618
You can’t keep a good arms dealer down!
Hey, Joe and I will be at Matsuricon this weekend. It’s the con’s 10th year anniversary! We’re once again hosting a number of panels this year:
An Illustrators Guide to Photoshop
Main Events (Ballroom 1) | Sun 11:00 AM – 12:00 AM
Webcomics 101
Guest 1 (Taft A) | Sat 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Action & Comedy in Feudal Japan: No Need for Bushido
Guest 1 (Taft A) | Sat 6:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Legendary Legends of Galactic Heroes
Guest 1 (Taft A) | Fri 10:00 PM – 11:00 PM
Star Wars A Newer Hope
Matsuri Room (Muirfield Ballroom) | Sat 12:00 AM – 1:00 PM
There’s a Humble Bundle featuring some not-so-humble Bandai Namco produced games. I picked it up to try the often lauded Dark Souls, although I suspected it was the type of game that wasn’t for me. Turns out the PC port is nearly unplayable without the fan-made Dark Souls Fix mod. So I installed that, and was feeling pretty good after making it through the tutorial area. Then all the dying began and the game got extremely frustrating. Dark Soul’s formula seems to be: “here’s your character that can die in two hits, now make it to the next bonfire to progress, but we’re gonna throw who knows how many traps, over-leveled enemies, and mobs in your way, and, on top of that, you have no idea where the next bonfire is and your weapons degrade with use. Also, with each death, all the enemies respawn, but your inventory is still depleted from your previous attempt so you have to farm for souls and items before you try again. Have fun!”
I don’t feel like it’s giving me an impossible challenge, necessarily, just that it requires far more time and effort to make progress than I care to invest in a game. I’d say that I just like easy games, but I love intense action games like Metal Gear Rising and Bayonetta. I think the real problem for me is that Dark Souls is a game built on testing the player’s patience, and real life has plenty of that game mechanic built into it already, I don’t need it in my video games!
Published on by Alex Kolesar | 51 Comments on 618
617
The ambassador motivates through angry glares.
Anyone watching The Heroic Legend of Arslan? That’s like my favorite currently running anime! If the animation were a little better and most of the female characters didn’t wear such implausible clothing, it would be my ideal low fantasy anime!
Published on by Alex Kolesar | 30 Comments on 617
616
Sometimes you do your darndest to ruin a weapons deal without killing anyone, but it just wasn’t meant to be!
Joe and I saw Mr. Holmes over the weekend. A near little character piece of an aged Sherlock Holmes played by Ian McKellen! Somehow I hadn’t even heard of the film until I went to look up show times for UGH Terminator Genysis. I was like “Joe, we could see Terminator, or there’s also this Mr. Holmes movie at the same time.” He said “Well, you pick,” and I was like “There is no question.” Mr. Homles isn’t a particularly exciting film, and its mysteries aren’t terribly deep or convoluted as you’d expect from most Sherlock stories. In fact, it may be the most realistic depiction of Sherlock Holmes I’ve seen. But it is fun to watch McKellen’s grumpy Holmes befriend the son of his housekeeper while also trying to remember the details of his final case through the cloud of his senility. There’s a scene I particularly like where he goes to a movie theater to watch a film based on one of Watson’s stories about him. Anyway, It’s worth a watch if you like Sherlock Holmes stuff and aren’t tired of the character’s more recent over saturation in main stream media.
Published on by Alex Kolesar | 33 Comments on 616
615
Genchu, master translator.
My week’s been rather busy, and I found myself staying up until 2am (well, it’s getting to 2:30am at this point) to finish the page. Part of that was because I didn’t start the drawing stage until Friday night, and spent most of Saturday visiting the parents. The other part is because EVO2015 happened this weekend and I was kinda glued to Twitch watching the Street Fighter IV finals JUST NOW. And holy geez wow it was exciting! EVO finals are always edge-of-your-seat material! Although I think the Gamerbee vs Infiltrator endurance match would’ve made for a greater finale than the actual final match between Gamerbee and Momochi, especially with Momochi’s on the fritz arcade stick throwing off the momentum. It certainly did raise the tension, though! Geez, EVO, you’re only on once every year, but for that weekend, my productivity is inevitably shot.
I also want to thank deedylovescake, who’s been flatting NN4B for the past five or six pages. If I didn’t have her help flatting the pages for me, I’d probably still be working on the page, all tired and cranky or whatnot. Thank you!
Published on by Alex Kolesar | 42 Comments on 615
614
Well, I guess this was the obvious outcome, wasn’t it??
