28 days to alien homeworld." Not only is it eminently stupid to put a timer on a frakking third-act plot twist, but it is a slap in the face to much of the plot where Ender is being tested and refined. <i>You have one month, dill-brains! Just start training him outright! </i>They also overlook the second Bugger Invasion completely, which undermines the sociological and psychological topography of the threat. The whole point of the book is that the Formics first attacked with a scout force and then sent a proper invasion years later when they found a seemingly weak target.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white;">One of the hurdles that Orson Scott Card has personally mentioned in <a href="http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/10/cardqa/" target="_blank">an interview with </a><i><a href="http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/10/cardqa/" target="_blank">Wired</a> </i>was that the book is very insular--much of the action is internalized within Ender's mind. The movie rather clumsily tries to flesh this out by vocalizing Ender's e-mails back to his sister, Valentine, but the correspondence is so bland it feels like a kid reporting on summer camp and doesn't really seem to fit the character or the setting--almost like he's self-censoring to avoid spilling classified info. If that was the case, it could serve the story, but it's a significant plot-point in the movie that Ender is being open with his bland, uninspired letters, and so it defeats the purpose of even including them.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span><b>
Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy'</b>: I'm glad I saw <i>Ender's Game</i>, and I may even see it again in theaters. The battle scenes were gorgeous, and Ford's delivery of Graff's hardline strategy for saving the human race is engrossing.<br />
<br />
But...<br />
<br />
(minor spoilers ahead) <br />
<br />
I can't say this is a very good movie. I'm not saying it's bad, but I find it hard to get into something that is so confused about what it wants to be. For a movie so rushed up until it happens, they take way too long to resolve the post-Command School plot. A part which I think would've been better left as a one minute post-credits scene, they draw it out more than any other scene in the entire movie when they didn't even build up to it properly.<br />
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They only partially met the three expectations I listed in my earlier post anticipating this movie. The third invasion of the Formics was not even a lie in this movie because there was no second invasion, and they seriously drop the bomb of that lie at the earliest possible opportunity so that the steaming dud doesn't even really impact the audience. And when Ender ignorantly wipes out the Formic homeworld, the emotional content of the scene is so backwards as to defeat the impact of the twist itself (for Ender, because with the timer reveal any audience member should see the twist coming). In the book, Ender is supposed to be mentally exhausted and spent, ready to quit when he petulantly 'breaks' the game with a suicidal and genocidal attack on the enemy's base. The observing leaders, however, are supposed to be relieved, cheering and crying and congratulating each other at that moment of victory. That cruel juxtaposition, then, beats Ender when he was already low. The movie, however, depicts the kids cheering while the adults somberly conference and inform Ender of the dire truth.<br />
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It may seem like a nit-pick, but the changes the movie made to the mind game Ender plays throughout his training was also tweaked in a fundamental way. In the book, when Ender commands his mouse avatar to burrow into the giant's eye and kill him, the giant then rots and becomes a green, rich hillside. This is not only dramatic symbolism that foreshadows how humanity will suborn colonies originally terraformed by the Formics, but it also alludes to Norse creation myths and the death of Ymir. The movie's simple omission of this detail robs the mind game of its elegance and symbolic force that could have really helped to elevate the quality of the narrative.<br />
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The changes to the timeline were especially illogical and unjustified. And omitting the Second Bugger War altogether entirely defeats the plausibility of Graff's position. That can't be overstated. I really had to insert the movie Graff into the plot of the book in order to have him make sense, and in order to match Ford's dour defeatism he brought to life. And that's not only imaginatively over-complicated, but it's rather pathetic. <br />
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<b>General Enjoyment 'Cheese'</b>: <span style="background-color: white;">Fans of sci-fi who aren't terribly in love with the book--or haven't read it at all--might be able to get into this movie. I say might because the plot holes and weaknesses that gall me are still visible within the context of the movie by itself, but less obvious. Fans of the book will at best be pleased with pretty lights and great moments that do adhere briefly to the novel, but mostly they'll come away with a story that is more "inspired by" than "adapted from" <i>Ender's Game</i>. Fans may be able to enjoy it if they're sufficiently braced against such disappointment, but they need to really understand that no moment in the movie compares to a comparable part of the book in terms of dramatic and emotional content or social commentary.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">You know, as a fan of the book's depth and someone who wrote a better screenplay in junior high, I'm not sure I was prepared for the plot to be the weakest part of this movie. I doubted the job the young cast might do. I worried the three-dimensional Battle School scenes wouldn't translate well to the screen. I thought they'd outright cut large sections of the book. Instead, they condensed everything without making the tough decisions to cut out some of the elements they underdeveloped and under-delivered, and everything else is rather more anemic because of it.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;">At the same time, in a world where <i>World War Z</i> was turned into a dumb action movie without real zombies, socio-political drama, or one recognizable element from the critically acclaimed novel and still get 67% on Rotten Tomatoes, I think <i>Ender's Game</i> deserves its chance. It's certainly closer to the text, more reverent, and more consistently respectful of the fans who made the book popular in the first place.</span>Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-69733450343466852152013-10-28T23:07:00.000-05:002013-10-29T22:41:17.586-05:00Movie Web Monday: Christian Bale<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
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<b><i>Movie Web Monday:</i></b><i> Each
week, I'll look at a specific actor's roles across three good movies.
The third movie will in turn tie into the first movie of the next week's
actor, whose third movie will continue the pattern. I will go through
actors and movies at this rate, with the following limitations in mind:
every movie(or television show) invoked will be one I either own, or
wish to own; no movie or actor will be invoked twice. So sit back and
enjoy as you fall into the nerdery's movie web. (Oh, and I'll try to
keep spoilers to a minimum, telling you just enough to know if you'll
enjoy the movie)</i><br />
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Today's actor is probably one of the first that I really started to movie-web consciously. Christian Bale, an infamously great-but-demanding actor, has starred in a whole slew of excellent movies dating back to <i>Empire of the Sun</i> and <i>Henry V</i> in the late 80s, with his mainstream attention ramped up in the past decade after his incomparable realization of Bruce Wayne in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. With Ben Affleck the mildly controversial replacement to don the cowl in the <i>Superman vs Batman</i> movie, it remains to be seen whether that stays Bale's most recognized role.<br />
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Not that there aren't tons of great under-exposed roles in his filmography. I don't feature them below, but I also highly recommend <i>Rescue Dawn</i>, where Bale plays an American fighter pilot shot down in Laos during the Vietnam War. It's brutal, raw, and psychologically draining, but an excellent film. Similarly, <i>The Machinist</i> is one of the greatest psychological films of all time, and Bale's star performance is engrossing in its mundane grotesqueness. The film's inspiration is pure Dostoyevsky, with heavy elements of <i>Crime and Punishment</i> and <i>The Idiot</i>, so that comparison will go a long way to informing whether you might enjoy it or not.</div>
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<b>Movie:</b> <i>Terminator Salvation</i> (Own it)</div>
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In the first film to finally focus on the actual Machine War, Christian Bale takes up the role of John Connor, hero of humanity and walking target of the franchise. I'd been waiting to see the Machine War realized on the big screen ever since I saw <i>Terminator</i> as a five year-old (heavily censored by my big brother sitting on me during the objectionable bits). I wanted to see the all-out apocalyptic showdown, firefights in the concrete morass of long-nuked cities, and with John Connor orchestrating it all. Bale's John Connor steps into the grim struggle with the right amount of weight and exhaustion throughout his scenes, even though he's not yet the supreme commander of the human resistance. Action hero gunplay and fighting aside, I think it's the bag-eyed weariness, that drawn and haggard leader of men caught in the midst of successively worse decisions, that elevates the film for me. It's encapsulated in the beat before John broadcasts one of his machine-fighting tutorials over the radio:<br />
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The person being referred to is Kyle Reese, John Connor's deceased father and future subordinate thanks to the loopy paradox at the core of the franchise. Setting the causal stupidity of time travel plots aside, it's a superb small moment of Bale pulling back the seams of Connor's armor and showing what drives the exhausted resistance leader--the idea that his loved ones are out there, that he has a family that extends beyond his physical reach that he can't see but that he can protect. Coupled with his wife Kate Connor (played by mesmeric Bryce Dallas Howard) and her baby bump, Bale portrays a man in transition to a point where he is not only about to become a father, but that also his prophetic grasp on the future is catching up to him and he will soon be on his own. It's a chilling thought, in a franchise bound by time-traveling take-backs and cause-effect loops, to imagine being on the verge of true uncertainty once more. If only we could get there--but alas, rumor is that the next <i>Terminator</i> movie will return to the time-traveling format again, and almost certainly retconn this film's continuity.</div>
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<b>Movie:</b> <i>Newsies</i> (Own it, but gorram if I can ever find it)</div>
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This is the first movie I ever saw with Christian Bale in it, and it still gets trotted out for a viewing every few months. Heck, as a music kid in high school I knew a lot of girls who liked nothing more than associating with guys able to sing "Santa Fe" soulfully, so this movie has made a lot of hay throughout my life. For those of you who don't know, Newsies is a period musical set in New York City at the close of the nineteenth century and follows the rousers of a strike of newsboys against the mongering gigantic newspapers controlling their fate. Christian Bale plays their charismatic leader, Jack Kelly, and accordingly spends much of the Disney flick brooding in a pop-musical style. Which means, unlike his future Batman brooding, there was a lot of dancing alone and smoldering on iron catwalks and fire escapes--okay, maybe that's a little like Batman, after all. The film is really well done and infectiously catchy if you're even remotely susceptible to the genre, and Bale's portrayal of Jack Kelly is a neat compromise of sort of popular pretty boy charm and self-serving gregariousness--something few actors could capture so easily between musical numbers, let alone a teenager, but Bale does it expertly. It plays so well in the moments where Jack squares off against sinister Joseph Pulitzer, played by Robert Duvall, or even in the scenes where the impoverished gnat rails against the corporate giant. One of my favorite examples of this:</div>
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In a movie full of great, energetic and upbeat performances in a really fairly dark plot, Bale stands out and carries his scenes like a veteran despite how incredibly early this was in his career. It's also a nice flick to watch to see a very different side of Bale--even his more artsy roles are still just in contrast to his action movie blockbusters, and there's very little to compare to a Disney lighthearted period musical.</div>
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<b>Movie:</b> <i>3:10 to Yuma</i> (Own it. THE SPOILERS SHALL FLOW)</div>
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The 2007 remake of <i>3:10 to Yuma</i> is one of my absolute favorite films. <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2011/06/fathers-day-at-nerdery.html" target="_blank">I mentioned</a> it two years ago as a great Father's Day movie. A relatively cozy (in terms of plot analysis) western about a group of men from a small town trying to escort dangerous robber and gunman Ben Wade to a prison train, it contains great period action, great performances by the lead and supporting actors, and is an insane fatherhood tear-jerker. Christian Bale plays the protagonist Dan Evans, a one-legged rancher and family man on the verge of losing everything who decides to join the impromptu armed escort and try to stay one step ahead of Wade's ruthless gang hunting them. Wade, played by ember-eyed Russell Crowe, alternates between a happy rider and opportunistic murderer as they journey along, and the paradoxical role ends with Wade and Evans having an antagonistic but respectful bond at the end. As the rest of the escorts are killed or scared off, only the hobbled Evans has the courage and stubbornness to stay and try to see things through despite his terrible prospects. There's lots of great moments of ragged beauty in this film, but probably the greatest is the pathetic moment in which Evans explains what truly drives him in his suicidal-but-noble quest:</div>
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Oh, the sweet, sweet tragedy of this movie is so beautiful. In this moment, Dan Evans' disarming honesty and wounded nobility finally win Ben over, and in the final run of the two to the train station we see that he's also won over his son, William, making his final, sudden demise so much sadder and at the same time so much more admirable and inspiring. The movie's full of these dry bits of underplayed-but-poignant drama, with Bale the hero of the western without ever really trying too hard. Unique, masterful, and engrossing no matter how many times I man-cry through it.</div>
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<b><i>Movie Web Monday</i></b><i> will continue next week with a new actor, picking up with some other prolific player from the last movie listed above.</i></div>
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Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-88046435115364241112013-10-27T00:30:00.000-05:002013-10-27T00:30:05.251-05:00GM Tips: Scaring Your Players<b><i>GM Tips:</i></b><i> It's easy to get into any number of RPGs as a new player, but getting started is a rocky, uphill battle for the Game Master, as he must wrangle player personalities, schedules, and the rules of the system in addition to developing his own plot. Hopefully, a few personal lessons will ease your GMing burden, or at least illustrate how one nerd shoulders the burden of the Game Master.</i><br />
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<a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/10/what-heck-was-that-plus-cosplay-charity.html" target="_blank">Last week</a> I mentioned that I wanted to follow up on a search hit with GM tips for scaring one's players. With Halloween this weekend, now's as great a time as any to share my thoughts on the subject and impart a little advice. At first I had planned on sharing tactics to evoke a variety of emotions, but to keep this post focused I wanted to pare things down to scaring your RPG group. Fear is one of the harder emotions to evoke around the game table, so it's all the more important.<br />
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When players come together to play a tabletop RPG, they do so to entertain each other and socialize in a shared, imaginative experience. But that means that every role-player is interested in a certain amount of goofing off and chit-chatting. That's fine, but it makes fear more elusive because your players' mindsets are in the wrong gear. Fear is about anxiety, and anxiety is an emotionally taxing state--it requires your constant attention and imagination. A horror movie or video game can cheat anxiety by throwing a grotesque image or gore at the audience, but in an RPG session this tack can be problematic--and smelly. The GM needs to be deliberate and reactive to his players to keep them afraid for their characters.<br />
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While I haven't led a lot of horror-focused games, all of my campaigns have featured fear and suspense as important factors. My current RPG campaign in particular--the one in the <i>Myth</i> setting--is thematically built on three pillars of tragedy, duty, and horror. I've also played and led a few games in a low-powered mortals campaign of <i>World of Darkness</i>, with all <i>The X-Files</i> creepy goodness that went with it. So I've stretched these GM muscles a bit in the past. There's a lot of interactivity in an RPGs, obviously, so anything you do needs to be tailored and responsive to your group. An easy shortcut to tailoring is to find out what other stories your players like. Do they like psychological horror? Throw thought puzzles and philosophical paradoxes at them. Do they like gory violent schlock? Give them a red-shirt or two and have them die in meticulously detailed scenes. Responding to your players is about two things: correcting wrong assumptions you made in the tailoring process and letting your players have a legitimate sway over the direction of the plot. This is the balancing act of fear in an RPG--your players want to exert control over the plot, and in so doing they are out to destroy any atmosphere of horror you might create.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Tell The Story</b></span><br />
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This is a fundamental issue for most RPG sessions. GMing a campaign involves a lot of work: mapping out locations; plotting out characters and adversaries; hammering out the mechanics of player options in-game. But once everyone is at the table, you're all involved in a storytelling experience, so don't forget to tell the story. Tell the frakking story. Don't give your players a mechanic or stat-value unless they have a description to justify it--and sometimes if you give your players a thorough description of the action, you can make some of the mechanics unnecessary. And don't fall into the trap of describing only the mechanically important elements of the story. It may be important that the room has a conveniently heavy desk near the only door, but does it have pictures on it? What about interior decoration? Do the drawers have paperwork that might entice the player characters to waste time investigating? These details help create a three-dimensional story that draws the players in and helps put them in a place where they're more likely to feel the tension and fear you're trying to create. Yeah, you need to do some legwork to get your players into the right mood for your fear-mongering to settle. Deal with it.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Don't Name It!</b></span><br />
