I’m not normally very keen on horror games, or horror in general, really. But as anyone who reads this blog knows, I adore The Secret World, so I absolutely had to buy its spin-off, The Park, as soon as pre-orders went live, and I played through it within hours of its release on Steam.

I have a lot of love for the Secret World setting, and for the bits of written by Joel Bylos (who helmed The Park) in particular, so I went in with very high expectations.

The Park is far better than I expected.

The Park is another narrative focused game, meaning it has little to no “gameplay” in the traditional sense. It’s another game to be derogatorily referred to as a walking simulator, but while that isn’t necessarily my normal cup of tea in gaming, it works well here.

It could be considered a prequel to The Secret World, but only in the very loose sense that it takes place in the same setting, uses a familiar location (the Atlantic Island Park), and takes place before the events of TSW. There are many references to TSW in The Park, but they’re subtle, and you do not need any knowledge of TSW to enjoy The Park. They are very much separate entities — they simply exist in the same universe.

In The Park, you play as Lorraine, a troubled widow whose son Callum becomes lost in the theme park after dark. As she delves deeper into the park’s twisted underbelly, nightmare and reality intertwine, and the story of Lorraine’s life and her struggles as a parent unfold.

As in TSW, the ambiance in The Park is stellar. The music is subtle, just noticeable enough to help communicate the rising tension and dread of the game. The graphics are excellent, hauntingly beautiful and chillingly eerie.

Most impressive of all are the ambient sound effects. There were moments when the wind blowing through the foliage sounded so real I actually felt the chill even sitting in my computer chair.

What’s most interesting to me about The Park is that it really isn’t what I’d expect from a horror game. There are few jump scares (that are good enough to seriously threaten your sleep), but honestly, it’s not a terribly frightening game. Creepy, yes, but not exceptionally scary. It’s not even possible to die or lose.

What The Park excels at is character and emotion. The park is ultimately just a backdrop for a story of tragedy, depression, and the dark side of parenthood. In a game set in a haunted theme park designed to harvest the lives of the innocent, the true horror comes from struggles all too mundane, and the demons that can lurk in a person’s heart.

The Park may not be frightening in the traditional sense, but it can be profoundly disturbing.

At no point along the way does The Park’s storytelling falter, either. Its pacing is impeccable. The voice acting is top notch. The slow slide from ordinary life to surreal horror is masterfully executed.

It’s amazing to me that Funcom never even intended to release this game to the public up until about two or three months ago. It’s just something they threw together to learn the Unreal engine. And it’s absolutely brilliant.

The only thing that could be considered a negative about The Park is that it is extremely short. A full completionist play-through will take two hours at most.

Yet even there, I struggle to fault it. It’s short, but it’s an incredible ride while it lasts, and it doesn’t feel at all rushed or incomplete. It’s exactly as long as it needs to be.

If you’re a fan of The Secret World, you’ll love The Park — think Tyler Freeborn with a better emotional hook. If you’re not a fan of The Secret World, you’ll love The Park — it’s a beautifully twisted piece of interactive fiction.

Overall rating: 9.6/10 A brief but masterful experience.

While I’m on the subject, I will also mention that The Park features some swag for TSW players. Specifically, a killer chipmunk costume (which I hate, and you will too once you play The Park) and some very high level neck talismans. The jury seems to be out on how good these talismans are — half the people are saying their unusual procs make them useless, while the rest are claiming the talismans are overpowered to the point of being game-breaking.

For those who don’t currently play TSW, The Park also gives you the option of a seven day free trial. Which you should take, because TSW is awesome, and don’t you want to learn more about the Atlantic Island Park after all that?

Samhain 2015: The Seven Silences and more

On the same day as The Park’s released, The Secret World released its latest Halloween event.

This year’s new mission is The Seven Silences. It’s a good mission, though not quite on the same level as the last two events.

A bee has died. The story is that they managed to commit suicide, and it’s up to the player to travel across the world and through the world of nightmares to discover how an immortal can die.

The mystery of how exactly you can kill one of Gaia’s immortal chosen — which we always knew to be possible but supremely difficult — has been around for a long time, so it’s an interesting plot with a lot of significance to TSW’s greater mythos, though it does ultimately raise as many questions as it answers.

The ambiance is also once again absolutely top notch. I never cease to be amazed by Funcom’s ability to create the most surreal and unnerving environments — places as awe-inspiring as they are dreadful.

However, the mission is a lot longer than it needs to be, and the travel time in particular is a real drag. There are also several stages that can become quite frustrating if you fail at any point — and you probably will — due to the need to repeat the entire stage and, again, long travel time.

So it’s a decent story-arc, but it’s not on the same level as The Broadcast by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s also worth noting that you require access to Kaidan to complete the mission, so this is the first holiday mission to be completely inaccessible to new players, even if they get high level help.

However, I’m still loving Halloween in TSW. Between the new mission and the return of all the past events, there’s an almost overwhelming amount of stuff to do, and the whole event is just a joy. There’s nothing else quite like it in gaming.

Oh, sure, lots of MMOs have events, but none of them can match the quality of content or the sheer festival air that permeates TSW in Halloween. Even an antisocial curmudgeon like myself cannot help but be caught up in the wonderful sense of community and celebration it cultivates.

I’ve even put aside being a spiteful hermit for the moment, sharing my loot bags with lowbies in Kingsmouth and offering to carry lower level players through the content from time to time.

I guess my point is: Halloween in The Secret World is awesome.

As has become my tradition, I will now offer my collected thoughts on the most recent World of Warcraft expansion as it winds to an end.

Do I even need to say this will be a giant rant?

Out of left field:

I think it’s safe to say that the announcement of alternate universe Draenor as the setting for an expansion pack was a surprise to everyone, and probably not a pleasant surprise for most.

Warlords of Draenor has been, from beginning to end, a bizarre and borderline nonsensical tangent that has contributed little of value to the ongoing story of the Warcraft universe.

I’ve chosen to simply write it off as akin to, say, the Simpsons Halloween episodes — a what if scenario with no bearing on the “real” story. Of course, this also makes the expansion feel very pointless and severely hampered my motivation to keep playing… but it’s the only way to maintain my sanity as a lore fan.

It’s not even an interesting what if scenario, either. The Iron Horde are not at all compelling as villains. They have no depth or personality, and they are soundly defeated at every turn, so they never feel like a threat.

I’ve long railed against the idea that Blizzard favours the Horde, but I will grant WoD is a clear example of the Alliance getting the short end of the stick. It’s basically an Orc expansion, and what little Alliance storyline does exist is dominated by the Draenei, and Yrel.

It’s no secret I hold a very low opinion of the Draenei, but at first, WoD seemed to be turning that around. They were actually being treated as real people with flaws and internal conflicts, and I quite enjoyed the Rangaari, Maraad, and Maladaar. But then Yrel happened.

Yrel is a strong contender for worst character in the Warcraft universe, and the embodiment of everything wrong with the Draenei. She’s a shiny perfect hero archetype with no depth or personality whatsoever, and the game is constantly hailing her as a born hero and saviour despite the fact she never actually does anything.

The one and only time we see Yrel actually take command, she leads her people into a blindingly obvious trap. This might have been a good opportunity to add some nuance to her character, but neither the game nor Yrel itself acknowledges her failure, and the game just keeps on treating her as the most perfectest saviour of all Draenor.

And the entire story revolves around her. Other, far more interesting characters are pushed to the side or killed off outright just to make room for the rise of this Maryest of Sues.

That said, it’s not a great expansion to be a Horde lore fan, either. It mostly amounts to a giant character assassination of many iconic Horde characters, and the Orc race as a whole, and any non-Orc Horde races have been completely forgotten.

So Alliance got the worst of it, but this was not a good expansion for either faction’s story.

There are only a few highlights in this otherwise dull expansion.

One is Frostfire Ridge, which had an absolutely fantastic storyline. I loved how they fleshed out the Frostwolf culture, Durotan was excellent throughout, and while pretty much everyone is a bit burnt out on Orcs by now, this story was a great reminder of how awesome Orcs can be at their best.

I also had a lot of fun uncovering the history and mythology of the Arrakoa in Spires of Arak, and Reshad is a character I have a lot of love for. The story was over too quickly and inconclusively, though.

Flying:

I’ll be blunt: Trying to remove flight was one of the stupidest things Blizzard has ever done.

I reject all of the arguments made against flying; I find them utterly spurious in the context of the game’s reality. I do not believe flight has any negative impact on WoW. However, even if I did accept the criticisms of flight to be accurate, trying to remove it would still be a terrible idea.

Flight has been a core feature of World of Warcraft for a large majority of its lifespan. Flying mounts have long served as the ultimate prestige reward in the game, requiring major grinds or even real money purchases in some cases. There was no way that trying to take away flying was not going to make everyone lose their minds, and rightfully so.

One must also make mention of how badly Blizzard mishandled their communications on the issue. We as fans spent months getting conflicting answers and waffling ambiguity, and it ended up coming across as severe incompetence at best and deliberate dishonesty at worst. It’s amazing a company as big and successful as Blizzard could mishandle its PR so badly.

Of course, Blizzard finally backed down and put flying back in, but of course, it had to come with another poison pill.

I do not agree with the idea that the Pathfinder achievement is a “good compromise.” We had a good compromise for years: you can’t fly while leveling, but it unlocks at max level. That was a good system that satisfies both sides of the argument.

The Pathfinder achievement is yet more grind for grind’s sake, and it comes across as spitefulness on behalf of the developers over the players not sharing their grand vision.

And now the mess is starting all over again, as we can’t get a clear answer on how or when flight will be available in Legion.

I, for one, will not buy the new expansion until flight is in the game.

Garrisons:

Garrisons have gotten a lot of hate, not entirely undeserved, but personally I enjoyed them. I enjoy having a little of the game world to call my own, and collecting and upgrading followers was an enjoyable — if somewhat grindy — minigame.

I think garrisons do deserve a lot of credit for solving the problem that plagues most player housing systems: a lack of tangible gameplay. I’ve never much cared about player housing because there’s nothing to do there once you’ve built a home to your liking. With crafting integration and follower missions, garrisons offered a reason to keep coming back even after construction was complete.

However, garrisons do suffer from two crippling problems.

One is that they lack almost all personalization. Even the ability to choose the location of your garrison was scrapped pre-launch, and now there’s almost nothing you can do to make a garrison feel yours. So while garrisons lack the fatal flaw of most player housing systems, they also lack the main virtue.

The other is that garrisons are completely unavoidable. It’s all but impossible to reach level cap without building one’s garrison as you go. In theory, you could mostly ignore it at level cap, but no one in their right mind would do so, as garrisons are one of the must ludicrously rewarding activities in the game’s history. You can make thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of gold per week just putting the bare minimum of effort into follower missions, and that’s just scratching the surface of what garrisons offer.

