Monster Hunter Generations

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There is no replacing the feeling of the first time a Monster Hunter Game clicks. I dabbled slightly in the PSP games and Tri for the Wii, but Monster Hunter didn’t really come together for me until I played Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate. That game enthralled me. Then came Monster Hunter 4U, which was objectively better in numerous small ways. I still liked it, but it didn’t quite have that same thrill of discovery that MH3U had. When Monster Hunter Generations came out, I thought up a way to get that feeling back. I played the previous two games using the Hammer as my primary weapon. With MHG, I would make the experience fresh by not using my go to weapon. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

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Though the game is in many ways a backwards facing anniversary title, Capcom actually changed things up more than it initially seems with Generations. There are only a handful of new monsters, I believe there are exactly seven new beasts, and the graphics are all but indistinguishable from MH4U, but the combat has gotten a significant, for this series at least, facelift. The new wrinkles here are Hunter Arts and Styles. It keeps 4’s mounting, the ability to leap onto a monster’s back and inflict significant damage, and one of its four Hunter Styles exists just to facilitate mounting. There is also a style that is mostly the same as the old way of playing, one that gets extra Arts and one that rewards precise evasion. The Arts are mostly flashy new moves to supplement the usual array of combat techniques available to the player. While the game doesn’t really lose the deliberate pace of combat from previous games, the arts make things more flashy and video gamey. That is a terrible description, but I don’t know how else to describe it. For all the ridiculous weaponry of this series, it had an internal realism. You might be able to swing around a sword larger than your character, but you couldn’t shoot into the air like a rocket or perform a shoryuken. The Hunter Arts don’t break things, but they do push the series a little further than it had gone before.

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My goal going into Generations was to not use the Hammer. I had stuck primarily to that weapon in the two previous Monster Hunter games and I hoped that changing my weapon would help freshen up the experience. The different weapons in Monster Hunter play differently enough that changing them almost makes it feel like playing a whole new game. Unfortunately for me, I really only like the version of the game that involves bashing dinosaurs in the face with a giant maul. I did try to use other weapons this time, which I think is why this game didn’t initially click for me.

First I tried the lance. I love the lance in theory; it makes me feel like my character is a straight up Medieval Knight. The lance is also slow and cumbersome and defensive. It is basically the opposite of my beloved hammer. A few fights against easy monsters quickly showed me that neither the lance, nor its sibling the gunlance, was the weapon for me. Next was the long sword, which was a suitably aggressive weapon, but it ended up feeling too fiddly. It lacks the straightforward elegance of the hammer. The next pair of weapons I tried were the ones that worked best. The trusty sword and shield, while somewhat boring, are perfectly fine weapons. They were my go to when I absolutely needed to sever a tail in previous games. They are easy to use and are very adaptable, especially with the new oils that can be applied to the sword that gives it special properties. I also got some mileage out of the Charge Blade. Honestly, I think that is the weapon I should have spent more time with, but it takes time to learn a new weapon and I was tired of wasting my time at this point.

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In the end, I switched back to the Hammer and everything fell into place. That is the weapon for me. In the future I may dabble with a handful of other weapons. I like to use bowguns in multiplayer, the Hunting Horn is close enough that I really should learn it and sometimes you just need to cut off a tail. However, I don’t think I’ll ever attempt to make anything but the hammer my primary weapon going forward.

Monster Hunter Generations is just more Monster Hunter. The game’s fresher fighting isn’t really much different from what it was before and everything else in this game is intentionally a call back to another game in the series, which is a decade old at this point. If/when Generations U (called Double X in Japan since Generations was X) comes over here I may or may not pick it up, but I will definitely be right there when the inevitable Monster Hunter 5 shows up. This series is one of the few reliable joys in the current gaming landscape that doesn’t come courtesy of Nintendo.

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Live By Night Review

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Live By Night doesn’t really work. It has a lot of good or interesting performances and some really well done scenes, but it doesn’t come together as a cohesive story by the end of it. It wants to be a gangster epic, but in all of its sprawling detail, going from Boston to Tampa and covering a couple decades it struggles to tell a coherent story. Still, there is a lot here to like even if the end result is less than the sum of its parts.

Ben Affleck directs and stars as Joe Coughlin, a WWI vet and son of a Boston Police bigwig who came back from the war disillusioned and became a small time stick-up man. His desire to avoid getting caught up with the real gangsters ends when he starts dating Emma, the boss’s moll. After a bank job goes awry, Joe is caught by both the boss and the police and serves a few years in prison, while Emma is killed in a car accident. After Joe gets out of prison, he follows the boss to Florida to get revenge by ruining his rum running business. From there the movie goes all over the place, with Joe meeting a new love in a Cuban expat (Zoe Saldana), dealing with the KKK, religious groups and interference from his Boston boss. At no point does it acquire anything that could be called narrative momentum.

The biggest problem the movie has is Joe. It isn’t Affleck’s performance, which is solid; it is that there really isn’t a character there. He doesn’t want to be a gangster, until he does. He wants revenge, until he doesn’t. He wants to build a bootlegging empire. Or a casino. Or nothing. He is a void at the center of the movie that he is supposed to be driving. The movie keeps moving, letting Joe interact with a lot of characters, but it never really amounts to anything.

