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Genchu’s poor hat can never catch a break!

I assume we’ve all seen that newest Star Wars trailer? It certainly gives me the fanboy spine tingles! I suppose I’m concerned that there will be lack of humor in this film? But not that concerned considering the great banter that’s in every other Abrams film.

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Everybody was kendo fighting! Their swings were fast as lightning.

I started listening the audiobook of the latest Jim Butcher novel, ‘The Cinder Spires: the Aeronaut’s Windlass‘ (aka. the book that everyone wishes was the next Dresden Files). Gotta say, so far I’m digging it. I like that it’s narrated by someone with a pleasant British accent. Story-wise, you’ve got crystal powered airships broadsiding each other, you’ve got floating cities at war, magic power gauntlets, and very polite badasses. Also talking cats. So, basically, I’m sold, definitely enjoying it! Would I have enjoyed the next Dresden Files more?? Eeeeeehhhhhhh…. probably, but only because I’ve invested a near decade of my life into that series. Honestly, Dresden Files is 15 books in, and it’s kind of a clustercuss of a narrative at this point. I often wonder if I’d appreciate the series more had it just kept each book as a self contained detective noir series with maybe hints at a bigger plot that would be revealed in the final book. Well, I guess the TV series tried to do that and it was an awful disaster so maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge!

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Well, okay, this is escalating quickly! EDIT: I adjusted the lighting on the past four pages to give it a more bright sunny day feel (using some of Pascal’s artistic advice). The old version was looking very ‘yellow’.

Joe and I saw The Martian. It’s real good, go see it! We’d both listened to the audiobook a while back and both agree it’s an ideal adaptation of the book, retaining the book’s intelligence while streamlining the many problems the characters encounter into something highly entertaining to watch within two hours.

The only major complaint Joe had, which I agree with,  is that they made the main character, Mark Watney, more of an everyman and less of the super nerd he’s portrayed as in the book. I mean at one point he wishes he could have a D&D Paladin’s water creation ability, which he’d always thought was useless when he role played, but would’ve been extremely useful while trying to grow plants from his poop garden. But that is a minor complaint, since I suppose main stream audiences would get it, or care, or something, even though Big Bang Theory is still an inexplicably popular sitcom.

Anyway, go see The Martian, it’s great. In fact, wow, there have been a lot of great action/adventure/scifi films this year! Mad Max, MI: Rogue Nation, Avengers 2, Ant Man, Ex Machina, Jurassic World, Inside Out, The Man From UNCLE, probably a bunch of others I haven’t seen. This has been a quality year for my favorite movie genres! And then there’s still that other movie that’s coming out, what’s it called…Star Wars?

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I’m getting a distinct ‘poop hitting the fan’ vibe from this page.

I have acquired Disney Infinity 3.0, which is a dangerous prospect! Specifically it’s the Fall of the Republic starter set and some miscellaneous Star Wars figures. I remember how excited I was for Amiibo when they were announced, and I rode the hype train for a bit, but, wow, just the level of incompetence when it comes to the distribution of those things is staggering! Add to that the fact that Amiibo rarely do anything notable to add to a gaming experience and it’s hard to stay excited about them. In some ways that’s good, because many of them are so hard to get your hands on that it’d be frustrating if they were required for any meaningful content. On the other hand, if there were an Amiibo-specific game, as Disney Infinity is to its figures, I think that would be a pretty strong collector incentive!

Either way, though, falling down the toys-to-game vortex can be an expensive venture. But, uh, Star Wars! When DI 3.0 was announced and they showed off those great looking Star Wars figures,it was as if a million amiibo cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. Sorry, Captain Falcon, with your crotch stick, or yellow pee Link, or Zero Suit Samus and your poor carbonite encased leg, Disney Infinity figures do not have your awkwardly placed support structures! They’re also beautifully consistent in style and design. Oh, and they’re Star Wars (along with any other potential Disney owned property that I love, which is many)!!

Even if the game ends up being a big stinker (which seems unlikely considering the reviews), at least I’ll be able to fill up some of my empty shelf space with little Disney princesses.

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That Wataro ambassador has a face only a mother could love. I assume we’re talking about a very generous mother at that.

I’m at 27% completion of Metal Gear Solid V, and the number of hours I’ve sunk into it since buying it a week ago is kind of embarrassing! The game is a beast, and as much as I love video games, I haven’t binged on one this much in quite a while. It’s a detriment to other projects and chores I need to be getting done and wildly irresponsible! BUT, as a poor counter argument to overplaying a video game, MGSV is likely the last full blown console game in probably my favorite game series of all time, and the internet is RIFE with spoilers, so my best bet at avoiding them is to beat the game as quickly as possible! Except I’m not really beating it that quickly, am I? Well, stealth games are meant to be played at a leisurely pace, right?

