(New Acquisitions) - Yokohama

Yokohama

Hisashi Hayashi made a splash a while back with Trains a kind of area control deck building game. This game is more of a classic euro style and also very well received.

At its core is a action select worker placement game. The game uses a variety of cards that contain the actions and worker slots. Unlike many worker placement games the workers actually move rather than being placed anywhere, meaning that different setups when dealing the locations can change the tactical thinking between sessions.

Like many euros it is a bit of a multiplayer solo game, there is some blocking but really it is more a kind of "race' game were you rush for points vs your opponents.

The game does look busy and kinda of crowded, particularly in at full player count. You deal less locations at lower counts so there are less slots, this is how this games gets around the worker slots issue that worker placement games have for different player counts. This allows great variance between the sessions as certain actions are missing from some games, but lacks the coherence of a properly deigned board. I am not sure anyone can seriously defend the look of it on the table, it looks a little worrying at first glace!

4 Player Game

2 Player Game

It is extremely well designed, and is not nearly as complex as it looks and is one of those games that has very interesting decisions on every turn.

The game reminds me a little of Bruxelles 1897. I know it is not actually like that game really, but even so it reminds me of it somehow. Maybe it is in how there are so many avenues to victory and you build this little player area as you go. Bruxelles 1897 btw is one of my favourite games, so reminding me of that game is a good thing.

Anyway, this is a top game. I have only bee able to play it a few times on TTS, and it has been on my wishlist for years, the subsequent pre-xmas sales and reprint seemed like a great time to pick it up.

Most photos are for the deluxe version, I just got the standard. It is basically the same but the small cardboard tokens are replaced with meeples and fancy meepels replace the cubes.

(Game Prieview) - Operencia: The Stolen Sun (Zen Studios)

 Operencia: The Stolen Sun

Zen Studios are famous for pretty much one thing... Zen Pinball... I always check up on their website when Xmas comes around to see if any cheap tables are available...and saw they have a RPG now. And not just any RPG one made is the classic dungeon crawler style of Eye of the Beholder.Might and Magic and Shadowgate... all games I loved. There was a recent series called Legend of Grimlock that I also really liked. My point is that this old school style of a grid based dungeon crawling is a style of game I really enjoy. It is also one that is criminally underdeveloped by the "retro" gaming boom that is going on at the moment. I suppose it is just the next sub-genre to get a crack after all the other retro revivals.

Anyway it is on sale at the mo on Epic so picked it up.

1st things 1st.... the game is gorgeous. The art is all awesome and colorful 3d renders, kinda like the old Myst games. The controls are classic as is the combat. This game is not doing anything new, I think they are just trying to do it well. Still the art is off the chain.

The combat is as you would expect. Some cool enemies but the imaginative stuff dose not come till you are deep in the dungeons. You fight in a 2x2 formation.. again, classic. The mechanisms of the combat is more modern though... more like a jRPG.. lots of buffs and shields and hastes and potion items and stuff. I think this is actually pretty cool and if you turn it all the way up, poses some challenge, at least in the early game. I suspect like all RPGs you end up godlike.

 True to form and a great nod to Shadowsgate and beyond, much of the game is puzzle design. Almost like Myst or a Point and Click adventure. Some of them are pretty cool, but nothing to hard. The hardest are the chest puzzles which are classic puzzle boxes and I also found one that was a legit cypher.. this puzzle woud be super hard if you did not recognise the encoding.

The voice acting is not the best, unfortunately, but all in all I am very happy with this one and enjoying it more than Legend of Grimlock 2. The start is a little wonky, but really it is just a long tutorial. So power through it, once you get past it the game begins to shine.

Verdict : Love it!

(TV Review) - The Mandalorian Season 1 : Episode 1+2 (Disney+)

The Mandalorian Season 1  : Episode 1+2

It is no secret that I am a buthurt and also a bitter old Star Wars fan. I loved Star Wars and Empires. I mean, loved. I can literally quote Empire backwards. Well. I used to be able, haven't tried for ages but I did so and won a competition at a Star Wars convention in the mid 90s once. Anyway, I liked Jedi less, but still love it for the most part. There is an age old joke about how you can tell someone's age by if they liked Jedi or not, as you were either a kid that loved talking teddy bears, or you thought it was off putting that people with sticks and stones could take out a highly advanced race of aliens. This joke is 100% true, imo, and the joke is now expanded to other generations who watched the newer films.