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By this, I mean don't use the official rules-related name for your game's adversaries. This is especially important when your players might have a good idea of what a NPC is capable of once they get the monster's name (a particular problem for DnD groups), but it applies pretty much whenever that antagonist's name or title will give a hasty shorthand of their capabilities and/or motivations. Nothing kills the mystery of your average monster as much as seeing its Playboy spread. Sure, it might be convenient to refer to that level 3 Ghoul as such, but once your bring your monster into the light, you generally can't convince your players that it's a silhouette again. So don't name your monster unless it's absolutely necessary: that isn't a zombie--it's a twitching, pallid trucker in a torn plaid shirt and broken fingertips; that isn't a ghost--it's a flickering cloud of sighs and soft crunching of bones. This ties in with telling the story, as filling out archetypal NPCs with detailed, unique descriptions are a good way to add depth to your players' investment in the story.<br />
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Extending this principal beyond the monster's appearance and name, you can take this as a reminder not to give your players cozy answers to unsettling mysteries. Most serial killers and real-life horrors are scary because of the fickle, unfathomable motivations behind their acts. Only a GM, speaking with the voice of God, can give you that authoritative answer of firmly knowing that person X did for Y reason. Any person speaking with limited knowledge in your setting can only speculate what made your game's bogeyman don a slicker and go on a killing-spree, and that will make the thrill of hunting him down all the more tense for them.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Secret Dice Rolls</b></span><br />
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This is a simple one. I'm a firm believer in hiding things from players, especially to create a scary atmosphere. This dovetails with not sharing your monster's names with your players, as it's often important that your players don't know what certain dice results are. For example, if your players are making a check to detect whether that suspicious groundskeeper is telling the truth, it'd be pretty pointless if they got to see if their dice results yielded a success of failure in the 'detect lies' skill. Roll those dice in secret and then accordingly lie to the players about how charismatic and helpful the scraggly man is, and about how his offer of hospitality seems totally genuine. One of the potentially most immersion-breaking aspects of a tabletop RPG is getting to see how your dice fare--a meta-game indicator--rather than having to rely on the subjective report of actual effects--an in-game indicator.<br />
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I also like to sometimes extend this to making extra rolls in secret--that is, I roll the dice behind my GM screen for no point other than to make my players anxious. <i>What was Ben rolling? Did we just spring a trap? If we did, why aren't we being attacked yet? What's following us? We should explore this room more. Maybe this NPC isn't everything he said he was.</i> It's a way of subverting some of the mechanics of the tabletop experience to create a pavlovian response in your game group--secret rolls are a source of player-based tension, so it can be used to enhance the fear the characters should be exhibiting. Use sparingly--and not too much immediately after blogging about it.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Minimize Mechanics</b></span><br />
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Dice rolling and game mechanics are fun and deserve to form the lynchpin of your average RPG. But they're logical (hopefully), fair (most of the time), and balanced (somewhat), which are not really conducive to fear. When your players are thinking of game mechanics, they're thinking about modifiers, odds, and binary choices to narrow down the most likely route to success. They aren't thinking about mysteries or the mental image of the floating corpse with its lungs ripped out through his throat. And that's too bad. So do yourself a favor as a GM trying to scare your players by minimizing mechanics. Try not to look into your ten-pound gaming encyclopedia at the game table--if you can't remember a rule, wing it and double-check later. This won't work with some players without a good amount of persuasion, but I find it's a super helpful way to get players invested in the mood you're creating.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Add variety to the stakes</b></span><br />
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I hate saving the world. It seems like every movie, television show, comic, and game out there is interested in saving the world. Don't get me wrong, the world has some nice things to offer, but it's pretty boring to have stakes that are consistently raised to the max all the time. And it's also kind of hard to imagine what saving the world feels like, really. It ends up just being a ham-handed way for GMs to say that the players are now "Over 9,000!!!" How do they know they've reached the final boss? The GM gives them a narrative that it's all come down to this, the armies of the world are arrayed, and the final battle is about to begin. Then Shang Tsung descends and says "Fight!" and the players wade into a big arena fight with an over-powered yet obviously flawed boss character.<br />
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No thank you. How about a campaign to save only yourselves? That's a great horror objective. Or to save a loved one, if you have characters who aren't orphan-murder-hobos like those that are typically played in your average RPG? Or what about when the stakes are uncertain? Is this hostile trying to rob us, mug us, murder us, or kidnap us? Making the objective of the enemy uncertain throws a wrench into what retaliation is acceptable for the players, and that not only makes them hesitate but makes them internalize the details of the plot to digest the fearful elements better.<br />
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Also, the big bad doesn't need to be more powerful than the players. Making a threat boil down to someone who's simply more ruthless than everyone around him, or who has a better plan, or is more tactically cowardly, can be a lot more interesting than the huge thing that trades blows with the four champions of the free peoples of the world.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Control (or at least be mindful of) Ambience</b></span><br />
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I never GM a game without music in the background. I use it to set the mood of the game and also to fill in the silences in the action of game sessions. It's important to pick music that is spooky, scary, or terrifying and queue it up as needed to give your players the creeps, but I also think it's equally important to pick something that isn't too on the nose and overly popular. The <i>Halloween</i> theme is chilling, but everyone knows it and is inured to it, whether from seeing the movie too many times or from going to one too many Fright-Fests at Six Flags. Pick something relatively obscure and let it fine-tune your ambience. Also, remember that ambience is about more than just music. If you can, think about changing around your game room to make it spookier--dimmer lighting, closed doors, and even what's on your game shelf behind you can modify players' moods in your gaming space.<br />
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So those are my quick and dirty tips for GMs interested in scaring their players. Take your time to tell your story, go out of your way not to label your threats, use secret dice rolls, minimize the game and maximize the story, add variety to the stakes, and remember your ambience.Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-59507913464951461542013-10-21T01:35:00.000-05:002013-10-21T01:35:17.789-05:00The SHIELD That Could Have BeenI think I've done a fair-to-decent job of confirming my status as a Marvel fan. I've now written detailed reviews of five of their movies (<i><a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2011/05/thor-god-of-thunder-on-movie-thor.html" target="_blank">Thor</a></i>, <i><a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2011/07/captain-america-first-avenger-hes.html" target="_blank">Captain America</a></i>, <i><a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2011/06/x-men-first-class-so-disappointing.html" target="_blank">X-men: First Class</a></i>, <i><a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/05/avengers-reviewed.html" target="_blank">Avengers</a></i>, and <i><a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/05/iron-man-3.html" target="_blank">Iron Man 3</a></i>), and I've <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/05/comic-books-focus-groups-for.html" target="_blank">plugged</a> their Marvel Unlimited online comic service. In my haul of swag from my <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/05/c2e2-2013-roundup.html" target="_blank">C2E2 2013 roundup</a>, you saw that I'd bought a half dozen pieces of Marvel art and literature, and that's only a modest addition to my collection of Marvel stuff that I haven't mentioned on the blog before. I have at least a dozen Marvel t-shirts, and I'm proud to say I have Captain America plates, coasters, and even boxer briefs. And if anything ever were to drive me to exhibitionism, I'm pretty sure it'd be my love for those Captain America undies. Except when I'm changing at the gym and I forget I wore the Cap skivvies that day--then it can be awkward. But you get the idea.<br />
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I love the Marvel characters, the major arcs (even when I don't), and I love what they're doing with the cinematic universe. But sometimes loving someone means caring enough when to tell them when they suck. Marvel made the movies <i>Daredevil</i>, <i>Wolverine Origins</i>, and <i>Ghost Rider</i>; there's no escaping that. But that's nothing compared to that one time they tried to make a SHIELD television series.<br />
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Yes, that's right. <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> is not the first attempt to bring the Marvel espionage organization onto the small screen. In 1998, Fox aired a made-for-television movie starring the director of SHIELD when he was but a mere agent. It's clear that the film was meant as a television pilot, but thankfully the world dodged that bullet and nothing more came of it. It did get released on DVD a decade later, becoming instant bargain bin fodder for Marvel nerds with $5.28 burning a hole in their pocket, and thereby allowing me to inflict it upon you.<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">"Except when I'm changing at the gym and I forget I wore the Cap skivvies that day--then it can be awkward. But you get the idea."</span></i></div>
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Let me stress that this DVD that I own is a total cheap cash-in on the success of <i>Iron Man</i>. How bad of a cash-in? Well, it goes right down to the fundamentals of SHIELD--an acronym that remains constant despite representing five or more titles over the years. In the plot of <i>Iron Man</i>, they established the current full title for SHIELD: the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. This is the full name that is dropped on the back of the DVD case. But, being made in the late 90s, this explanation for SHIELD hadn't been used yet, and in the very movie they drop that it stands for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-enforcement Division (and that was actually outdated in the comics as of 1991, too). So the people blurbing the back of my DVD of this little gem didn't even bother to pay attention to the movie, and that's assuming they had the cajones to actually sit through it.<br />
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Now before you think about how intensely critical I can be, let me give you a rundown of the movie. First we have a terrible call-to-action scene, in which it seems two SHIELD mooks--one of them a traitor working for Hydra--are the only guards for a detention facility that houses the cryogenically frozen remains of Baron Strucker, a Macguffin-cicle whose DNA is the secret to a biological holocaust weapon called the Death's Head. When the shady mook shoots the legitimate SHIELD guard, Hydra waltzes into the base and shows how this is the easiest key-to-doomsday in the history of the genre. Five minutes into the film, with no protagonists introduced, the villains already have everything they need to accomplish their terrible goals. Fortunately for Nick Fury, the bad guys want to dick around and showcase staggering incompetence on both sides for 80 minutes, which leads us to our hero...<br />
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Pick-axing in a cave. No one else around, no visible machinery to process whatever he might find. No explanation other than the hand-waved assumption that Cold War badass spies must find manual mining a therapeutic retirement hobby. Plus, Nick Fury is played by David Hasselhoff, and it's a great opportunity to establish one of the primary themes of the show: Nick Fury sweats pretty much all the time. At least by setting Fury's golden years (hehehe, see what I did there?) in the Yukon, this movie departs from bad television form by at least having one scene filmed in the right country. Everything is clearly Toronto forests and studios, whether it's the European op or the eventual attack on New York--or generic American city with buildings up to three stories high and a really fuzzy New York skyline dropped in.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In case you've never seen rural Canada before, this is what it looks like.<br />Also a good substitute for every television location ever...</td></tr>
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Fury also gets to show off his remarkably-adroit-but-toothless combat skills. Angry at having his daily communion with the rock interrupted, good ol' Nick runs out into blinding daylight and proceeds to kick the keester of the poor prissy schmuck standing there: British agent Alexander Pierce. Nick kicks the guy in the low chest for an opener, lays a fist across the face of the dry-skinned buffoon, and then flips him hard onto the rock-strewn ground. Pierce gets up and has not a mark to show for it. And besides a slight pant that may be from getting the faintest drubbing of all time or may simple be British indignance, Pierce is able to then hold up a conversation perfectly fine.<br />
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Our titular hero wastes no time in establishing that this Fury is so badass he isn't afraid to sound stupid, provided he confines his language to a hard-G or soft-PG rating. "You're gonna have to tell SHIELD to shove one up their collective end-zones," in response to Pierce letting Fury know he's been reactivated. He uses the classy term "sexpionage" to introduce female lead Contessa Fontaine to the audience and establish that he is too masculine to think that using that sort of terminology might inhibit his chances to suck the beauty mark off her face by film's end. Later, to mock the over-accredited Pierce he chest-kicked as a d-bag howdy-doody, Fury cracks, "How's your needlepoint?" Or "When the Iron Curtain was sent to the cleaners I was suddenly out of style." And when he's in the scariest MRI machine envisioned by man:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">So...much...chest hair.</td></tr>
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And, best of all, when he's introduced to the team's completely useless psychic and she mentions that her powers are heightened by implants, he conspicuously checks out her mammalian bits so that she has to specify that her telepathy is heightened by <i>neural</i> implants. Oh well, if the setting has Jean Grey, Emma Frost, and Betsy Braddock, you could understand how he might think bra size might correlate to ESP potential.<br />
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Also let me take a moment to mock the realization of the helicarrier in this boondoggle. The SHIELD mobile headquarters looks like that of an helicarrier-via-erector-set, or more accurately like a model badly cobbled together from sets of two or more different scales. It's dumb, ugly, bulky, and gives no sense whatsoever of how big the helicarrier actually is since no useful details can really be discerned.<br />
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Anyways, back to the plot, as it stands. About forty minutes after the baddies waltzed in to secure their Death's Head freezer pop, they issue a demand for one billion dollars or they will unleash their super-virus on Manhattan. Now, I don't know how money transfers of this scale work--I never worked that high up in banking--but I do know that the national deficit of the US at the time was around five trillion dollars. So in my mind a one billion dollar demand is fairly easy when you're threatening to kill off about three percent of the nation's people in one blow (later they suddenly inflate the bad guys' scheme to imperil forty million people, so that's more like one-sixth of the US population at the time). Nobody talks about paying the amount anyways, and they immediately have their psychic Agent Obvious tell them that the crazy blonde daughter of Baron Strucker has no intention of accepting the ransom anyways. So they give a ransom demand only to immediately invalidate it as irrelevant to the plot in the same scene. Well, at least they padded the movie with another two minutes while giving the bad guys a chance to tip their hand to their enemies.<br />
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The good guys follow the recommendation of Nick Fury, their dunce-in-the-hole, and seek out Arnim Zola so the bad guys can boost him under their noses and then give the Hoffster a poisoned kiss. Hitting all the bases here. Nick gets a terminal diagnosis that conveniently has no cure but Madame Hydra's blood and on a deadline that neatly coincides with Hydra's doomsday plot anyways.<br />
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Hot on the heels of Nick's bad judgement getting him sally-straddled by a one hundred-ten-pound blonde with poison lipstick, the rest of the protagonists still decide to follow his plan and split into two teams for the finale of this movie. Contessa "Do-these-lips-make-my-face-look-small" Fontaine leading a bunch of redshirts in a search for a deadly virus-carrying refrigerated garbage truck, while Nick, Irrelevant Psychic, and Agent British go after the enemy command center. Contessa's team basically owns by fiat after she surprises a Hydra goon playing wall-ball instead of guarding by substituting his ball with the world's weakest hand grenade. Seriously, the grenade barely disintegrates itself and does like no damage to the goon, but he and several adjacent guards go down anyways.<br />