This is the same mistake Blizzard just keeps making over and over again: forcing everyone into a narrow band of content whether they like it or not. In Cataclysm, it was raids. In Pandaria, it was daily quests. In Draenor, it’s garrisons. I wonder what narrow niche of gameplay Legion will make us all hate?

Garrisons should have been designed as a deep but optional side activity, like pet battles. As that, they would have worked brilliantly.

One other major disappointment is that Blizzard is planning to abandon the garrison feature after WoD. It seems tragic to me that a feature with so much potential is simply being thrown in the trash can, rather than iterated on and improved. Garrisons aren’t an amazing feature now, but they easily could be if Blizzard was willing to put in the effort.

Oh, and let’s not even talk about how excruciatingly unfun the shipyard is.

An empty shell:

Even if all the other issues hadn’t been a factor, WoD would still be an underwhelming expansion based purely on how small and unambitious it was.

There simply wasn’t much to do. Scenarios were inexplicable abandoned, as were most daily quests. This left apexis grinding as the only significant content outside of raids and dungeons, and that was simply soul-crushing. I actually like the idea of filling a progress bar through a variety of activities, but they were tuned so badly. One percent completion per mob kill makes me die a little inside. And what do you get in the end? Merely a pittance of apexis crystals.

WoD also repeated one of the worst mistakes of Pandaria by not adding any new five man dungeons after launch. Timewalking and mythic dungeons are both welcome features, but they’re no substitute for new dungeons.

In fact, WoD added hardly anything at all after launch. We got only one content patch worthy of the name, and Tanaan had been intended as a launch zone before being delayed, so really the only new content we got all expansion was a single raid and the garrison shipyard.

But by far the worst mistake of WoD’s endgame was the removal of valor and justice points.

I have no interest in RNG gearing. I am not motivated by the slim chance of getting a drop that may or may not be useful. If I wanted to gamble, I’d go to a casino. Grinding out points has been my endgame since I started playing. Without it, my motivation to keep playing after leveling is pretty much nonexistent.

This is another one of those cases where Blizzard is telling us what we’re supposed to find fun. They said that going to a vendor to buy gear wasn’t exciting. I guess I imagined all those years of looking forward to rushing off to the vendors to buy a shiny new upgrade. Certainly that was more exciting than killing the same boss for months only to have your shoulders still not drop.

Now Blizzard is planning a patch to re-implement valor, if only for item upgrades. It would be very tempting — and probably accurate — to call this too little too late, but at least it’s a step in the right direction. I can only hope valor will be a launch feature for Legion, as a way to buy gear and not just upgrade it.

We could also talk about how the Raid Finder’s rewards were gutted as a further attempt to remind those outside of raiding guilds that we are second class citizens in Blizzard’s eyes, or how important story moments were locked behind mythic-only phases, or how the legendary quest repeated the endless grinding of Pandaria’s without its excellent storytelling and single-player challenges, or how the nerfs to casting while moving have sucked much of the fun out of ranged classes, but this post is already dragging on too long.

WoW’s development has always been a case of two steps forward and one step back. Every expansion has made big mistakes. But Warlords of Draenor is the first expansion to do more harm than good. For the first time, I wish I could turn back the clock to an earlier period of the game.

WoD didn’t expand or improve the game. It contracted it and made it less fun, in ways I’m not sure it will ever recover from. Not because the problems are unfixable, but because I don’t think Blizzard is even interested in trying.

Overall rating: 3.1/10

I don’t normally get caught up in hype. I may get excited when it comes to upcoming games, but it’s usually based on my own opinion of whether or not it looks interesting, not communal buzz or marketing.

I don’t often get caught up in hype, but when I do, I usually regret it, and that’s true of Sword Coast Legends.

That’s not to say it’s a bad game. But I could probably have found a better use for the money I spent on it.

The game:

For those unaware,  Sword Coast Legends is meant as a throwback to classic CRPGs, taking place in Dungeons and Dragons’ omnipresent Forgotten Realms setting. A lot of its hype in the gaming community came from its dungeon master mode and player content creation tools, but this review will mainly focus on its story mode and core mechanics, for reasons I will get to in a bit.

Sword Coast Legends is pretty much what you’d expect from an old school-inspired RPG… which mostly means it has really crummy combat. It’s a lot like the combat of the first two Dragon Age games, and long-time readers know that’s not a compliment coming from me. Mostly it’s a lot of sitting around and watching your party auto-attack while you wait on cooldowns to refresh.

This can be mitigated by acquiring cooldown reduction gear, but that’s a double-edged sword for the game. The end result is that you never want anything other than cooldown reduction gear — it vastly outstrips any other stat.

To be fair, though, I didn’t hate the combat in Sword Coast Legends as much as I did in, say, Dragon Age: Origins. If only because the top-down camera creates a different expectation of pacing for me than over the shoulder does. Playing a ranger also helped — they’re a ridiculously versatile class that always has something to do.

Something I found refreshing compared to most other RPGs these days is that classes in Sword Coast legends are quite versatile and can be built a lot of different ways. This also opens up a little more freedom for party composition. For example, I didn’t need a rogue in my party, because I trained my ranger to pick locks and disarm traps.

I really loved the ranger class in this game.

On the downside, unlike pretty much every RPG I’ve played in the last… ten years, at least, party members will not gain XP or otherwise match your level unless you’re actively bringing them adventuring with you. Since leveling is very slow in this game, that means you pretty much have to pick a single party composition and stick with it the whole through.

Which is even more problematic because there are points in the story where you can lose companions (yes, plural) permanently, often with no warning and no way to prevent it.

I also did not care for the fact that a full play through of the story mode, completing every side quest and fully exploring every map, will still leave a few levels short of the cap.

One thing I did really like, though, is that Sword Coast Legends often offers multiple ways to solve problems beyond simply killing things. Characters with a high strength score can attempt to intimidate enemies, or force certain locks, while a high charisma will allow you to persuade NPCs to a variety of ends. This is certainly a refreshing change of pace, and it makes the game feel a lot more detailed than the average RPG.

I also liked that, unlike pretty much every other game I’ve ever played with systems like this, upgrading your non-combat skills doesn’t seem to hamper your fighting prowess too much.

The story:

The storyline of Sword Coast Legends would be best be described as a mixed bag.

Its greatest strength is its characters. Nearly all of the party members are fleshed out, interesting, and likable — if often bizarre and quirky. They’re not quite Bioware-quality, but I definitely got attached to my little crew of oddballs after a while.

The voice acting is also pretty good. Not the best I’ve heard, but good enough to sell the characters.

You have a few choices to make over the course of the story, but most of them don’t have a lot of impact. It’s better than nothing, though.

The main storyline, though, is at best adequate. It’s a pretty cliche “bad monsters want to destroy the world, you are the chosen one” affair. It’s mostly pretty predictable, and there just isn’t much that’s memorable about it.

There were also several storytelling decisions made near the end that I did not like at all. One twist, in particular, in addition to being very frustrating to me as a player, could be considered borderline offensive. I’m sure the writers didn’t mean any harm, but they really should have thought things through, given the context of real world history and culture.

So, on the whole, it makes for a somewhat underwhelming experience from a story perspective.

It also didn’t help that the last boss fight bugged out for me badly, causing all my companions’ AI to stop functioning. That did not make for a good time.

The toolset:

As of this writing, I haven’t done anything in Sword Coast Legends other than the story mode. I never had much interest in playing as a dungeon master, and my lukewarm feelings on the game mechanics have put a damper on any desire I might have had to play content made by other players — though it could still happen at some point.

I was fairly interested in the campaign creation tools, but I quickly discovered that they are currently severely limited in what they can do. I recall games from the nineties having more powerful content creation tools.

To the developers’ credit, they have released a fairly detailed timeline of planned improvements, and it sounds like the content creation toolset will soon be much more robust, but as of right now, there’s not much to it. If I do any campaign-building, it will be after those changes are made.

* * *

Overall rating: 6.7/10 Not a bad game, but not a particularly memorable one, either.

I now reach the end of Once Upon a Time’s third season, and it goes out not with a bang, but a whimper, leaving me to wonder if this show is still worth my time.

“Bleeding Through”:

It’s seance time!

Despite the best efforts of Regina and Robin Hood, Zelena has stolen Regina’s heart, and not in the fun way.* Zelena is now on the brink of victory, but if the people of Storybrooke are to defeat her, they need more information on her plans, and her past.

*(That’s Emma’s job. :P)

To this end, Belle delves into Rumpel’s collection of lore to determine what sort of spell Zelena hopes to cast, and Regina attempts to summon the spirit of Cora to learn the truth of Zelena’s origins. The tale therein shows Cora as close to sympathetic as she’s ever been.

Surprisingly, this also offers the opportunity for Snow and Regina to bond — bet that’s something you never thought you’d see.

I have to admit I’m rather embarrassed it took me this long to realize the significance of Zelena stealing courage, a heart, etcetera.

Thus far this whole Wicked Witch arc has been decidedly underwhelming, but “Bleeding Through” is pretty good, perhaps due to a strong focus on Regina. It was very strange but also very enjoyable to see her and Snow bonding so much, and I really liked Snow’s assessment of Regina as a person at the end.

My complaints with this episode are several but mostly minor. It was entirely too easy for Zelena to track down Regina’s heart, which rather invalidated the ending of last episode. There’s still no explanation of how or why Zelena wound up in Oz — this seems to have taken place before Cora started learning magic.

I also feel the characters judged Ava’s actions with excessive harshness. I mean, I’m not saying what she did wasn’t a little catty, but Cora was lying, and she was clearly only interested in Leopold as a path to wealth and power.

Overall rating: 7.8/10

“A Curious Thing”:

Time is running out to stop Zelena (no pun intended). The people of Storybrooke come to believe they may already know how to defeat her, but lost the memory along with the rest of the year they spent in the Enchanted Forest. To uncover the truth, they’ll need to break the curse (again), but to do that, they need Henry, so first he must recover his own memories.

But Zelena isn’t about to let that happen without a fight, and between that Hook continuing to be really quite awful, Emma and company are going to have a rough ride.

Thankfully, we as television viewers don’t need Henry, so we get to learn the truth via the traditional flashbacks.

This was a pretty enjoyable episode. The pacing is quick but not rushed, there’s a good emotional weight without being too sappy, and it moves the story along quite well. The fact that Zelena didn’t cast the curse is quite an unexpected twist, but it makes perfect sense, and I quite liked Snow’s plan to circumvent the price of the curse. Very clever.

And Hook is having a bad time.

Quite good all around.

