Just saw the trailer for Black Lightning on the CW.

And I want to see more.  It looks cool, and much better done than Marvel's Luke Cage.

Here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZpJeuXo2CY

I'm a tad confused by younger gamers now...

I honestly don't understand how a simple game like Dark Souls took off like it did.

Dark Souls is not a difficult game. It's all about pattern recognition and waiting. It's an easy game masked with cheap tricks and bad coding. Like having basic enemies able to bomb you through solid walls, and massive damage to compensate for an actual challenge. And waiting for an opening to strike is not difficulty, it's time wasting.

Before anyone accuses me of being a try-hard here, when I played I had well over 200 actual deaths before I finished my run. But at no time did I feel challenged, and at no time did I feel good about any achievement simply because I knew I would get punked easily the next time I turned a corner.

Also, at what point is this game about exploration? Because any time you leave the beaten path, you get killed. That's not exploration, that it;s teaching you, psychological conditioning, you touch the banana, you get zapped, you touch the carrot, it's OK, you go that way. The exact opposite wandering around, getting lost and finding something cool.

One more thing, I'm a little confused so to its main teaching tool: Death. This is supposedly how the game let's you learn its systems, where you can and cannot go, and recognize/learn the attack/defense patterns. I mean, that's the whole poin of the original tagline of 'Prepare to Die', right? So why does the game punish you for dying to an ambush or bad luck? It feels awfully cheap and unfair.

This is difficulty now? This is fun? I found the entire experience to be dull and tedious. And you know what's the saddest part of all this? I wanted to love the series. I like moody, atmospheric fantasy games, but the execution was painfully bad and full of fake difficulty that it killed me.

And that's not even touching on the lackluster lore that is a massed jumble.

Dragon's Dogma was a much better Souls game in the end for me, I actually enjoy it when I die then.

A friend suggested I do this. To put my thoughts on paper about an incident that happened back in Nov of 2014. And so I'm going to post something that might seem political, but it's just my perception and experience, pure anecdote, no facts. At least nothing scientific. This is likely going to be a long post, so without further ado.

Back in Nov. I got banned off a forum that I enjoyed over a rather hot-button topic (Gamergate) and in the process I got accused of a few nasty things, but that is neither here nor there. Because frankly, those types of accusations are hard to defend against without outside help. Still, that's not the point.

The point was that in part of the dialog, I was told that I had to 'learn sympathy for minority' groups, immediately assuming that I was the majority. Now on the surface I am. I'm white and male. But I am also a minority: I'm crippled, my back is literally fusing itself together, and because it's a form of rheumatoid arthritis, it's never getting better (barring a medical treatment or miracle.) I also have some mental issues, but really, I gloss over those as that it's darn tootin' hard to prove.

At first I was admittedly miffed that I was accused of not understanding the minority side, then I thought about it, and what it really meant. And why they would say that I don't have any sympathy. They never knew. Simply because I never made a big deal out of it.

And that's the crux of it. Despite being a 'minority', I don't want to be treated any different than anyone else. So I don't generally tell people don't know that I have to walk everywhere with a cane on good days, an actual walker on the really bad ones that I have to leave the house with (and in a Canadian winter like this one, that's outright hell on the legs and spine. Which is why I haven't been able to leave the house much.)

I could go on and on about how limiting it all is, or whatnot. And really, given my brain, anyone who asks, I tell. And often give too much information, but at the same time, I never actually ask for help. I will accept it if offered, but I rarely ask for it when it comes to the bigger things. Like moving, which I really should have, looking back on this last month. Simply because I see that everyone has their own issues to deal with, which might be more important than mine.

Here's an example, because I'm literally not allowed to drive, I take the bus everywhere (which has been no different for most of my life anyway) and in Ontario and Quebec, they have buses that 'kneel' for ease of access. What that means is that there's a system that lowers the front end, so that the doors are closer to the curb, for those people who can't lift their legs high enough.

Thing is, I've never actually asked for a bus driver to do it, despite the fact that I am legally allowed to, because I need to. Not to mention that there are bench seats up front for disabled and elderly people, and that they even fold up for those who have children in strollers.