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Nick's team gets all the excitement. First, the two junior agents watch as the ailing Fury takes out multiple guards with his fists while they have (apparently) silenced weapons handy that they use later on. Then the trio get held up by laser sensors for about two seconds before Agent British busts out his Laser Repellant and they slip through to meet a lone goon waiting for Fury to ask, "How's Hydra's dental plan?" A few more unexciting exchanges later, the eponymous hero is confronted with the dreaded does-the-doomsday-password-end-in-six-or-nine puzzle. As the final twenty seconds on the countdown burn through precious moments of my life that I'll never get back, Irrelevant Psychic is no help and allows Fury to heroically waffle on the six-nine decision until the timer hits maximum drama. The villainness is then caught, Arnim Zola shoots himself with the most fiddly booby-trapped gun ever, and Fury gets to drop a "pop-cicle" joke before Madame Hydra escapes with her father in the world's slowest elevator.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Eat this, Adam West's Batman!!!</td></tr>
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What's most amazing to me about <i>Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD</i> is how many recognizable names are in the credits of the movie. David S. Goyer wrote the script--about the same time he was doing the original <i>Blade</i> script and seven years before <i>Batman Begins</i>. Director Rod Hardy has captained episodes of <i>The Mentalist</i>, <i>Battlestar Galactica</i>, <i>The X-Files</i>, and <i>JAG</i>, so it's not like he hasn't met with televised success before or after this particular feature. And there are several forever-supporting actors that you're likely to recognize. Ron Canada, Tom McBeath, and Gary Chalk, for instance, all have significant television resumes that include <i>Stargate SG-1</i>, for whatever nerd-cred that presents in your opinion. And yet this movie blows so completely that no one thought to make it a DVD until ten years after the fact when it was certainly forgotten and could cleanly trade on the name established by the first <i>Iron Man</i> movie. Does the Hoff really drag a production down that much? Specifically, does chest hair and peculiar sweat scenes drag a production down that much?<br />
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I doubt it. As much as I want to pan Hasselhoff specifically, I can't. This movie/pilot was a conceptual failure from the start. SHIELD exists as the interconnecting web of global plots in the Marvel universe, and trying to make a story about SHIELD when there was no established greater Marvel universe to connect was inherently dumb. Like trying to interior decorate a house that's under construction, SHIELD has no place without a stable of superheroes hedging them in. With one very irrelevant exception, <i>Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD</i> had no superpowers whatsoever, and made no references to any superhumans of either good or bad moral persuasion.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: large;">"Fortunately for Nick Fury, the bad guys want to dick around and showcase staggering incompetence on both sides for 80 minutes..."</span></i></div>
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But I'm thankful for <i>Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD</i>, and I'm glad I own it. As a fan of the Fox-aborted television series <i>Space: Above and Beyond</i>, <i>Firefly</i>, and <i>Drive</i>, it's nice to see that at least one decision to pan a new television series was not only justified, but may have saved the free world. Consider: if this show had been allowed to continue instead of purged with fire, the mainstream Marvel movies that would be coming out in the next few years, <i>X-Men</i> and <i>Spider-Man</i>, would've had to cater to the show's creative decisions in some way. Those movies would have suffered for it, Marvel's comic-distribution wouldn't have gotten the boost it did from those movies' popularity, and they never would have been in a position to take a risk to the tune of $50 million on <i>Iron Man</i> or any of the other <i>Avengers</i>-related films. Robert Downey Jr. wouldn't have been thrown into the public light as an all around awesome human being and nerd despite his Hollywood chops. Samuel L. Jackson's highest profile nerdy role would remain Mace Windu. Hugh Jackman would still be kicking around the Australian stage. And Scarlett Johansson would be flitting around art movies getting paired up with creepy old men for romantic interests instead of becoming a genre-crossing meta-hottie.<br />
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My goodness, I am thankful for <i>Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD</i>. And I'm thankful for David Hasselhoff--without him, somebody might've decided the show was worth picking up, and that would be an evil too dark and terrible to imagine.Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-29911630078880786602013-10-19T19:53:00.000-05:002013-10-19T19:53:29.168-05:00Kickstart: Rayguns, Space Frontiersmen, and White Russia in Space<i><b>Kickstart Your Weekend:</b> A series in which I
occasionally spotlight Kickstarter projects that are ending soon and
deserve a little nerd love. Also, I'll highlight some past projects as
well, as you never know when these enterprises are going to turn up
again.</i><br />
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Today we're getting back into regular articles, with a laser-zap back into Kickstart Your Weekend. And these three are a particularly fun selection of games for fans of very different science fiction sub-genres. We've got a miniatures wargame-powered reboot of a classic pulp sci-fi series, a PC management game with a crude frontiersman angle, and finally a space epic computer RPG with a galactic empire inspired by pre-commie Russia.<br />
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Yeah, you heard me.<br />
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Before we dig into it, though, there were several awesome Kickstarter projects that wrapped in the past few months. And while you can't pledge, I thought I'd name-drop a few of them just in case you wanted to follow their development and release.<br />
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There were several interesting movies successfully funded this summer: <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1350609618/bound-fun-animated-brickfilm" target="_blank"><i>Bound</i></a>, a Lego brickfilm with a spiritual theme and made by a brother and sister team; the brickfilm <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1543728341/melting-point-a-stop-motion-short-film" target="_blank"><i>Melting Point</i></a> also funded successfully, and I can't wait to see this feature's take on the wry humor the creator, Jonathan Vaughan established in his other short films; <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playlandpictures/man-vs-snake-the-long-and-twisted-tale-of-nibbler" target="_blank"><i>Man vs. Snake</i></a>, a quirky documentary based on a man trying to reclaim a video game record from the early days of arcade games, helmed by two editors from <i>Battlestar Galactica</i>; <a href="http://www.mmprfilm.com/Enter.html" target="_blank"><i>MMPR</i></a> funded quite well, and so they'll get a shot at making a couple of episodes to snare all the grown-up fans of the original three seasons of <i>Power Rangers</i>. <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/peteradkison/the-devil-walks-in-salem" target="_blank"><i>The Devil Walks in Salem</i></a> looks kind of cheesy, but its remarkable distinction is that it's adapted from an RPG--not from the rules or setting--but from an actual play session between some honest-to-goodness role-players. Even if the end result turns out clumsy, I think it'll be worth a watch for anyone who ever looked around their gaming table during a really gripping session and thought "Why can't they make movies like this?"<br />
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(And if you don't know the feeling I'm talking about, watch <a href="http://youtu.be/WXJxQ0NbFtk" target="_blank">this episode</a> of Wil Wheaton's Tabletop. You're welcome.) <br />
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On the sad-to-see-it fail side of things, Stephan Frost, the creator of the intriguing and beautiful <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659602193/mortifera-comics?ref=users" target="_blank"><i>Mortifera</i></a> graphic novel, failed to get funding to create the animated pitch for <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659602193/hell-mary-the-animated-series" target="_blank"><i>Hell Mary</i></a>--a Weird War One-type setting about a redheaded femme fatale offing Black Hand goons and Kaiser Wilhelm cronies. It could've been great, but conventional animation still proves to be a big hurdle for Kickstarter projects--you have to raise a lot of money for relatively small rewards. Plus, Frost's offered incentive for success and stretch goals were probably too quirky and off-the-wall to serve their purpose--enough funds would have seen him get a second middle name of "Bonertown" and get a tramp stamp of two unicorns in...conjunction. I know I wouldn't want to inflict that on any man or beast, unless it was part of a really weird court sentencing.<br />
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And finally, probably the coolest film project I didn't report on this summer was definitely <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/okaybyme/fire-city-the-interpreter-of-signs-a-demon-noir-fa" target="_blank"><i>Fire City: Interpreter of Signs</i></a>. A horror-fantasy story with a noir mystery flavor and really grotesquely interesting practical effects, <i>Fire City</i> feels to me like the sort of film I wanted the director of <i>Pan's Labyrinth</i> to make--rather than a thought-lite smash 'em up full of forgettable robots and monsters and with the only interesting characters thrown into the background while cardboard cut-outs subjugated them with their plot protection. (Oh snap: that dangerously run-on sentence really tore <i>Pacific Rim</i> a new one, huh?) Anyways, <i>Fire City</i> had the advantage of already having a really creepy short that shows off the subtly disturbing characters, and let them raise twenty grand over their one hundred grand campaign goal. That, and the sentimental daughter-focused thematic behind the production really gets to me as a father, and I'm really curious to see how this world of starving demons and dealers turns out. Just make sure the kids are fast asleep before watching it--even the sounds can make your skin crawl. Check out their <a href="http://www.firecity.com/" target="_blank">webpage</a> for more tastes of their unnerving aesthetic and eerie style.<br />
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Games, glorious games. Kickstarter is always good for game-nerding-out. <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hinterlandgames/the-long-dark-a-first-person-post-disaster-surviva" target="_blank"><i>The Long Dark</i></a>, a first-person post-apocalyptic game with an emphasis on Grylls-esque survival, just recently finished a successful campaign. I love gritty survival games that aren't afraid to punish players with hunger, disease, and sleep dynamics, and the promised tension of making meaningful survive-or-social choices is too cool. <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1613260297/golem-arcana" target="_blank"><i>Golem Arcana</i></a>, a miniatures wargame powered by a tablet app and specialized stylus for rules and stat reference, squeaked by with full funding after a personal plug from Chris Roberts. Personally I'm not too keen on a wargame with forces composed of nothing but golems, but...Chris Roberts. (Blogger, how the frak do you not have golem in your spell-check dictionary?!) <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/532062403/alien-uprising" target="_blank"><i>Alien Uprising</i></a>, a cooperative sci-fi board game where players try to hold off savage alien natives while repairing their wrecked spaceship. I didn't pledge for it, but I'll be keeping an eye out to play it at conventions. <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dicehateme/belle-of-the-ball-a-fancy-schmancy-card-game" target="_blank"><i>Belle of the Ball</i></a>, a card game with fantastic art and a princess<i>-</i>party-conniving-set-collection-gimmick, almost snared me into its grip, but I was much too masculine for such sissy stuff. That, and the game mechanics didn't seem as entertaining as the card art. Then I turned around and pledged for <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1898617831/marrying-mr-darcy-the-pride-and-prejudice-card-gam" target="_blank"><i>Marrying Mr. Darcy</i></a>, a <i>Pride and Prejudice</i> card game produced by a Wisconsin local that has players trying to court the bachelors of the Austen book. My wife didn't even talk me into it.<br />
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Whatever. I don't mind your small-mindedness. I was excited for <i>Marrying Mr. Darcy</i> even before they hit the stretch goal that adds undead elements to the game.<br />
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Predictably, the music-powered fantasy MMORPG <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/37002837/anthymn" target="_blank"><i>Anythmn</i></a> failed to meet its funding goal. Which means that for the time being if I want to combine role-playing games and trumpet-playing, I'll have to find a very tolerant LARP group in the midwest. <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/682539325/fairytale-games-the-battle-royale" target="_blank"><i>Fairytale Games: The Battle Royale</i></a> funded with more than $100,000 over their original goal. I pledged for the project and want to play the game but my enthusiasm has been severely muted since they censored Esmerelda (of <i>Hunchback of Notre Dame</i>) to be an alchemical assassin instead of a gypsy assassin for some vague political correctness concerns. I mean, the game is Hunger Games murder fantasy with fairly cheesecake interpretations of many of their characters--and they're afraid of using the word gypsy to describe a character for whom being a gypsy is a plot point?! Gugh, I say. Plus by the end of the campaign the list of miniatures coming my way has gotten so confusing that I'm just trying to forget the project until I actually have everything in front of me. <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/double-fines-massive-chalice" target="_blank"><i>Massive Chalice</i></a> did well by pulling in a cool half million more than their initial goal, but the <a href="http://www.develop-online.net/news/double-fine-breaks-broken-age-in-two/0115282" target="_blank">controversy</a> over Double Fine's previous game has me grateful that I passed on this campaign. I'll wait and see if they can actually deliver what was promised.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZCZQxP3J0v3T5U5ZAumNOayY_73Zw85Y1oiSVi2iJDT6TZ-VEKqyLjMTl0ppkEtKCLE7x7wVVlK5s7qQRWq2qJk8FBkTT_3qLquM8coGnqV0n2Z9LhNRm2KXM2KIBfuF7zCJaWnPGCxs/s1600/Multi-spread.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZCZQxP3J0v3T5U5ZAumNOayY_73Zw85Y1oiSVi2iJDT6TZ-VEKqyLjMTl0ppkEtKCLE7x7wVVlK5s7qQRWq2qJk8FBkTT_3qLquM8coGnqV0n2Z9LhNRm2KXM2KIBfuF7zCJaWnPGCxs/s400/Multi-spread.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Projects I backed during the past three months</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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The summer also had a few neat print projects funded through Kickstarter. <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/954587867/men-vs-cosplay-2014-gaming-calendar-project" target="_blank"><i>Men vs Cosplay</i></a> was a 2014 cosplay calendar that eschewed boobs for biceps. I would've pledged, but I'm a jealous nerd. Also, you may recall I'm a big mammalian fan. <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/939036895/kids-eh-the-first-year" target="_blank"><i>Kids, Eh?</i></a>, a web-comic annual print book, funded with triple it's $2,000CAD goal. The author is a stay-at-home Canuck dad with a one year-old and three year-old always providing comedic fodder for his <a href="http://kurtisfindlay.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">weekly strip</a>. Check it out. And FUBAR, the zombie alternate history comic series, funded it's most successful installment yet: <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1607639297/fubar-mother-russia" target="_blank"><i>Mother Russia</i></a>. It's about a Soviet lady sniper in Stalingrad saving a toddler from uncounted Nazi zombies. I pledged on this one hard, as even my wife wanted to see more of the viscerally violent cutie-pie story.<br />
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On the mint-y side of things, there were two projects for nerdy numismatists. First, the <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/miniongames/futuristic-metal-coins-or-victory-tokens" target="_blank">Futuristic Metal Coins</a> project from Minion Games brought us a great selection of uniquely sci-fi tokens for use in board games and RPGs. Between having these shiny creds to serve as cashy money and the upcoming <i>Firefly</i> RPG, I think I'll be doing some gaming in the 'verse in the next year. For more fantastic gaming, Conquistador Games funded <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cqgames/the-best-damn-metal-gaming-coins-ever" target="_blank">The Best Damn Metal Gaming Coins Ever!</a> Seriously detailed, high-quality coins, many of these pieces are inspired by historical examples. They're also non-denominational, meaning that they don't have a prescribed value printed on them, so if you want to throw odd pence-shilling-crowns around in your gaming, you can.<br />
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And probably one of my favorite projects of the past three months has to be the <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2085348754/revelations-of-mars" target="_blank"><i>Hollow Earth Expedition: Revelations of Mars</i></a>. <i>Hollow Earth Expedition</i> (HEX) is an RPG by Exile Games that I've followed for a while but never got into. Built on a cinematic system based on dice pools, HEX is founded upon Jules Verne and E.R. Burroughs imagery as they populate the center of the 1930s earth with a land full of weird science, dinosaurs, and savages. If you ever watched the Aussie show <i>Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World</i>, you're on the right track. <i>Revelations of Mars</i> expands that setting to the red planet, with beautifully bejeweled alien princesses and big bug aliens needing stomping in grand E.R. Burroughs fashion. Since my wife and I enjoyed <i>John Carter</i> (of Mars!) so much, she actually mandated that I pledge on this particular RPG campaign. Well, who am I to look an RPG mount in the mouth? I pledged to receive <i>Revelations of Mars</i> when it releases next year and the preceding HEX books digitally right away. Wow. I'll do an in-depth article on HEX at some point, because I don't think I've had so much fun just reading an RPG sourcebook since the <i>Serenity RPG</i> came out.<br />
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So that's it for catch-up, but what's out now and worthy of a nerd's radar?<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1744629938/mars-attacks-the-miniatures-game" target="_blank">Mars Attacks</a></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPeURwiqgst19OtCClfA28IPCvbfVfTgeXxMMMffupxEI1LQEaYKxsaeQkHqqZoVzbSR5naLCqIpSTqF0n60GvKAQTz5Xdv-v18Y_QbZvTugPzP82h2b3TEJzCvKn3BS46SWr7t4_S6j4/s1600/Mars+Attacks+Game.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPeURwiqgst19OtCClfA28IPCvbfVfTgeXxMMMffupxEI1LQEaYKxsaeQkHqqZoVzbSR5naLCqIpSTqF0n60GvKAQTz5Xdv-v18Y_QbZvTugPzP82h2b3TEJzCvKn3BS46SWr7t4_S6j4/s400/Mars+Attacks+Game.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<b>What it is</b>: <i>Mars Attacks</i> began life in 1962 as a trading card series. A somewhat linear series of cards featuring alien invasion, slaughter, and torture before the eventual human counter, <i>Mars Attacks</i> was a violent, gory romp in pulp sci-fi, with rayguns, flying saucers, and swooning women at their mercy on a lot of the cards. Now, hot on the heels of their Kickstarter successes with <i>Kings of War</i>, <i>Dreadball</i>, <i>Loka</i> chess, and <i>Deadzone</i>, Mantic Games is producing a licensed miniatures wargame adaptation of <i>Mars Attacks</i>. The game is a lighter treatment to wargaming than their previous projects, evoking quick violent skirmishes between Martians and human resistance without a ten pound rulebook to slow things down. Even movement and ranges are based on a coarse 3-inch grid to eschew the all-but-ubiquitous measuring tape of other games.<br />