There’s been so much buzz around Heavensward that I decided to download Final Fantasy 14 and run the 2 week free trial on my PC. I’m not into MMOs, though, but so far I guess it’s not too bad! It’s gameplay feels more user friendly and enjoyable than my previous two forays into MMO’s (WoW and SWTOR). I sure as heck like the music, and Eorzea is an elegant and colorful world. I definitely prefer its aesthetic over WoW. I’ve also found playing solo fairly easy, which is a plus since I’m wildly antisocial in social games. I also like how all job classes are open to me after the level 10 quest in my primary job class. It reduces the feeling that I’m missing out on other content if I’m not sporting multiple characters, and even gives XP boosts to any job class that I’m leveling that’s lower than my highest level job. My big concern is that it’s a huge time sink, as are any MMOs, which is why I usually just avoid them. I’m also easily overwhelmed by the amount of learning required to play the game well. It feels like learning another language, minus any practicality. Every time I’ve tried to get into one, I find myself with feelings of guilt that I’m not expending all that time and brain power into learning to play an instrument, or a programming language, or just doing more art! Most likely I won’t even manage to hit level 20 before my free trial runs out, at which point I’ll have to see if I’m enamored with it enough to sign up for the minimum $10 monthly subscription. But simply the fact that FF14 has gotten me to like it as much as I have in this short amount of time is a testament to its quality!
Published on by Alex Kolesar | 93 Comments on 614
613
What would a ship be without a few holes, after all?
Do you like Portal? I like Portal. It’s the best, what with all the lying cakes and science being done. There’s this TOTALLY FREE Portal mod called Portal Stories: Mel. I’m playing through it and it’s about as authentic a Portal experience as you can have outside of an official continuation of the series (which we’ll never get because Valve only sells other people’s games now).
Over the past week or so, Joe and I have been inundated with a smorgasbord of great are from reader Crowlitch (@crowlitch on twitter), and I’m FEELING THE KEN/CHO PASSION! I’m also quite enamored with Yori’s animated L’oreal hair toss. You can find more NN4B art (some of which is rather incomprehensible without context), as well as Crowlitch’s other great art on Tumblr and Twitter. Joe and I are currently working on projects for Matsuricon 2015, which is coming up on August 14th, but Joe has intentions of resurrecting our defunct Fan Art section in the future (sorry, Joe, I announced it pubilcally so now you can’t back out!).
Published on by Alex Kolesar | 47 Comments on 613
612
Oh Genchu, you’r e such a broken record! We’re all very scared of your murder face, we get it.
I’ve had Shadows of Mordor sitting in its plastic wrap since my birthday, but I finally unwrapped it and started it up! UGH IT’S SO BLEAK. I mean the LOTR movies get pretty dark at times, but they’re still jaunty high adventure films! Shadows of Mordor is like LOTR meets THE PUNISHER. You play as a ranger living on the borders of Mordor (probably not the best place to set up camp) when some orcs and an evil dude in black armor show up to capture your wife and son and murder them in front of you! Through some accidental summoning shenanigans, Talion, our ranger hero, gets an elf lord tied to his spirit, giving him a companion character, split personality, and magic elf powers all in one! He then sets out to murder every orc in Mordor because screw those guys.
Needless to say, the uplifting LOTR marching theme does not make an appearance in this game, as far as I can tell. That’s too bad, because the music of the LOTR films is a large part of its identity. I guess I’m just frustrated because I’m totally enjoying playing the game! It’s just hard to like the main characters, since they’re so dour and angry. I think if the game had more of a heroic vibe it’d be a much better game all around. I wish the plot went something like… a group of (important?) people are kidnapped by orcs, and Talion and a female ranger companion make an uneasy alliance as they infiltrate Mordor to save the hostages. It’d be fun, the two could meet up to advance the main plot, argue with each other, flirt wih each other, fight orcs together, save some people, save each other, form a strong bond and come out on top. Maybe you could even switch between the two characters! Yeah, I wanna play THAT game.
I do still think Shadows of Mordor is fun. I can see why it won a lot of 2014 Game of the Year awards (a lack of many stand out titles that year didn’t hurt either), and I love how accurately it’s recreated the visual look of the films, especially Mordor itself! Everything feels very authentic to the LOTR film universe, except the tone. In some ways I wonder if I should be impressed that the game tells a side story that’s not just a repeat of the plot of any of the films, but the grim tone feels like the antithesis of what people actually love about Lord of the Rings. It’s morbid and gloomy and I’m not seeing any light in the darkness, despite what Talion’s elf ghost proclaims after each time a respawn from death.