Still, there is a lot of strong stuff here. Joe dealing with the KKK and the Church are interesting because they are not groups built like the gangster businesses he is used to dealing with. He can’t buy off people whose motive is unthinking hate. Or any true believers. He tries to make a deal with the religious leader, only to find that they won’t budge. That pair of encounters does the most to show the kind of man that Joe Coughlin is. When confronted with the hatred of the KKK, he eventually goes to murderous lengths to deal with them. When confronted by the Church he refuses to take that step. He wants to keep thinking of himself as a good man, even as he does bad things. He has lines that he won’t cross, even if they lead to his undoing.

The movie is at its best when Joe is doing his bootlegging work with his number 2 man Dion. They have these sarcastic little side conversations that other characters can hear that add a lot of life to things. The highlight might be the two of them tracking the origin of a stray bullet that hit Joe during a shoot-out. Was it fired by their foe or was an accident by Dion? That stuff works better than the turgid musing on what makes a good man that is never fleshed out enough to really matter.

There are a lot of things to complain about with Live By Night. It is overlong, scattershot and while the setting looks good it doesn’t look lived in at all. South Florida should look warmer than that, especially to a couple of boys from Boston. It has a lot of good actors – Brendan Gleeson, Sienna Miller, Elle Fanning, Zoe Saldana, Chris Cooper, Chris Messina – given very little to do in roles that should have amounted to more. Still, the individual pieces and scenes assembled here are worth watching, though it reeks of a real missed opportunity.

***1/2

River City Tokyo Rumble

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I love River City Ransom. It is my #2 favorite game of all-time. When I heard that one of those recent Japan-only follow ups was actually going to make it across the pond, I got pretty excited, especially when I saw that it was sticking with the classic NES look. Bad timing, a small print run and my reticence to drop $30 on a digital title led to the game passing me by early this fall. I was more than happy to find it under the tree at Christmas, though. That this game looks and plays so much like that NES classic is reason to be a little leery of my opinion of it. This is a game made to press my nostalgia buttons.

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River City Tokyo Rumble manages to be both a follow up to the game Americans actually like, River City Ransom, while not completely ignoring the crappy game that gave the series its start, Renegade. Last year I played through Shin Nekketsu Koho: Kunio-tachi No Banka which was enjoyable in a lot of ways, but was also clearly more of a follow up to Renegade than River City Ransom. River City Tokyo Rumble is very much in the same vein as River City Ransom. There are town areas, shops, RPG-elements and free smiles. While the game plays like a sequel to River City Ransom, the story is very much a sequel to Renegade. It starts with Kunio’s buddy getting beaten up in the parking lot and the characters that join Kunio are ones that were bosses in Renegade but didn’t appear in River City Ransom. While that does keep the game from perfectly hitting the nostalgia like it could have, but it also makes it feel somewhat fresh and new for those that rightly don’t much enjoy Renegade.

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There are some changes from the River City Ransom formula and most of them are sideways steps rather than strict improvements. Gone is getting stat increases from food, instead there is an experience system. It works, but it makes the restaurants and shops less important or interesting. They only refill health and willpower. Useful, to be sure, but not as important as improving stats. Players can now accumulate all of the special attack scrolls they can get their hands on without being limited to how many can be equipped. The map opens up slowly, but it is now broken up into freely visit able, once unlocked, areas instead of one big map. Each area is small enough that is hurts the game sense of progression, since the only difference between areas are the enemies in them. It is reminiscent enough of River City Ransom to delight that way, but different enough to not just feel like a cash in.

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Some of those differences add quite a bit to the game. Once change is a new system of odd jobs the player can take on. Most of them are pretty mundane, go to a certain place or beat a certain enemy, but it is more than enough incentive to keep the player running around the game’s world. Then there is the gradual accumulation of moves, which far outstrips those available in the NES game. By the end of this game Kunio is an unstoppable death cyclone. It also adds a few difference partner characters, with Shinji and Misuzu in addition to the usual Riki. The new leveling system works against that, though, since they each have to be leveled up with the player and soon fall far behind Kunio.

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While it is a far from perfect, River City Tokyo Rumble feels a lot like the Mega Man 9 to River City Ransom’s Mega Man 2. It isn’t as perfect a recreation of the old aesthetic as MM9, it evokes a similar feeling of playing a game just like the games you used to play. The changes to the system, the humorous off beat odd jobs and a story that goes real big by the end makes the game feel even more like a 2D take on the Yakuza series. I’ve always felt River City Ransom and Yakuza shared a lot despite originating nearly 20 years apart and this game doesn’t dissuade me of that notion. And while I am usually not one to complain about price, despite the addition of a dodgeball mode this game feels awful slight for the full $30 price tag. Still, for fans of old school brawlers and River City Ransom in particular, River City Tokyo Rumble is well worth playing.

Movies to Watch Early 2017

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It is a new year, so it is a good time to look at what movies coming up over the next few months look checking out. I’ve had to widen that scope to fill up enough space to actually make this worthwhile as movies like The Dark Tower have been moved to later in the year. Still, there are a handful of intriguing titles on deck over the first third of 2017 that should provide ample reason the head to the movies.

January

Underworld: Blood Wars – The year gets started with this fifth (!) entry in the Underworld series. As great as Kate Beckinsale is, I have never found these movies to be anything dull, turgid messes. I am not especially interested in seeing this.