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<b>Why it's exciting</b>: This game, based on a well-known classic license by a seasoned producer of wargames products, stands poised to be Mantic Games' greatest hit yet. With three weeks to go, the game is already at $438,000 pledged out of their original goal of $50,000 so there's already dozens of stretch goals, updates, and add-ons unlocked. Being an old-salt and game snob myself, I tend to turn up my nose at rules that don't let me pull out my tape measure and have fewer than five stats per model, but I can't deny that the quality miniatures in this set--and the insanely good deals attached to the campaign's success--are extremely enticing. If nothing else, I might be seduced by the promise of their plastic US soldiers and flatbed truck-turned sci-fi transport/technical.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tynansylvester/rimworld?ref=users" target="_blank">Rimworld</a></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIBXssBZpnPyngUEvY-H-nsCjRUu56Oe01ONS4t4GbBTGj20e42PCkR8A4gGW6oZYb2j_xSvo3LKQbB_E9rFnidFe1_gwLr501b1OL-ctXEo0BVHTuk6-M9AJgtP-nwcsjBYMd9dlZVKQ/s1600/Rimworld.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIBXssBZpnPyngUEvY-H-nsCjRUu56Oe01ONS4t4GbBTGj20e42PCkR8A4gGW6oZYb2j_xSvo3LKQbB_E9rFnidFe1_gwLr501b1OL-ctXEo0BVHTuk6-M9AJgtP-nwcsjBYMd9dlZVKQ/s400/Rimworld.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<b>What it is</b>: <i>Rimworld</i> is a sci-fi colony sim game for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Players must coordinate the survivors of a crashed colony ship on a procedurally-created world rife with natural disaster and other hazards. Colonists can be directed to mine, farm, build free-form buildings and facilities, and defend the colony from raiders. The game has developed a number of dynamic, interesting features that are coordinated by an AI director that can be selected to suit your play-style--whether looking for an exploration-focused game, a life or death struggle, or a relaxing buildup experience. Right now this is a one-man project with a lot of promise, but the campaign seeks to let the creator, Tynan Sylvester, hire a dedicated artist to add nice graphics to his ambitious game.<br />
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<b>Why it's exciting</b>: With over $140,000CAD raised of an original goal of twenty grand and two weeks to go, <i>Rimworld</i> is definitely going to be a success. Creator Tynan hasn't set any stretch goals for the game, wanting to work on it organically without imposing artificial goals leading to development bloat. That's a promising, healthy attitude for a small indie game, especially since so many games that succeed on Kickstarter fall victim to development bloat (Double Fine being the flagship example of this pitfall).<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1964463742/the-mandate?ref=users" target="_blank">Mandate</a><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfYXFpk1phXLu8vnOwfn6Y6J7ap4TKJkqEc3fuEbkBooDAcNmUBxa1IA85iPI2Ajo9KrOARpGXTKSVFVxmytgjyaj2alAsmquQ9BrqGu6kriN1pTKVBSMXk4Z5IDAzyMH_tbFemQWUV60/s1600/Mandate+Game.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfYXFpk1phXLu8vnOwfn6Y6J7ap4TKJkqEc3fuEbkBooDAcNmUBxa1IA85iPI2Ajo9KrOARpGXTKSVFVxmytgjyaj2alAsmquQ9BrqGu6kriN1pTKVBSMXk4Z5IDAzyMH_tbFemQWUV60/s400/Mandate+Game.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<b>What it is</b>: <i>Mandate</i> is a sci-fi PC RPG with an epic scope. Set in a galactic empire inspired by 19th century Russia, <i>Mandate</i> is going to place the player in command of a Mandate ship at the outbreak of a civil war, giving the captain tactical control over their crew and boarding parties and maneuvering their ship in battle as well. Apparently, the game's campaign will grow from commanding a single ship to controlling outposts and stations and building up to having a subordinate fleet of their own. It's being developed on Unity engine, which means that not only is the game going to support Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, but they're already releasing preview modules of the game on their <a href="http://www.mandategame.com/" target="_blank">website</a> for fans to sample--right now they have a build-a-ship module that allows players to customize and then destroy a flagship of their very own.<br />
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<b>Why it's exciting</b>:
I have a few different buttons that can easily cinch my support for a Kickstarter. Sci-fi role-playing game with tactile elements? You got me. Cross-platform support planned? Nice. Preview modules of the game? Cool. Dynamic choice-based gameplay? Yes yes. Russian space empress voice-over for the intro video? Easy buddy, you've already made your sale. I'm in for this game, and I haven't been this anxious to see a Kickstarter succeed since <i><a href="http://www.interstellarmarines.com/" target="_blank">Interstellar Marines</a></i> (mentioned in a previous post <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/06/kickstart-lost-moon-men-and-marines-in.html" target="_blank">here</a>), which was another cross-platform Unity-based sci-fi game. At $135,000 right now, Mandate has a long ways to go to reach their half million goal, but they also went for a longer campaign and so have well over a month to get there.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtOhtK-mv2H157ZITKWdw58otLG9gcnQjM9IC9QRWLoGqArh6zJSTBhfAZsMP7DepMY6WIe4B_DuQxIbIALmOmIn2DWnjCuU9ObusrVmH3cBl7_F9EZf95PH6EUtRDBq35IprddJLc6eI/s1600/Mandate--nerdery+has+you.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtOhtK-mv2H157ZITKWdw58otLG9gcnQjM9IC9QRWLoGqArh6zJSTBhfAZsMP7DepMY6WIe4B_DuQxIbIALmOmIn2DWnjCuU9ObusrVmH3cBl7_F9EZf95PH6EUtRDBq35IprddJLc6eI/s400/Mandate--nerdery+has+you.jpg" width="285" /></a></div>
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Holy moly. Not only did I just touch base on more than twenty Kickstarter projects in one post, but this is also the third article this week, which means that it's knocking off a point from my 31 post deficit.Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-37645875244777059682013-10-17T19:54:00.000-05:002013-10-17T21:44:51.655-05:00ODST Corpsman, OutboundSo here's the finished product of the Extra Life 2013 ODST. It's packaged up and on its way, first-class, to Steelheart of Grievance Gaming, along with a little note to whomever will be the lucky recipient of this fun decoration.<br />
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<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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You’re the recipient of a 3D printed model. This model is
composed of a composite plaster powder, 3D printed in color, which has been
bound and cured in a cyanoacrylate (similar to super-glue) bath. The parts were
then sanded, assembled, and painted by hand to achieve a finer finish before
finally being waxed.</div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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The composite material should be about as resilient as
modeler’s resin. It can withstand a moderate amount of heat without any issue—temperatures
of less than one hundred fifty degrees should not be an issue, and higher
temperatures for short periods of time can be withstood—so keeping it on a desk
beneath a normal desk lamp is perfectly fine.</div>
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</div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
For a cursory and humorous overview of 3D printing, feel
free to visit my blog on the subject <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/05/what-i-do.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2013/05/what-i-do.html"></a>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thank you for helping Grievance Gaming support Extra Life
and help the Children’s Miracle Ne<span style="font-family: inherit;">twork of hospitals. Doing good for others
isn’t always easy, but sometimes it can be fun.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Ben’s
Nerdery</span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-m6IbhILcc97MaLt5oRAYWHqKwywfgiHWyfpQgKNZtXbZom10pppw_hC1jJ8zrkzL_VD3PSKLQAHcV1m0lL1g2gJAyS26e60zMoUBaKNdyoLq1aWKLYuCOvlTr_N5ovaiV7g5D4MT8k8/s1600/Painted+ODST+Extra+Life.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-m6IbhILcc97MaLt5oRAYWHqKwywfgiHWyfpQgKNZtXbZom10pppw_hC1jJ8zrkzL_VD3PSKLQAHcV1m0lL1g2gJAyS26e60zMoUBaKNdyoLq1aWKLYuCOvlTr_N5ovaiV7g5D4MT8k8/s400/Painted+ODST+Extra+Life.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
I really hope you'll support Extra Life. As a father, I'm really sensitive to the mission of the Children's Miracle Network, and it's a pleasure getting to do something, however small, for them this year. To help you appreciate this piece, here's an overview of the work that went into this miniature.<br />
<br />
The computer data related to the miniature has to be prepared and transferred to the right format. In most cases, there's a lot of cleanup to do, and this was no exception. Fortunately, I'm a big Halo fan--or was, before the dark days of Xbox One loomed over the franchise (and seriously, a mobile game!?). Anyways, that meant that I'd already spent a lot of time tidying the data into something easy to use and modify. This particular data is also highly accurate and high-resolution, being able to be scaled up to life-size just fine, so I didn't have to fill in or add any details, which is unusual for such parts. The base I designed in Blender (a powerful, free app for drafting, rendering, and animating 3D data), including the Grievance Gaming logo and a label commemorating the event itself.<br />
<br />
The data cleaned and reformatted, I hollowed out the data to make the part lightweight, faster to print, and a little more secure. It's a counter-intuitive truth that models like these can be too thick to be resilient: it's easy for a thick part to become too heavy in relation to its tensile strength, since interior volume is printed with lower density binder.<br />
<br />
Okay, you should probably just skip over those last couple of sentences. Might be a little too much information. I make data good to make good miniature.<br />
<br />
Once the model was printed, I dipped it into an infiltrant of cyanoacrylate (CA), a thinned out superglue that gets into the sandstone-like pores of the model and cures quickly to make the part stronger and watertight. This is also the fun chemistry moment of building a part. All adhesives result in a chemical reaction that generates heat. The faster and stronger the chemical reaction, the more heat is generated, usually. So if you take a baseball sized model in hand and dunk it in CA, you might burn the holy feldercarb out of your digits--cheap-ass gloves or no. Chemical burns are unpleasant, kids.<br />
<br />
When the fume-bombs are done throwing around their migraine-smoke, you have a sturdy part that feels even rougher than the sandstone part with which you started, so then you sand. Sanding cuts down on the gritty feel of the powder-based model and helps to reduce the layered-cake effect of 3D printing, without reducing the detailed accuracy of the part--if you do it right.<br />
<br />
With that, I decided to re-prime and paint the parts. Priming a 3D printed miniature helps only slightly to cover the layer effect I mentioned, but most importantly it adds the slight grit to the part that you need to paint--otherwise a well-sanded print will be too smooth to take paint nicely. Now even though the 3D print was in full color, there's a couple of reasons why I wanted to hand paint the part. First, a full-color print can have color streaking and inconsistency in the color matching. Hand paints eliminate that. Secondly, the paint used on the visor had a slightly metallic glossing effect that you can't get with 3D printing.<br />
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After painting came assembly. I'd made the base and helmet as separate parts to speed up build time, make painting easier, and to ensure that if anything broke in the process I could reprint and replace it. Once everything was painted, I glued the base and helmet together again and stuck it in a hot wax bath to give it that nice, fresh-off-the-lot feel. The final part weighs 163 grams (about .36 pounds), and is about 4" wide x 4" deep x 5" tall. The base is hollow, so you could conceivably weight it or insert a little goodie of some kind in the cavity. The material itself is about the same strength as a thin, dense hardwood, meaning that if you ever find reason to modify it you can always dremel it to suit yourself.<br />
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So that's my little contribution to Extra Life 2013. And if any of you are interested in <a href="http://www.grievancegaming.org/" target="_blank">Grievance Gaming</a>, check out their impressive list of represented games. They also have a wide-ranging series of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/GrievanceGaming?feature=watch" target="_blank">Youtube videos</a> that feature guild news as well as general gaming news and hype. And <a href="http://www.gggirls.net/" target="_blank">Grievance Gamer Girls</a> is a subset group that focuses on the ladies, which is always nice.Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-43016003987116713662013-10-14T21:34:00.002-05:002013-10-14T21:34:12.020-05:00What the heck was that? (Plus cosplay, charity, and campaigning for the year's end)Blech. So another fat pause in posts, and when I finally bring myself back into the habit, it's with much less fanfare than I'd hoped.<br />
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It began, as so many things do, with the birth of my son, the beginning of many epic projects, and an all-but-inevitable slide into insomnia (or in-zomb-nia, as my loving wife insists I pronounce it). I saw several movies that I'd really wanted to write Nerdviews on, but things kept piling up and most of the movies this past summer were more disappointing than anything else. Perhaps in the coming weeks I'll write-up mini-digest Nerdviews, with just a couple of sentences (heh--yeah, sure--just a couple of sentences) to sum my feelings on a lot of the movies I've neglected over the life of this blog. I think the superhero sequel to the Dave Lizewski movie (keeping it family-friendly, yo), <i>Oblivion</i>, <i>Pacific Rim</i>, and <i>Despicable Me 2</i> all merit mention, but I've also been kicking myself for not reviewing <i>Dark Knight Rises</i> and <i>Amazing Spider-Man</i>. And with <i>Agents of SHIELD</i> officially picked up for a full first season, I need to give that a write-up with a special surprise element tacked on. Filmatleven.<br />
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Most importantly, I've still got to get my most important new article series started: Nerds of Interest. Intended to be a series of features on different nerds I've met and taken an interest in, I should've posted the first article in this series months ago. I've already interviewed the really nice ladies behind Horsefeathers Cosplay as the first in this series, and I owe them (and you) a big apology for not getting that put up post-haste. They have helped inspire me to finally bite the bullet and get into cosplay fully and truly, and I definitely want to honor their influence and that of Cosplay4UsAll in my hobby insanity.<br />
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Along those lines, I made my first foray into cosplay. And as one should
expect of me, it's been intense, grueling, full of mistakes and petty
triumphs, and way too rushed by conservative cosplay standards. You see,
October 10th was the one year anniversary of Star Citizen being
revealed to the public and opened up for crowd-funding, and they made a modest event out of the observance. On September 19, they announced a photo contest to coincide with the event, which would close a mere two weeks later. Never one to let reason bar me from setting a goal, I decided that I would make a Star Citizen cosplay in that time. The (sorta) end result was a pretty feldercarb picture of a frakkin' awesome work-in-progress cosplay that didn't even place or get mention in the photo contest. I'll post more about this costume and my progress towards completing it later, but for now here's the underwhelming photo:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqK2QIXN6bOQsk9g00W8W7FakmhQ-7RnNqBXXVlzwxWMUAKWbHlYdSVW5b7soapsXWjHLDBfsPR-w1loB5TQiZCAO4HecFnaLqSI7hMWsP5h3MFO3nrMSjIiXg8l6w-egoi9gPD2qKIJg/s1600/Composite+Picture.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqK2QIXN6bOQsk9g00W8W7FakmhQ-7RnNqBXXVlzwxWMUAKWbHlYdSVW5b7soapsXWjHLDBfsPR-w1loB5TQiZCAO4HecFnaLqSI7hMWsP5h3MFO3nrMSjIiXg8l6w-egoi9gPD2qKIJg/s400/Composite+Picture.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Those who follow me on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BensNerdery" target="_blank">Facebook</a> or <a href="https://plus.google.com/111642225772059938640/posts" target="_blank">Google Plus</a> can see some of my other pictures as well.</td></tr>
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I'm not cowed from the hobby, but I don't think I'll put up any more pictures without taking the time to get some decent ones taken with a decent camera and photographer. No offense intended to my wife, but I felt like a motorized tripod with a remote would've been a better setup. Alright, I guess I intend a little offense with that comment. Anyways, the point is that this first frustrating entrance in no way dissuades me from cosplay. Expect to see a lot more on that in the future.<br />
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Another article series that needs posting: Nerd Level Up Program. A simple series of fitness and general wellness goals I've set for myself, I've already hit enough of my modest goals that I've essentially backlogged two or three level up posts. This actually dovetails with my interest in cosplay, but working out regularly was one of those things that was always a part of my holistic life goals.<br />
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My RPG muscles are starting to atrophy. I haven't sat down for a proper tabletop session in well over a year, and the lack of RPG goodness in my life is really unacceptable. On the homefront, I'm <i>this</i> close to actually doing verifiable work cleaning out my <strike>dungeon</strike> basement game room and facilitating game play down there. On the blog front, though, I've been planning a couple of things for a while. The GURPS Centurion project is still under way--more character write-ups and eventually several comic pages.<br />
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I try to keep a bead on the search terms that bring people to my blog, and every once in a while I come across a really unusual set of search terms. Months ago, I found a particularly interesting phrase on my stats page: "GM tips for scaring their players." My my my. I just love that there is a GM out there looking for tips to scare their players. So at some point in the future I want to make an article of tips for getting emotional reactions from your players: fear, sadness, awe, and elation.<br />