Overall rating: 7.9/10

“Kansas”:

And now we’re back to an old problem: Emma and Charming are morons.

Sorry, but there’s just no other word for it at this point. Charming insists that Emma bring Hook when she goes to confront Zelena, even knowing Hook can destroy all of Emma’s power. That’s idiotic.

Then Emma gives Hook mouth to mouth to save him, knowing it will destroy her magic. That’s even dumber. Even if Hook wasn’t a worthless sleazeball, it still wouldn’t be worth sacrificing the whole town to save him, which is essentially what Emma chose to do. Of course, someone stepped in and cleaned up her mess, but she had no way of knowing that was going to happen.

And that brings us to the saving grace of Storybrooke, and this episode: Regina.

With Emma failing miserably in her role as saviour, it’s up to the ex-villain to save the town, and it’s a fantastic culmination of Regina’s redemption arc to date. And once again, Lana Parilla’s gravitas has saved what would otherwise be a truly dreadful episode.

There’s also yet another series of flashbacks, this time dealing with Zelena’s time in Oz and her fateful encounter with a girl named Dorothy, which is… fine, I guess. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I don’t see that it adds much.

Overall rating: 7.1/10

“Snow Drifts”:

All seems well in Storybrooke. But Emma is not content. For reasons that are not entirely clear, she’s planning to abandon Storybrooke and her family and take Henry back to New York, despite the fact that no one wants this, least of all Henry.

Hook is sent to calm her down — because nothing says “voice of reason” like murderous, alcoholic, self-centered pirate — but they spot Zelena’s reactivated time portal, and because Emma has all the wisdom and good sense of a crack-addled chicken, she rushes in to investigate instead of, you know, seeking the help of someone who could actually do something about it.

Inevitably, she and Hook wind up stuck in the past, and promptly destroy the future. It is then their task, with the aid of Rumpelstiltskin, to fix things such that Snow and Charming once again fall in love and everything proceeds as it should.

In case the heaping portion of snark hasn’t given it away yet, I did not particularly enjoy this episode. Once Upon a Time’s two worst characters trying to save the world from their own incompetence just doesn’t make for a particularly compelling plot.

I don’t know what else to say about it, honestly.

Overall rating: 5.9/10

“There’s No Place Like Home” (season finale):

The final episode of Once Upon a Time’s third season is pretty much a continuation of the last one. Which is not a good thing.

Again, we see two incredibly uninteresting and unlikable characters trying to save the world from themselves… and having no real trouble with it, either. They almost effortlessly manage to repair the damage to the timeline. There’s no drama.

Worse still, the episode concludes with Emma finally falling for Hook, a plot twist I find so utterly unpleasant it’s making me give serious thought to giving up on the series altogether. The only thing making Hook’s presence tolerable was Emma’s continued rejection of him.

I cannot withstand a world where Emma/Hook is a thing. I just can’t.

That said, there a few saving graces this time. Not enough to make it a good episode, but enough to make it not a total waste of time.

I did very much like Emma’s confrontation with past-Rumpel near the end. It was a rare case of Emma not sucking. Snow and Charming naming their son after Baelfire was also a very touching moment.

The woman Emma rescued being Maid Marian is also a very good twist. I just hope it doesn’t once again reset Regina’s redemption arc.

Overall rating: 6.4/10

* * *

Months have passed since I originally wrote this post (yeah, dat backlog), and although further seasons of Once Upon a Time have been added to Netflix, I have not watched them. I won’t say it’ll never happen, but I don’t have any particular desire to at the moment.

This series has always been very hit and miss, but its flaws are becoming increasingly difficult to stomach. Emma and Hook are genuinely ruining the show for me. Emma is not an interesting character, and the actress behind her is simply wooden and lifeless. Hook was introduced as an utterly despicable character, and the subsequent ham-fisted and half-assed attempts to make him sympathetic have only made me resent him more.

Furthermore, the Peter Pan arc was so excellent that I just know the series will never be that good again, and part of me thinks it would be better to quit while I’m ahead, so to speak.

I’m still a big Robert Carlyle fan, but Rumpel’s character seems destined to be an unending source of disappointment. It seems unlikely he’ll ever stop relapsing to his evil self, and at this point, I’m not sure he even deserves redemption. It’s not worth getting invested in the character.

That leaves Regina as the one major redeeming feature of the series, but I’m just not sure she’s enough on her own.

It’s been a long time coming.

As StarCraft fans, we waited over ten years for a follow-up to Brood War, and as a Protoss fan, I had to wait even longer for the expansion that would at last put my favourite race in the spotlight.

It’s been a long time coming, but to paraphrase that most quintessential Canadian band, it’s well worth the wait.

The End War:

I enjoyed the first two installments of StarCraft II. Wings of Liberty had some flaws, but mostly it was a strong story that I enjoyed. Heart of the Swarm was somewhat of a disappointment, but even it had many highlights.

Legacy of the Void vastly outstrips both its predecessors. The fact I am a Protoss fan may bias me, but I think there’s a lot more to it than that.

LotV’s campaign begins with the full might of the Daelaam Protoss united at last, ready to retake Aiur from the Zerg and reclaim the pride and tradition of the Firstborn. But in remarkably little time, things go terribly wrong.

Thus begins the End War, the final conflict with the void god Amon. Whereas the last two installments spread themselves thin over many stories that had at best only tangential relationships with one another, LotV focuses entirely on the conflict with Amon, and while it can at times feel a little abrupt or rushed, mostly it does an excellent job of selling the idea of a universe teetering on the brink of destruction.

Over the course of the campaign, Artanis must bring together the disparate tribes of Protoss, some familiar and some new in LotV, to forge an army capable of facing Amon. Something that I’ve liked about the Protoss from the start is that although they are a very alien race, they are also very diverse, with many differing viewpoints and philosophies within their ranks, and LotV builds on that well, further deepening the Protoss culture even as it goes through great changes.

Legacy of the Void is in many ways a story about multiculturalism and the strength it brings. Although its handling is at times somewhat inelegant, I think this is a very noble message to send, and quite relevant in this day and age.

The story doesn’t end with Legacy of the Void’s main campaign, though. There is also an epilogue campaign consisting of three missions that give you the chance to play as each race once more.

Actually, calling it an “epilogue” is perhaps a bit misleading, as it is every bit as epic and intense as the main campaign, and it at last brings a close to all of the story and character arcs that began all the way back in the 90s.

I was sufficiently impressed by that ending that I struggle to think of what to say about it. It was awe-inspiring. It was emotional. Most of all, it was immensely satisfying.

The mechanics of storytelling were also better than ever this time around. Cinematics are as ever a feast for the eyes, and they are both incredibly numerous and more seamlessly integrated than ever before. At times, cinematics even play in the middle of missions, shifting from gameplay to cutscene and back with total smoothness. Very impressive.

That’s not to say the entire campaign was perfect. I can poke some holes here or there.

By far my biggest complaint is how small a role was given to Executor Selendis. Blizzard has spent years dropping hints that she was going to be a big deal in the coming story, but in actuality she appears in only a handful of missions, and then in a relatively small role.

I also had issues with some of the ways the Protoss culture changed over the course of the campaign, including but not limited to the fact they tend to happen a little quickly and/or with poorly explained reasoning.

Still, on the whole, it was definitely the best part of the StarCraft II saga, and possibly the best installment of the franchise to date. Definitely a worthy end.

…Except it’s not the end; story DLC is already on the way, which is now giving me mixed feelings. On the one hand, yay, more StarCraft. On the other, there’s pretty much nowhere to go from here but down.

RTS done right:

From a gameplay perspective, Legacy of the Void’s campaign is also a step up from its predecessors.

Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm had excellent mission design, bringing a breath of fresh air to the sometimes stale RTS genre, but they relied too heavily on missions with some sort of time limit. Every level was a sprint the finish, and it became exhausting after a while.

LotV still has some missions like that, but they’re not as omnipresent. There are a lot more missions that allow you to take your time, plan your strategy, explore the map, and gradually fight your way to victory. There’s still a lot of fresh ideas, but it also brings back some of the long, epic battles of more old school RTS games. It’s the best of both worlds.

I was quite disappointed to not see the return of hero units as seen in Heart of the Swarm, but being able to call upon the abilities of the Spear of Adun is a decent substitute. They’re similar to the god powers of Age of Mythology, but with the advantage of not being limited-use.

I also greatly enjoyed the mechanic for customizing units this time. Instead of upgrades in the traditional sense, each unit has three variations based on the various Protoss factions, each with different advantages. You can swap between different variations between missions, so there’s a lot of encouragement to experiment and tailor your forces to a specific challenge.

If I have a complaint about the campaign’s design, it’s that it takes a little too long to unlock more advanced units and abilities early on. It makes a certain degree of sense from a story perspective, but after two games, I’m kind of over the “slowly build up your forces from nothing” angle. Let’s cut to the chase, shall we?

Multiplayer:

I dipped my toes into competitive play for the first time in years, but I didn’t stay long enough to get a comprehensive view of what Legacy of the Void has brought to the table in that regard.

I will say that I think the economic changes are very good. They cut down on a lot of the tedious downtime at the start of a match and allow you to get to the action more quickly. If anything, they don’t go far enough — there’s still too much economic busywork in this game.

But mainly what I learned is that I’m still terrible at competitive StarCraft II, and still lack the emotional fortitude to deal with the high stress of it all. Especially now that the game is faster than ever.

To their credit, Blizzard has put some effort into opening avenues of multiplayer that are not so intense. Archon mode allows two players to work in tandem, splitting the responsibilities of running a single army. Cool idea, but to me it just sounds like you’d constantly be stepping on each other’s toes. Doesn’t appeal to me.

More interesting to me are the co-op missions, which allow two players to work together against the AI using powerful units and abilities from the campaign. These don’t replicate the campaign experience as well as I was hoping, and I feel they’re best played with a friend, but they’re still pretty fun, even if you’re playing with a stranger.

On the whole, I’d rate co-op missions the most positive addition to SC2’s multiplayer.

* * *

With a stellar campaign and some solid changes to multiplayer, the final installment of the StarCraft II trilogy is also by far the best. This is why I’m such a big Blizzard fan; they may screw up a lot, but when they get it right, they get it right.

Overall rating: 9.5/10 Possibly the best Blizzard game since Warcraft III.

Later tonight, the TV premiere for the new sci-fi TV series The Expanse will air, but the first episode has already been available online for several days. Always eager for some new sci-fi, I decided to give it a shot.

I knew little of The Expanse going in aside from the fact that it was getting a lot of buzz and had already been compared to Battlestar Galactica and Game of Thrones. That isn’t entirely good news where I was concerned, but I figured it was worth a try anyway.