But I never ask. I don't feel like I should be treated any differently than anyone else. If someone does give me their seat? I thank them, genuinely. If someone needs my seat, I give it to them, no questions asked. The bus driver lowers the edge of the door? I thank them too. In fact, I thank the bus driver when I get off the bus no matter what, because he or she is doing me a service. Whether or not they've been paid to means nothing to me. They helped me get from point A to B, that deserves something from little old me, an acknowledgment may not really mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but what does it harm to thank someone that helped me?

Again, though, at the same because I don't feel the need to be treated differently, I don't see why all these special interest groups should either. Yes, I get that some have had it rough, I know, I have a lot of difficulty doing every day things that others take for granted. I get that, for some people it's social for others it's physical limitations, but again, everyone I've ever seen, encountered or talked to, has had their own issues that complicates their life.

I guess what I'm saying is, I don't get why people like me should be clamouring for more, everyone has problems. Everyone. Some have it worse than others, yes, but no one escapes life without problems in their lives. And I guess I see all these 'reparations' that are being asked for as inconveniencing others. Are they legit? I don't know. In the past, perhaps, but I didn't live back then, so I have no idea what it was really like, and most people nowadays, haven't either, I would guess.

This has not been meant to change anyone's mind, just give a sense of where I come from. Thank you for reading.

My first RPG review for this site: Cold Steel Wardens by Blackfall Press LLC

Before I forget:  I bought this with my own money.

First off, I want to say, I love the Iron Age of Comics, but I'll also be one of the first to say that a lot of it was crap. Mostly an excuse for blood fueled, ultra-violent revenge porn. But when it was good, it was fabulous, and deep, and dark and went places that the still somewhat active Comics Code would not have allowed. And a lot of modern comics and stories still don't. So finding this game and with someone talking a serious take on it, without going into self-parody, like Marvel's Deadpool (who was the poster child for all bad Iron Age characters, in my opinion) or pointless violence (like a lot of DC's Vigilante, Deathstroke the Terminator and Marvel's Punisher comics of the early to mid-90's. And most of Images comic lines, I'm sad to say), was a Godsend. And exceedingly rare.

Having read the game, but not tried the system, I can't honestly say how it runs. And so I won't. I will however go into impressions from what the game gives me, via the game system, the setting and the overall tone.

First off, the basic premise is that most characters are beginner vigilantes, whether they're street level paladins like Spiderman and Daredevil, Batman and Nightwing, Cloak and Dagger, heroic mercenaries like Luke Cage or Daniel Rand AKA Iron Fist, or out and out killers for justice like the original Vigilante or Punisher. However, it also implies that they're not very well trained, having a basic level of combat and investigative training. Which if you ever read most Iron Age styled comics, this is not the case, most vigilantes have a background from which to draw on a lot of skills, usually military and/or police, or if not, they'd have done some sort of training or have powers, that make them more than a match for multiple gang members at once.

A lot of the pre-made characters certainly seem capable of doing so given the dice numbers, according to the basic math I've done, which is by no means exhaustive, or sadly, likely accurate, White Room testing can only do so much. Oddly the text keeps inferring that death should be feared at all times, but that's unlike most of the setting material it draws from, it creates a bit of a disconnect. Heroes and Vigilantes should not fear death, it's something they have had to deal with, will have to deal with. Their own, or others. It's how they deal with it that matters. Most of the enjoyment of a game like this is more the moral quandaries and situations that don't always involve murder. Although, admittedly, some villains just need a good killing. Death should have meaning, after all, most vigilantes will encounter it often, whether caused by their own hands, or they have to deal with the victims of crimes.

The powers are a nice touch, most street level heroes don't have any or much if they do have some. And they're kept, for the most part, relatively low powered, save for two, but they've always been a bit of a game breaker, but at least here, they've kept them from breaking the system too hard. The two I'm talking about? Invisibility and Phasing. The ability to bypass a lot of situations always break the system.

The gear is typical grim and gritty, typically found in the stuff like Sin City or The Punisher. No fancy wrist guns or the like. Which for the most part is well within setting. The issue is the armour. Now, realistically, armour technology has almost always lagged behind weapon technology. However, in most comics it's almost always at parity. The Punisher's body armour has always been reasonably bullet resistant, as he's usually one man taking on an army of goons. Most vigilantes, which tend to get together in groups no larger than two or three, rarely four or higher, tends to face off on groups of twenty or more, sometimes even at once. So a lot more protection is necessary than what is provided.