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On the back of my embarrassing cosplay failure, I decided to throw myself into the concerns of others, like an infested Terran from Starcraft. In the middle of my clumsy cosplay sprint, I got in touch with one of the fine members of <a href="http://www.grievancegaming.org/" target="_blank">Grievance Gaming</a>, Shrivasta, about helping their group with a charity drive for <a href="http://www.extra-life.org/" target="_blank">Extra Life</a>. Here's a little statement from Shrivasta about the event, coming up November 2nd:<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>As many of you know, Grievance will be participating in Extra Life next month on November 2<sup>nd</sup>, 2013. Extra Life began in 2008 as a way of honoring a young lady named Victoria Enmon. Tori’s battle against acute lymphoblastic leukemia inspired the Sarcastic Gamer Community in a way that is difficult to describe. Members sent in video games and bought gifts to keep Tori’s spirits up despite numerous hospital stays and three bouts with the deadly disease.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Tragically, Tori lost her battle with cancer in January 2008.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>Since then, the gaming community at large has participated in the Extra Life project, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals in the US as well as Canada! This year is no exception. In November, thousands of gamers will be participating in a 25 hour marathon gaming session for charity!</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>This will be the first Extra Life team for Grievance, and we aim to make it an annual tradition. We’ll not only be taking pledges for the hours played, but we will also be auctioning off items to the community to raise additional money for Extra Life as well.</b></span></div>
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I've been a fan of Extra Life for some time, and the Grievance Gaming guild is a fun group of gamers, so when I happened across Shrivasta on Facebook, I decided to do a little something myself. Since I'd made some paperweight-sized ODST (from the <i>Halo</i> franchise) helmets in the past, I thought it'd be great to make one with a custom base and a medic paint-job and add it to the Grievance auction. Here's a picture of the early print of the model, before I got really hands on with the piece.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVwRpNYL66IPrpxbGlfoj7xLy2myzsh4ypu2-GDSad-ZQmN8kNTTtqGToFLyJ-Vm5kN5jwkP7TKR4fj4DnhyphenhyphenDceP5JtLQb3BKgG-VqXlj9ljNVDXo5IJ13NcEroyXifANuSf9Efyo8i_I/s1600/Extra+Life+Medic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVwRpNYL66IPrpxbGlfoj7xLy2myzsh4ypu2-GDSad-ZQmN8kNTTtqGToFLyJ-Vm5kN5jwkP7TKR4fj4DnhyphenhyphenDceP5JtLQb3BKgG-VqXlj9ljNVDXo5IJ13NcEroyXifANuSf9Efyo8i_I/s400/Extra+Life+Medic.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Visit <a href="http://www.extra-life.org/" target="_blank">Extra Life</a> to see about pledging, and check out <a href="http://www.grievancegaming.org/" target="_blank">Grievance Gaming</a>.</td></tr>
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Please spread the word about this worthy cause and seriously consider donating. And if you want your own ODST medic sitting on your desk, be sure to get in touch for that auction.<br />
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So all this stuff is nice enough, but it doesn't mean too much if I'm not going to post regularly, does it? Well, the number of followers I currently have means I need to post at least twice a week, but over the past three months or so I figure you readers have a back log of 31 posts. So as I get back into blogging here, I'm going to try my level best to put in an extra 31 posts (in addition to the two weekly you've already earned), so that by December 31, 2013 you should have just as many posts in the past year as though I hadn't been MIA the past three and a half months. I don't know how reasonable that will be, but it's a good goal to close out the year, and it's quite obvious I've got enough content lined up to fill those spots.Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-80444497679438267682013-06-24T23:15:00.002-05:002013-06-24T23:15:47.075-05:00Movie Web Monday: Anton Yelchin<b><i>Movie Web Monday:</i></b><i> Each week, I'll look at a specific
actor's roles across three good movies. The third movie will in turn
tie into the first movie of the next week's actor, whose third movie
will continue the pattern. I will go through actors and movies at this
rate, with the following limitations in mind: every movie(or television
show) invoked will be one I either own, or wish to own; no movie or
actor will be invoked twice. So sit back and enjoy as you fall into the
Nerdery's movie web. (Oh, and I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum,
telling you just enough to know if you'll enjoy the movie)</i><br />
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Today we've got an actor that you've probably heard of for the wrong roles. Anton Yelchin began appearing in some top-notch productions at the age of eleven, delivering powerful performances opposite big name actors and still staying under most audience's collective radar. Then he starred in JJ Abrams' <i>Star Trek</i> reboot as the most pathetically endearing iteration of Chekov yet, and that's easily his most recognizable role--and him stammering "nine five wictor wictor two" to the Enterprise's obtuse computer. But the three films I've got below show a good deal more of his acting chops, and I hope he continues to get diverse parts in future movies, as right now he's one of the most underrated twenty-something actors out there.<br />
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<b>Movie:</b> <i>Hearts in Atlantis</i> (Rent It)</div>
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Anton Yelchin plays young Bobby Garfield in <i>Hearts in Atlantis</i>, which puts him in the shoes of the main protagonist alongside acting great Anthony Hopkins as Ted Brautigan. It's not the sort of role I'd envy for an unseasoned eleven year-old actor, but Anton holds his own, thanks in part to the film's magical script and also thanks to the tone of precocious wonder he carries throughout. Precocious wonder is an essential characteristic in a Stephen King nostalgia film--this is a film with brutal bullies, sexual trauma, teary reminiscence, young love, and eerie abilities, all with children as principals. So being able to register and reflect Brautigan's eloquent amazement at the world of children is invaluable. But still he remains a little boy at that age where he exaggerates childish silliness, especially when accused of being interested in his best friend, Carol Gerber. The cootie-shy Bobby retreats from Brautigan, defensively asking:<br />
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It's a fun moment that displays the mundane concerns of a child who is trying to fossilize his young notions, even while glossing over Brautigan's supernatural gifts. Which is really very much the central motif of <i>Hearts in Atlantis</i>.</div>
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<b>Movie:</b> <i>Charlie Bartlett</i> (Rent it)</div>
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I don't generally watch R-rated comedies. Most of the things that qualify a movie for R-ratings either don't interest me in a comedy or--more often--repel me in conjunction with humor. <i>Shaun of the Dead</i> and <i>Hot Fuzz</i> are huge exceptions to this preference, but since they're British and functionally action/thriller movies as well, my rule of thumb holds. <i>Charlie Bartlett</i> really stretches that preference with its dramatic depth, magnificent acting, and exuberant characterization of the title character. As the title character, this has got to be Anton Yelchin's most impressive and enjoyable role. Gregarious, insecure, a compulsive manipulator, Charlie Bartlett is an almost schizophrenic character--ranging from shy to charismatic in scenes that are fun to watch and showcase the young actor's talent. This is really highlighted when he auditions for the school's production of <i>Henry V</i> by vying directly for the attention of Susan Gardner, played by Kat Dennings:<br />
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Or even better is when the plot of the movie is established by Charlie's descent into becoming an eccentric prescription drug-dealer and mock-therapist for the kids at school. His first step into becoming his school's pusher? Intimidate, then sympathize with the school's bully and drug dealer with a cleverly practiced speech:<br />
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"Maybe you got slapped around one too many times for your lunch money on your way to the bus. Maybe your pop's gotta booze himself up every morning so he can plow roads with a sense of humor, then, when he gets home, you're just a distant third to sloppy joes and a bad sitcom. Maybe the cheerleaders call you a scumbag behind your back. Maybe it's because the school's got you placed on the remedial track and your teachers are really good at making you feel like an idiot..."</blockquote>
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This movie is dark, but let me assure you that the divisive-but-good-willed drug dealing quickly falls around Charlie's head, and he's completely devastated when he has to confront his own willingness to fake his own character and pander for the sake of popularity. Also, Hope Davis, who played Anton Yelchin's mom in <i>Hearts in Atlantis</i>, plays mother Marilyn Bartlett in this film, and her bad parenting is even more damning and hard to watch than in the King drama. On the flip side of the coin, Robert Downey Jr. delivers an awesome performance as the school's principal Nathan Gardner and father to love-interest Susan. He's an alcholic, ground-down, depressed wreck of a loving single father, and somehow Downey is able to make the character really fun to watch anyways:<br />
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<b>Movie:</b> <i>Terminator Salvation</i> (Own it) </div>
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I love the Terminator series without exception. I said it, and I mean it. <i>Terminator Salvation</i> pulls off a plot of epic combat in post-apocalyptia with confidence and consistency--I'm talking consistency of quality, not of plot, so just back off. What's great and unique about the fourth installment in the series, though, is that it's the only movie set in the future and therefore liberated by ham-handed social commentary. There's some ham-handed philosophical commentary thrown in at the end, but that doesn't even hold a candle to Sarah Connor's fatherhood narration in the middle of <i>T2</i>. But the characterization of the principal character is solid, and Anton Yelchin's masterful rendition of a teenaged Kyle Reese is no exception. First of all, he gets the real tagline of the Terminator franchise:<br />
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Similar to his portrayal of Bobby Garfield in <i>Hearts in Atlantis</i>, Yelchin's Reese spends his time cautiously absorbing Sam Worthington's heroic courage and worshipping his leader/idol/son's rogue radio transmissions. And in so doing, he straddles the lines of survivalist cynicism and youthful idealistic hope--basically Bobby Garfield with a twelve gauge and no lady friend to help him work out his issues.<br />
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<b><i>Movie Web Monday</i></b><i> will continue next week with a new actor, picking up with some other prolific player from the last movie listed above.</i></div>
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Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-10090690264353449062013-06-21T23:58:00.001-05:002013-06-22T01:12:17.344-05:00A Pregnant Pause in the Blog SprintMan, I take a week off and quite a lot of things happen. We had CliffyB proving he's the popped collar of the gaming industry, E3, more dismal Xbox One news followed by a surprise reversal, a couple of interesting new Kickstarter projects, and Free RPG Day this past week. Now, since I'm a little behind, I'm going to try to cover all these things briefly in one post, so I won't forget to mention them.<br />
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On the running Xbox One debacle, there's some mixed news. Specifically, on the questions of DRM, Xbox had been looking more and more arrogant and defensive. Enter E3 and Angry Joe, from the Angry Joe Show.<br />
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If you check out Angry Joe's (remarkably diplomatic with a low cuss-count) <a href="http://angryjoeshow.com/2013/06/xbox-one-aj-interview/" target="_blank">interview with Larry Hryb</a> (Xbox's Major Nelson), you get a real good view of the sarcastic, patronizing, and disrespectful way Xbox is handling the concerns of consumers:<br />
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"Xbox One is the future. Do you want to come with me to the future?"<br />
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"I'm not a lawyer--are you a lawyer?"<br />
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"You're not on the development team, are you?"<br />
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And so forth in response to Joe's questions on the key concerns of the Xbox One's DRM policies. It's really worrisome, and the fact that convivial Major Nelson is shilling so hard for Xbox that he becomes this abrasive makes it all the more shocking to me. I mean, Angry Joe may be known for curse-filled rants and ripping apart bad games, but I think he's a teddy bear overall, and he's surprisingly forgiving of a lot of video games and their companies (I really think he drank Bioware's Kool-Aid on the Mass Effect 3 "extended ending"), and his interviews are really polite and respectful. Even when he's asking hard questions like he did of Major Nelson. Plus, Joe hasn't even gotten around to the really big implications of the Xbox plan. They are:<br />
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<b>1) Microsoft's goal is to price control the console game market through trust-like activity between Xbox and game publishers.</b> If Microsoft can make consumers swallow their DRM pill and anti-ownership assault on consumers, then age will be the only practical factor in determining the cost of a game. As it is, when a AAA game tanks, second-hand retailers get a surplus of returns that drive down not only the cost of used games but the new products as well. If they can cut out that consumer-based check on game quality, then Microsoft and Developers could form a closed loop for pricing their games so that you'd never be able to find a good deal for a game, no matter how bad it is. Heck, if price control wasn't the point of this policy, it'd be pretty silly of Microsoft to invest in developing their own re-vamped digital distribution system when they could've saved a lot of money by porting other services like Desura or Steam to their box. But by keeping it all in their hands, they control the prices of their games, and the only reason to lower prices would be to stay competitive with Sony and Nintendo. Maybe.<br />
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<b>2) The daily check-in policy, while trumped up as an anti-piracy measure, is almost certainly a method to farm customer usage information.</b> Let's just think about this for a second--there are a lot of ways to accomplish what Xbox claims to be trying to do: combat piracy through online verification. A daily online check-in is not necessary. Most simply, you could make it where installing a game from the disc itself requires an online handshake that flags that game as the 'active' version of the game, and deactivate any other installs from that game CD. So why have the daily online policy? To upload a cache of your Xbox's activity. Now, I'm not talking about some conspiracy theory where Xbox is interested in stealing your identity or anything, but the Xbox's TV and game-playing activity for millions of users would be tremendously valuable marketing demographics they could easily sell to advertisers, publishers, whoever. And don't bet the farm that Xbox would ever pass those new profits on to consumers through cheaper prices.<br />
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Then the heavens lifted and Microsoft's collective voice boomed from their emerald fortress: <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57590134-75/microsoft-pulls-a-180-reverses-xbox-one-always-on-drm-and-used-games-policy/" target="_blank">they would reverse their DRM and online policies</a>, including their region lock, apparently. First of all, let that be a lesson to all you corporate apologists out there: us entitled raging nerds can make a difference. Maybe. Personally, I think it's just as likely that Microsoft backed down through a combination of investor pressure and the dire predictions of lawyers that they were going to get caught with their briefs down.<br />
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More importantly, however, look at Larry Hryb's comments, quoted above, just one week before the whole company reversed course. Granted he's a paid cheer-leader for Microsoft, but that kind of arrogance behind the project doesn't just go away. The certainty that these draconian measures are the "future of gaming" doesn't just go away. And the dishonest implication that this would be a difficult policy to reverse hints at a more insidious truth: if Microsoft decides that it's worth it, after the bad PR dies down and the first few waves of Xbox Ones have been purchased, to try to quietly reinstitute these or similar measures on a captive audience, they'll try. The way they're pulling back their vaunted Family Sharing Plan--which was generating some excited buzz--smacks of a bargaining chip to give customers when the other shoe drops.<br />
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And if you need anymore reason to retroactively hate Microsoft for what they almost did or might try to do again, here's some chaw in your maw: Cliff Bleszinski, the popped collar of the gaming industry, <a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/124957-CliffyB-Thinks-Used-Games-Are-Bad-Sony-is-Playing-Us" target="_blank">jumped in to defend</a> Microsoft's plan to prune-squeeze gamers. CliffyB, as the wannabe Situation is known, is the creative "mind" behind the <i>Gears of War</i> franchise, and he recently stepped down from Epic Games to basically not shut up about his stupid cult-of-the-game-developer ideals. Now that Microsoft has about-faced despite his <strike>eloquent</strike> erroneous defense of their plans, he's <a href="http://screencrush.com/cliff-bleszinski-thinks-microsofts-policy-changes-will-result-in-tough-times-for-the-industry/" target="_blank">sounding off</a> that these developments will be bad for the industry and the consumer, predicting: "More studios WILL close and you'll see more PC and mobile games" Dun-dun-DUN!!! Wow, Cliffy, thanks for that realization, and thanks for trying to pin long-standing consumer patterns on consumers' reactions from last week. Cliff Bleszinski: don't be that guy. Also, don't be on the same issue as him. And if you're in the same region as him, check out the real estate market elsewhere.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Kickstart: Fanciful Bloodsport, Musical Mystics, & Frigid Freaks</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/682539325/fairytale-games-the-battle-royale?ref=users" target="_blank">Fairytale Games</a></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc31vZpx5EpZi8yanDbhtgh6iZz0ao6ONSrtwLkepebTmDiUFbSe_EplZFSmoPCf3GmBuViyyvbHm1d4dZYf-I1_oXaa8_LTjkQAd3omjKHACTWLzI9xIega7bdJ2IYvQBs96qEqZCjtY/s1600/FairytaleGames.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc31vZpx5EpZi8yanDbhtgh6iZz0ao6ONSrtwLkepebTmDiUFbSe_EplZFSmoPCf3GmBuViyyvbHm1d4dZYf-I1_oXaa8_LTjkQAd3omjKHACTWLzI9xIega7bdJ2IYvQBs96qEqZCjtY/s400/FairytaleGames.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<b>What it is:</b> <i>Fairytale Games</i> is a character-based card game of survival, exploration, and battles to the death. Set in a world run by the evil trinity of the Dark Queen, the Queen of Hearts, and the Snow Queen, the three tyrants secure their rule by persecuting any upstarts, especially those associated with the Enchanted Forest. Their method of persecution? A public bloodsport set in the wilderness of their kingdoms, pitting all sorts of classic fairytale figures like the Beast, Red Riding Hood, Alice, Pinocchio and 36 more in a <i>Hunger Games</i> sort of scenario.<br />