Live By Night – Ben Affleck directs this movie set during Prohibition. His previous directorial efforts have been very good, so I am hopeful about this one. Plus, I am always a sucker for that between the World Wars setting, so this looks right up my alley. I know this was technically released at Christmas, but it isn’t getting wide release until early January.

xXx: The Return of Xander Cage – The first xXx was pure nonsense in a (somewhat) good way, something of an extreme James Bond sort of way. The trailer for this looks stupid, but the kind of stupid that can be entertaining.

Resident Evil: The Final Chapter – I put this series as kind of a spiritual sister series to Underworld, both being horror themed action movies and also both being terrible. Still, as terrible as they are, the Resident Evil movies could maybe claim to be the best video game movies. The subtitle claims that this is the last movie in the series and I certainly hope so.

February

Lego Batman – Batman is great, the Lego Movie was great. This looks like it could also be great. The trailers, which are numerous, have been funny so far. I am really hopeful that this turns out well.

John Wick Chapter 2 – It looks bad ass. The first movie as good and this looks to be more of the same in a very good way.

The Great Wall – Mat Damon is great and I’ve enjoyed several Zhang Yimou movies. I hope it has plenty of wuxia style action and not just the usual CGI monsterfest. I don’t know that I am precisely excited for this, but I am definitely interested in seeing it.

March

Logan – Maybe the third and final Wolverine solo movie will finally get everything right. X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a goddamn mess, but The Wolverine was mostly pretty good, even if it couldn’t stick the landing. This one is based off of one of my least favorite Wolverine stories, but it did have a great trailer. Plus, it is supposedly the last time Jackman will play the character, so I am definitely going to see it.

Kong of Skull Island – I hesitate to get well and truly excited for this movie, but I really like the trailer and I love the cast. Also, I love monsters and King Kong in general. I’ve got my fingers crossed and haven’t seen anything yet to make me doubt my excitement.

Beauty & The Beast – I haven’t been a huge fan of Disney’s animated to live action conversions, but I do love Emma Watson. Also, Beauty and the Beast is Disney’s best animated movie, maybe this version will be similarly excellent.

Power Rangers – Misplaced youthful affection for Power Rangers was just enough to get me through the miserable trailer. This looks like another Fantastic 4 situation, but sometimes you really feel the need to watch the train accident.

Ghost in the Shell – This is another one kind of like The Great Wall, with its controversial casting of a white performer in an otherwise Asian movie, but while I don’t disagree with those complaining about that, I still want to see both movies. I really liked the Stand Alone Complex anime series and I liked the trailer. Here’s hoping this turns out.

April

The Fate of the Furious – While the rest of April looks barren, the next Fast & Furious movie is almost enough to sustain a month by itself. While I doubt that the series can return to the heights of Fast 5, this looks more than good.

Did I miss anything? I know I passed by some comedies that might be promising because I know I won’t end up seeing them. While the spring looks kind of sparse, next summer should be jam packed if everything currently scheduled actually hits cinemas. There are some good looking superhero movies coming up and a new Edgar Wright movie to look forward to in 2017, along with several updates of classic sci fi movies and a few new ones. I hope people who are more in the know can lead me to the legitimately good movies instead of just the promising genre stuff that I am tuned in to.

Yakuza 5

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I don’t think I’ve written about my love for the Yakuza series much. And I do love it, though it is unlike other games I tend to enjoy or write about here. I have been a fan of the series ever since I picked up the original game way back in 2008 or so. I was initially put off, having read bad reviews, likely from that rag Game Informer, but as the second game was nearing release, I picked up the first game used and has a blast with it. It felt like the distant descendant of River City Ransom, with an RPG’s attention paid to the story. While I wasn’t able to find a copy of the sequel, I did nab Yakuza 3 & 4 when I got a PS3. I only finished the fourth game a little more than a year ago, just before Yakuza 5 finally hit. I purchased and downloaded it right away, but put off playing it for a while since I had just spent so much time with Yakuza 4. I’m glad I did, because Yakuza 5 is probably the best game in the series and it deserves to be played fresh.

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Like its predecessor, Yakuza 5 splits the game into chapters, each with a different protagonist. Each of these chapters could be their own game, though those games would be a little short. It starts with Kazuma Kiryu, the series longtime protagonist, while Shun Akiyama and Taiga Saejima make return appearances. While there is no sign of Tanimura, Yakuza 4’s fourth protagonist, he is replaced by Tatsuo Shinada. Also, for the first time in the series Kazuma’s adopted niece/daughter/ward Haruka Sawamura is playable. Each of these chapters has its own setting, storyline, and tone. Yes, they eventually connect, but they also stand on their own right up until their conclusions. Kiryu’s chapter is a very much a traditional Yakuza game, with a city to explore and lots of thugs to fight. Saejima’s chapter features another prison break for him, as well as an extended stay in the mountains. The third chapter is a curve ball, starring Haruka as she gets her start as a pop star. All of the fighting is replaced with dance battles and rhythm game musical numbers. At least, they are until the president of her talent agency turns up dead and in debt to genial lender Akiyama. From there the two split the chapter as they try to win a singing competition and get to the bottom of a murder mystery. The last chapter is back to Yakuza business as usual, but this time with a character completely unfamiliar with the criminal underworld. While their stories are separate, they all lead to the same place, with one mastermind behind the whole thing.