You could, in theory, go for the Powers to mimic the higher level of defence, but forcing the players to up their arsenal by using a subset of the rules, that apparently are supposed to be rare seems a little counter intuitive to me. The amount of money given at character creation is also a bit lacking. Let's face it, the most famous killer vigilante started out as a Spiderman villain, but had an arsenal from Day 1. Others have extreme to superhuman levels of skill to avoid taking damage, admittedly, but the base system doesn't seem geared to handle that. Although, that's just me eyeballing the basic math.

However, I will state that most of the above are easily rectified if you're like me and house rule the crap out of everything you play. And really, it's just gear, it's not like you're rewriting the system from the ground up.

The critical damage system, which is called 'Strain' here has two sides to it, physical and mental, each having a often crippling effect to the player's character. On the whole it's a cute idea, but in implementation, I'm finding that it could lead to issues where campaigns end, because physically injured characters take a while to heal, and players don't want to go through that much 'down time', worse, if they are amenable, a lot of these can be bypassed all together, by simply 'waiting' the prerequisite amount of time. This is assuming they don't flame out and go in a blaze of glory during the adventure in which they take any damage that severe.

The mental Strain chart is a whole 'nother ball of wax, one that, the designer admits, can get sticky for some crews out there. And even among those that are OK with it, it can end up with a character that's unplayable do to mental issues and potential conflicts among the various situations and characters (not Players, in this case.)

As a whole, I'm not too keen on either system, although in theory it shouldn't happen too often.

There is an oddity in the book's layout, however. The investigation creation kit, with suggestions as to how to create them is just in front of the Game Master's section. I would have put it in with the rest of the GM's information, simply because the GM is the one who'll be using that most often. But other than that, it's a useful resource with three ways to set up an investigation style adventure. I will touch on the GM's section below, as I have a bit to say about it.

Now, the setting of New Corinth. This is an expansive and modestly detailed rust belt-esque city that you can plunk down anywhere you want. It's a self-contained module with no outside links to any one nation, although it does assume American for convenience sake. It's made up five major districts and goes into some detail, but I'm finding that there's a lack of actual information on the districts except for key elements. Now that would be fine, normally but it's written in such a way to leave very little wiggle room. And the fact that there are no mention of Asian gangs, which was a huge thing in the Iron Age, especially with it's love of Ninja and anything martial arts related, is a bit of a crime to me.

But it's full of bit and major characters, easily fueling that side of the game, there is an extensive list of types of adversaries (including, yes, Ninja, but no one that would hire them) both mundane and somewhat supernatural. All well done and detailed just enough to give one ideas. And there's even a small selection of premade Vigilantes for the Players to pick from.

There's a section in the GM's chapters, explaining what the author believes makes up an Iron Age styled game, most of which I agree with but, like almost all fandoms, we'll all have our outliers. However, there's one thing that he keeps going on about, and that is death, namely player death, and how to make it meaningful even if it seems pointless. Which is great if you're trying to run a Noir game, in which the 'hero' such as they are, are less likely to live at the end of the tale. But in a Superhero type setting like the Iron Age of comics, even though a lot of them are not superhuman themselves death of a character is not something that is feared. Sometimes it happens, as in the case of DC's Vigilante or Marvel's Scourge of The Underworld, but at the same time, once the character is dead you lose the character's potential for change, growth or even epiphany. And frankly, it's so unlike the Iron Age, I'm not quite sure what the author was trying to do with the game.

Which all boils down to my issues with this game. It starts out strong with great ideas, but it then dives into a different genre altogether as if without realizing it.

I'm not going to give this a rating, I've come to realize that a number is arbitrary and in no way reflects information given, so instead I shall as a simple question at the end of each review.

Should you get this book? If you like the Noir, or just want a setting to riff and rip off? Yes. The mechanics seem solid, and the investigations section are very useful for any system. The layout, other than that one hiccup, is easy to read and flows from one chapter to another. But if you're looking for a feel of the comics of the mid to late 80s and 90s in a book, this needs a lot of mental massaging. It can be done, it's just do you want to?

Hot topics in Comics and Video Games

We, as a species, have either evolved or been trained to accept death of men.  But involve a woman?  People of both genders get up in arms.  And even worse, get a child involved, and you'll have a lynch mob ready with tar and feathers in record time.