The prequels broke me. They were so atrociously bad that I find it almost unbelievable, and the fact they are now not the worst to be made astounds me in the most horrific way. All the kids that saw it, when they were 8 or whatever, are now in there late 20s, early 30s, the prequels came out over '99 and 2005, and they are a driving force of a revisionist movement where those films are widely thought of as unfairly judged. If you soil yourself on theForce.net, the general voice is that those films are great. It is these "new fans" that drive this change of opinion, as they are still active and engaged in the Star Wars community.

This is all about how we relate to the memories of our youth, and not about the films themselves. I think it also shows the innate childishness of the movies. It took me a long time to realise that Star Wars, all of them, are kids films, like say Goonies. The originals were just really good kids movies, so good that they appeal to all ages, but they are childish films made for children at their core. Which is why each generation hates the next set of films and the new generation loves the new ones. It is not that "kids do not know any better" it is that I am just far and away outside the target audience of the franchise, but I was the target audience when I was a kid, and of course I remember being a child and nostalgia is a thing. George Lucas understood this, and the attempting to force the newest movies into adult sensibilities is part of why they are spectacularly bad, in my eyes. He knew the key to the franchise was to make them appeal to the kids and cultivate new fans. Mark my words. The current Trilogy will be thought of as excellent by the next generation once they are old and judging the trilogy of 2038, or whenever it comes out.

The thing is I am burnt out on Star Wars. When the prequels were out I was a vocal poster about how shit they were, watched tear down vids and all that, but somewhere along the line between "Revenge of the endless lava fight of boredom" and "who gives a shit what it is called 2nd film that came out recently", that I am just spent. I care so little about it that I do not even get annoyed by it any more. All the fuel has been burnt. I do not like it, or hate it, I just don't give a shit about it. Star Wars is like Fast and the Furious to me, or maybe more like a long running soap opera like Neighbours. It is so under my radar and of such little interest to me that it barley enters my field of vision at all.

What I am trying to say here, besides trying desperately to not fall into a ten page rant about how terrible Star Wars is, I like to think I have no stake in the franchise any more, but deep down I do. The Star Wars I loved for so long is gone, erased by decades of "cannon" stories that removed all the magic and mystery of my imaginings and compressed what I thought to be a saga spanning centuries to 19 years. I can not help see Star Wars as a inferior shadow of what it was, and what it meant to my generation who spent decades without new content. Where we built our own fandom from what the shows inspired in us, not what they showed us. I am still bitter and this produces bias. I have tried three times to talk about this show but end up writing pages about my relationship to the material instead of the show itself... lol.. fuck it I'm not deleting it this time.

Anyway... lets get to it...

So, considering my relationship to most Disney properties, the mass of Disney+ TV shows that have been announced were as exciting to me as hearing that a new CIS show was coming out. Still, Disney+ is a film quality tv platform. Beyond its library of junk, it is pumping billions into original content. The Mandalorian looks fantastic, it looks better than some high budget science fiction films. They have hired top level actors, directors, writers and more, and it shows. The show from a production standpoint is just about as good as TV can get. So that is a big plus. There are few shows that have ever looked so much like a big budget film. The super rich source of design they have inherited, means even with only a few original additions, the show just looks amazing, as it is reproducing design elements that have been honed over decades. The outfits, the armour, the set aesthetics, the sheer amount of cash saved that other fantasy productions would need to spend, is then diverted into other areas and it really shows. Anyone that says this show is not one of, if not the, best production quality we have seen on TV is kidding themselves.

Beyond the production the real star of this show is David Filoni. He has a long history of making fan pleasing content and has shown he understands legacy as well as having the ability to add new content. It is well known now the terms of the Lucas deal means George retained royalty rights for merchandise for the prequels and the original series. "Let the past die" and all that shit coming down from high to wipe the old films away started to make so much sense when you consider this. Yet Filoni has somehow always managed to walk a line that brings new fans into the modern works, rather than alienate them. Do not be fooled by Jon Favreau's name. David Filoni is the guy behind this, and if they had any sense it would be him in Kennedy's chair, someone btw who is famously not involved in this show in anyway.