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The most amazing thing about Yakuza 5 is how varied the gameplay is and how satisfying everything it. I have long criticized a lot of open world games, like GTA, for offering the player thousands of things to do, except none of them are fun. While not everything available to player to do in Yakuza 5 is fun or remotely worth doing, the bulk of the central modes are enjoyable. Kiryu starts the game with a job as a taxi driver, and his racing and driving missions are surprisingly fun. That same goes for Haruka’s rhythm games and Shinada’s adventures in the batting cages. The standout is the hunting minigame with Saejima. There you take to the snowy mountains with just a gun and a small pack to hunt bears, as well as host of other woodland creatures. All of these things are different from the main brawling gameplay, but all of them are also worthwhile in their own right. The pool minigame isn’t half bad either, nor is the golf, though you can safely avoid the slot machines.

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The Yakuza series doesn’t seem like the sort of thing I would like. It is a very violent game. Overtly, obscenely, unnecessarily violent. But that violence tends to stop short of killing. This is not a murder simulator. The dudes you pummel in the streets might not realistically survive the beatings they get put through, but the game dutifully shows them alive, if aching, after every fight. That goes a long way for me. Even though this is a game about criminals, taking a life is not something even they take lightly. It is a game that strikes a tone similar to Metal Gear Solid. That series can ponder the nature of loyalty while at the same time have Snake track down hidden cartoon monkeys in the forest. This is a game where the protagonists can get caught up in all sorts of silliness, like a man getting into multiple fist fights with a bear, but still features long cutscenes where the characters ruminate on what it means to be a man and how to go about keeping their manly honor.

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The tragedy of the Yakuza series is that Kiryu will always be the star, even though it would likely be better for him if he weren’t. By the third game in the series he has retired to Okinawa to run an orphanage, but in each game since he gets drawn back into the action. In the last game worthy successors were created in Saejima and Akiyama, but fans would revolt if Kiryu weren’t in it. Even in the game world he is such a legend that he is deliberately pulled into the action so a character can prove themselves by beating him (they can’t). The trio of non-Kiryu fighters in this game would be more than enough for the game on their own. Akiyama is a personal favorite of mine, with his lackadaisical approach to life, but his deathly serious take on his job. Shinada’s story is the most disconnected from the rest of the game, but it is also the most satisfying. He is a former professional baseball player who was framed for cheating and banned from the sport. More than a decade later he is prompted to investigate the conspiracy that got him banned for life. He is joined by the apparently unscrupulous loan shark Takasugi. While the normally carefree Shinada is forced to confront some darkness he had ignored, Takasugi proves to me much more soft-hearted than he initially appeared. It is an altogether satisfying little story. However enjoyable the other stories may be, the heart of the game is the relationship between Kiryu and Haruka. He gives everything up to let her live her dream, but by the end she realizes that her dream, which began as a way to provide for her surrogate family, will prevent her from being with them.

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Yakuza 5 is a jambalaya of a video game. Everything is thrown into the pot and the flavors meld perfectly. The tone ranges from silly to somber, from awesome to heartbreaking. I have enjoyed each and every game I’ve played in this series, but I don’t think any of them are quite as good as Yakuza 5 is. It is too bad I’ll never get to play the Japan only spin off, but at least we can look forward to Yakuza 0, Yakuza 6 and Yakuza Kiwami over the next year or so. That is almost enough to finally get me to spring for a PS4.

What I Read in December 2016

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Four books in December, with a couple left half read. If you include the comic collections I read I got to my goal of 55 books in 2016. It was a near thing, though. In 2017 I am upping my goal to 60 books, a little over one book a week. I think I can manage it. I’m off to a good start so far. It was an odd smattering of books I read in December. I didn’t intend it to be so, but the month turned into a Wimsey heavy month. I had one book on my Kindle forever and another I found for a buck while doing some Christmas shopping and couldn’t resist picking it up.

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Lost in a Good Book

Jasper Fforde

I decided to reread the second book in Fforde’s excellent Thursday Next series. I have read the first one, The Eyre Affair, three or four times, but I haven’t really reread any of the later volumes. I had forgotten how slowly Fforde rolls out his book world. The idea of jumping into books is central to The Eyre Affair, but the rules aren’t really explained in that one. Fforde set himself a difficult task by creating two different alternate realities in this series, with the strange world inside of books being set against the strange world outside of the books. Which is itself the world inside of a book, since these are books. So not only does the reader have to contend with a world where fictional characters live lives outside the confines of the stories we read about them in, but also a world where cloning is advanced and the Crimean War continued for a century. So it makes sense that he was slow to roll out the book stuff, never giving the reader more than was necessary for any given story.

