Monthly Archives: October 2014

Reviews

Dracula Untold

DraculaUntoldI didn’t go see Dracula Untold on opening weekend because the reviews were bad. Maybe my low expectations helped, because it didn’t seem anywhere near as awful as its early reviews suggested.

That’s not a huge vote of confidence, I know, so let me say this: I enjoyed it.

No, really!

It’s kind of a superhero origin story, complete with the “bitten by a…” and the “look what I can do!” underscored by “with great power comes great responsibility.” Also, comic-book physics, at least insofar as the portrayal of the inertia of a swarm of bats goes. And, you know, pretty much every vampire ability on display.

Dracula Untold comes in at #20 for me so far this year, which puts it squarely between my thresholds of “awesome” and “disappointment.” In terms of your movie dollar, however, seeing Guardians of the Galaxy again might be more rewarding.

Journal, Reviews

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

I really enjoyed the first two Borderlands titles. I even enjoyed the stories, which is kind of ironic since my introduction to the first game was my friend Brandon telling me how much fun it was in spite of the terribly disappointing story.

I don’t write game reviews, but I’ll try to describe my experience with the latest Borderlands installment, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, in meaningful ways.

Game Play

Lots of people have complained the BL:tPS felt like more DLC for Borderlands 2. This is an outgrowth of something I actually appreciated: all my game-play reflexes from Borderlands 2 totally fit. That was a big time-saver.

The new stuff here was invigorating. Enumerated:

  • Low gravity and butt-slamming! I had to build a new set of twitch reflexes, but once I did it was pretty rewarding.
  • Action Points start at Level 2! Oh, thank goodness. One of the worst things about BL1 and BL2 was that your choice of Vault Hunter means very little for the first four levels of game play.
  • The Grinder! About 1/3rd of the way through the game there’s a mission from Janey to repair the machine that grinds up weapons to make better (sometimes) weapons. This was fun.
  • More Dialog! Your character actually has a voice this time around. You don’t get to choose what to say (this title’s  from Gearbox, not Bethesda, let alone Bioware) but you have a personality.

What did I not like?

  • Broken maps! In three places the story quest ground to a halt while I looked for the path to something critical. The low-grav jumping had me thinking I was in a platformer, but no, I was lost because the entire path required me to walk off the edge of the map. (Note: In Borderlands 1 & 2 this is reserved for Easter Eggs and Instant Death.)
  • Loooong quests. “Artificial Persuasion” in particular had several points of re-direction (“that didn’t work, let’s try this… on the other side of the map!”) and felt like it should have been staged as four different quests.
  • Platforming? Not quite. All the jumping around makes you think you can scale some things, but no, this game is still kind of 2-dimensional. Not everything can be jumped on — even things that are within jumping distance. It’s frustrating to fall through things, or bounce off of invisible walls while trying to get from point A to point M without trudging past points B through L.
  • No difficulty setting. This is a real turn-off for me, especially in a game where the story has finally gotten really interesting, because it means I need to grind and grind and grind in order to be tough enough to slop my way through a fight that you super-twitch kids will blast through on raw skill.

Story

Gearbox delivered a pretty amazing story. I won’t spoil anything for you, but here’s some background: Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel takes place about four years after the events of Borderlands, and about one year BEFORE the events of Borderlands 2. (It’s prequel AND a sequel, and they doubled down on giving it a goofy name.)

The four playable characters are people we’ve all met in the previous games, and two of them were NPCs we had to beat during boss-fights. The story-driving NPC, Jack, is the main villain in Borderlands 2, and is probably my favorite “I hate this guy” character in any story or game.

How, then, would the writers build a game with a satisfying story if half the playable characters and their boss turn out to be monsters?

Answer: Wow.

Better answer: If George Lucas had played these games prior to writing the Star Wars prequels, we’d have had much better movies to chronicle the fall of Anakin Skywalker and the rise of Darth Vader.

I’m impressed. Everybody in the story–EVERYBODY–acted from logical internal motivations, and responded rationally to external pressures. NOBODY did things because of plot-pressure. And the end was, at least for me, very satisfying.

If you plan to play, but haven’t finished yet, be sure to sit through the credits after you beat [REDACTED]. There’s sequential art running alongside the the scrolling list of names, and that art will complete the stories of Athena, Nisha, Wilhelm, and CL4P-TP.

$60 is a lot to spend on a game, but according to Steam, I’ve logged 35 hours on it, and my son has logged 30 (using the shared library.) Between the two of us, that’s a dollar an hour for play-time. Granted, I only bought ONE copy… I’m totally going to wait for the sale before buying enough copies for my kids to play with me at the same time.