The premise for The Expanse is pretty interesting. Two hundred years into the future, humanity has begun to colonize the rest of our solar system. Earth, ruled by the United Nations, and Mars, ruled by its military, are the dominant powers, with a smaller civilization of “Belters” eking out a existence in the asteroid belt.

Tensions are high between Earth and Mars, with war potentially on the horizon, and there is unrest in the asteroid belt as well, as its oppressed underclass chafes under the heel of the inner planets.

The world-building is pretty good, and the show has a fantastic eye for detail. For example, a bird that has adjusted to the low gravity on Ceres* and barely has to flap its wings to fly.

*(Which bears a suspicious similarity to Mass Effect’s Presidium.)

This is also an incredibly beautiful show, with absolutely stellar special effects (no pun intended). The Expanse is an absolute feast for the eyes, even with the crappy video quality of Space’s player.

Unfortunately, the rest of the show is less impressive.

“Dulcinea” seems to have been mainly written using a handbook of standard sci-fi pilot cliches. We’ve got “woman finds something strange and scary and screams hysterically,” and “gratuitous sex scene.” Throw in some casual torture, a wide-eyed rookie cop, and call it a day.

The characters are likewise extremely cliche. Thus far the story focuses on Detective Miller, a roguish but not entirely heartless detective on Ceres who is tasked with tracking down a missing woman, and Jim Holden, a roguish but not entirely heartless starship officer whose freighter investigates a mysterious distress signal.

We’re also introduced to a ruthless UN secretary, Chrisjen Avasarala, but her role is too small to form any real opinions of her. She is, however, played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, who voiced Admiral Shala’Raan in the Mass Effect games. Which is cool.

So thus far I’m terribly underwhelmed by the cast. The one character that I kind of liked has already been written out. And once again, in an incredibly cliche way.

It’s a pretty uneventful pilot, too. Only Jim’s plot advances in any meaningful way, and then only barely and only at the end.

On the whole, “Dulcinea” has mostly given me a greater appreciation for how good Dark Matter’s pilot was.

Still, it’s pretty, the concept is interesting, and sci-fi shows often have slow starts, so I’ll probably give it at least one more episode.

Overall rating: 6.1/10

Also it fills my heart with warmth that as of right now the Enterprise episode still appears higher in Wikipedia results for “The Expanse.”

The Expanse is apparently still offering early previews of its episodes, so when I went to watch the second episode, I found the third ready to go as well. That means you get two reviews for the price of one!

…Though given that the price is “free,” that’s maybe not such a great deal.

“The Big Empty”:

Most of this episode is devoted to Holden and his ragtag crew trying to escape in a crippled shuttle. Desperate repairs needed, little hope, you know the drill.

It’s certainly more eventful than the pilot, but that isn’t exactly saying much. It’s all things other sci-fi shows have done, and done better.

There is once again a cliff-hanger, so at least they’re good at making you want to move on to the next episode, but if they don’t provide a good pay-off soon, they’ll just be stringing the viewer along.

I hate being strung along.

The other plots continue to go nowhere slowly. My only comment on Chrisjen and her arc so far is that she appears to be pretty much just Dick Cheney in space. It’s making me feel oddly conflicted because I liked the actress so much in Mass Effect, and every time she speaks, I’m still thinking “Oh, yay, Quarian,” but now I kind of want to see her get hit by an asteroid.

The only thing that really interests me so far is Miller’s story — it is at least an effective mystery, and that’s always welcome — but it is, again, going nowhere. Most of his scenes in this episode are devoted to some side plot about water theft that doesn’t appear to have anything to do with anything.

I have seen some sci-fi shows that were very dull to start and then became great — Stargate: Universe comes to mind — but if The Expanse doesn’t do something impressive soon, I’m giving up.

Overall rating: 5/10

“Remember the Cant”:

Three episodes in, and we now get our first real glimpse of the third major faction in The Expanse: Mars.

Turns out they’re basically the Galactic Empire, at least in terms of art design.

Rifts quickly form in Holden’s crew as the Martian interrogators attempt to find — or create — guilt among them, and I come to the conclusion that I don’t particularly like any of them.

I do, at least, enjoy seeing the Martians get some development. It’s very early days yet, but they have the potential to be an interesting culture.

Meanwhile, Chrisjen’s story takes an odd turn. On the one hand, she seems much more sensible and a bit more likable this time around, but on the other, it seems very out of sync with the rest of her character to date. Is she a warmonger or not? Make up your mind, Expanse.

Miller’s investigation on Julie Mao continues to go absolutely nowhere, and tensions on Ceres reach a boiling point, costing the series the one character I liked after the last character I liked died.

In fairness, “Remember the Cant” is definitely a step up from previous episodes. There is a pretty good mystery developing here. Who is trying to start a war, and why? It’s certainly keeping me guessing.

But again, I can’t escape the feeling I’m just being strung along. Sometimes a good mystery only serves to make you drag yourself through an otherwise tedious story. I’ve had that happen before, and I’ve regretted falling for it.

“The Expanse” definitely has the potential to be a good show, but it’s still aways off, and I’m not sure how much longer my patience is going to last.

The fact is I’m just now enjoying this show very much. I want to, but I’m not.

Overall rating: 6.7/10

Well, here’s something we haven’t seen from The Expanse so far: excitement.

“CQB” sees the Martian warship carrying Holden and his crew come under attack by unknown assailants… who bear a suspicious similarity to the ship that destroyed the Cantebury.

What follows is a very lengthy and largely entertaining battle only slightly hampered by the facts that I still don’t really care about Holden and his crew and that the bad guys apparently went to the storm trooper school of marksmanship.

Meanwhile, Miller’s plot continues to go nowhere. Seriously, why is he even in the show at this point? We’re four episodes in, and while I enjoy his hard-boiled attitude and general snark, he hasn’t done anything at all.

Also, Chrisjen apparently still exists.

I’m starting to feel like Holden’s the only character the writers even care about. He’s the only one whose plot has had any significant development so far. They should have just not bothered with Miller and Chrisjen, or at least waited to introduce them until they actually had something to do. They’re just taking up space (har har) right now.

But at least the titular “Close Quarters Battle” was entertaining. A slightly more drawn-out, stately kind of space battle than we tend to see these days. I’m reminded of Star Trek’s original vision of emulating old naval battles.

I’m also getting a bit more drawn in by the mystery. I think I’ve figured it out — they don’t keep including random mentions of the Mormons for nothing — but we’ll have to see if my theory pans out.

Though there’s still that feeling of being strung along. They’re certainly taking their sweet time offering any kind of reveals.

“CQB” was entertaining enough to convince me to keep watching for at least one more episode, but The Expanse remains on thin ice where I’m concerned.

Overall rating 7/10

Apologies for the short length of this post. There just isn’t much to say about this show. It’s very good at filling an hour with very little.

If you read this blog often, you will remember that I did not have high hopes for MTV’s Shannara Chronicles, which adapts Terry Brooks’ Elfstones of Shannara into a TV series. Now at last the pilot has premiered, and despite my very low expectations, I gave it a try in the hopes my long quest for some good fantasy TV would be satisfied.

So what did I think?

Well, it’s not good news.

First, a little backstory for those who are new to Shannara.

The Shannara Chronicles is based on the Elfstones of Shannara, which was the second book of the original Shannara trilogy (or quartet if you count First King).

The heart of the story is the Ellcrys, a magical tree which seals away the forces of the Void, otherwise known as Demons, in a magical prison called the Forbidding. The Ellcrys is maintained by a sacred sect of Elves called the Chosen, but when the Ellcrys sickens, Demons begin to escape, and the Chosen are murdered.

Only one remains, Amberle Elessedil, having fled the Elven capitol of Arborlon shortly beforehand.

But though Amberle is the main character, the chief protagonist is Wil Ohmsford, scion of the legendary Shannara bloodline. Directed by the enigmatic druid Allanon, Wil must protect Amberle as she embarks on a quest to restore the Ellcrys.

Along the way, they also cross paths with and are joined by Eretria, a cocky young Rover (Gypsy) girl.

The TV series follows the same basic story, but right away, there are differences.

Now, anyone who knows me knows I’m not a stickler for continuity or staying slavishly true to source material. Stories change and evolve; I accept that.

But a lot of the changes in The Shannara Chronicles are just change for change’s sake. They serve no purpose; they don’t make the story more interesting or more suitable for television. Often they make the story less interesting.

For example, in the TV series, the rules surrounding the Chosen and the story of Amberle and her time in the order are completely different. A sacred and dignified ritual is transformed into some bizarre Hunger Games-esque bloodsport, and Amberle’s reasons for fleeing Arborlon are totally different, robbing the story of a crucial piece of foreshadowing and the heart of Amberle’s story.

And hey, let’s throw in some random sexism because why not!

Similarly, for no reason at all, the leader of the Demons is now not actually a Demon.

What? Why?

Seriously, why? That doesn’t serve any purpose at all. It does, however, defang the Demons quite a bit, and whatever other flaws Brooks’ early works might have had, his Demons were bloody terrifying. The fact that their leader is now a human just completely robs them of their alien horror.

The one change that is positive is that we see a lot more of the ruins of the old world — our world — than were in the books. In the books, the remnants of the old world are rarely seen, especially in the earlier parts of the series, but the fact the Four Lands are not some alternate world but actually our distant future is at this stage of the story the main thing distinguishing Shannara from any other generic high fantasy story, so I think they were smart to play it up.

A shame that it is purely a visual element and does not impact the story. Not so far, anyway.

Visuals are one aspect of the Shannara Chronicles that I cannot praise enough. This show is beautiful. The special effects and art design are second to none. It’s an absolute feast for the eyes from beginning to end.

Beyond that, though, I find little to compliment.

My biggest worry when I found out that MTV was doing this series was that it would be all flash and no substance, and unfortunately, I was right to worry.

Even by Hollywood standards, the cast of the Shannara Chronicles is absurdly pretty and clean. I’m not a fan of the school of fantasy where everything is brown and everyone is dirty, but this is the opposite extreme. I was particularly distracted by the fact that Amberle’s uncles appear to be approximately six months older than her.

Also, what is with the music? I don’t want to hear New Agey pop music in the middle of a medieval fantasy.

The dialogue is similarly entirely too laden with modern slang and idioms. And even that aside, it’s still pretty bad dialogue. Not Lucas bad, but bad.

Of all the show’s weaknesses, though, the biggest is the core cast, none of whom are particularly inspiring. Wil is just a pretty boy with no personality. Allanon is the biggest disappointment by far, being about thirty years younger and a hundred times more handsome than he ought to be while completely lacking the mystery and intensity I associate with the last druid.

I’m not sure how I’d rate Eretria. I find her absolutely insufferable, but I did in the book, too, so maybe that’s a win for the show?