Lost in a Good Book has Fforde painfully destroying the happy ending he built for Thursday in the last book. It doesn’t come off as backtracking, though, but in the story just continuing. She beat Jack Schitt in the first book, but Goliath Corporation is still around and wouldn’t be finished with her. The events of this book build out of those of the last without simply repeating them, like all good sequels do. While this book does tear apart Thursday’s “real” life, it gives her an outlet in BookWorld, where literature lovers get to see famous characters in a different light, though they are still informed by their original stories. I love the Thursday Next books, and will likely reread the rest of the series in the coming year, but I find them hard to recommend. I don’t know many people who have read enough classic literature to get a lot out of these. It is not that works Fforde plays with are obscure – it is mostly Dickens, various Brontes and Shakespeare – but nearly all of them are the stuff people I know were forced to read in high school and never thought of again.

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Hangman’s Holiday

Dorothy Sayers

This collection of short stories is billed as a Lord Peter Wimsey book, but most of the book’s takes do not feature him. The bulk of the stories are Montague Egg stories. That doesn’t make them bad; most of these are quite good. Sayers indulges in some macabre plots that maybe wouldn’t work over a full novel. Some are almost just absurdly dark jokes. Still, these are some well executed mysteries. The most memorable are one where a joke goes too far and a terrified man murders the innocent joking tormentor and one where a doctor husband perpetrates unspeakable crimes on his ill wife. Also one that has to do with mass feline murder. Still, if you are reading this volume expecting Peter Wimsey I think you will be somewhat disappointed, since even in his stories he isn’t all that present.

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A Presumption of Death

Jill Patton Walsh/Dorothy Sayers

It will seem odd in light of my slight grumbles about the previous book, but I quite liked this Wimsey continuation from Patton Walsh even though Lord Peter himself barely appears in the book. I think this book flows more naturally than Thrones, Dominations, likely because it is all Patton Walsh’s work and not her finishing an unfinished Sayers manuscript. That book, while mostly very good, had an uneven quality to it. This one is more cohesive. It does use Sayers’ Wimsey Papers, a fictional series of wartime letters between the characters of the Wimsey series, at the front and back, but those operate as separate pieces from the rest of the story.

A Presumption of Death has Lord Peter’s wife, Harriet Vane, step into his role as amateur sleuth while he is out of the country doing intelligence work in the early days of WWII. She has relocated from London to their home in the country, taking both her children and those of Lord Peter’s sister. With everyone doing what they can for the war effort, the local police are shorthanded when a woman turns up murdered during an air raid drill. Since it will be easier for another woman to look into some aspects of the victim’s life, Harriet is recruited to aid in the investigation. This leads to her question land girls, city girl moved to the country to help farm, as well as the pilots at a nearby military base.

The only real problem with this mystery is that the mystery itself frequently takes a backseat to the daily struggles of the war effort. The characters spend more time dealing with wartime considerations, including an uncomfortable look at the succession to the Wimsey title, than they do investigating the mystery. That is a problem with expectations, though. That this book is as much about that war effort and its effects on several families as it is about a murder mystery is not a problem with the books, but a problem with the readers’ expectations. I found it engrossing and a fast read, though I wish it could have got to the point with the mystery a little faster. It seems all but solved fairly early, but is disregarded for quite some time as other stories play out first. Still, I enjoyed it.

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Mornings on Horseback

David McCollough

This is partly a look at the early life of Theodore Roosevelt and partly an examination of his family. The eventual president is the central character of the book, but Mornings on Horseback exists to illuminate the home life that young Theodore would have had. How his parents met and came to marry, his father New York royalty and his mother the daughter of southern plantation owners. McCollough does a great job of making the Roosevelt family come alive, so Teedie doesn’t overshadow his other family members. Like the stolid, elder Theodore cuts an imposing, though generous picture as a man who is committed to his family and charity or the eldest child Bamie, whose health problems mad he seem to always strive to be useful to the family.

While their financial fortunes never really wavered, at least not through the portion of their lives this book covers, is does show the ups and downs they faced. All four of the Roosevelt children had some health problems growing up and their parents spared no expense in their care. That also meant that they never attended traditional schools. Or the household tensions during the Civil War, with the children’s Uncles on their Mother’s side being Confederate heroes but their staunchly abolitionist father not serving. Last it gets into Theodore’s days in the West, with him leaving New York after his wife and mother died on the same day. There is a lot to chew on in the relatively slim tome that goes a long way to helping the reader understand the make-up of Theodore Roosevelt and the family he came from.

Now Playing December 2016

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Beaten/Abandoned

Pokémon Moon – read post here.

Shantae: Half Genie Hero – read post here.

Mighty No. 9 – read post here.

Yakuza 5 – read post here.

DoReMi Fantasy – Read post here.

Never Alone –

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It makes me feel bad, but I didn’t like this game. It is a game that clearly had a lot of effort put into it and it is exactly the kind of game I tend to enjoy. It is a story heavy puzzle platform game. It goes to great length to get details of the Inupiaq folk tale right and is filled with great details. However, the gameplay is floaty and imprecise. Maybe it is just the WiiU version, but I encountered numerous bugs and glitches. I got stuck right at the end because the game simply didn’t work right until I shit it off and started it over again. When things work right, the game is solidly satisfying, though still unspectacular, but too often it didn’t.

Uncharted Waters: New Horizons – I’ve got a slightly longer post about this game coming up, but I am abandoning it. Not that it isn’t a solid game, because it is, but because it is drowning me in complexity. I have played it long enough that I have a feel for how the game works, so I will write it up, but I feel like I could play this game for another 30 or 40 hours before feeling finished with it.