There is a lot of talk about how this show is like a western, but it isn't even remotely like one. It really shows how devoid of imagination much of the critical audience is. My guess is the "western" line came from Disney itself and then one critic said it and this just went on and on and on, each taking the lead from another. The show lacks all the cinematic fingerprints of the western, calling this show a western is like calling the 1st Conan film a western. Sure it is a lone man in a desert, doing fetch quests but that is about it. It will be hilarious once the latter episodes are on different planets and more characters have been introduced and stuff and this link to the "western" will be more and more absurd.

The episodes are short, and it is a mercy. It would have been so easy for them to fall into the netlfix trap of making a 20 hours film and 1/2 the audience loosing its cool mid way. The episodes are short and sweet, never staying to long and this makes you want more. I actually think the episode length is probably the smartest part of this production.

In addition there are a lot of touches that seem tailor made for old school fans to address issues that have come up over the last two decades of media. The "hero", for example, is fallible. Spending some time falling on his arse and getting nearly killed. The way the Jedi have evolved in cartoons, comics, games and films have made jedi characters into caricatures, and the simple act of the main dude not being perfect at everything instantly gives the show some credibility in my eyes. Also the "Judge Dredd" not taking his helmet off thing is really cool, and something I was sure would not happen.

I also really liked the main hook, that of the young Yoda. For those that do not know, Yoda's race and back story has never been named in any cannon media. Seeing a baby "yoda" tells fans that this show is going to seriously add to the lore of Star Wars in a major way. This is intriguing, on paper at least. All the "worshipping metal" and tribal stuff from the comics can go fuck a fruit bat, though.

I want to hate this show, but in truth there is little to fault it on. I mean I can talk about the bloodless violence or the shameless easter eggs to make fanatics wet themselves but the reality of this show is that it is well made, seems to take itself seriously, seems to have real direction and is for all appearances may be the best Star Wars live action offering since Rouge One, and that film wasn't exactly devoid of problems.

Yet, I still do not give a shit. I'm just not interested at all. Watching this show was like watching Downtown Abby with my wife. The show is good, well made even, but I just do not give a flying fuck about those stuck up English toffs or their hokey gutter snip domestics. Downtown Abby is just not for me. Magicians is just not for me. House MD is just not for me. Sopranos is just not for me. Breaking Bad is just not for me.

Star Wars is just not for me.

It was burnt out of me, all the things it was to me in my youth are gone and now it is just another random scifi, like say Killjoys and I doubt I will be bothered to summon the effort to watch the 3rd episode and beyond. It just doesn't hold my interest.

Verdict : George Lucus visited the set of Mandelorian and was latter quoted saying Dave Filoni "is like a son to me".

(Film Review) - Godzilla 35: Monarch 03 - King of the Monsters (2019)

*** SPOILERS ***

Godzilla is a strange beast in that the character is beloved, for it is a classic pop culture icon known throughout the world, as in Superman levels of penetration into the culture and yet only a tiny fraction of the people that instantly recognise the character have ever seen his films. You could ask an 80 year old granny, you could ask a 6 year old child, and you could ask them on nearly any continent on earth and they would know who Godzilla is, but have they ever seen a single film? Those that have seen the films generally considered them to be B-Movies. Even diehard fans accept the fact that the movies have always kinda sucked. That does not mean they're not films people like, even love, but I do not think that any serious filmgoers can sit there and tell me that the Godzilla films are amazing stories or incredibly well made films, beyond the original.

I have always been a huge Godzilla fan and have watched the movies a ton of times when I was small and again as an adult. It was that exposure, particularly as a child that I think is the key to my experience with this new film.

 When you are a kid you do not see the men in suits running around a glorified train set. You see Godzilla. You see a wild monster crushing cities but you also see that particular Japanese aesthetic, in their modern storytelling where mankind is completely out of control of the events around them. I kind of fatalism of endurance where the is no response to the disaster, a disaster more often than not we have caused ourselves. We are ineffectual and unimportant, the only option is to hide, to hope and to survive from a roll of a die. We are nearly superfluous, you can imagine the stories of these films carrying on without us, despite our pathetic and wretched meddling that ultimately leads to nought. It is Godzilla that saves the day, as inevitable as the dawn. But Godzilla's is selfish in a way, like us his concern is for his planet. Our planet. A beast that fights for Earth, not humanity, not for morality, not for gain and who is unable to be controlled. Yet as we live on Earth he is kinda the good guy, one we rely on as we live on Earth too. This focus moved Godzilla slowly from a hideous bad guy to what I consider as a representation of Gia itself. A force of nature, Earth personified, and who could in their right mind not want to cheer for the Earth itself.