Published on by Alex Kolesar | 49 Comments on 612
611
Captain Ricardo’s a bit of a sleep talker, it seems!
I saw Pixar’s Inside Out tonight and it was GREAT! I’m going to just encourage everyone to go see it, for certainly. In fact, I only have one gripe about it! SPOILERS When the Long Term Memory workers send the ‘bubble gum song’ memory orb up to the control room, why doesn’t Joy send the Core memory orbs up to the control room using the same method? I suppose maybe she didn’t trust letting them out of her sight, but it did seem like a rather obvious solution. END SPOILERS
AND WAIT I HAVEN”T TALKED ABOUT VIDEO GAMES!! How ’bout that E3? This year, I think Sony wins. I’m admittedly only so-so about a Final Fantasy 7 remake, since I never played the original (never had a psx!) and I’m sure the remake is two or three years away, if not more with Tetsuya Nomura at the helm. Still, it’s one of those fabled announcements that people had been waiting so long for that it had become a gag. It’s kind of surreal to have it actually happen.
And then there’s Shenmue 3, which has me PUMPED despite the fact that the Kickstarter video showed very underwhelming visuals, and despite the fact that Yu Suzuki is asking for a mere $2 million for a game that is clearly going to require fifteen times that much money if it wants to live up to the hype. Sony says it’s going to help with development (one would assume in the financial sense if nothing else), so I’m confident it’ll deliver, although I suspect we won’t get the game for three years, at the least (much like FF7 Remake). I never played either Shenmue game, but I did watch playthroughs on Youtube and Twitch. I’ve been following Gametrailers.com‘s Twitch streams of the Shenmue series, and I think Micheal Huber’s impossible hype for the franchise has rubbed off on me something fierce. Hopefully we can get a Shenmue 1&2 HD release in the meantime so I can finally play this beautiful martial arts epic for myself. EDIT: The idea that Sony is funding the creation of Shenmue 3 isn’t quite true. This video explains why the Kickstarter still needs as much help as it can get!
And then there’s THE LAST GUARDIAN. Guys, I dunno about you, but I’ve played through Ico at least five times, and Shadow of the Colossus more times than I can remember. I used to just roam around in that game for hours looking for any hidden secrets in every possible nook and cranny. The only other game that I ever felt that enthralled with was Ocarina of Time. The Last Guardian is a game I’m ready to get lost in, and I have total faith it will deliver, especially after seeing the new demo trailer. Geez, I hope the griffin doesn’t die at the end ! (Who am I kidding, it’s a goner, I’ll cry.)
I was somewhat disappointed that two of my favorite long dormant franchises, Onimusha and Prince of Persia, didn’t make an appearance, but there’s always next year! I was also pretty disappointed at the lack of a new Metroid game announcement. Nintendo’s weird Metroid Prime Federation Force felt like an unintentional troll on par with Sony’s FF7 PS4 port from last year! Here’s a list of some of the other games I’m hyped about!: Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Adrift, ABZU, Uncharted 4, Star Wars Battlefront, Disney Infinity 3.0, Star Fox Zero. I’m sure there are others I can’t think of at the moment… As always, I’ll probably only play about 1/5th of all the games I’m interested in, if that! Curse you, free time! Why do you continually shrink?
Published on by Alex Kolesar | 57 Comments on 611
610
Maybe Eijiro can think of a way to prevent Hirotomo from discovering all his son’s wheelings and dealings without having to murder allies! Or maybe he’s just digging himself into a deeper hole. Either way, I think he overestimates Nataku’s patience.
Friends, I saw Jurassic World today! It was BETTER THAN I EXPECTED. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t stupid, of course, but it was tongue in cheek enough to absolve itself of some of its movie sins. SPOILERS incoming!
I think my biggest problem with Jurassic World is with the portrayal of the dinosaurs. When Spielberg was directing the first two films, the dinos felt and acted like wild animals. It felt like if you sat in a tree and a brachiosaurus leaned in to eat some leaves, it could accidentally crush your body with its massive head if you weren’t real freakin’ careful. Sure, you could pet one, but a responsible parent probably wouldn’t put her kid in a petting zoo full of baby brachiosaurus and triceratops. I mean, they’re not goats! And yet that exact petting zoo is in Jurassic World.