Ongoing

Secret of Evermore – I’ve passed the point when this game is a delightful romp and into the part where it becomes a slog. The spell system is the biggest offender. Needing to level up spells, like in Secret of Mana, was bad enough. Now those spells are also limited in number of charges available by spell ingredients. So you have to go find ingredients to cast the spells to level them up so they are useful, then go get more ingredients so you can actually cast the spells against current enemies. The whole rigmarole is sapping all of the goodwill the game built up in the first half dozen or so hours.

Pokémon Picross – Free to play, but I’ve cleared the portion of the game that is actually free. Picross in general is great and this version is highly enjoyable. Enjoyable enough that I am thinking of dropping the $5 bucks or so that would keep me playing for another dozen hours or so. Really, this is a full-fledged release that Nintendo with a disguised demo. Also, kudos to Nintendo to limit the amount of money someone could spend on this game to $30, the cost of a retail 3DS game. I don’t intend to put that much money into it, but the addictive nature of picross puzzles has me wanting to unlock another few dozen or so more stages. Good thing Nintendo hasn’t left players short of picross options.

Runbow –

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This game is a delight. I’ve only cleared about a dozen of this games many bite-sized stages, but that has been enough to make me a big fan. It takes on central mechanic, with color changing backgrounds and platforms that disappear when the background changes and combines with a ton of small, specific challenges. Sometimes the world flips upside down, sometimes there are spikey enemies. They are just the right length to keep players trying out just one more until the next thing you know you’ve been playing for three hours. I will definitely be playing as much of this as I can.

Elliot Quest – I got back into this game when I was trying to finish up some download games that had built up on my WiiU. It is still Zelda 2 done right, but getting back into it after leaving it sit for a few months is rather difficult. Right now I am lost after finishing a fairly long dungeon, but it is a satisfying kind of being lost, not a frustrating one. It remains a charming little game.

Monster Hunter Generations – I wasn’t enjoying this game so much when it first came out. After another dozen or so hours I realized the problem wasn’t the rather significant changes to the game’s combat, but that I was forcing myself to use weapons like the Gunlance and the Sword and Shield and not falling into using my natural love: the Hammer. I’ve tried all available options, but Monster Hunter only feels right to me when I am smacking dragons in the face with a chuck of boulder on a stick.

SMT 4: Apocalypse –

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Ten hours was enough for me to realize that while this game may be very good, it is just not what I want to play right now. SMT 4 was great and Apocalypse makes some subtle improvements to its systems that make things just slightly easier to play. The story is not an improvement, but so far it hasn’t been a detriment. It is rather dark and oppressive and I am in the mood for something more upbeat right now. I’ll get back to this before too long, but it is going on the backburner for now.

Upcoming

River City Tokyo Rumble – Christmas game 1. I was pretty pumped for this before it came out, but when I missed the opportunity to get it with the keychain I put it on the back-burner. The few minutes I tried out after my brothers got it for me for Christmas were really promising. I love River City Ransom and this looks to be the Mega Man 9 to that game’s Mega Man 2.

Paper Mario Color Splash – Christmas game 2. One of the few WiiU releases I missed out on, but I am really glad I’ve got it now. Unlike seemingly everyone else on the internet I liked Paper Mario Sticker Star. It wasn’t the game Thousand Year Door fans wanted, but I felt it succeeded on its own terms. This looks to improve on that.

Robotrek/Lufia 2 – I am still planning on finishing last year’s 25 Years of SNES project and these two are on the docket after I finally finish with Secret of Evermore.

Remember Me – I got this a few years ago with Playstation Plus and enjoyed the first few chapters. Then I let my Plus membership lapse. Recently I purchased the game in a Humble Bundle and I think I’m going to finish it up. I’ve heard a lot of great things about Dontnod’s other game, Life is Strange, but I don’t see a reason to buy that game when I’ve already got this on the play.

What I Watched in December 2016

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It should be noted that this week’s posts were written under the influence of strong sinus medication. So forgive me if I just trail off in the middle of a

Movies

Allied – see review here. ****

30 For 30 Catholics vs Convicts – Another solid 30 for 30 effort, this one looking into the rivalry between Notre Dame and the University of Miami. It touches on a lot of things, from the racism inherent in the Catholics vs Convicts moniker to the landscape of branded apparel at the time that made it possible for a student to print up the t-shirts from the title. Like most of these movies, it is a very enjoyable look at a brief window of sports history. ****

Kung Fu Panda 3 – Not bad, not bad at all. This movie doesn’t do anything with the movies larger cast, but Bryan Cranston as Po’s long lost father was a lot of fun. The storyline doesn’t break any new ground, but it is mostly enjoyable. Other than a few impressive flat colored sequences, there isn’t anything great about this movie, but it is largely enjoyable. ***1/2

Angry Birds – What a miserable excuse of a movie. There were a lot of good animated movies this year and Angry Birds was not one of them. It isn’t funny, it doesn’t look good and its message – almost certainly accidental – is gross. Don’t watch this. *1/2

True Memoirs of an International Assassin – This isn’t quite as bad as one would guess. It’s not good, but it’s also not as lazy as a Happy Madison Production. There are sporadic laughs and the glimmer of a good idea here. None of that comes together in any sort of satisfying way, but at least it seems like people put effort into it. **