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<b>Why it's exciting:</b> The game promises to be a unique take on a lot of familiar figures, turning Pinocchio, for instance, into a tortured sort of Frankenstein's monster, and making the damsels into hardened survivalists that would make the originators of these violent fairytales proud (because most of the original fairytales are way more violent than Disney's sterilized versions). The mechanics involve laying out cards in a freely expanding grid as you explore the world, recruiting or killing off other survivors, finishing quests, and gaining items. And since it promises to support 1 to 10 players it is a rare game indeed that both features solo play and stabbing up to 9 buddies in the back in the course of one game. Very fun. They're nearly funded, and the stretch goals will potentially unlock a huge number of extra cards for backers--including a zombie version, or miniatures at the very highest stretch goal. I'm not a huge card gamer, but this set looks more like a dynamic battle game than a shuffle-fest, so I'm already in on it.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/37002837/anthymn?ref=users" target="_blank">Anthymn</a></span><br />
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<b>What it is:</b> <i>Anthymn</i> is a typical Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG), where players take on the roles of heroes in a fantasy land in the midst of turmoil. Except all the players are mages in this game. And all magic is tied to music. So spells are actually uniquely composed tunes, and battles are actually special effects duels of music and fire. Players choose a faction based not only on gameplay style, but on musical play style--picking from classical, electronic, tribal, or other styles that have a specific look, culture, and magical power associated with them.<br />
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<b>Why it's exciting:</b> This Kickstarter campaign is not looking healthy. With less than two weeks to go, they are at less than $30,000 of their $600,000 goal. Which is a real shame, as this game shows a lot more imagination and guile than almost any other game being crowdfunded right now--they promise a rich, dynamic, player-created soundscape where players trade and teach others their battle-songs, and the core mechanics of the game sound like they will educate people on the basics of musical theory. Even if you aren't going to back this project, you should really consider spreading the word so they have good exposure and support should the worst happen. But seriously, back this. Where else can you be this frakkin' cool playing a trumpet? (Four years of band camp will tell you: nowhere--unless you count that football game where you finished half-time with the Braveheart speech and a trumpet blast)<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1683973133/frozen-state?ref=users" target="_blank">Frozen State</a></span><br />
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<b>What it is:</b> Take a bunch of Russians in a necessarily wintry setting, add in some critters from John Carpenter's <i>The Thing</i>, throw in a global apocalypse and old school <i>Fallout</i>-style gameplay, and you have <i>Frozen State</i>, the best thing to come out of Moscow since Sean Connery. Created by Snow Arc, the computer game features an older style of RPG campaign, where you pick one of three preset characters and run them through an RPG where you battle the elements in addition to hostile survivors and things-with-too-many-mouths/limbs/bumpy-bits. The game will involve a non-linear campaign where seeking out resources and loot in devastated Siberia is a constant lure.<br />
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<b>Why it's exciting:</b> I really like the wintry setting, and the fact that survival will be a central element is cool. They're talking about making a meaningful day/night cycle where going out at night is dangerous due to weather and the creatures drawn out by darkness, which sounds atmospheric and crunchy. I haven't pulled the trigger on this one yet, though, as its funding is in British Pounds, and I've yet to back a pounds-based project. But with all the cool goodies they've got and the fact they're shooting for a Windows/Mac/Linux release, this might be the time to do it.<br />
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<a href="http://www.freerpgday.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-size: large;">Free RPG Day</span></a><br />
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Last Saturday was Free RPG Day 2013. An annual observance since 2007, it's a chance for RPG publishers and retailers to team up to give players free demos, supplements, and teasers of their games in an effort to spread awareness of their games and promote the hobby in general. This year <i>Pathfinder</i>, <i>Battletech</i>, <i>Star Wars</i>, <i>Cosmic Patrol</i>, and more all got their free on at your Friendly Local Game Shop (FLGS). Make sure to keep an eye out for freebies next year, and support your FLGS. It's a great way to browse other systems and maybe add a few new games to your hit-list.<br />
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So what have I been doing while all this stuff was going down?<br />
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Getting daddied up.<br />
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Again.<br />
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Once more my irresistible procrastinator genes have so infected my offspring that my son cruised past his due date. So once more we got to schedule our son's birthday, essentially, by going in to the hospital to get induced. Man, you do not sleep well once your pregnant wife gets to her due date. Throughout the later stages of the pregnancy you start to look at her like a damp, full grocery bag--any sudden movement could tear out her bottom and wreck a whole lot of perishables. But once you hit that final week to deadline and go past it, things take on new severity. Like when Sylvester the Cat drinks the nitroglycerine in the old 1940s cartoon, every movement is sudden death. Needless to say, it's hard to sleep in that kind of environment. (And adding a second boy under 3 years old to our household probably won't help!)<br />
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Then, the next day, you go through a weirdly calm morning of getting things ready, shipping the kid off to the grandparents, and then try to have a nice brunch before going in to the hospital for the scheduled horror show. Few things in life are quite so unpleasant as trying to eat with a woman who's pregnant with a child other than their first. Something about that first birth and the 20 or so hospital staff touring her monstrous hoo-hah gives a woman the impression that everyone wants to hear about what's going on with their sensitives forever. For at least one year per kid, everything is mucous, membranes, and fluids, and any time you try to gracefully bow out of the all-access experience, you're instead rewarded with an eye and earful of something you'd rather believe was only the province of R-rated movies. There is no escape.<br />
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The build up is kind of mesmerizingly complex, but also tediously long, and you don't really feel like much of what's happening relates to what's about to occur. The little lady is thrown into a flattering hospital ensemble, hooked up to machines, and set on display in the middle of a sci-fi creche. It's like the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2XkRn_pAQI" target="_blank">Disney Alien Encounter</a>, except the lights are on, nothing is sanitary, and the grotesque monstrosity in the middle of the room is the one doing most of the screaming.<br />
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And the main event--whew. First, there's a whole lot of doctors and nurses taking the Livingston tour of your baby's den, and then when he comes out, you're suddenly surprised that your huge wife was able to hold, feed, and pass the little Roswell alien. It's like Mary Poppins' hand-bag, except when it starts, everything improbable is going in, and then when something comes out it's totally different--though no less improbable.<br />
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So that's been my week. That, and spending the past week fending my two year-old away from the fascinating newborn. On the hospital ride home, he calmly tried to convince us that the new addition would be more comfortable back in mom's belly. But since she nixed that plan, he's stuck with a little brother. Poor guy.<br />
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Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-70339292522426515642013-06-09T23:59:00.001-05:002013-06-10T00:21:43.030-05:00State of Decay...<span style="font-size: large;">...Running, Screaming, and Bleeding Through the Motions</span><br />
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<i><b>Nerdview:</b> A good review is hard to find. A good review--that is, a quality review, not a positive review--seems to be even more rare amongst professionals and dedicated reviewers. Fortunately, the Nerdery is helmed by a literary nut. Each review, whether it is a game, movie, book, or television series, will have the four elements: bias, appreciation, personal enjoyment, and general enjoyment. Put in food terms, these are odor, beef, gravy, and cheese.</i></div>
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I was originally going to save this post for a more polished Nerdview later on, but I figure now is as good a time as any to put my thoughts out there, since I've now spent at least a dozen or so hours playing it within the past week.<br />
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<b>Expectations 'Odor'</b>: <i>State of Decay</i> is an open-world sandbox game in which the player controls a small community of survivors in a world overrun by zombies. The player directs the survivors in scavenging for supplies and building a base from which they hold the zombie infestation at bay. Gameplay involves stealth, vehicles, and straight up combat with the player collecting scores of found weapons from baseball bats to shotguns to fight the shuffling menace.<br />
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I love zombie games. I bought <i>Call of Duty World at War</i> specifically because I heard about an unlockable Nazi zombies mode. <i>Dead Rising</i> was one of the biggest factors in my original decision to get an Xbox 360 in the first place. <i>Left 4 Dead</i> will never be too outdated for me to forsake its twitchy thrill-kill gameplay and epic standoff sequences. And I've also pledged for a Kickstarter project for a game called <i>Dead State</i>, which will be a gritty "true zombie" (slow and no special forms) survival game in which the player takes up turn-based tactical control over his band of survivors as they raid nearby homes and offices in their small Texas town. Hrm...wait a second...<br />
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Yeah, it sounds like <i>State of Decay</i> is kind of a ripoff of <i>Dead State</i> at first. That, and the fact that this game had crept under my radar until a mere three days before it was to be released, had actually muted my enthusiasm for this game, fearing it'd be a cash-in on a heavily populated game genre. And that's not the mention the name, which is so similar to <i>Dead State </i>that it might as well be a senile Yoda trying to recite his game library.<br />
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<b>Appreciation 'Beef'</b>: Boy, was I thrilled with the differences. While superficially similar to the tactical promise of <i>Dead State</i>, <i>State of Decay</i> is a much more stream-lined and light approach to its themes. At its core, <i>State of Decay</i> feels like a focused Rockstar gameplay experience--the animations, controls, and rendering style all draw from that studio's distinct style. I didn't see Rockstar's name anywhere in the credits for this game, but I call straight-up shenanigans on that--especially after playing <i>Undead Redemption</i>, the zombie DLC for Rockstar's <i>Red Dead Redemption</i>. The games are just too tactilely familiar.<br />
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The game has that classic Rockstar/Grand Theft Auto action-style gameplay with lite RPG elements thrown in. You level up your skills in Cardio (the first of many <i>Zombieland</i> references in this game), Powerhouse, Fighting, and more through the regular use of the skills, increasing passive benefits regularly and occasionally getting a new ability or move as well. They also track a few keywords about each character's personality traits, as the clash or harmony of characters back at base mean you might come back from a long day of head-smashing to find your teammates at each other's throats. <i>Sigh... Ed, you silly Idol-watching sluggard, I knew I should have dropped you off in that zombie-infested trailer park.</i><br />
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The base-building element of the game gives small, regular benefits that you'll definitely feel, but since the different facilities you'll build are going to be static set-pieces dropped in empty areas of your homebase, they don't necessarily feel as interesting as they are useful. Not to mention that getting the resources to build the base add-ons are a lot more work than you might be prepared for. Expect to spend 20 to 30 minutes gathering resources to build an addition only to have it take another 15 to 30 minutes to build. And that's assuming there isn't a delay due to a shortage of a specific resource.<br />
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<i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The open world map is quite spacious. I'd compare it to about the size of one of the states in Red Dead Redemption. The following picture shows about one-fourth of the world map in the game, and it is dense enough with interesting terrain features, lootable buildings and little zombie surprises throughout. It's a well-realized and interesting world, as testified to by how much time I spent in the first town alone before even bothering to explore the second third of the map. I still haven't gotten to the third major region of the map.</span></i><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is about one quarter of the total real estate in <i>State of Decay</i></td></tr>
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<b>Personal Enjoyment 'Gravy'</b>: Oh, it's been a while since I've played <i>Red Dead Redemption</i> or <i>LA Noire</i>, which are the games I'd compare most directly to this one in terms of primary gameplay dynamics. The zombies are typical video game undead in that their are several special boss forms and the rank and file zombie is given to running when they want to shake off the eerie shuffle of a true zed-head. Head-shots are the only way to take them down, however, and the rather clunky third-person aiming of the game engine means that dropping a zombie with anything but a shotgun blast takes a little practice and a cool head. And not trying to use the alcoholic accountant as a front-line scavenger.<br />
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I love it. The strategy of the game is really just a way to link your self-assigned missions with more narrative and importance, but it works for me. The coolest artifact that carries over from other Rockstar games, though, is the no-save gameplay. The only way to save your status in this game is to exit the game and fall back on your last checkpoint. And death isn't the safety net it is in other games, either. You command a whole party of survivors, or at least the ones willing to friend you in the game's trust meter. And when whatever character you're controlling gets turned into hickburger, your control shifts to whoever is left back at your base. It makes the game persistent and adds tension even when the zombies aren't that threatening. Because one screw up, one overconfident decision to press on to another mission without stocking up on meds, and your fiery assault-rifling Latina will get wishboned by a zombie. And then you'll have to replace her with Ed the <i>American Idol</i> fan.<br />
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<b>General Enjoyment 'Cheese'</b>: By now you should really know if you'd like this game or not. It's well-crafted and pushes the genre forward in an interesting way, but it also doesn't break the rules or really surprise you, either. Sandbox fan? Get it. Zombie nut? Get it. Enjoy inexpensive games with high replay value? It's a $20 download through Xbox Live, and I find that the combination of base-building choices and character progression gives you a ton of different ways to approach the game. And the brutal way the game makes you lose vital characters and then just press on not only evokes the genre magnificently well, but it also makes you wonder whether it's worth it to restart from the beginning just one more time.<br />
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<br />Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-66019242717991837542013-06-08T23:51:00.002-05:002013-06-08T23:51:41.531-05:00Nerd CitizenToday's been a fairly lazy day on the Nerdery front. I've been working on several gargantuan blog posts that will take a good deal of work due to either the tremendous writing/editing load necessary or due to editing media I want to attach to the associated blog posts.<br />
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In particular, I've been stalled by the release of the addictive <i>State of Decay</i>, which came out on Tuesday on Xbox Live Arcade. I'm currently in the research and evaluation stage of writing a review for it (ie, I'm playing the game as much as my spazzy, tow-headed spawn will let me). That should be forthcoming within the next handful of posts, if all goes well the next few days.<br />
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The big news in the Nerdery, though, was a small package I received in the mail. Tearing into it, I dropped my engraved metal Citizen's ID Card, a beautiful little reward for most <i>Star Citizen</i> backers. Featuring my planned character's name, my founder and pledge status, and a really neat engraved circuitry design along the top and bottom, this is a first class bit of totally superfluous game bling. And I love it. I love getting collector's editions of games specifically because of these sorts of baubles. In the <i>Fallout New Vegas</i> collector's edition, for instance, you get a neat case with a starter deck of Caravan cards, a graphic novel, and a handful of poker chips from the casinos featured in the game. The <i>Dragon Age: Origins</i> collector's edition came with a fabric map of Thedas. Which is awesome because I can now say I've literally caressed Ferelden to my cheek. I love you, you hound-loving nation of malcontents.<br />
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Now Star Citizen is fast joining those noble ranks of uber-sexy nerd add-ons that make me unjustifiably enthused for the game beyond the promised gameplay experience. Plunking this plate down on my laptop keyboard, I then snapped a few pictures and threw together the following image. Later tonight I'll be reviewing my character's crew contracts, which will totally be used as an in-game charter for anyone wanting to serve aboard my Constellation-class merchant ship. Oh yes, I'm serious. In the coming weeks, I'll probably share my multi-page crew forms at some point in the future, as well as my detailed thoughts on space-mining as a potentially deep gameplay feature for <i>Star Citizen</i>.<br />