Essentially no one on this island is the SLIGHTEST bit concerned that they’re literally arm’s length away from genetically engineered murder machines. At one point there’s a shot of people canoeing down a river while long necks and parasaurolophus drink from the water. What if one of those long necked dinos accidentally lifted up its head and knocked a canoe over? Better Lawyer Up, InGen! And don’t forget the infamous hamster ball scene, where kids are given full control over a spherical vehicle so they can drive alongside real big dinos! All it would take is one jerk attendee to decided to start ramming his sphere into every dino leg he could find just to piss the animals off. Next thing you know you’ve got someone suing the park because he got a neck injury while his sphere was being knocked around and crushed by angry dinosaurs. AND THEN THERE’S THE MOSASAURUS!! It’s that giant alligator dino in the water. That thing is so huge I have no idea how they contain it. But here’s the crazy part, at the end of the movie it just shoves itself halfway onto dry land, right in the center of the park’s common area, and eats up the evil Indominus Rex, the villain dino of the movie! So I guess basically the mosasaurus could’ve hopped out of the water and eaten like fifteen park attendees at any time if it’d felt like it?? And yet we’re lead to believe that NO ONE has died on in Jurassic World since it opened. Hey, I guess they’re doing something right!
I said earlier that no one is afraid of the dinos on the island, except for the Indominus Rex, a super dino that was created by mixing a T-Rex with Superman’s kryptonian DNA. Bullets bounce off of it or have seemingly no effect. It can camouflage itself, as well as mask its infrared heat signature. It’s also smart enough to lead people into elaborate traps, despite never having experienced anything outside of the cage it grew up in! And let us not forget its super strength. When it escapes its paddock, it crumples the iron blast door holding it in like the thing is tin foil! In fact, it pretty much rams through every human made structure it comes across to no apparent ill effect. I have no idea why it didn’t bust out a long time ago! In the end, it takes the combined power of three raptors, a T-Rex, and the Mosasaurus to take it down. Why all the dinosaurs felt like teaming up to kill the Indominus when there were lots of juicy humans just sitting around waiting to be eaten is a little beyond me, but I guess that’s the kind of stuff I’m referring to when I say that the dinos don’t seem to act like real wild animals.
The whole movie also has a much more overt scifi aesthetic than any of the other films in the franchise. It’s supposedly modern day, but we see holographic dinos and holographic touch displays, as well as those crazy sphere cars and a lot of futuristic looking guns. Combined with the very dangerous looking rides and attractions, and an overuse of CG, it all has the effect of making the movie feel very staged and implausible. I know, it’s a movie about a dinosaur park, of course it’s implausible! But the first film felt like it could really happen, it had a sort of hyper reality to it.
I remember a lot of people wondering why the parents in the movie would send their children to a dinosaur park alone, but in the film it’s revealed that the park’s manager is their aunt. This actually leads to an even bigger plot hole, why have these kids never been to Jurassic World BEFORE NOW?? That’s like if your uncle was the manager of DisneyLand, wouldn’t you be taking a family vacation there every year? Especially if your kid was really into Disney like the kid in the movie is really into dinosaurs?
But, hey, I said I enjoyed this movie, and I wasn’t lying! The characters are fun, there’s some great banter. It’s all very cartoony and tongue in cheek, and the actors seem to be having a good time. Chris Pratt definitely elevates the overall entertainment value of the film, portraying his smartest character to date! I also enjoyed all the subtle and not so subtle callbacks to Jurassic Park, and the return of Henry Wu, now a more fleshed out character than his brief part in the original film. And as much as I would’ve loved to have seen Grant or Malcolm return in World, having a totally new cast not carrying any of the emotional baggage from the previous films was a refreshing change of pace. I was also very ready to hate the whole “Chris Pratt controls the raptors” bit that the trailers showed, but then they made a point of saying “this is a really bad idea” so when it actually worked it didn’t feel as dumb! It was still kinda dumb, though. But, also, I suppose, totally rad!
Published on by Alex Kolesar | 46 Comments on 610
609
Nataku’s a real creep, for sure, but Eijiro’s kind of a whiney brat himself. Perhaps they deserve each other.
We often see movies with one of our long time readers, friend, and blood relative to Joe, Slogra (not his real name). Being quite the movie buff, he wrote up some entertaining thoughts concerning this year’s big blockbuster films that reflect my own, so I thought I’d share them!:
I am a heavy consumer of movie previews, teasers, trailers, production stills, information leaks, and the like. After years of diligent service to this media, I’ve become quite good at judging movies before they even come out. Even with my expertise, however, I was fooled this year on two separate occasions within a day of each other.