Tai Chi Master – This is a good time. Jet Li plays a disgraced Shaolin monk whose friend betrays him in a never ending quest for power. It isn’t the best kung fu movie I’ve watched, but Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh are great as always. ***

Man of Tai Chi – Keanu Reeves directs this movie about a kid who gets pulled into a dangerous underground fighting league. Reeves plays the villain, who runs the league and sets out to deliberately corrupt a good but headstrong kid. It has some really good fight scenes, but the story is a fairly bland morality play. Still, it is more than worth watching. ***

Rogue One – read review here. ****1/2

Neighbors – I didn’t really expect to enjoy this as much as I did. I still didn’t love it, but it has its moments. The movie tends to focus on lesser jokes and slip right by the genuinely good ones, but some of the good ones would suffer from extended focus. Still, it has more than enough good laughs. ***

TV

The Office (USA) – I revisited this after watching the original version last month. I am even more convinced that the American version is the superior version. Especially in the first three seasons. After that it mostly settles into comfortable sitcom stasis, but the early seasons have most of the original’s bite and longing while having more and more interesting characters. I would rank it among the best TV comedies.

The Grinder – I skipped this show when it aired last year, and now I deeply regret it. It is damn near great television, and now it is cancelled. Rob Lowe and Fred Savage have some great chemistry as brothers and after about a half dozen episodes the show gets into a pretty great self-referential groove that calls to mind shows like Community and Better off Ted. It is a minor tragedy that this show only got one season. I suspect it will remain in my Netflix comfort viewing rotation for a good long time.

Turn S1 – This is kind of … not good. The production values are there. The cast is there. But the writing is not. Everything feels muddled and unfocused. A lot of time is spent on stories that are completely uninteresting, or on stories that seem to exist only to make the protagonists look bad so viewers won’t sympathize with them(?). There is a lot here that is good, but unless season two starts telling a genuinely interesting story I am going to be out sooner rather than later.

Columbo S1-6 – I saw this was leaving Netflix and made a mad dash through it. Columbo is great. He is a character that is rightfully considered one of the greatest TV characters of all time. Nearly all of this show’s feature length mysteries are well-crafted, with guest stars doing good work against a nearly perfect Peter Falk. I think I have a lot more to say about this show, maybe about how the show deal with class and wealth, but I’ll save that for a full post about the show. It’s worth it.

Top 10 Comics 2016

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I wasn’t planning to go this list, but reading some other Top 10 lists I decided I read enough good comics in 2016 to make a Top 10 list. It is very DC heavy, though filtered through Vertigo, Digital Firsts and their Hanna Barbera lines. I am sure there are Image books and the like that deserve to be on here, but I tend to read those in collections and don’t stay completely up to date on them. For instance, I read the first collection of Descender this year and absolutely loved it. The end result is that the books on my list are all books I read monthly.

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10 Patsy Walker Hellcat – This decidedly low key book has Patsy Walker set up a temp agency for people with superpowers and brings back a lot of her old romance comics’ characters. It is just about a perfect fun book. There are fights, but they are small parts of a book that is more about interpersonal conflict and cat puns. It is just a good time.

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9 DC Comics Bombshells – DC’s digital first titles have been very good for a long time, with some excellent Batman and Superman titles in the past. DC Comics Bombshells, their second digital first title based on a line of figures, is somehow one of DC’s best Elseworlds titles in forever. It stars all of DC’s famous heroines redone in the style of WWII pin-ups, placed in a world where all (or at the very least most) of the superheroes are women. The designs are mostly good and Marguerite Bennet’s writing of the title makes it truly great. Many characters get a chance to shine, from big names like Batwoman and Wonder Woman, to a ton of tertiary Batman characters turned into Batwoman’s replacement Batgirls. Bennett and a host complementary rotating artists have made this book one of the best pure superhero books available for almost two years now.

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8 The Vision – This one is small compared to the grander scale that Tom King’s other tragedies, like Sheriff of Babylon and Omega Men, operate on. It is much more personal but no less tragic. The Avenger Vision tries to establish the perfect family, only to find out that life is hard. The result is inevitable and painful.

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7 Batman – Tom King makes the list again with his Batman. His take on Batman, with art by Mikel Janin and David Finch, is something of a gritty take on the old TV show. Batman does all kinds of superheroics and solves his problems with improbable leaps of logic. It is over the top but with plenty of depth behind it. I hope he has a good long run on the title.

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6 Superman – I am a sucker for a good Superman comic and that is exactly what Peter Tomasi, Pat Gleason and Doug Mahnke are delivering here. Recasting Superman as a father attempting to impart the same lessons that he learned from Pa Kent is an inspired move. The rambunctious but well-meaning Jonathan Kent is a great new Superboy and having a proper Lois and Clark relationship back is just icing on the cake.

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5 Sheriff of Babylon – Tom King yet again. While his other works are set in superhero universes, this one’s setting is very real. Not having the robot or space opera sugar makes this one more of a bitter pill than his other work. It is no less engaging, though. A former police officer working to train an Iraqi police force in the aftermath of the Iraq War is drawn into investigating the death of one of his trainees. Everyone has conflicted loyalties and the entire world is grey areas. It is amazing.