Amberle is the only bright spot. She’s not great, but she offers no cause for complaint, at least. To borrow a phrase from my father, she’s the only one I can’t hear acting.

A lot of the minor cast members are actually pretty good, too — Wil’s uncle, Flick, is a pitch perfect match for how he was in the book — but being minor cast members, we don’t see enough of them for it to matter.

So in the end The Shannara Chronicles has almost exactly matched my expectations. I wish I had been wrong, but I was not.

If I could watch the show for free, I might give it another episode or two to see if it improves, but so far the only way to see it I’ve found is to buy episodes on Google Play, and it’s not worth the money. The pilot was two dollars and two hours that I dearly want back.

Overall rating: 4/10

Why is it so bloody hard to find decent fantasy on TV? It’s so rare to begin with, and what fantasy shows do exist are rarely of any quality. Once Upon a Time is wildly inconsistent, and it spends most of its time in our world, so even at its best it doesn’t entirely scratch the fantasy itch. The Shannara Chronicles, well, you just read the review. I don’t have any way of watching Game of Thrones, but for all its hype, the more I hear about it, the less appealing it sounds.

Sci-fi TV has a long and storied history of greatness. Why can’t television get fantasy right?

Here’s why this is a difficult show to review: This entire episode could have been condensed down into ten minutes, and nothing significant would have been lost. And I’m being generous with that ten minute estimate.

Holden and company receive an offer of help from an OPA terrorist, and despite the characters immediately acknowledging that they have no other options, half the episode is spent on their debating whether to take it.

The most noteworthy part of the episode comes from a series of flashbacks depicting the backstory of said terrorist, which manage to be both very brief and longer than they need to be. But at least they’ve got a good emotional punch.

Meanwhile, Miller painstakingly teases out a few other minor clues about Julie Mao — something that could have been done in a single scene. Which makes this most eventful episode for Miller to date by a wide margin.

And that’s it. How do I review this? What do I analyze? It takes serious talent to fill an hour with this much nothing.

I think it’s time I just give up on this show. We’re five episodes in, and it’s still going nowhere slowly. Even Stargate: Universe — the poster child for shows that sucked at first but then became awesome — was showing significant improvement by now. Maybe The Expanse will attain greatness sometime down the line, but at this point we’ve hit “life is too short to waste on this” territory.

Overall rating: 4/10 Like watching paint dry in slow motion.

Even though this blog is free, I feel like I’m ripping you off with just a two hundred word review, so now I’m just going to ramble incoherently for five hundred words or so.

Well, my father is always saying I should talk about music on the blog, so I guess I’ll talk about my awful, awful taste in music for a bit.

For the last several months, most of my musical attention/obsession has been focused on the most recent offerings from two of my favourite bands, Metric and Chvrches. Last September, within a week of each other, Metric put out their sixth album, Pagans in Vegas, and Chvrches released their second album, Every Open Eye.

I was a bit disappointed with Metric’s last album, Synthetica, but Pagans in Vegas has once again completely blown me away. After playing it safe with Synthetica, they’re trying new things again, and while some songs are clearly failed experiments (Cascades comes to mind), many are excellent.

Something else interesting about Pagans is that a lot of the songs feel like throwbacks to the many different sounds Metric has had over the years. Celebrate and Lie Lie Lie remind me of Old World Underground, whereas For Kicks sounds like the best of the Fantasies era.

But by far my favourite song on the album is The Governess, which is a clear throwback to their first album, Grow Up and Blow Away, in all its quirky and morose glory. That was and still is my favourite album, and I had long since despaired of them ever revisiting that style of music, so The Governess just fills me with happiness.

Probably doesn’t hurt that it always puts me in mind of a character from my current writing project, either.

Meanwhile, Every Open Eye turned out to not be quite as good as Chvrches’ first album, The Bones of What You Believe, but there are still more than a few strong tracks on it. In particular, the standout by far is Down Side of Me, an achingly beautiful and haunting song that is possibly my new favourite Chvrches song (which says a lot) and definitely Lauren Mayberry’s best vocal performance to date (which is also saying a lot).

I saw them live back in October, and let me tell you: Lauren is the real deal. Absolutely amazing performer, as well as an all around charming and lovely person.

…I sincerely apologize for subjecting you to all that.

Oh, and if you’re looking for a good mystery novel, I’d highly recommend The Cuckoo’s Calling by “Robert Galbraith” (who is of course really J.K. Rowling).

Actually, in theory, it’s not that good of a book. The twist at the end strains credibility, it relies on a lot of cheap tricks to maintain the mystery, and there isn’t a lot of drama or suspense. But the characters are colourful and fiercely likable, and the writing is just so excellent that it’s just a delight to read even despite its flaws.

I had previously resolved not to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, on the principle of “fool me six times, shame on you; fool me seven or more times, shame on me.” My feelings on Star Wars are known by now. I think the movies are, for the most part, childish and ridiculous.

I also have a pronounced dislike of JJ Abrams.

But the smartest person I know — who is also not traditionally a Star Wars fan — liked it, and frankly, I wanted an excuse to have popcorn for lunch.

First of all, let me say that this is still very much a Star Wars movie. And by that I mean it views logic, continuity, and common sense as optional frills and frequently interrupts the already thin plot for yet another over the top spew of (admittedly excellent) special effects.

There are so many things about this movie that are utterly ridiculous or make no sense at all — not even movie sense. I couldn’t even begin to list them all, though I would especially like to highlight the First Order’s incredibly liberal definition of “fifteen minutes.”

Much of the Force Awakens’ stupidity results from its endless need to make shameless and unnecessary plays to nostalgia. I’m not sure I entirely agree with those who say that this is purely a retreat of A New Hope, but it does feel that way at certain points.

By far the most egregious example is the fact they built another Death Star.

What is it with these Dark Side types and their Death Stars? Lordy, I thought I had a one track mind.

It’s like Terry Brooks with the damn Blue Elfstones. Just stop. There are other plot devices out there!

And just like the original Death Star, it destroys worlds and kills millions in a cataclysmic attack that is forgotten by every character within five minutes and has no significant impact on the story.

However, not every nod to the past is a negative. Both Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher reprise their original roles, and perhaps the biggest surprise for me out of the whole movie was how incredibly good they both were.

Both show a great vulnerability, and they’re very convincing as a pair who have simply suffered too much and lost too much. It’s kind of heartbreaking, honestly.

Han still has all of his cockiness and sarcasm, but it’s clear it’s now just a shell he’s built around his pain. There’s a definite fragility to it.

However, the real strengths of The Force Awakens are where it stops riding the coattails of its predecessors.

For all its many flaws and unabashed stupidity, there is one major highlight to the seventh Star Wars film.

Her name is Rey.

Now, I can understand why people call her a Mary Sue. She pretty much is, but that’s kind of par for the course in Star Wars. It’s meant to be a very larger than life, mythic story. So it fits for Rey to be amazing at pretty much everything.

Either way, she’s impossible not to like. Daisy Ridley plays her with an irresistible combination of toughness, vulnerability, and charisma. Despite her admitted Mary Sue-ish traits, she still comes across as a very human character, and watching her grow and evolve over the course of the movie, defying the expectations of those around her at every turn, is a complete joy.

This is something that hasn’t really existed in Star Wars before: competent acting. Not just competent — excellent, even. I’m very impressed by the subtleties of Daisy Ridley’s performance. She’s able to communicate a lot of inner turmoil and growth with just subtle facial expressions and changes in her tone of voice.

Rey is definitely the star of The Force Awakens, in every sense of the term.

Of course, she’s also a complete reversal of the stereotypical roles women are generally relegated to in the media, and generally a feminist’s dream come true. Hell, I’m a guy, and I love it.

This is another unexpected triumph of The Force Awakens; it does a fantastic job of giving women a fair shake. Not just in terms of major characters, but even just unnamed fighter pilots, stormtroopers, and random extras. I don’t think I ever truly realized how male-dominated our media truly is before now. This may be the first blockbuster I’ve ever seen with a cast that is more or less gender-balanced.

Does make me feel good to pay to see the movie. That’s actually part of why I decided to see it in the first place — I heard it was an unusually progressive movie. Anything I can do to piss off racists and misogynists.

Which I suppose brings us to the other main character of the film, Finn. He’s still an unusually strong character for Star Wars, but he definitely isn’t the home run Rey is.

What I like most about Finn is that he’s a stormtrooper who refused to bow to evil. It puts a human face to what have previously been portrayed as evil drones without identity or humanity. On the downside, this statement is rather undermined by the fact that everyone else in the First Order is portrayed as cartoonishly evil, with no attempt made to give them any kind of nuance, or a motivation beyond “rawr evil.”

I also found that John Boyega was hamming it up a bit. Sometimes it’s the charming kind of ham, but other times it’s just ham.

I also feel like they’re trying to set-up a romance between him and Rey, which already has me cringing over its predictability. I’d be more on board with all that Finn/Poe shipping that’s going around. They’ve got chemistry.

And just as not all of the nods to the past movies are bad, not all of the new characters are marks in the film’s favour. Specifically, Kylo Ren has got to be one of the most pathetic excuses for a villain I’ve ever seen.

At no point does he feel even remotely dangerous or intimidating. He comes across as a whiny, petulant child. If there’s one thing Star Wars got right before, it was Darth Vader, so Ren feels especially disappointing considering the act he has to follow. Hell, even Palpatine’s one-dimensional cartoon evil was still better than Ren’s temper tantrums.

And I still say that lightsaber crossguard is idiotic.

Finally, The Force Awakens does have a very bad case of “first movie in the trilogy.” All whizz bang action aside, not all that much actually happens, and it ends up feeling more like an introduction to the new characters than a fully fleshed out story.

So honestly, I’m really struggling to figure out how to rate The Force Awakens. It is both an excellent movie, and a powerfully stupid one. One scene will have you facepalming so hard you’ll get bruises, and the next will make you want to stand up and cheer.

I guess I can say this much: I don’t regret going to see it. There’s that.

Overall rating: 7/10 I definitely think this is one of those things where I’ll come back in a few months and feel that I should have given this a different rating. This is the best I can do for now.

Full disclosure: I had most of the movie spoiled for me before I saw it, and I do find Daisy Ridley very attractive. Both of these things may have skewed my review one way or the other.

It saddens me to no end that the RTS genre has fallen to the wayside as it has, so I try to snap up any decent-looking one I can find.

Enter sci-fi RTS Grey Goo.

I’ll say upfront that this review focuses on the single-player campaign. I’ve heard it said that the multiplayer community for Grey Goo is virtually nonexistent, and I didn’t have much interest in playing it competitively anyway.

Grey Goo centers on the conflict between three races: a ragged group of alien refugees called the Beta, a hyper-advanced far future version of humans, and the titular all-consuming nanotechnology.