I remember the various war crimes reporting in Bosnia, the genocidal murders they called ethnic cleansing. Horrific stuff.  But I also remember people getting upset at the womenfolk and children getting hauled away for assumptions of torture and rape, which were likely true, but very rarely did we actually consider what had happened to the male victims.  The ones the aggressors (and both sides are/were equally guilty of this) lined up, shot and then tossed into pits to rot.  Sons, Fathers, Siblings, Lovers, all dead men because the attackers thought it was better to wipe them out because they would make taking the women difficult.

Instead we focused the plight of the living women and girls.  Or if they turned up dead, we mourned them and clamoured for the heads of the monsters who were hurting them.

Why?  Because we, humanity as a whole, see women (and children) as 'weaker'.  Ironically, it's because of their height.  The majority of women are smaller than men on average.  And some of those same women are are more capable than their male counterparts, but we tend not to see this.  And so whenever someone bullies or hurts or kills someone smaller or weaker we get upset.

Now what does this have to with video gaming and/or comics?  Everything.

As a pure story device, harming a female character gets audiences worked up and angry.  It's a way of showing how 'evil' the villain is.  Especially since targeting children was a no-no in comics.  It also happens in video games.  We often kill or mow down hundreds of male foes without a second thought, but we will always remember the female kills/defeats.

So where am I going on this.  Well, there's this movement, called "Women in Refrigerators" (look it up!), which is in relation to an incident were a supervillain from DC comics (Major Force) for some reason kills and stuffs the new (at the time) Green Lantern's girlfriend into a fridge.  Pretty nasty stuff.  And it got ALL the readers upset and wanting to murder Major Force.  The movement, however, focuses on more than just that.  It picks out every single instance of a woman character that's been used and abused (There are a LOT of those, to be honest, a bit too much) and tries to shame people for...  I honestly don't know.  But there's a lot of trying to shame people.

The movement's heart is in the right place.  Don't get me wrong, hurting and killing anyone is wrong, and we should be upset when some evil person does it to a woman, but especially to a woman.

The thing that strikes me is that in 2010, Marvel released a short series, called Amazing Spider-Man Presents: Jackpot Vol 1 where in a new (well, not quite, she showed up in 2007, but was a different character -a friend to the real one- who died because of substance abuse. This was the original Jackpot first series) superheroine called Jackpot had a series of adventures.  She crossed paths with a villain named 'The Rose' and a henchman named Boomerang.

Now, in the course of the three issue series, Boomerang figures out who Jackpot is.  And comes to her house, where she's having dinner with her husband and daughter, and kills the husband in front of both girls.

Full stop.  A few things of note here, but most importantly, the husband character never got a name.  Why is this?  One could go into a myriad of reasons, but the one that matters the most is because the writers knew that it wouldn't matter.  We wouldn't care about the dead husband, we'd focus on what would happen to Jackpot and her daughter.

The things is, both Kyle Rayner's (Green Lantern) and Sara Erhet's (Jackpot) significant others exist for the sole reason of creating character tragedy, they were both meant to be killed brutally in a fashion to get us, the reader, upset.  And for the most part it works, but in different ways.

The issue remains though, that Ms. Erhet's plight is more what we focus on, instead of actually hating Boomerang.  Instead of her going and hunting down Boomer, she unmasks The Rose, but decides to retire and go into the 'Witness Relocation Program', to protect her family.

But with Mr. Rayner, we immediately get up in arms about a big bad company abusing women again.

Which also brings up a point, I understand why it's upsetting, and yes, some sort of other device should be used from time to time, but at the same time, I get a sneaky suspicion that the Women in Fridges movement assumes that the readers are giggling and masturbating whenever a woman is killed.  And I can say with reasonable confidence that...  Most of us don't.  We understand why it's there, it's to get us angry.  And it really does work.

And it really is because we've been trained as a World Society that women and children are to be protected at all costs.  Men's lives are nothing compared to a single Woman's.

So in the end, I'm left with an honest question, for a male character who has a 'tragic past' (and there's no going around it, no saying "no tragic past here"), what would 'you' use to as a device in a story?

Red Dead Redemption (Spoilers)

Straight up warning, there will be some spoilers.  If you do not want to know about them, stop RIGHT HERE:

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So I had, for about a year, Red Dead Redemption.  And I'm confused.  It's really not that solid a game.  I mean it was fun, but the horse riding controls were insanely wonky.  And frankly, I think shooting some crook in BOTH knees should prevent him from being able to escape.  I can't tell you how many times the Bounty got away because I couldn't kill his goons fast enough, or that every time I thought I was 'safe' enough to make a capture, I ate enough lead to make my dick into a pencil.