These are powerful ideas for a kid and this film more than any before it is showing us the monsters as we imagined them. I never saw a guy in a suit with visible strings holding up 3 sock puppet heads. I saw a golden dragon. This movie shows us the monsters as they lived in our imagination, not as they lived on celluloid. This film is about how Godzilla is perceived, more than about what it actually has been.

It is also an American production and it loses some of those deep-rooted cultural concepts about our place as a human race in relation to the planet itself. In an effort to make the story more "realistic" the Gods themselves are reduced to dumb animals, easily commanded by a magic box. A switch to make them rage, a switch to make them docile, a switch to call them, to drive them away. Having humans attempt to control Godzilla and his ilk is not a bad thing in itself, in fact, it is a common theme through the series, but ultimately I feel that it should always fail utterly and be ultimately unimportant.

Godzilla for me is at its best in the way western film audiences were introduced to him in the last 2015 film by that Monsters guy. They should basically not even notice us. This is what made that scene Godzilla vs King Ghidorah in '91 so powerful for Godzilla fans, as Godzilla stood there and looked directly at the dude, feelings of acknowledgement and understanding pass through the audience at the gravity of the idea that Godzilla was noticing us at all let alone singling him out for retribution. This scene worked so well as it was so unusual. In this film, the monsters all act more like King Kong. They are letting people touch them, bending down to snort on them Jurassic Park style and chasing little girls who can somehow outrun them. For how I personally relate to Godzilla, there seems to be what I consider a definite misunderstanding of the writers and director about some pretty basic concepts of what Godzilla is all about, concepts that the 2014 film, flawed as it was, nailed.

Even so, I immensely enjoyed this film. The film looks fantastic. Some of the shots could be screen capped from the Blu-Ray, printed out and hang on my wall. I mean it is absolutely gorgeous and if you are after giant monster battles, this film has you covered. The action is fantastic. I loved it. There was a lot of chatter from the trailers about the film looking dark, but I call bullshit on that. The film is extremely easy to read, even during the ground level, humans dodging exploding cars and toppling buildings I never felt like my eye was lost on the screen or that the action was obscured from view. The film is loud though. Do not go to this film if you have a headache. It is basically 2 hours of screaming monsters.

I also liked how they delved deep into the lore of the beasts. While I am a huge advocate of not explaining shit in films, nothing sucks more than crappy pseudoscience and technobabble, which this film has a decent share of. Still, it is things like Monster Zero causing hurricanes all around him from beating his wings and his electric charge or Rodan rising from a volcano and how ancient man translated these sights and how the monsters themselves are part of human collective consciousness, filtered into our legends. I thought a lot of that was really cool. I felt this film really pushed the lore and I loved that.

That is not to say the film is not fucking dumb.

The biggest nitpick I have is that apparently water pressure is not a thing, but I can forgive a submarine form just cruising about at the bottom of the ocean or a helicopter flying in a tornado. Having hero characters conveniently picked up by some kind of transport that comes from nowhere as they need to be at the next scenes location or even the killing off of the Japanese scientist's female assistant, just to replace her with the exact same character, this time Chinese to allow the sale of the film in the Chinese market are just things that niggle me but are not deal breakers. If you make a 200million dollar film that is trying to do so much there are concessions you have to make, to make it at all.

There are also the increasingly common pacing problems that event cinema is having. With so much going on there is no time for the story to "boil". Mothra wakes up and spends all of 10 mins in the film before it cocoons itself. Rodan is born and fighting before it even takes flight form the Volcano. Everything feels rushed, we as an audience need time to see the monsters and understand what they can do. Seeing Godzilla sucker punch Rodan isn't as cool unless we have seen Rodan be a badass himself. These monsters need actual arcs. I think they could take some lessons from martial arts cinema.