I watched the breadcrumb trail of Avengers: Age of Ultron in the months leading to its release. I feasted on the slurry of information leaked to the public, ranging from casting decisions to pure speculation. The time came when the movie itself was finally released and I approached the theatre. I garnered all my strength to cease my quaking legs as I walked into the cinema, and the hype pouring forth from my personal aura was palpable, seasoning the popcorn in the equally eager laps around me.
I watched.
It wasn’t exactly like the moment in my youth where I realized my parents were fallible. It was more akin to the moment where I realized I had made a very grave error, all because of my uncompromising belief that my parents never made mistakes, and that I had allowed them to lead me astray.
Yes, I still blame my father for taking me to see Reign of Fire.
But that is another harrowing tale for another time. I’m really amazed at how much good will seeped from the porous, shriveled mess of a movie before me. It wasn’t a bad film; it just wasn’t nearly as good as it should be. It largely rehashed aspects of the first film that didn’t need rehashing. The Avengers once again turn on each other like moody teenagers but learn to work together through the power of friendship and teamwork, only to disassemble by the end so that Marvel can make more money more stand alone movies.
There was a lot of awkward exposition, many witty lines that fell flat, and a really weird scene where Thor slips into a hot tub full of memories. Or visions. Or something. The movie teeters on the edge of being a complete mess, held together only by good acting by good actors and some action sequences that are pretty to look at, even if they are silly.
What really ground my soul into powder was the spirit-crushing nonsense sprinkled throughout the movie. I won’t list all the logical fallacies here, for there are only so many words of hatred that you, dear reader, can ingest before exploding in a bitter bomb of disgust.
But just to give an example of the systemic nature of the movie’s problems, consider Ultron’s abilities and how he didn’t utilize them, even when the movie made it clear on certain points what he could and could not do. Ultron, we are told right away, can exist without a body, and his brain as it were can be copied. This creates the problem of having an enemy that cannot be truly destroyed. The writers of the movie ingeniously get around this problem by ignoring it as the movie goes on. Even when the Avengers are told that they must destroy all the robots, stating that none can leave the arena of the final action scene, no one brings up the fact that if the super-smart Ultron is in fact smart, he will have made a copy somewhere else. Perhaps he did and perhaps the next 8 Avengers film will be about Ultron reappearing like a Saturday morning cartoon villain, always defeated but never caught. Or perhaps Ultron screwed up in not realizing he could copy himself. Or the Avengers screwed up in not realizing that there’s a tablet somewhere possessed by a copy of the evil AI. Or perhaps the Ultron writing staff screwed up and wrote themselves into a corner.
I tire of writing about Ultron, so I’ll have you know that by the time I got around to seeing it, it was the day before opening night for another movie, Mad Max: Fury Road. What’s odd is that unlike the previews for Ultron, Max’s trailers left me uninterested. Cars exploded and characters said lines. There was no creepy Pinocchio music and there was no shared universe with other lesser Mad Max characters, composing themselves in Fury Road in a heroic assembly.
And yet any given moment of Mad Max was more exciting and entertaining than the broken promise that was Age of Ultron. Exposition was given during action scenes because the movie is basically one continuous action scene – not in an exhausting way, but in a fascinating fashion that kept my body consistently at the edge of its seat. Literally, the story is told as the main character is tied to the front of a flame-spewing vehicle, racing through the desert as the blood races through his veins and into another man’s like some nightmare version of the Red Cross, all the while that a one-armed badass traitor drives a fuel truck through a lightning-fire storm.
I don’t even know what the lightning-fire storm was. Age of Ultron would have given me some bullshit explanation that made no sense anyway. Mad Max just gives you the storm, and you either accept it or you don’t have a soul and you don’t accept it. I’m just stating facts.
I won’t list every time my heart lept from my chest and I was forced to retrieve it, no doubt missing some beautiful moment in Mad Max in doing so. There is only so much joy I can express in this prose before I lift my fingers from the keyboard and race off to the cinema, thirsting for more Max.
I will instead leave with the inescapable denouement that one does not always get what one wants when one sees an Age of Ultron, yet one may yet pick up the shards of disappointment and rearrange them into the mosaic of a Mad Max or its equivalent, if one can be lead to believe that Max in fact has a theatrical peer. I’m sure there’s some lesson to be learned in all this, perhaps a message of hope for a recovering drug addict and the life such a person hopes to find, but I am not a person to draw such lofty conclusions. I can only wait for the sequel to Max and devour the inevitable trailers, make hopeful predictions, and likely become disappointed in the sequel that never lives up to the original.
It would seem that I cannot learn any lesson after all.
Published on by Alex Kolesar | 48 Comments on 609