But really those are minor gripes compared to the bait and switch the game pulls on you.  I don't mind if the main character dies, but I want it to mean 'something' not be an excuse to play another character.  I didn't want to be Jake.  I couldn't stand the whiny git.  What's worse is that there's no way you could know it was coming, it felt cheap and pointless to me.  Like I said an excuse to change characters.

When it happened, and I got to play Jack, I paused the game.  Waited.  Then powered off the console, ejected the disk and gave the game back to my friend.  I normally stop playing when I realize I'm not having fun (Final Fantasy 10 was like that, at one point I realized I was just going through the motions, I wasn't actually having any fun), but RDR is the first game that made me so mad that I stopped trusting Rockstar.  I simply do not trust them not to do that again on me.

Maybe it's an overreaction, but I honestly, I rather liked the story, I could ignore the silly horse controls, or the fact that the Dead Eye controls let me kill every living thing within 30 seconds of me (my aim kinda sucks), as long as I could see more of John's story.  But the moment it stopped being his story, I was no longer interested in playing it.

I'm sure Jake isn't that bad a character, but I wasn't interested in him, there was nothing built up with him.  My emotional investment was with John, I had gone through 40 hours (total, including restarts and deaths) with him, and the ties he made to the people around him.  But Jake?  I didn't want to do that again, nor was I finished with John's story, despite his reunion with his family.

I'm also one of those people who will have his game experience ruined if the ending sucks.  Mass Effect 3, the reason I haven't picked it up is because every ending that I spoiled for myself isn't worth the time investing into the game.  It could be the awesomest game in the entire universe, but if the last 5 minutes suck dead donkey balls, the rest of the game also feels like wasted time to me, time I could have spent getting a 'better' story somewhere else.

This is just my opinion, I could be wrong.

The New Tomb Raider game

So here I am sitting and trying to figure out a topic to blog about.  And I'm surfing various gaming sites, and I come across a video review or two of the new Tomb Raider game.  Now the issue isn't the review scores, because frankly I don't care about the rating numbers, I'm more about what they show.

And what the showed was ultra violence.  Now before anyone goes off about how I'm ragging on games being the cause of...  Yada, yada, I have nothing against it.  I love the brutal finisher 'Killmoves' in Skyrim.  Sleeping Dogs is pure Hong Kong Blood Opera, and I enjoyed the demo.  I love the Wolverine game, the one based on the most recent film, which is better than the actual movie!  I have nothing against violence when it's against pixels and fictional depictions of evil monsters, human and otherwise.  This is more about ultra violence and Lara Croft, or rather her depiction.

The apparent story here is of Lara's beginnings as an explorer.  Which is fine with me, but according to the reviews, the only way to gain experience to level up her abilities and the like is through killing.  But the cut scenes, when they aren't brutal depictions of her getting injured -do we really need a death scene of her getting impaled in the throat or stomach, if you screw up on a Quick Time Event?- show her agonizing over killing an animal, or the almost rape scene -which is one of the things that turned me off on the game, rape is not a character builder- she's sobbing over killing her would be tormentor but when she's back under your control, she's this calm collected killer that can perform brutal executions with her bow, arrows, climbing pick  and whatever gun she's holding.  In fact the executions give you bonus experience if you pull them off.  When she goes exploring and raids the actual tombs that the series is famous for, she gets rather lame bits of lore or trivia that don't give her any experience.

Am I the only one seeing the irony here?

My first game for the Playstation console, the first one, was Tomb Raider, and it was a pure action adventure, in the vein of Indiana Jones.  It was campy, unrealistic and the only game at the time where you faced off against a T. Rex with a pair of .45s.

Another irony is that the original development team created this new Tomb Raider, Crystal Dynamics, and yet they seemed to have forgotten what Ms. Croft was all about.  Not sure what I was thinking there, Eidos was the creator of Tomb Raider, not Crystal Dynamics.  My apologies.

It makes me sad that the  Publishers think that the only way to sell a game is to make it as violent as possible.  Fictional Violence has it's place, it's a cathartic release mechanism for a lot of people, including me, but it shouldn't be the only thing a game has going  for it.


This is just my opinion, I could be wrong.