Interestingly, we first experience the game through the eyes of the Beta, not the humans. The Beta have spent generations fleeing across the stars to escape something called “the Silent Ones.” When hostile probes begin appearing on their world, they fear the Silent Ones have found them again, but the new threat is discovered to be something altogether alien to the Beta — though rather familiar to players.

And through it all is the rising danger of the Grey Goo, a ravenous breed of nanotechology consuming all in its path to attain some unknown goal.

Based on the setting and the trio of races, I had expected Grey Goo to be something of a StarCraft clone, but it turns out to play more like the old Dune or Command and Conquer games. I have since learned a lot of former Westwood people worked on Grey Goo, so that explains that.

It’s not my favourite style of RTS, but with the genre flagging as it is, beggars can’t be choosers, and it’s been so long since I played a game in this style that there was something pleasantly nostalgic about it.

There’s just one resource to gather, catalyst, and the races aren’t terribly distinct. Beta and humans play pretty much the same with only subtle differences.

The Goo are a bit different. Their units are still fairly similar to those of other races in a lot of cases, but there are more deviations (the Goo, for instance, cannot field air units), and their economy is completely different. There are no structures, only protean blobs of Goo that then transform into units.

Each race can also field epic units, which are akin to Age of Mythology’s Titans. They are very difficult to create, but nearly unstoppable once produced. Although Goo were my least favourite race to play, their epic unit, the Purger, was the most fun for me. Nanotech Cthulhu.

This is a rare case where I actually liked the humans best. An interesting twist is that in Grey Goo, humanity plays the role of the super advanced aliens, with the Beta technology being far more basic and rough around the edges. At one point a human dismisses the Beta as primitives by saying, “They’re still using bullets in their guns.”

I mostly enjoyed the campaign, but it does suffer from two major flaws, which sort of feed off each other.

The first is that it’s very short. There are only five missions per race, and I was able to finish the entire campaign within ten hours.

As a result, it can also be quite rushed. There isn’t enough time to fully flesh out the characters or develop the story arcs.

The other issue is that this is one of those games that really throws you into the deep end and hopes you learn to swim. This is true of both the gameplay, as Grey Goo does offer a relatively steep learning curve, and the story, which throws you right into the middle and leaves you to try to figure out what’s going on. It took until midway through the final campaign for me to get a clear picture of Grey Goo’s backstory and what was really going on. This is undoubtedly the result of how small the campaign is.

There’s a DLC campaign, Emergence, to help flesh things out, but it’s quite brief, so while it does add some welcome insight into the events of the campaign, it doesn’t do much to help the game’s length issue. It’s also very difficult and thus somewhat frustrating.

There are a few other hiccups, as well. The mission design is old school in the extreme, with nearly every mission being some variation of “go destroy the enemy base.” The difficulty is a bit oddly tuned, too, with some missions being fairly simple, but others, especially near the end, being incredibly frustrating even on the easiest difficulty setting.

That said, once you finally figure out what’s going on, the story of Grey Goo is pretty interesting, with some good twists and excellent use of its core sci-fi concepts.

This is definitely not the same style of sci-fi StarCraft is — IE just fantasy with space ships and guns — but a game that is serious about its science fiction. Grey Goo is about as close to hard sci-fi as I’ve yet seen in a video game. Which still isn’t that close, but still.

Putting aside the issues mentioned above, the storytelling is of a high quality. Cutscenes are frequent and spectacular, and the voice acting is very strong.

Despite some stumbles, I would like to see a sequel or expansion to Grey Goo. There’s a really interesting premise here, and the world needs more quality RTS games.

Overall rating: 7.3/10

Also, because I can:

I’ve only ever seen one episode of Archer. The ants thing was the only part that made me laugh.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is another movie I missed out while I was living out in the middle of nowhere, but thanks to Netflix, I have now caught up.

The previous movie was somewhat imperfect, but still enjoyable on the whole, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is pretty much the same. It’s more well put together than Rise was, but still ultimately unsatisfying in some ways.

For Dawn, the plot jumps ahead ten years and goes full post-apocalyptic. Most of the human race has been wiped out by the so-called “simian flu,” to the point where the apes believe humans are extinct altogether.

The apes, on the other hand, have prospered, and led by Caesar, they have begun to build their own society in the wilderness of California.

Caesar and the orangutan Maurice are the only characters to return from the first movie, though I doubt anyone’s complaining, as the human cast members were by far the weakest link of Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

Things change when a group of human scouts stumbles into ape territory, hoping to reactivate an old hydro-electric dam to power an enclave of survivors. Relations between apes and humans are initially tense, but Caesar hopes to come to an understanding with the humans, and he finds a kindred spirit in a human named Malcolm and his family.

But there are elements on both sides who are distrustful. The biggest obstacle to coexistent between human and ape comes from Koba, a lieutenant of Caesar’s who was tortured by human medical experiments in the past and wants nothing more than to make humanity suffer.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes wisely puts a greater emphasis on the apes than its predecessor, and they remain the more interesting and developed half of the plot, but this time the humans are not so flat and lifeless, and they also prove a worthy contribution to the story.

There are also a lot less things in this movie that are, well, stupid, compared to Rise. There are still some implausible or ridiculous things — Caesar seems to have Wolverine-levels of healing ability, and the size of the ape population seems to vary based on the needs of the plot at any given moment — but on the whole it’s a much more well-written story.

However, the themes and arc of the story are a bit confused. It often seems to be wanting to tell a morally gray story, with neither the apes nor the humans being entirely good or evil, but in practice it does tend to make the apes out to be bad guys more often than not. Ultimately Caesar and Maurice are the only decent apes.

It makes the movie a bit hard to get invested in, because the apes are the focus and the main characters, but they’re also the villains. It’s… odd.

Perhaps because of this, I found the story somewhat unsatisfying. The ending is neither pleasant nor conclusive.

Overall rating: 7.3/10 Like its predecessor, it’s an interesting but flawed movie.

I enjoyed District 9 back in the day, so when I heard the director was putting out another sci-fi movie, titled Elysium, I was immediately interested. Of course, my life was a mess at the time, so it’s taken me until now to actually watch it.

Set 150 years in the future, Elysium depicts a dystopic planet Earth utterly ruined by disease, overpopulation, and pollution. The wealthy have escaped to a vast, paradisaical space station, Elyisum, where their every need is fulfilled, and any sickness can be instantly cured.

The story follows Max Da Costa, played by Matt Damon, an ex-con factory worker. He receives a lethal dose of radiation in an industrial accident and is given five days to live. Meanwhile, his childhood friend, Frey, struggles to support her daughter, who is dying from leukemia.

I think you can see where this is going.

I was expecting Elysium to be an intellectual, thought-provoking piece of science fiction. As it turns out, not so much. The story is fairly straightforward, and the messaging is quite ham-fisted.

In particular, the ruling class of Elysium are so cartoonishly heartless and evil it’s difficult to take seriously sometimes. Even my anti-corporate, pro-equality, angry leftist self found this to be a case of laying it on a bit thick. It’s certainly not the chillingly believable dystopia of Continuum.

Thankfully, though, Elysium does have other strengths to call upon.

Elysium didn’t turn out to be a think-piece so much as a fairly standard sci-fi action adventure, but in that, it does its job well. The action sequences are brutal, visceral, and exciting. The special effects are spectacular, and the art design is strong. It manages to both an incredibly ugly movie and an absolute feast for the eyes at the same time.

The main characters are a little thin, but they’re good enough to keep you engaged. Similarly, the acting is adequate but not award-worthy. I was able to forget I was watching Matt Damon after a while, at least.

Actually, the best acting probably comes from the main antagonist, played by Sharlto Copley, who is so skin-crawlingly vile from beginning to end that I spent half the movie visualizing gruesome and painful fates for him.

Elysium has a pretty strong emotional punch, and while the journey to get there is a little inconsistent, its ending is one of the more powerful and satisfying that I’ve seen in recent memory.

So in the end Elysium is a lot like District 9. It, too, was a bit rough around the edges, but ultimately it was a good movie, and the same is true of Elysium. Not a masterpiece, but worth your time.

Overall rating: 7.3/10

300 is a movie I have a lot of fondness for. It’s the ultimate guys’ movie, heroic bombast at its finest. And yet not entirely a mindless slaughterfest, either. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest movie, but it was smarter than it needed to be, and maybe it wasn’t the most heartfelt movie, but it put more feeling into the story than it needed to.

So I was eagerly anticipating the sequel from the moment I heard about it.

Of course, it’s an old story by now: I missed it in the theatre because Real Life was in the way at the time. But now it’s made it to Netflix, so I was finally able to see it.

Rise of an Empire takes place mostly concurrently with the events of 300. While the Spartans seek to hold the Hot Gates, the Greek fleet, led by the Athenian general Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton), battles the Persian fleet at Artemisium and Salamis.

Themistocles’ rival is Artemisia (Eva Green). Greek by birth but with a profound hatred of her homeland, Artemisia is Xerxes’ most loyal adviser and most ruthless commander.

Over the course of the film, Themistocles and Artemisia vie against each other across the open seas, resulting in no end of spectacular and ridiculously gorey battle sequences. Whereas Xerxes was a minor prop in 300, Artemisia has a much bigger role with much greater development, and Eva Green does a decent job as the ruthless femme fatale.

However, while much of the same elements are there, I didn’t find Rise of an Empire as compelling as its predecessor. There’s all the same bombast and gloriously absurd violence, but it feels hollow somehow.

Part of it is that Sullivan Stapleton’s Themistocles has none of the charm or charisma of Gerard Butler’s Leonidas. On the whole he’s just not very convincing as the famed hero of Athens. At least they did justice to Themistocles’ brilliance as a tactician.

Lena Headey puts on another strong performance as Queen Gorgo of Sparta, but her role is too small to have much of an impact on the film as a whole.

Also — and I realize this may seem a ridiculous problem to have — it did bother me how many historical inaccuracies were in Rise of an Empire.

Don’t get me wrong. I know these aren’t documentaries. I wasn’t expecting a perfect adaptation of history. But 300, for all its cartoonish extravagance, stayed surprisingly true to the story of the Battle of Thermopylae. Its biggest departure was the implication that only three hundred Spartans fought at the Hot Gates, when there were also several thousand soldiers from other Greek cities present. Otherwise, you’d be surprised how much of 300, including much of its more memorable dialogue, was ripped right from the pages of history.

Rise of an Empire takes much greater liberties. Darius didn’t die by Greek hands, not at Marathon or anywhere else. There was a Queen Artemisia who served in the Persian navy, but the character in the movie bears little resemblance to the historical figure beyond that.