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Genchu knows how politics work. Fear will keep the locals in line, fear of this boom stick!

So when I try to think of any new and exciting media I’ve ingested that I want to blog about, and the answer is METAL GEAR SOLID V. But I’m so enraptured that I’d rather go play it than sit around writing about it. I do want to say some non-spoilery thoughts, though. I Kind of miss the days of Metal Gear games being a one shot, story driven adventure where you play an 8 hour campaign from beginning to end, and it’s all heavily orchestrated wrapped up in a neat package. When did Metal Gear become all about THE GRIND? I mean I’ve sunk maybe thirty hours into MGSV so far, and I’ve gotten practically nowhere. If this were any other Metal Gear game, I’d be on my third or fourth playthrough by now, but instead the game says I’m at 7% completion. That’s because MGSV is structured almost like an MMO in how it drip feeds you progress. In an MMO, if you want cool gear and items, you can craft, farm, hunt, gather, go on raids over and over in hopes of getting rare drops… It’s all crazy time consuming, but it does get you the cool stuff. MGSV is similar in that you can go out, gather, hunt, capture soldiers to recruit, and commandeer weapons and vehicles to expand your Mother Base. You can research new tech, and build new gadgets assuming you’ve stockpiled adequate resources and personnel. You can make a lot of progress unlocking items in the game without progressing the story, normally Metal Gear’s biggest focus, at all, and that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. Granted, MMOs bore me to tears, while doing all these menial tasks in MGSV is like living out an action movie, which I find totally engrossing.

Story-wise, it’s a weird part of the MGS timeline. I mean, all Metal Gears have weird, hyper detailed stories, which is why I love them,  but I wonder if MGSV’s is kind of redundant. Admittedly I’m not very far into V’s story, but at the end of Peace Walker, Big Boss basically says “We’re our own nation of soldiers now, we’re not beholden to any government, and we’re nuclear equipped and we’ve got a Metal Gear.” Seems like if they jumped ahead 20 years and had Solid Snake infiltrating Outer Heaven, where Big Boss had holed up after having become disenfranchised with the rest of the world, that’d match up pretty nicely. The deeper MGSV goes into that story between Peace Walker and Metal Gear, the more retconned it all gets, especially if it basically has to end at the same point where Peace Walker ended, with Big Boss creating a nuclear equipped military nation state. MGS4 was a great end to the Solid series, it wrapped everything up beautifully, even including Big Boss at the end, someone who didn’t come off as evil but as a man who’d made decisions in grief that he’d come to regret. Why that person couldn’t have been the person we saw at the end of Peace Walker I’m not sure. I’m not yet convinced we needed a story bridge there. Still, I can’t complain too much since I’m LOVING MGSV’s gameplay, it’s wildly addicting for a long time fan of the series and the stealth game genre. What my dream ending for this game would be , and I doubt this will happen because no game sites have been flipping out about how great the ending is, we’d see Big Boss establish Outer Heaven secretly, and then establish Foxhound in a series of time skips. Then it would jump ahead to 1995, and we’d take control of Solid Snake, voiced by David Hayter, and we’d infiltrate Outer Heaven base as the game credits roll. Oh how I would flip out! Actually, if Konami wants more of my money, just get David Hayter to re-voice of all Big Boss’ lines and release a Hayter voice pack. Keifer Sutherland does a fine job, but there’s just something about Hayter’s performance that really makes me smile when I hear it. He’s kind of the heart of Metal Gear Solid to me, and that heart is missing in this latest and potentially final entry in the Solid series.

Still, it’s a pretty incredible game and anyone on the fence should just take the plunge!

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Troop morale is at an all time high! You go, Yukizane.

WARNING, STAR WARS RANT INCOMING!

I’m currently listening to the audiobook for Star Wars Aftermath, the newest Star Wars novel exploring the new canon following Return of the Jedi. It’s… well, it’s certainly written in the present tense. I’m pretty sure that’s a first for a Star Wars novel, and I hate it. Maybe it’s just me, but present tense prose is wildly distracting and keeps dragging me out of the narrative. I guess, maybe, sometimes, present tense is effective, but it’s got to be alienating to most casual readers. So it sure seems like an odd choice to have the first, heavily advertised Star Wars novel of the new canon doing the ‘he says, she says’ instead of the ‘he said, she said’. I feel like most books written in present tense are either by pretentious authors who think they’re being avant garde, or authors writing smut. Seeing as how Aftermath has not had a single ounce of sex appeal so far, I’m betting it’s the former. I’m also concerned because this Aftermath book is part one of a trilogy of books leading up to Force Awakens. Don’t give me two more new canon SW novels in present tense, guys! I can’t do it, it’s just so obnoxious to read!!