This leads me to the biggest problem I have with this film. The monsters are just that. Monsters. These films over the years have produced definite and realised characters for these creatures. When you see a King Kong film, there is no doubt about his personality. You see it in his actions and expressions. The monsters in this film, despite some legit attempts, fail to have any feeling of character. We as an audience want to love these guys, to emotionally bond to them, even the bad guys but what we get are just creatures. Look at Aliens. Just tiny moments of showing intelligence and that scene with the Queen issuing direct commands and understanding Ripley's threat gave those monsters such depth and the ability for the audience to connect to them. This film needed those kinds of moments and it just doesn't have them.

Also, this films lacks the conviction to have an actual bad guy. In an age of understanding, it is no longer acceptable to just have a crazy scientist dude nearly cause Armageddon. The audience is deprived of the classic and always satisfyingly cathartic experience of the bad guy getting her comeuppance, as it is obfuscated in touchy feely bullshit. The eco terrorist and the doctor should really have been one character, and she shouldn't have a redemptive arc of any kind, imo. Why is a film asking me to identify with a woman that has literally murdered millions? Fuck that. Have her stepped on my Monster Zero or a building fall on her or something.

All in all this film is one I really enjoyed and I have already seen it twice at the cinema. Once with friends and once alone in iMax. I may even see it again as my brother wants to go see it. Even so, I am not going to sit here and tell you it is a great film. It is great because it is a Godzilla film, it isn't a great film. Even with all the monster action, the final fight is concluded in a super fast sequence that feels a little anticlimactic after such epic and awesome fighting. In Dragonball Z they don't suddenly end it once everyone is juiced up. That is when the real battle begins. This film, for all its good work, fails to tap into that mythic feeling that I so desperately wanted it to have.

And that mugffin magic briefcase thing was fucking retarded.

Verdict : All hail the rise of the King, lets hope this is one of many.

I'm back!!

G'day....

So after a long time I have decided to start posting myreviews again. I kinda stopped as I was upset with how I basically got zero feedback of any kind. I never stopped making reviews though.. I just srated posting them on variouss themed geek fourms. Like a Film Fourm or a Comic Fourm.

I actually got a lot of good responses in those threads and many people said I should restart my blog.. so here it goes!

How long will I keep it up.. I dunno. 

If anyone knows of a better platform or a way to get my blog noticed then let me know thanks!

[Comic Review] - What's so funny about 'Truth, Justice and the American Way'?

Action Comics vol.1 #775 - What's so funny about 'Truth, Justice and the American Way'?

In an age of the mega-crossover-event it can feel strange to think that some of the best stories in comics used to be from limited series inside monthlies or even in single issues. This "One-Shot", Action Comics #775 manages to pack into a single book one of the most important Superman stories since "What happened to the Man of Tomorrow". It is particularly interesting as a expression of the American backlash to the British Invasion which occurred during the 80s as Vertigo mined extraordinarily daring talent from 2000AD, like Allan More, Grant Morison, Allan Grant and... well that is a huge list I may as well stop there.

The 90s is a complicated time for comics and is what I describe as the "adolescence" of the American Comic. The hope of the 60s had broken down into the decadence and nihilism of the 70s through to the 80s and comics like so much other media began to reflect this by becoming dark and violent with strong anti-establishment themes.

The hokey comics of the past seamed then, and now to an extent, rather silly and dull. Stagnating in the ruts left over from decades of paper strip comics designed specifically for young children and values stemming form the end of WW2 and the baby boomers. At this time the American trust in authority was getting severely undermined by the failure of Vietnam, its government scandals and increasingly brutal acts by the police and criminals alike. There was a collective anger in youth culture, and not just in the States. The brutal realities of human nature crushed the dreams to the 60s and left us on the downward spiral to the cynicism and acceptance that defines the post millennial. 

American comics were selling badly as the sweet hopeful charm of Superman started to seem ridiculous and DC looked across the pond to England to a comic revolution being fought by the boys at Action and latter 2000AD.

2000AD, the punk rock of comics. Daring, visceral, violent and above all satirical of the status quo. It birthed some of the greatest comic legends of art and stories in the history of comics as they cut a bloody swath through peoples perceptions of what a comic was and what it could do. 

The so called "British Invasion" was the influx of these artists and writers to America and they brought with them a post-modern look at the Superhero comic, which was something a little alien to the shores of England. Superheros were simply not looked at the same way by the British and this lead to runs like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Swamp Thing, Hellbalzer, Sandman, The Boys and more. Lessons learnt and vibes cut to a fine blade at 2000AD were brought to America where it was soaked up by the eager youth that had finally found stories that reflected the world they lived in, and not some shadow world cast decades before them.