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In other nerd news, I've been taking baby steps towards cosplay ever since the euphoric epiphany that was the Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo. I'm still at the point where I'm just testing stuff out as I research options and pick the brains of much more experienced and talented cosplayers. Most of the stuff I'm actually doing right now is helping out some other fine folks with a project of theirs while also using that effort as an opportunity to sponge up their methods and talents as best I can. But, I'm not just working on other people's stuff. You could say I've got some nerdy projects in the works.<br />
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I'm hoping to have something relatively wearable ready for my son within the next week, so if that happens as I hope you can bet you'll get some more images of it in the next few days. The idea is to present him with this as a novelty consolation prize for being ousted as the cutest thing in our household once his little brother is born. Of course, I think this makes him even cuter than any merely human son could ever be--he's not just cute now...he's supercute!<br />
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<br />Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-48329249098231550342013-06-07T23:39:00.002-05:002013-06-07T23:39:53.139-05:00Kickstart: Lost Moon Men and Marines in Training<i><b>Kickstart Your Weekend:</b> A series in which I occasionally spotlight Kickstarter projects that are ending soon and deserve a little nerd love. Also, I'll highlight some past projects as well, as you never know when these enterprises are going to turn up again.</i><br />
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Tonight I'm plodding along, continuing the blog sprint and vaguely entertaining the idea of keeping it going until post number 150. That's not terribly likely, as my wife is going to evict her 9-month old parasite any day now, but there is a chance I'll be able to keep the momentum going even then.<br />
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Speaking of momentum, <i><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1744629938/deadzone-the-sci-fi-miniatures-board-game" target="_blank">Deadzone</a></i> ended up pulling in a grand total of $1,216,482 in pledges this past week. That's nearly 300 grand more than Mantic Games' previous best Kickstarter campaign, and a full 100 grand more than I was predicting they'd pull in. Their final hours pulled in several hard plastic sets for backers to add-on to their pledges, and that probably really helped boost the final results of the campaign. Most Mantic models are resin or a trending new resin-plastic mix. As a model material, resin holds small details sharply and cleanly, but resin can be more difficult to glue and harder to convert due to being a bit more brittle and prone to cleavage. (Not that kind, silly mammal.) By offering a few optional sets of plastic models for the game's core units, Mantic gives players a chance to have more ambitious control in constructing their models. And if there's one thing wargaming armchair generals love--it's ambitious control. That and smack-talking their opponents.<br />
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Ryan Sohmer's second children's book, <i><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1412277313/the-bear-a-first-time-parents-continuing-journey" target="_blank">The Bear--A First Time Parent's Continuing Journey</a></i> finished at a healthy $54,381 out of an original goal of $40,000. It doesn't compare to the success of the first campaign, but I can't fault anything with the second book on that score. I think the more muted success of book two speaks to how cogent and complete the first book was--there's simply not as much demand for something more. Still, the art for these books is beautiful, and I received my book from the first campaign promptly and in great condition, and you can't beat the wry observations and tear-jerk imagery of each and every page. Total dad-bait.<br />
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Dino-hunting survival game <i><a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/524168447/the-stomping-land" target="_blank">The Stomping Land</a></i> ended at $114,060 blowing their 20 grand goal out of the water and securing extra funds for hiring extra part-time designers to expand the game environment. I was on the fence on pledging to this one--the gameplay really excited me, but I was kind of hoping for them to show more interest in Mac support as well as PC. As it is, though, I'm sure I'll get it sometime next year to play on my Star Citizen gaming PC--sitting in my high-tech simpit while running a caveman avatar around in a loincloth. Anachronism, your name is me.<br />
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The superhero-vs-mastermind board game <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iello/guardians-chronicles" target="_blank"><i>Guardians Chronicles</i></a> is poised to break 60 grand tonight, with a little over a week to go in their campaign. They slowed down a lot in the middle of the campaign, perhaps more so than is usual, but with the fact that they're picking up steam and about to unlock a dice stretch goal, I still think their ultimate stretch goal of $100,000 is within reach. More importantly, until June 13 they have a trivia-based game giveaway contest in which the grand prize is a complimentary $160 pledge level for the Kickstarter campaign. Check that out <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/contests/guardians" target="_blank">here</a>. They've also posted full rules for the game and enough art that you can play a small demo of the game with your own miniatures/markers/old Tic-Tac cases as proxies for their characters.<br />
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Okay, so that's it for Kickstarter updates. So what's new this week? Well, not a whole lot. So today I'll share another two promising-but-failed Kickstart projects.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://joegotgame.com/shackleton-crater/" target="_blank">Shackleton Crater</a></span><br />
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<b>What it is</b>: <i>Shackleton Crater</i> wanted to be a near-future strategy computer game where players struggled to manage and create the first colonies on the moon's surface. No cover system, no alien invaders, and no secret uprising. A strategy game without violence, where survival and thriving would be challenging enough to keep players entertained. Building pre-fab modules inspired by real NASA concepts and designs, players would scour the moon's rugged surface for materials, conduct research, and hide from cosmic storms and the like. The game environment was based on the actual surface of the moon, and one of their listed stretch goals proposed that the game feature the entire frakkin' surface of the moon. That's a lot of solitary playground, yo.<br />
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<b>What happened</b>: I enjoy a good dose of violence in my entertainment. Most zombie games make me giggle rather than cringe at face-smashing finishing moves and the obligatory chomp-chomp-chomp deaths of helpless characters. But I also enjoy a harmonious game, too, where excellence doesn't have to come at the end of a gun or at someone else's expense. Challenge can go hand in hand with a relaxing experience. And I think that's what appealed to me about <i>Shackleton Crater</i>--I envisioned a game that was smart and well-balanced enough to provide a challenging experience, but while also being totally wholesome. And I suppose it's that last part that made it a tough sell. The game community as a collective doesn't want another <i>Oregon Trail</i>--not unless you make the final stretch of the journey a cannibalism simulator or you give players the option to raid trading outposts instead of, y'know, trading. About halfway through their campaign and at less than ten percent of their base funding goal, creators Joe Got Game cancelled the project, promising that they'd keep moving forward with development. Unfortunately, no news has surfaced for the past two months.<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.interstellarmarines.com/" target="_blank">Interstellar Marines</a></span><br />
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<b>What it is</b>: <i>Interstellar Marines</i> has been in indie development hell for years. A science-fiction first person shooter being developed by Zero Point Software, they apparently started out with a mainstream publisher and partners but got cut off as their realistic, visceral approach to their setting seemed not enough <i>Halo</i> or <i>Call of Duty</i>. Since then, however, they've ingeniously switched their game code over to the versatile and inexpensive Unity Engine, which has allowed them to do something really neat for their game by making portions of the game playable on their website through your browser. It's a fun teaser of what they have envisioned, and it also enables the developers to actively troubleshoot and play balance their game one feature at a time.<br />
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<b>What happened</b>: The project had a decent start but quickly slowed down. It crawled along, and I think a lot of potential backers (myself included) were a little gun-shy to jump into such an ambitious game being developed for so long. All gamers have been collectively <i>Duke Nukem Forever</i>'d, and we're all scared of it happening again. But the game itself looks great, and I love that the premise for the prologue to their series was going to put players in the middle of a series of harrowing wargames as futuristic soldiers prepare for first contact with alien species. Which is pretty much never good. Their Kickstarter video was great too--it started off with a droll speech about the first interstellar beacon test, and then cut to the developers talking about their game in a sort of <i>12 Monkeys</i> stream of hallucinations. Doesn't make sense? Well, it was funny anyways.Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-53518931815739111852013-06-06T23:53:00.000-05:002013-07-31T20:12:23.742-05:00Myth Map Released<span style="font-size: large;">Just 'Cuz</span><br />
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Over the past week I had come to the decision, with a little encouragement, to release the full resolution version of my Myth map. Now, this might not seem too relevant, but as I quickly summarize my process and decision-making it might help you flesh out your own world-building process. You can feel free to use these maps for your own fantasy RPG--better than the generic D&D worlds, in my vitriolic opinion--or you can just use this as inspiration for one GM's process for map-making and world-building. First, a reminder of the official map with which I started:</div>
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I love this map. It's characterful and has a great texture to it, and the cartography does a great job of evoking the hand-made qualities of ancient map-making. Tolkien-forgive-me, but I think I like looking at this map more than most of the original Middle Earth maps. At the same time, however, it's an incredibly game-y and contrived map. Maps traditionally fit as much detail as possible into a confined space, and the sort of large gaps that define the map above would normally be indicative of a wild, uncharted region. And in the lore of Myth, that doesn't quite jive. So I'm left with a map that is attractive and evocative, but that at the same time pulls me back and says it's a game map.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
When I sat down to change the world map, then, I wanted to ensure that there'd be a good and representative density to the map. If something was particularly bare, I wanted that bareness to say something about the setting. My tweak of the map was also going to be perfectly consistent: every civilized settlement of more than two thousand people would be on the map. This would assuage my anal-retentive GM obsessive compulsion, and it would mean that I could use the settlements on the map to estimate the population of the free world--very useful when your major antagonist is on a ten year plan to make it all burn. And finally, I wanted the map to be functional for journey-charting for the party. So this meant that as dense as I might make it, the map would still need to have enough space to mark it up.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Step one was figuring out the scale of the official Myth map. In <i>The Fallen Lords</i>, there's a quote that a runner from Willow traveled fourteen hundred miles to Rhi'anon. Of course, the quote might be dead reckoning or it might estimate the path the runner took. More useful, however, is another line that says Silvermines is one hundred miles away from Bagrada, the southernmost pass through the Cloudspine mountains. That let me scale the map and feel confident in slapping a scale key on it. Then, in determining how big the map would physically be, I wanted the map to be overlaid with a one-inch hex grid. Based on the width of the regions represented, I decided to make each hex 20 miles across. This would be an average day's travel, so for convenience the party might travel 1 hex per day.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The next major creative hurdle was filling in all the details. And that meant kicking up the number of named settlements on the map from about a dozen on the official map up to over 150 on the oh-my-gosh-how-long-does-Ben-plan-on-running-this-campaign map. First I had to add lots of small rivers and lakes to the map, though, because pre-industrial villages generally gravitate towards bodies of water. Yes, I really thought that far ahead. Once I had plunked down all the little land features however, I had a list of about 200 geographic sites waiting to be named. Poop. I hate being me. This is when a sane person would seek help and try to overcome their obsessive tendencies. But I just called it good GMing and started categorizing each feature by fictional ethnicity parallel. Yep, that simple. For instance, the Cath Bruig are the dominant human ethnicity in the setting. They have a number of character and place names gleaned from Celtic and Gaelic folklore, so I started pulling a list of other names I liked from there. I also happen to be madly in love with the Welsh language though, and it gives my inner sadist a GM-happy whenever I watch my players try to pronounce Welsh names, so I threw a ton of Welsh-inspired locations in the middle region of the map. The west was going to be a semi-independent former colony of the Cath Bruig, so I went the English route by bastardizing and crassifying the Bruig language to populate the Province. Yes, I meant to say crassifying. The northern tribes were straight-up Norse in their influence, and the easternmost kingdom of Gower was built around my wiki-knowledge of historical Turkish traditions. The dwarf kingdom and the forest kingdom of The Ermine required me to extrapolate my own language conventions based on what little we get in the official lore, in order to create a consistent standard.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Overall, it's a lot of work, and if you end up using it for your own games I'd love to hear that my GM lunacy saved you at least a little effort. So here's the long-previewed full resolution Myth map.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh63POqa5bzvbFzLBPMN5PhL03IqF2hnuqfYJqH1pJQUY-kBXggCKtClQOUBnLo2tGUVhLf7WMceO2DfYLQ35MZer_8mjEOXH6Z0myvVYd_oCeYOzWcq13YUG9wWUccdsS4hlEYsVlwxEc/s1600/BlogMythMap.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh63POqa5bzvbFzLBPMN5PhL03IqF2hnuqfYJqH1pJQUY-kBXggCKtClQOUBnLo2tGUVhLf7WMceO2DfYLQ35MZer_8mjEOXH6Z0myvVYd_oCeYOzWcq13YUG9wWUccdsS4hlEYsVlwxEc/s400/BlogMythMap.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnDCN5P7VeaG7QnjJ-Tz1U0jneg33fb6yEPMQh04kxVGo_eqjurc1B-Bs7boJw3My5ixlJ9LoH1-y7HaL3OqkfErvedaLn-4qiKy3NRQ66HQfsJVNrzHZmJZmLBZ5L6VeB9btNBaK71Ys/s1600/BlogMythMapHexed.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnDCN5P7VeaG7QnjJ-Tz1U0jneg33fb6yEPMQh04kxVGo_eqjurc1B-Bs7boJw3My5ixlJ9LoH1-y7HaL3OqkfErvedaLn-4qiKy3NRQ66HQfsJVNrzHZmJZmLBZ5L6VeB9btNBaK71Ys/s400/BlogMythMapHexed.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">With Hex Grid overlay added</td></tr>
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Note that I had kept this world map secret from my players until their characters bought a regional map at the first market town they came upon. This helped to reinforce the feudal ignorance I wanted to emphasize in my game, helped keep the players from feeling too overwhelmed, and made for a nice one-page print-up at full-resolution.</div>
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And yes, as I've reviewed the map for this post, it's dawned on me that I need to add more details here and there. I'm a sick, sick nerd.</div>
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<br />
UPDATE 7/31/2013: if the above images still aren't big enough for you, try this <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2aVttpKcywea1dPQ1h5V2RNcE0/edit?usp=sharing" target="_blank">link</a>.</div>
Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-30482257862248431212013-06-05T23:15:00.000-05:002013-06-05T23:15:45.245-05:00Child Cancer Patients Given 'Supercure'<br />
(Disclaimer: supercure might be advertising and/or chemotherapy)<br />
<br />
<em><strong>Stolen from the Editor's Desk:</strong> There are a lot of opinion columns, write-in articles, and advice editorials in the greater medium of the written word. Virtually none of these advisors are particularly qualified, either. There's nothing to stop them from giving bad advice. Except me. Stolen from the Editor's Desk involves me taking some sort of advice column and tearing it a new one, all for your sake. Bad advice, meet the nerdery.</em><br />
<br />
This "Stolen from the Editor's Desk" is a bit of a stretch, since this is in response to a proper news article. But at the same time it's well within the spirit of the series, so forgive the slight stretch in categorization.<br />
<br />
A children's cancer center in Sao Paolo, Brazil is taking a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/03/children-cancer-center-brazil-superheroes_n_3379428.html" target="_blank">novel approach</a> to helping kids cope with chemotherapy. The hospital staff is telling their young patients they're getting a "superformula" and emblazoning their chemotherapy supplies with Justice League character symbols.<br />
<br />
Warner Brothers' team-up with the Brazilian cancer center goes further than that. They're kitting out rooms of the hospital as superhero game-rooms with comic book decorations. Furthermore, they're penning a series of special comic book issues in which DC's title characters get cancer (or some similar ailment) and then go through their own version of chemotherapy, after which they promptly return to full crime-fighting health.<br />
<br />
Now, one of the key problems with treating long-term patients is morale. There is a measurable correlation between optimism and recovery outlook. That's why hospitals all over the world engage in different programs designed to cheer up their patients--whether it's individual volunteers or organizations like the Make-A-Wish foundation. For children fighting cancer, they have to cope with invasive, painful testing and medical treatment as part of chemotherapy, so for them maintaining a hopeful and determined perspective is especially important. I get that.<br />
<br />
But how do you treat those children in order to give them hope?<br />
<br />
Do you make them as comfortable as possible and try to equip them to deal with any outcome? Or do you tell them that if they cooperate and do the right thing, well...look how easy it was for Batman? It seems to me like there are better ways to make kids have fun with the process--why not give kids the opportunity to customize their chemotherapy kits, rather than giving them commercially-produced kits that bear the promise of a brand.<br />