Similarly, 300 presented a very rich — if somewhat simplified and exaggerated — depiction of Spartan culture, but Rise of an Empire does not do the same for the Athenians. They’re just random dudes with swords. How did they make a ninety minute movie about Athenian soldiers and not mention the goddess Athena once?

300 was like an enhanced version of history, painted in broad and dramatic strokes to heighten the story. Rise of an Empire is just an action movie loosely based on historical events.

Overall rating: 6.8/10 Rise of an Empire lacks the spirit and vigour of its predecessor, reducing it to naught but an empty bloodbath.

Age of Mythology was a very important game in my youth. It took everything I loved about the excellent Age of Empires series and spiced things up with the addition of spectacularly powerful god powers and myth units. It spurred an interest in ancient mythologies (especially Norse mythology) that continues to this day.

It deserved to go on to become one of the great franchises of the real time strategy genre, but for whatever reason, it didn’t. It had one expansion, The Titans, and then vanished into obscurity, its vast potential largely wasted.

So I was happy to see Age of Mythology given a second lease on life when it rereleased on Steam as the “Extended Edition,” with updated graphics and full Steam support.

Admittedly, the new graphics don’t make a huge difference. The lighting is a bit more realistic, the water’s a little prettier, and I think the textures are a bit more detailed, but it’s not a major overhaul. The good news is AoM was a very good-looking game in its day, so it hasn’t aged as badly as it might have.

The Extended Edition also includes an extra mini-campaign called The Golden Gift. Apparently this was something Microsoft put out back in the day but which I somehow never knew about. An extra four Norse missions is certainly nice to have, though if I’m being honest it’s not an especially remarkable campaign.

Where things really got exciting was when it was announced there would be an all-new expansion to the Extended Edition: The Tale of the Dragon, featuring the Chinese as a new playable civilization.

I bought Tale of the Dragon immediately upon release, though it took me a couple weeks to actually get around to playing it, having been distracted by other things.

The mysteries of the East:

Tale of the Dragon turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag, but on the whole, I’m happy with it.

First, the bad news.

The new campaign is, well, not that good. Age of Mythology was never a game with especially memorable storylines, but they were at least basically competent. The characters were memorable, if not deep, and the plots were coherent and engaging, if not particularly complex or thrilling.

Tale of the Dragon’s story, though, is clearly the work of amateurs. There are significant parts of it that just flat-out don’t make sense, and otherwise it’s just shallow and uninteresting in the extreme.

It also has issues with polish. There are some significant bugs, and the difficulty tuning is very inconsistent, effortlessly easy one moment and brutally punishing the next.

That said, the mission design is pretty strong, with a good amount of variety. Even with the story issues, it could have been a good campaign with better quality control.

The good news, however, is that the new Chinese civilization is excellent. It carries the otherwise meh campaign and is great fun in skirmishes (and presumably multiplayer, though I haven’t had the courage to attempt that).

The Chinese aren’t wildly different from previous civilizations, but they have enough new ideas and interesting quirks to feel fresh. A lot of their units break the game’s usual rock/paper/scissors rules. For example, their main cavalry unit, the cataphract, counters infantry. Usually, infantry are the counter to cavalry in AoM.

Their myth units and god powers are also for the most part very fun and interesting. I think it’s a good sign that I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time agonizing over what gods to worship because they’re all so appealing.

Also, the Chinese can unleash giant magical monkeys on their enemies.

Giant magic monkeys.

It’s a small thing, but something else I really like about the Chinese is how pretty their towns are. The new developers managed to get some pretty good results out of the game’s creaky old graphics engine. The Chinese buildings are very detailed and just nice to look at.

I generally hold up Blizzard games as the apex of real time strategy, but one thing StarCraft and Warcarft have never captured is the simple pleasure of building and maintaining your own little city. The Age of _____ games have always done a very good job of that, and it’s more true than ever with how aesthetically pleasing the Chinese villages are.

So even with its hiccups, I would definitely recommend Tale of the Dragon to any Age of Mythology fans.

And if you’re not already a fan, pick up the Extended Edition and remedy that situation immediately.

There’s a lot of comparison to be drawn between Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm. Both games from a company I love in genres I dislike. Both games that had me torn between excitement over what they could be and concern over whether I could get into the gameplay.

With Heroes, I was lucky enough to get into the alpha early, and there I was able to determine it was a game I enjoyed playing after all. With Overwatch, there’s been a lot more waiting, but I finally got an invite to this weekend’s stress test. I spent two days playing it heavily, trying to learn the game and get an impression of whether it’s something I want to invest in.

Sadly, it seems Overwatch has less in common with its MOBA cousin than I would have hoped.

The good:

First, the good news.

Overwatch is a gorgeous game. The maps are beautiful, colourful, and detailed, and the character models are second to none. Most of the game’s cast seem to be in some competition to see who can be more instantly lovable and huggable. Is it Mei with her adorkable glasses, Tracer with her boundless enthusiasm, Bastion and its tweety bird, Lucio with his easy-going charm?

As with any Blizzard game, everything about Overwatch just overflows with colour, personality, and vibrancy. It’s a really good example of what I find so compelling about Blizzard.

I was also impressed by the variety of playstyles the game’s many heroes offer. Shooters are at their core very simple games, but Blizzard still managed to make every character feel very distinct. Mercy and Lucio, for example, are both healers, but they play very differently.

The diversity of the cast also continues to impress me. You don’t realize just how homogeneous video game casts are until someone breaks the mould and offers a game that isn’t totally dominated by beefy white guys.

Playing Overwatch is a bit like living in Toronto: Everyone is a different colour, and half the time they’re speaking something other than English. It’s awesome. IDIC!

Even putting aside all high-minded liberal ideals, the diverse character design is refreshing purely for being a change of pace. How many action games let you play as an adorable Chinese climatologist?

Finally, I was pleasantly surprised to see no toxic behaviour whatsoever during the entire weekend. I think the game is so frenetic people don’t have time to nerd rage.

The bad:

Going in, I was of the impression Overwatch, like other Blizzard games, was meant to be a fairly accessible game. Easy to learn, and welcoming to newbies, much like Heroes is.

Yeah, no.

Overwatch’s learning curve is brutal. There’s a very basic tutorial which tells you nothing beyond the basic controls, and then you’re pretty much thrown into the deep end.

Yes, you can play versus AI, but even that can be fairly stressful if you have no experience with these types of games, and it still doesn’t do much to prepare you for play against other players. It’s better than nothing, but…

The lack of a good way to learn map layouts is one of the biggest problems. So much of the game is based around positioning and flanking, so knowing every map inside and out is crucial. But there’s no way to experience them outside of live matches, so it’s very much a baptism by fire.

It took me most of the two-day test to learn the map layouts well enough to play decently, and that was with the map pool limited to just three maps. I can only imagine how hard it would be in the full game.

While the variety of characters is one of the game’s biggest strengths, it also makes the game even harder to learn. Between the hero swapping mechanic and the fact you can’t pick your hero until you’re already matched with a team (who might have already picked all their heroes), you can’t just focus on learning on one character. You can’t have a “main” like you would in a MOBA or RPG. If your team needs a healer, you’re healing — like it or not.

You need to learn at least four heroes (one of every role) just to reach the point where you’re not a liability to your team, and to actually be good, you’d need a solid mastery of at least a good chunk of the game’s twenty-one heroes (and counting).

If that sounds daunting, that’s because it is.

So needless to say I spent most of the weekend alternating between sucking and blowing.

At least I think I sucked. It’s actually hard to tell, because Overwatch gives you no adequate way to measure your own performance.

There’s a personal stats screen at the end of each match, but it’s just a spew of seemingly random statistics, overwhelming in its scale and completely lacking in any context. To make matters worse, you only have a very brief window to study it before being automatically hurled into the next match.

In other words, the stats page is completely useless.

Really makes me appreciate how clear and helpful Heroes’ stats screen is, even after all the ways Blizzard has made it worse since alpha.

Finally, there’s just too much damage flying around in this game. Half the time, you’ll be dead before you even have a chance to register that you’re under attack, let alone react. That’s just not fun.

Now, by the end of the weekend, I did finally start getting the hang of things. I even earned Play of the Game once or twice, and I started enjoying myself quite a bit more. My final match featured an epic holdout where we managed to halt the enemy payload on Route 66 just inches from its destination, surviving for five full minutes to somehow win the match against all odds.

But it was an incredible effort to reach that point, and I’m a fast-learner. It’s also worth remembering that I’m a massive Blizzard fanboy who really wanted to enjoy Overwatch. If anyone else had made this game, I’d have given up within the first hour or two. This game is not at all friendly to people who aren’t already FPS pros.

Hero impressions:

I wasn’t able to try every character over the weekend, but I tried to sample as many as I could.

As I expected going in, Pharah turned out to be my overall favourite. I like that she rewards precision aiming while still being somewhat forgiving if you can’t perfectly nail every single shot. I also love her backstory, aesthetics, personality, and voice-overs.

And she can fly. Nuff said.

Her ultimate is a bit frustrating, though. It seems to take a very long time to charge considering how easy it is to counter.

My picks for other roles were more surprising.

I expected Lucio to be my favourite support, but while I like his style, his gamelay turns out to be very dull (IMO). Zenyatta felt awkward to me, but much to my surprise, I fell in love with Mercy, enjoying her only slightly less than Pharah. She seems very powerful, I love how mobile she is, and her ultimate just feels awesome to use.

“Heroes never die!”

I also had a lot more success with Mercy than any other hero. She’s probably the only one I can say I’m actually good at. Probably a good hero for newbies.

Symmetra was just strange. The one time I played her against other players, we won handily, but I can’t tell if I contributed to that. It felt like I hardly did anything. I just ran around building turrets, and there’s no easy way to tell if those turrets are actually doing any good.

My first rare unlock was a Mercy victory pose. Clearly it was a sign.

My choice of tank was also a surprise. Zarya was the tank who most appealed to me on paper, but again, I found her quite dull in practice. Instead, D.Va won my affection. It’s just hard not to enjoy piloting a giant killbot.

I can’t seem to figure out how to play her outside of AI matches, though. I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a tank in this game.

Given my love of both sniper rifles and archery, you’d think I’d have taken to Hanzo or Widowmaker, but the game is just too frenetic for such precision play to be workable, at least for me.

I like Mei, but to be blunt, I’m really bad at her. Just can’t seem to figure out her playstyle.

So Bastion became my preferred defender. Not the most exciting hero around, but its positional play is interesting, and going all Saving Private Ryan on a charging enemy team is satisfying.

As for everyone’s favourite time-traveller, Tracer can be fun, but she’s just so insanely frenetic it makes my head spin. I think you need an IV drip of Red Bull to play her properly. Thank God I don’t get motion sickness.