While the British Invasion changed comics forever, and for the most part, for the better. It also had some shocking side effects, namely being the 90s. Now I personally love the 90s comics, as this was when I was most active as a young collector, not getting back into the hobby till I was entering my 30s. Still for every Doom Patrol and Sandman there was a hundred other comics which were little more than exploitation cinema but on a comic page. Women for example were sexulised to such a extreme that even to this day comics have not yet recovered, but the real side-effect of the Britsh Invasion was the nihilism and ultra-violence that was brought to us by the British. 

Go 90s Superman (Hunter/ Prey). Spawn cloak, shoulder pads,

buckles, belts and other junk and of course the Super Mullet!

So, how dose this all relate to "What's so funny about 'Truth, Justice and the American Way'?" Well, this comic was written as a backlash to the direction superhero comics headed during this time. Action Comics #775 came out in 2001 during the great retreat into the classic values of the Superhero and this story expands on the themes brought up in the epic "Rein of the Superman" but in my mind it is #775 that is most clear in the forceful rejection of the British aesthetic which influenced comics so much across the 80s and 90s. Heralding the the return to the idealistic attitudes that are characteristic of hero comics.

In someways this comic is a direct response to titles like "The Authority". The core concept in this comic is that a super powerful team of "heroes" appears who have no qualms about killing. They fight against bad guys but they are brutal and unmindful of collateral damage. Superman, obviously has a moral stance against these guys but the beauty of this comic is in how the general populous, as in us the readers, accept these murders as heroes and hold them as role models. 

Superman feels rejected, out dated. His values are mocked as the populace call out for extreme solutions. These are issues that are completely relevant at this terrible time in history we live in right now. The Elite, as they call themselves are actual vigilantes but on a global super scale. This is the idea of the benevolent dictator that will find, and wipe out all they deem evil with no accountability as they are the strongest. Basically this is a fascist ideal, hence "The Elite". 

We have all felt this, why not send a military hit squad down to the local drug dealing thugs and kill them all.. because it is wrong that is why. Yet we as comic fans had stopped buying the old comics and were consuming at huge rates these new types of comics.

This one shot is a reflection. The populous in the comic is us, the comic readers and The Elite are the British invaders and Superman, is the last hold out.. the original hero and the last hero where the line had to be draw or the idea of the "hero" would be lost.

The Elite. Lead by Manchester Black

The Elite is the symbol of the British vision of the Superhero, flawed, ultravolent, dark and unaccountable. Lead by Manchester Black, who not only is named after a famous British city but sports a full body chest tattoo of the British Flag visible in all shots while spouting English slang in every bubble. This is the nightmare vision of Joe Kelly, the writer of this tale at his realisation that this new direction in comics is the antithesis of what makes Superman, well... Super.

Is this the Superman you really want to read? (Hunter/Prey)

There are some fantastic speeches in this book, from both sides as lets face it the Brits had point, still I need to remind you this is a ONE SHOT. This is all in a single issue. Amazing. In these speeches Black lays out the ridiculousness and unreality of Golden Age and Superman argues for hope and the power of dreams. What are stories really for? To crush us, or uplift us?

As this is a one shot, there is a lot of spoilers going on here as there is not much content I can talk about with out giving it all away and many people are probably familiar with the tale as it was one of the great Animated Films from the DCAU. Superman vs The Elite.

DCAU 14: Superman vs The Elite

Still the take away for me is that this comic is really the salvation of the American Comic. The British Invasion changed everything, much for the better, but during it the American idea of the hero was lost. Something which has since been recaptured culminating in to hugely popular Rebirth.

This book was written and drawn by Americans, for Americans, fighting for the soul of American Comics, and it won.

I love you Superman.

[Comic Review] Superman : Dark Knight over Metropolis

Superman #44, Adventures of Superman #466-467, Action Comics #653-654, + Annual #1

Many people look back at the 90s as a dark time for comics and super hero comics in general. There are some infamous story lines as well as some truly absurd costume designs that are the subject of ridicule to this day. Yet for me the 90s remains a fascinating time for superhero comics and one that I personally believe to be, in its own way one of the best periods in comics.