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4 Sugar & Spike – This was released as part of the anthology title Legends of Tomorrow, which got that title to tie-in with the TV show even though the comics inside didn’t in any way. While three of the full length books inside were fine superhero tales (Firestorm, Metal Men and Metamorpho) the gem of the bunch was the “gritty reboot” of Sugar & Spike by Keith Giffen and Bilquis Evely. It starred the duo of Sugar & Spike, formerly trouble causing toddlers, as PI’s that solve embarrassing problems for superheroes. It was six issues of this mismatched pair going to Superman shaped islands or making sure that Wonder Woman’s marriage to an alien monster was properly annulled. It had a lot of fun with some of the goofier parts of DC’s history and introduced a pair of characters that were just a lot of fun. Evely’s art was also great.

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3 Legend of Wonder Woman – There are many versions of Wonder Woman’s origin story, but never has it felt more alive and vital than in The Legend of Wonder Woman by Renae De Liz. It is bright and colorful, telling Diana’s origin as epic and mythic while downplaying some of the more awkward sexual aspects of it. I would honestly book this book in the same category as Batman Year One or Man of Steel (or Secret Origin, really insert your favorite Superman origin story here).

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2 Omega Men – Tom King’s last title to make the list, Omega Men is a dark look at our adventurism in the Middle East by way of space opera. Green Lantern Kyle Rayner gets sucked further in to the abyss of the revolution in the Vega System, finding it harder and harder to differentiate the good guys from the bad guys. It explores the narrow line between terrorists and freedom fighters. It is amazing.

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1 The Flintstones – That this book even exists is kind of crazy. An update on The Flintstones that turns into a pitch black social satire is not what people expected, I think. The Flintstones continues the strong work that Mark Russell was doing on the sadly shortened Prez series. The book is a bleak, but not entirely hopeless, with characters facing dilemmas that they can’t possibly solve and usually coming away with something to hold on to. It leaves the reading thinking that we as a species are fucked but maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Shantae: ½ Genie Hero

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Wayforward does good work. They are the go to company for solid, if only rarely spectacular, licensed games as well as updates on classic games. They are the ones behind games like A Boy and his Blob, Contra 4, DuckTales Remastered and Batman: The Brave and the Bold. As good as those games, as well as a couple of handfuls of others across primarily the Wii, DS and 3DS, are Wayforward has always done their best work on their original titles. Those include the Mighty games – Mighty Switch Force, Mighty Milky Way, etc. – and the Shantae games. When Wayforward went to Kickstarter to fund the latest Shantae game, Shantae Half-Genie Hero, it seemed like the surest possible bet. While the game missed its projected release date by more than a year, the finished product turned out to be everything fans hoped it would be.

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Shantae: ½ Genie Hero breaks no new ground. While its story doesn’t pick up from its predecessor Shantae and The Pirate’s Curse, the gameplay doesn’t stray far. The biggest difference is in our heroes abilities, with Shantae reverting to her dance triggered transformations rather than relying on skills like those of Risky Boots. The same transformations that she used in her first two games. Well, not exactly the same, but similar. Still, while Shantae is a riff on the same kind of game people have been playing for more than 25 years, everything about it is so well done that it just warms the heart.

First of all, the graphics and sound are excellent. It shares a general look with DuckTales Remastered, but it simply looks better. It is not the pixel art of previous games, but it is fluidly animated and is frankly one of the best looking 2D games I’ve ever seen. It still has that usual Shantae look, which includes a lot of cartoonish voluptuousness for better or worse, and Sequin Land has never looked so good. The game also has some great tunes, I don’t know how else to say it, they are just some awesome listening.

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Gone is any sense of this game as a sort of Metroidvania, the game is strictly level based. Each level has two or so distinct areas and while each area has places to explore, the play out completely linearly. The stages are largely really well designed, each with distinct challenges. One takes place in the air during a flying carpet race. Another has Shantae lost in a spooky mansion. While they don’t really break any new ground, they are interesting and fun to play though. The linear nature makes for some awkward bit, when you must go back to stages to look for doodads and power-ups. It is tempting to run back to each stage after completing the next one and getting a new power-up, and the game encourages this by gating the unlocking of the next stage behind completing some tasks for the townsfolks. They are not onerous tasks and the time spent searching for whatever the citizen or Uncle Mimic needs can also be used to scrounge up extra hearts and collectibles. They are fun to explore, up to a point and by the end of the game it reaches the point where it stops being fun and starts being a little tedious.

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Shantae controls as well as usual. Unlike the original GBC game, her hair actually feels like it has sufficient length to make a good weapon. I did have a little bit of a problem with the difficulty curve. The first stage, after the quick opening one, is likely to be the most difficult task in the game save for the final level. You haven’t really had a chance to get any extra hearts or power-ups at that point, so it is all about the player’s skill. After that, when the player gets more and more hearts and finds numerous healing items, the folds like tissue paper. Until the last stage, which is suitably challenging.

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Most of my complaints here are nitpicks, reasons why Shantae: ½ Genie Hero is not the best game ever, merely an extremely good one. My expectations for this series grows with each game I play, and each time the new game exceeds them. I don’t really know is this game is better than the previous one, but at the very least it is as good. Shantae: ½ Genie Hero joins Shovel Knight as one of the best Kickstarter triumphs.