Conclusion:

On the whole, Overwatch has disappointed me. There’s so much potential in this game, but it’s just so over-caffeinated, hard to learn, and unforgiving of any kind of mistake or weakness.

It’s a very repetitive game, too, with nowhere near enough variety in its game modes. I long for a single-player campaign, but even a decent co-op mode would work wonders.

I may play some more during open beta, but I don’t see myself buying the game at this point. It’s not that it’s not a fun game. For all my complaints, it does have a lot to like, and it can produce some awesome moments.

But is it fun enough to justify a ~$50 price tag? Definitely not.

* * *

Also, thanks to the limited map pool, I had this stuck in my head all weekend.

Origin regularly offers up games simply for free, which is the one thing that elevates it above being merely the poor man’s Steam. One recent offering was an old martial arts-themed RPG from Bioware called Jade Empire.

Jade Empire was never really on my radar, but hey, free is free, and I did like later Bioware games.

Took me until now to finally get around to playing it (unfortunately this means you’re too late to pick it up for free if this blog makes you curious about it). Ultimately the main trait it shares with more recent Bioware titles is that it’s a game that leaves me with mixed feelings.

The biggest surprise about Jade Empire is that its combat is actually pretty good, not something I expected to say about a Bioware game, especially one of this vintage.

It’s an unusual but interesting system. Essentially, you have three main options at all times: a quick, usually high DPS attack; a slow, heavy attack to break enemy blocks; and an AoE attack.

However, the effects of each of these three attacks changes radically based on your current style.

The best analogy I can draw for styles is that they’re a bit like the different guns you might have in a shooter. They’re bound to the number keys, and you can instantly swap between them at any time for no cost.

Each style has different strengths and weaknesses, and while some merely amount to slightly different ways to punch people, others have far more unusual effects. Spirit Thief Style deals no damage but restores your chi (mana). Dire Flame Style allows you to hurl fireballs (at the cost of chi), offering an analogue to a mage playstyle.

Weapons also count as individual styles, and there are even transformation styles that allow you to shapeshift into a variety of strange creatures for powerful bonuses.

My favourite was Toad Demon Style, which transforms you into a giant, lumbering toad who slaps people into submission with its flippers for massive damage.

That is exactly as fun as it sounds.

That’s not to say the combat is perfect. In the greater scheme of things, it’s still not an especially exciting system compared to the best examples of RPG combat out there, and it has some minor quirks that can be annoying, such as some occasionally awkward camera angles

Still, on the whole, I’d count Jade Empire’s combat in the “win” column.

However, just as Jade Empire succeeds where many of its successors failed, it also lacks some of their strengths.

As you’d expect from a Bioware game, Jade Empire features a large cast of colourful characters who serve as your companions. However, they’re not nearly as well-written as their descendants in Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

A few of them still won my affection, notably the haughty but heroic Silver Fox and the roguish but lovable Sky. The biggest exception of all, however, was the conflicted Sagacious Zu; he alone stands with the great characters Bioware would later create.

However, the fact remains that if you go into Jade Empire expecting Mass Effect or Dragon Age quality character development, you’ll be disappointed.

The romances are especially confusing. As in later games, several of your companions can become romantic interests for your main character, but these romances are, well, a bit broken if you ask me.

I had intended to romance Silver Fox, but there never seemed to be any dialogue options to support such an effort (I only know she’s a romance option from reading about it elsewhere). Meanwhile, there didn’t seem to be any option but to romance Dawn Star (not without treating her with outright contempt, anyway). It seemed I was doomed to end up with her even though I was merely trying to be basically nice, a sensation like sinking into quicksand.

However, the romance never amounted to anything, leading me to wonder if I’d misinterpreted all that talk of “true feelings” earlier, or if I somehow ended the relationship somewhere along the line (without any blowback from Dawn Star?), or if the romances in Jade Empire are just that anticlimactic.

On the plus side, the fact that Jade Empire’s romances ultimately left me only confused and alone does make them a remarkably good mirror for real life, at least where I am concerned.

One twist that I did find interesting is that there are a few segments near the end where you will control some of your companions and make use of their unique talents. Although I grant it could become tiresome if overused, I’d like to have seen a bit more of this throughout Jade Empire — and maybe in later Bioware games, too.

Also mirroring later Bioware games, specifically Mass Effect, Jade Empire has a morality system based on two extremes, the Way of the Open Palm and the Way of the Closed Fist. These are pretty much just paragon and renegade, right down to my maxing out my score for paragon/Way of the Open Palm.

The morality doesn’t seem to affect gameplay much, though given my dislike for rigid morality systems I’d count that as a positive. The biggest impact is that there are a handful of styles and quests that are only accessible to followers of a specific moral path — and really “handful” might be generous. I can recall only one quest and one style I was locked out of by not following the Way of the Closed Fist.

As for the main story in Jade Empire, it’s… okay, I guess? It’s a bit of an odd mix. The first 70% or so of the game is very slow and feels very predictable, but the remainder is breakneck and full of unexpected twists.

I feel as though I should have enjoyed the story more than I ultimately did. It left me feeling cold, but I’m struggling to understand why. The twists surprised me; the ending was a bit abrupt but mostly satisfying.

Perhaps there was just one too many big boss fights in close succession. Perhaps the relative lack of strong characters sucked some of the heart out. Perhaps the sheer oldness of the game began to wear on my jaded tastes after a while. Jade Empire’s graphics and gameplay have aged very well all things considered, but they’re still not up to modern standards.

Overall rating: 6.9/10 It might have warranted a better rating in its day, but it doesn’t shine as much as it could compared to modern games.

Following the success of Diablo’s Book of Cain and Book of Tyrael, Blizzard has began producing similarly lavish lore books for their other franchises. Warcraft gets the Chronicle, which will be spread out over several volumes, and StarCraft so far has only been given the StarCraft Field Manual.

Of course you just knew I’d be on these like stink on a monkey.

The Warcraft Chronicle:

The Warcraft Chronicle represents an attempt to streamline, clarify, and unify all of Warcraft lore to date — an ambitious effort considering what a morass of retcons and scattered storylines Warcraft has become over the years.

Volume one covers the entire history of the Warcraft universe from the beginning of time up until just before the opening of the Dark Portal, and much of it covers periods of history we have previously had little to no knowledge of.

All this is helped along by some incredibly beautiful and detailed artwork depicting major events and locations, many of which we have never seen before, such as the Black Empire, ancient Zandalar, and Zin’Azshari at its height. The art of the Warcraft Chronicle is absolutely fantastic and probably the best reason to get the book.

As for the story content of the book… well, I’m still digesting it.

There are a lot of very big revelations in this book. Some are retcons, others just new info. A lot of what the Chronicle talks about is epic, thrilling, and fascinating in the way Warcraft lore is at its best, but it does change a lot of things, and it will be a while before I fully decide how I feel about it all.

It is good to finally get a clear and ordered history of things and try to clear up the vagaries and contradictions that have cropped up over the years. This will likely benefit the story going forward.

On the other hand, sometimes a little mystery is a good thing, and having an answer to (nearly) every question can rob the universe of some of its mystique. I do think knowing exactly where the Old Gods came from and what their goal is robs them of some of their intimidation factor. They’re not these terrible, incomprehensible enigmas anymore.

Still, even with my mixed feelings, I’d consider the Chronicle a must have for Warcraft lore fans.

Overall rating: 7.5/10

The StarCraft Field Manual:

Unfortunately StarCraft’s lore tome proves less impressive.

The Field Manual is presented as an actual manual given to Dominion marines to help them understand the threats of the Koprulu Sector.

The entire manual is “enhanced” by comments scribbled into the margins by the manual’s original owner. This is a clever idea in theory but fairly annoying in practice. Terran marines are not known for their wit or insight.

And unlike the Chronicle, the Field Manual does not offer any major new insights into the lore. Mostly it’s just a series of blurbs describing the backstories of the various units and buildings, similar to what they had in the old game manuals. Which is all well and good, but I’m not sure it quite justifies the book’s relatively high price tag.

The artwork is nice, but nothing compared to that of the Chronicle. Really my favourite part of the book was a chart offering to-scale size comparisons of most units. Turns out the Spear of Adun is seventy-four kilometers long.

Them Protoss don’t mess around.

Overall rating: 5.5/10 Only worth it for collectors and extreme super fans.

It’s getting a little tiresome to repeat variations of the same story, but here it goes again: Looper is a movie that looked interesting to me when it first released, but I missed out on it because of my Real Life issues at the time. Now it’s on Shomi, so I gave it a shot.

Looper is set thirty years in the future, but much of the story has its roots thirty years past then. It is then that time travel will be invented, and subsequently outlawed. This makes time travel the domain of the mafia. Since bodies are nearly impossible to dispose of discretely in the ultra-connected future, the mob eliminates its enemies by sending them back thirty years, where they are killed by “Loopers.”

Our protagonist — if you can even call him that — is Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a junkie supporting himself by working as a Looper. Things go off the rails for him when he is sent to “close his loop,” to kill his future self (Bruce Willis). A moment’s hesitation allows the older Joe to escape.

Future Joe has a plan of his own. He’s after the Rainmaker, a mysterious crime lord who ordered his death, and murdered his wife in the process. Thirty years in the past, the Rainmaker is just a child, and future Joe intends to pull some Terminator shenanigans.

There are plenty of interesting ideas in Looper. It’s a novel take on time travel. And the performances are very strong. I really like Jospeh Gordon-Levitt. He’s a great actor.

I also very much like its down to earth yet futuristic art design. It’s a very believable vision of what the 2040s might look lie.

But.

The problem with Looper is that it’s a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to be. It’s trying to be both an action movie and a thought-provoking piece of sci-fi, and not really succeeding at either.

There are some big plot holes in Looper. Supposedly the mob sends people back in time because it’s impossible to get away with murder in the future, but somehow this isn’t an issue when they kill Joe’s wife. And if the mafia has time travel, why haven’t they used it for anything better than disposing of people they don’t like?

And really there’s just nothing about the movie that gets the mind going. There are no big questions posed. It feels like a movie that wants to make you think, but it doesn’t.

So it doesn’t work as a think-piece, but at the same time, Looper is also too convoluted, dark, and slow-paced to work as a popcorn movie.

And that’s not the only way in which it’s confused. The first half of the movie seems to be entirely about Joe — both versions of him — and their bizarre conflict, but the latter half shifts focus to the Rainmaker, and in the end Joe is just a prop for his story.

And most of all, the movie is just too long. You could have cut an half hour out and not lost anything, I think.

To be fair, the ending of Looper is clever and very powerful. But boy is it a long walk to get there.

Overall rating: 6.9/10 I don’t regret seeing it, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it, either.