As for the book’s story itself, well, I’m only about half an hour into it, and so far I’m not terribly impressed, it’s mostly just managed to make me nostalgic for the old canon’s later books that crammed 30 years of lore into each novel regularly. Even if those books weren’t literary masterpieces, they always made me feel like I was invested with how often they referenced that massive history of Expanded Universe content I’d spent years ingesting. The new books sometimes bring back EU terms and locations that make me almost forget that everything I once knew about the Star wars universe is a blank slate again. It makes me kind of sad that, so far, the new novels don’t seem to be injecting a lot of new ideas or memorable characters into the void left by the old canon. We’re my Mara Jade/Grand Admiral Thrawn/Jaina Solo analog?

I do keep hearing great things about Marvel’s Star Wars comic line, though! When they start publishing compilation graphic novels of those series, I’ll certainly be picking them up.

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shieldI guess at least Suzuka is willing to take her mask off when consuming food. It’s also good to know that Yukizane and her are really hitting it off. And for anyone curious what that thing in the first panel is, it’s Rapier Kamigawa’s very European shield, which will likely be more clear in a coming page. Why does a ninja have a broadsword and shield? I’m not totally sure, but it is a pretty diverse group of ninja, so why not, I say!

AND APPARENTLY MGSV IS COMING OUT IN TWO DAYS!! I didn’t preorder it, but now I’m wondering if I should at the last minute. I have Ground Zeroes for PC, and I know some of that data can carry over to Phantom Pain. I’m pretty sure my PC could run the gamet, since it handles GZ just fine, but my poor PS4 spends most of its time collecting dust. Also, do I want to play this massive, life consuming game on the computer I work at everyday, or on my couch in front of my big TV? Too many first world problems, for sure. I’ll also be on vacation until Friday, so I won’t be touching the game until it’s been out for a bit. Nobody spoil anything for me, okay? Or at least no more than the trailers have already.

PS. Have I mentioned how pumped I am to infiltrate bases will listening to Hall & Oates on cassette? I’m VERY pumped! It may end up being my favorite Metal Gear game for the soundtrack alone.

 

 

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Back to the Izuma ninja clan, which inexplicably seems to have more soldiers than the Wataro army! This page features one of our Kickstarter backers, Matthew, or, as I’d prefer to call him by his much more badass online moniker, Rapier Kamigawa. He’s the big, silent guy with the hood, if you weren’t sure. That’s also his own IRL LARP gear I drew, which just so happened to fit into the ninja mold quite naturally! On a side note, the ninja with the cocky attitude is wearing an orange headband in reference to a certain obnoxiously loud ninja with an affinity for orange.

On another side note, I saw Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. It was fun! I I feel like MI is a movie series that’s actually improved over time. I love all the practical stunts, although it is hard to believe that Ethan Hunt was able to just walk away from all the tumbles he takes. Pretty sure his spine should’ve been shattered in that opening scene alone. He also manages to leap through multiple panes of glass and fall off a motorcycle moving at excessively high speeds without getting a scratch while wearing nothing more than jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. Impossible? Not for team IMF! It’s just, you know, highly improbable, which is totally doable for these guys!

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I mean, sure, Genchu could’ve just wiped everyone out, but he’s really trying to re-evaluate his previous most common problem solving methods.

We had a really stellar time at Matsuricon this year! Not that it isn’t always a blast, though. I had a great time blabbing about the entirety of the Star Wars franchise for an hour, and meeting the fans, a number of which were Kickstarter backers! On top of enjoying the con, I got to absorb all this new Star Wars news coming out of D23, the Disney convention that happened this same weekend!! The cast shot for Rogue One looks super rad, and even though Star Wars lore alums have witnessed the obtaining of the first death star plans at least half a dozen times in novels, games, and comics, I’m totes fine with getting a new canon version where these Rebel badasses stick it to the Empire. Also, Star Wars theme parks? I’m there, I want to be there, I will be there! And all the new set photos and poster for Force Awakens has my hype meter unreasonably high! But that’s okay, I’m not speculating on story, I’m going in clean! That’s the ideal way to avoid disappointment (at least initial disappointment, who knows how I’ll feel about it a month later).

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