<br />
And it's not like these superheroes are necessarily meaningful to the kids getting them. What if a kid asks for Captain America? Sorry, have Green Lantern--he's kind of a supersoldier. What's that little girl? Want a heroine who's not laden with a history of bondage imagery to encourage you to get better? How about Wonder Woman? Because all they have is the Justice League represented.<br />
<br />
Which leads into the creepiest thing about this scenario: this is a commercial deal (however charitable) between a company and a cancer center. It boils down to placing advertising in a place of healing for children that are not only suffering, but are more likely to be the focus of news reports regarding their condition. I imagine the cancer center probably opted for this deal out of a chance to get a free or cheap way to meet their patients' needs, and that's admirable. But isn't it telling that this news is an international story so quickly? And what's even more damning, in my opinion, is that the attached video announcing this deal is in English, and the Portuguese version of the video was posted almost a week later. That's right, the version most likely to be viewed around the world was made first, and only six days later did they post a version in the national language of Brazil itself. And who's producing these Youtube videos in question? JWT, the fourth-largest advertising agency in the world. This is a transaction as much as it is a proper act of charity.<br />
<br />
I'd like for this to be a Marvel vs DC issue, I really would. Not because I enjoy kicking DC when they're down--though sometimes I do--but because this is more an issue of the way these high-profile medical facilities' decisions get treated. Like when Penny Arcade strong-armed their Child's Play charity to reject donations from "Retake Mass Effect" because he disagreed with their message <i>about a video game</i>.<br />
<br />
I don't know, maybe this should be a Don't Be That Guy article. Don't use sick kids as marketing gimmicks.<br />
Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5448492922655779296.post-43591096549269016332013-06-04T21:14:00.000-05:002013-06-08T23:54:50.889-05:00Dream Game: Star CitizenToday's post has been a long time in coming. Like 22 years in coming. Accordingly, it's super long.<br />
<br />
A little while ago, I got to cross a big entry off my personal, nerdy bucket list. I got some actual stick time in a Mechwarrior Tesla Pod. Now it may be hard to appreciate why that was such a big life moment for me, so let me rewind things a bit. Say about, oh...two decades ago, more or less. When I was a lowly little five year-old with a whole nerdy life ahead of me.<br />
<br />
My mother wanted to move down to Houston, Texas, where my grandfather was "living" at the time. I say "living" because after spending a summer and a half in Houston, I've determined that no one actually lives in Houston. At least not in the summer. Instead, they melt and dip in and out of a constant state of humid, clammy heat stroke while shuffling from one climate-controlled environment to another. Living in Houston in the summer is kind of like living in a state of reverse cryogenic freezing: you're only alive and active when in confined, artificially cooled spaces; the rest of the time you're in a state of quasi-death. And that's forgetting the insane proliferation of cockroaches in the area--huge, impossibly numerous, and insidious. Houston cockroaches are like R-rated versions of the Rad Roaches from <i>Fallout</i>. In any case, my family decided to move down to Houston. Out of ignorance. And my mother and I moved down there in May 1990 to start looking for houses while my brother and father tried to wrap things up in Illinois.<br />
<br />
So the two of us moved into a small Houston apartment, and with no friends and only a handful of toys to play with, I immediately fell back on my favored tools of entertainment: pencil and paper. I up-ended a moving box and slid it against a wall in the corner, and then I began plastering images on my large, double-wide pad of drawing paper. The first drawing was a space battle, with X-wings detonating Tie fighters while Star Destroyers looked on helplessly. I taped that to the wall just above the cardboard box. I then sketched out the cockpit controls for an X-wing fighter, which I knew by memory (I vividly recall as a five-year-old considering every visit to the video store a tacit pledge to rent one of the <i>Star Wars</i> trilogy). The controls I taped down to the top of the moving box. Then, sitting in front of the wall, I piloted my hastily improvised space fighter into harrowing dogfights and epic space battles, hands holding an invisible control stick and pounding the scrawled out buttons in quick succession to realign my deflector screens and adjust my targeting computer. I'm pretty sure if someone would've walked into our apartment then, it would've looked like I was being punished--sitting in the corner, muttering to myself, and rocking back and forth--but I was having a blast. I grew up on <i>Star Wars</i> and old scratchy VHS recordings of <i>Battlestar Galactica</i>, and space battles have always kept me up at night.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>"Houston cockroaches are like R-rated versions of the Rad Roaches from Fallout."</i></span></div>
<br />
Another life support function in Houston was the arcade. In a region where the summer is full of weekly reports of heat stroke deaths, parents are rather less eager to pack their kids into plastic tubes in outdoor playgrounds, apparently. So everywhere we went in Houston we tripped over the most God-blessed bounty of video arcades I have ever known. Places like McDonald's substituted their playgrounds with attached arcades, and shopping malls had elaborate, sprawling video game arenas that compared to nothing else I've seen in my life except the ill-fated Disney Quest ten years later. Yes, Houston may have been the worst region to settle, in my opinion, but once there those Texans accidentally made themselves a nerd haven where you couldn't swing a stick without hitting a video game cabinet.<br />
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At the shopping mall my family went to, they had a massive arcade that featured a bank of eight <i>Mechwarrior</i> simulator cockpits that were the precursor to the Tesla Pods I've raved about in the past. They had surround sound, multiple monitors, and banks of sexy working buttons and control surfaces. I was in love. But my ten year-old brother, in a pique of superiority, informed me that it was way too expensive: a five minute match in the simulators would blow half of my arcade allowance. "And besides," he'd tell me in that big brother way, "you wouldn't know what to do with all those buttons and controls. It'd be a waste of money." But for my brother, apparently, it was right up the future pilot's alley, and the fifth-grade schmuck would proceed to hop into matches and whoop and holler and throw his Mad Cat mech into the thick of missile-firing fights and laser-burning bust-ups. He'd even had the audacity to occasionally pull some of my share of the arcade allowance to get in extra matches, and I was stupidly ensorcelled enough by the explosions and sci-fi gratification of watching from afar that I would usually let him.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i><span style="font-size: large;">"I'm pretty sure if someone would've walked into our apartment then, it
would've looked like I was being punished--sitting in the corner,
muttering to myself, and rocking back and forth--but I was having a
blast."</span></i> </div>
<br />
We didn't move to Houston. My family collectively bailed out on the humidity capital of the country after less than six months. But the glories of the Houston arcade scene and the dream of the simulator cockpit (also known as a simpit) have stuck with me ever since.<br />
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Which I'm sure you've guessed by now.<br />
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That was also the year that a certain game called <i>Wing Commander</i> came out. A space sim in which the player got to slip into the cockpit of a fighter and partake in interstellar wars, it was the ultimate boon to my fevered brain, letting me fire blasters and pull extravagant maneuvers to shake enemies off my six. The following year, <i>Wing Commander II</i> came out, and we played that one to death, too. And when I say we, I mean I would harangue my brother into booting up the game on our cyclopean* DOS machine and then I'd bumper-car my way through space until he'd get fed up and take over. Which was often necessary, because I could get Angel killed in the easiest of fur-balls. Not to mention I had a knack for blasting through missions by the skin of my teeth and missing all chances for extra objectives and commendations. It was great. And it lasted for just one more year before we converted to a Mac family and my gaming life shifted to real-time strategy games like <i>Warcraft</i> and, eventually, <i>Myth</i>. Even when <i>Wing Commander</i> got ported to Mac, I didn't get as into it. Maybe it was no longer being threatened by my brother for every botched Immelmann turn, or maybe it was that the game lost its mystique when it wasn't hidden behind an inscrutable DOS command line, but I didn't keep up with the rest of the series.<br />
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Years passed and I always looked back on <i>Wing Commander</i> fondly. My brother and I got into <i>Mechwarrior 2</i> and tossed around simpit ideas until he got fed up with my "strategy" of attacking his Atlas-class mechs with gnat-sized Elementals, which often resulted in five to ten minutes of me hovering around him, unable to cause any damage but impossible to hit with the mechanical titan. My brother joined the Air Force and relegated all our nerdy past-times to me while he went off and, y'know, flew actual planes. The <i>Wing Commander</i> movie came out, and I stubbornly still enjoy it no matter what the rest of the world says. Heck, I'm listening to its soundtrack right now. But there's been nothing like those years in the early 90s, when the <i>Mechwarrior</i> simpits and original <i>Wing Commander</i> games were freshly ingrained in my fantasies. Both genres declined--the first reduced itself to more and more shallow action games, and the latter faded away in the midst of game developer takeovers. Playing a worthy simpit game remained fixed on my bucket list, but it was such a dim hope I was barely conscious of it most of the time.<br />
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Then I got to play in the <a href="http://bensnerdery.blogspot.com/2012/10/almost-6-months-omgwtfbbq.html" target="_blank">Tesla Pods last year</a>, and reality didn't even remotely quench the nerd-fire that burned for simpits. It heightened its roar, and within days of that experience, I started in on ludicrous plans of building my own sci-fi simpit. I could start with a cockpit, and then maybe build off of that into having a simulated bridge for a capital ship--that'd be the ultimate family gaming experience, me barking out orders while managing damage control and ordering my son to launch a fighter and keep the bombers off us. Oh yes, that'd be sweet. I researched games that might fit these lofty ambitions, looking especially for ones that had good mod support so I could conceivably rework everything to fit my vision of space. There were a few that looked promising, but I passed on all of them for one reason or another. And then, most ridiculous of all, I began researching the idea of making my own game. Sure, it would be clunky and ugly as sin, but I could always make it look like a stylized icon system, right? It'd be just like the Command School from <i>Ender's Game</i>.<br />
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Not even my boundless enthusiasm could BS me for long, though. That was an insane idea that would never happen. I'd never make my own game, and no one was making the sort of game I wanted. Nothing was going to come along and justify the huge effort of building a simpit, and nothing would be worthy of it if I ever made one anyways. The space simulator genre was dead.<br />
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Then last fall brought with it a new dawn. A project popped up on Kickstarter called <i>Star Citizen</i>. It was the first game in ten years that Chris Roberts would be making.<br />
<br />
Chris Roberts.<br />
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His name had tickled my ears the first time I saw the Star Citizen campaign page, but I didn't realize what I was in for until I watched the KS video and virtually soiled my actual chair:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"They said I was dead. They said console was the future. Now they say mobile and tablets are the future. I say to you, the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. I am a PC game."<br />
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Waaah! Glory shot of the Bengal carrier.<br />
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"And I am a space sim."</blockquote>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/1M995Mqr67E?list=PLVct2QDhDrB09ddbZT0BorMqJMWAvJMfd" width="480"></iframe>
<br />
Oh, those first 30 seconds of that video grabbed me by my childhood fantasies and has not let go of me since. I can't watch it without getting excited. Chris Roberts was the creator of the <i>Wing Commander</i> franchise, and he was coming back to the game industry to make something gloriously ambitious. I pledged to the campaign immediately and followed the updates doggedly, as every new addition to the project's goals brought it closer to everything I've wanted from sci-fi gaming:<br />
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<b>Sprawling, fully-realized ship interiors.</b> Star Citizen is going to allow the player to explore larger ships, walking down the corridors and into the bridge of carriers and other capital ships. What's more, since the game is going to feature seamless transitions (ie, no load screens) from in-cockpit action to walking around your mother ship, the interiors of the ships are actually going to be consistent with the physical shape of the ship. Unlike the Normandy from <i>Mass Effect</i>, which is depicted as physically smaller and the wrong shape to accommodate the interior spaces you explore in the course of the game.<br />
<br />
<b>Out-of-cockpit gameplay.</b> In addition to being able to simply walk around and idly explore in the innards of your big ships, <i>Star Citizen</i> is going to include a shooter-like experience for boarding actions. This integration and mingling of the two genres is going to be inspired, as you know I kept wishing for some space-combat crossover in the <i>Mass Effect</i> series and never got it. Now <i>Star Citizen</i> promises to give capital ship action, fighter brawls, and man-to-man gunfights in tight-packed ship corridors. It's like Chris Roberts has a checklist of my favorite recurring dreams. If there are cute redheaded witches, bottomless tubs full of spiders, and machine zombie hordes, it'll be official--he's ripping off my REM cycle.<br />
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<b>A vast forking campaign based on performance and decisions.</b> Long before Bioware ever gave you a non-choice at the end of an epic game, the <i>Wing Commander</i> series had them licked with a campaign that featured meaningfully divergent endings. Endings were based on direct plot choices and mission performance, so just barely clearing your mission objectives as opposed to wiping the board completely might change what your resolution was. They're going to be bringing that legacy back for Star Citizen, and since they've announced 50 missions for the main campaign of <i>Star Citizen</i> (called Squadron 42), I wouldn't be surprised if some of those missions were mutually exclusive based on what path you take your pilot through the plot. Tasty.<br />
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<b>Persistent universe.</b> The most exciting and lauded aspect of the game is Star Citizen's ongoing online experience. A variation of an MMO, Star Citizen proposes to let players shape a dynamic economy and play the game the way they want to play it. If that involves mining, trading, and exploring more than direct combat, that's cool with them. And that's very cool with me. I'm always a fan of games that let you go off the rails, even if I find myself not wanting to do so.<br />
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<b>Playable capital ships.</b> This was a later stretch goal met in the incredibly successful pledge campaign, and it promises to allow players to potentially gain control of ships as large as their mile-long carrier ships in the final version of the game. This goes hand in hand with cooperative and social play, as even some of their smaller ships are said to be nerfed if you don't have meat in all the crew seats. The 4-man Constellation ship, for instance, will feature two manned turrets and a detachable short-range fighter (a la the Serenity's two shuttles) in addition to the ship's pilot. Beyond that, you'd be looking at dedicated guilds needed just to get the most out of destroyer, cruiser, or carrier-class ship.<br />
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<b>Mod support.</b> With how great the core game is shaping up to be, and how visceral and engaging, I feel like this feature is almost perfunctory. But then I think about trying to model a full-scale battlestar in <i>Star Citizen</i> and scramble out in a viper (mk II, of course) to scrap a toaster onslaught. Ooookay...maybe I do still want mod support. And since they're talking about using that as a way to test the feasibility of fan-created additions to the game, I can definitely see me spending a lot of time turning some of my rough designs into something fully realized for this game.<br />
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<b>Support for multiple monitors and multi-function displays (MFDs), TrackIR, and advanced controllers.</b> And there it is. Star Citizen is going to support the ultimate simpit gaming rig with this simple promise. You want a three monitor display wrapping in front of you? Okay. How about a dedicated screen for your sensors? Sure. Joysticks, throttles, keyboards, and gamepads? Whoa whoa whoa now--you're a little nuts, aren't ya? That my friends, is a game that isn't simply worthy of the simpit I've been dreaming of these past 22 years--it demands one. Never mind that I'm a more artistic, fine detail sort of builder with minimal wood-working experience. Never mind that I've never wired anything like this before. Never mind that I will building the first PC of my very own from scratch to form the heart of the ultimate gaming rig (that I can afford). It is going to happen. It must happen. So let it be written; so let it be done.<br />
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Cloud Imperium Games is collectively working on realizing my dream game and the dream of tens of thousands of gamers all over the world. It's safe to say I'm going to be blogging more about the different aspects of this game in the future. I've already posted at least one article's worth on the subject of space mining in <i>Star Citizen</i> on the website's forums. I'll also be chronicling my progress as I work on my simpit and related projects for this game, so don't worry: I didn't run out of words with this article.<br />
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More's the pity, right?<br />
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<i>*Seriously, Google spellcheck? You don't know the word 'cyclopean'?!?</i>Ben Varahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04622895885317833390noreply@blogger.com1