Journal

Tagon’s Extreme Napping, Howard’s Extreme Angst

Two weeks ago I was at the Out of Excuses Workshop and Retreat*, and I tried something I’ve never tried before at a writing retreat–I worked on comics.

That went pretty well. I cranked out eight days of inks while listening to seminars from Dan Wells, Brandon Sanderson, and Mary Robinette Kowal.

I also tried working on the calendar art. That went less well. The art is on much larger pages, but there are no inclined drafting tables at Woodthrush Woods, and the light just wasn’t good enough for my poor old eyes.

That said, here’s the finished version of the piece I was working on:Maxim 40 bw Teaser

 

It never got to this point at the retreat, though. It did get to the point that I was using strong language in public spaces.

I wasn’t even able to get the foreground finished–the poor hover-table was just an elliptical squiggle and a couple of boxes that only I knew were destined to become a tall drink and a handgun. I did finish Tagon and his Hammock of Extreme Napping, but I wasn’t happy with some of the lines. I could tell that I was making bad decisions about where to put the ink, so I needed to stop.

It was really frustrating, and by the end of that session my eyes hurt and I was convinced the piece was ruined forever.

Fortunately I was also aware of the fact that I’ve rescued hopelessly ruined art before, so I packed the piece home, where I was able to go to work on the background in the warm, bright light of our front room, standing at the drafting table that has seen 8 years of Schlock Mercenary slide across its surface.

I’m happy with the result. Randy Tayler (my brother, who has been following the comic since before anybody else) said it’s one of the best things I’ve ever drawn. I’m inclined to agree. I guess the lesson here is that even the very best projects often hit a spot where they look hopeless, and success as an artist depends on being able to push past that spot.

Once Travis colors it (and I cannot wait to see what THAT looks like) this will be the April 2015 page in the 2015 Schlock Mercenary Monthly Calendar. Pre-orders for that will open tomorrow at 8am Mountain Time, at the same time we open pre-orders for Massively Parallel, “Munitions Canister 2” slipcases, and the re-print of “Munitions Canister 1” slipcases.

We haven’t released two Schlock Mercenary books in one year since 2006, and back then the two books we did had a total of 180 pages between them. This year we will have released 416 pages of of Schlock Mercenary once Massively Parallel joins Longshoreman of the Apocalypse, and while the 2015 calendar isn’t quite the same thing, I’m going to count it as another 24 pages, because that’ll bring us up to 440.

And speaking of comics, I really need to sit down and draw some.

 

*Note: We’re doing the Out of Excuses thing again next year, only it’ll be on a cruise ship.

 

 

 

 

 

Reviews

The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll

On the final evening of the 2014 Out of Excuses Workshop and Retreat, Mary Robinette Kowal and I sat with students and talk about historical stuff, and Mary brought up some fun 18th- and 19th- century spy techniques.

I realized that the 1980’s are far enough back that the spy tech from that era seems weird and outdated. And that reminded me of a book I skimmed while working at Novell in the ’90s. I spouted a quick synopsis at the students, and realized that it might be fun for me to re-read.

TheCuckoo'sEggSo I bought a copy online and re-read it on my iPad, and as I did so I realized that the reason I was able to do this is because guys like Clifford Stoll took it upon themselves to build “trustworthiness” into the digital and social structures of the Internet 25 years ago.

The Cuckoo’s Egg, by Cliff Stoll, is a non-fiction account of the author’s discovery of a far-reaching, insidious hack, uncovered because of what looked like an accounting error. The technology he describes is antiquated, but the logic behind the hacker’s exploits remains valid today, and Stoll’s attempts to rally the authorities demonstrate how very unprepared we were back in 1987 for the big disruptions of next 20 years.

It’s dry in spots, and didactic in others, but I plowed through it voraciously. Stoll’s descriptions of the Internet of 1987 seem kind of quaint, but they’re also spot-on for his time.  His political views were very refreshing–he writes as a self-proclaimed liberal hippie, and yet he had to work with the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Army, and the Air Force for an entire year. This was pretty conflicting for him, and for his friends, and was every bit as interesting to me as the computer stuff.

I met Cliff Stoll in 2006 at an Apache conference where he and I were keynote speakers. It was kind of cool to realize that he was one of the giants upon whose shoulders my entire business model was standing, and yet we had lots of common ground. In re-reading The Cuckoo’s Egg I found a chapter in which young Clifford Stohl sat down and talked to a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, asking for advice, and yes, there seemed to be some symmetry there for me.

[EDIT: As was pointed out by a reader, Cliff Stoll can be found making 3D immersions of Klein bottles with his family in Oakland, California. Looking for something awesome for that person who already seems to have everything? Look no further.]