Tonight we talk about a bunch of differing topics… that sorta blend together into a mix of ideas. We start off with some discussion of Thanksgiving Leftover abominations. From here Belghast talks a bit about his experiences with extremely Hardcore players on mobile phone games. This sorta leads its way into discussions of MMO Design problems, which itself leads to talking about the FFXIV Shadowbringers expansion announcement. We discuss the problems with the Blue Mage and how the Limited Class construct is probably not the right way to do it. This leads eventually into a discussion of the shenanigans that Tam and Kodra and crew have been up to in Fallout 76.
Something you need to know about me, is that I love Walking Dead. I started watching it during the first six episode season and have been a fan since. Over time it developed into a sort of watercooler moment for me and my coworkers, where we watch it every Sunday night and discuss it the next morning at work. This is the first time in my life that I have really had a show that I wanted to talk about like this, and even more so had people I wanted to talk about it with. So naturally when Fear the Walking Dead was announce we were pumped, because it would be our methadone to help weather the long dry spells between episodes of the main franchise. That said… season one was a massive disappointment, for me at least. It centered around a cast of characters that I simply struggled to relate to. I spent most of the first season rooting for them to get eaten by zombies, and now that we enter the second season I had hopes that maybe just maybe they would finally turn into characters worthy of the franchise. As it stands the only characters that I can honestly say I like… are Daniel Salazar and Victor Strand… the characters that the show runners are very much setting up to be the “bad guys”.
The biggest problem I have with the show right now is that the characters seem so phenomenally dumb. Admittedly the world has just fallen, and they are not quite adjusted to it… however they should have spent enough time by now to realize that the dead are dangerous. They should also know however that humans are even more dangerous. It just feels like they have exited the first season with zero lessons learned. It is like they still keep expecting life to return to normal… even as they are heading out to sea with Los Angeles burning in the background. I don’t want to get into any spoilers, but honestly that is pretty easy so far because nothing of any importance has really happened yet. Right now I am still very much rooting for the zombies because I keep thinking if we can thin the herd of our cast a little bit… maybe just maybe they will start to take the threat seriously. I guess the problem that I am having is that I keep expecting this to be Walking Dead, when at its core it just isn’t. I will probably give the show a few more episodes, because until Game of Thrones starts up in a few weeks I don’t have a Sunday evening show to be watching… and I have gotten into the habit of watching something on Sunday nights. That said… so far the second season is off to a pretty boring start.
Daredevil Season 2
As disappointed as I am in Fear… if there was a polar opposite I would feel that about Daredevil season two. While the season did not have the strong single story arc that the first one did, it chopped up into what felt like three smaller separate story arcs that were equally enjoyable. This is really the season where we see Daredevil emerge to be the hero we recognize from the comics. Its like over the course of season one and the first half of season two… the pieces were falling into place one by one. I guess that is part of what I have loved so much is that you can see the progression from a vigilante wearing essentially black sweatpants to the badass hero that we have come to expect. There are going to be spoilers in this write up because I am not sure how to talk about it without really going into spoilers. The quintessential moment for me was the creation of his “cane” weapon. From that point on this show turned into exactly what I always hoped it would be and I was constantly getting rewarded with awesome shots of him throwing it into baddies and then retracting it just in time to hit someone else with it. While he has better armor in this show… I like that it still shows the personal toll that being a hero has on not only his body but his relationship with Karen and Foggy.
The highlight of the season however has to be the introduction of the Punisher. “Shane” was a character that I loved to hate in The Walking Dead, and when that character left the show there was a big hole that never quite got filled… that is until Rick himself started to fill that role. Jon Bernthal makes a phenomenal Punisher, and I hope beyond hope that eventually we will see his own spin off series. As a kid my favorite comic book character was The Punisher, and my friends was Daredevil… so it was always an extremely special moment whenever we got to read comics where the two characters interacted and teamed up to fight the Kingpin. I have this feeling that we are heading in that direction, because in this season the Kingpin also finally became the Kingpin that we love to hate. As far as the Elektra arc I have to say it was done pretty well, and the whole hand vs chaste concept. The season was essentially a condensed version of all of the story lines that I can remember relating to Elektra/Daredevil/Stick/The Hand. Unfortunately the whole “Black Sky” concept is not something that I remember from the comics, because in that version The Hand worship a demon called the Beast. So this appears to be the point where we leave the story line and go off in a different direction. Regardless I am sure we will see Elektra once again, and I am certainly hoping that Season 3 will show us more of the Punisher and Daredevil team up as well.
This week was extremely dominated by my burgeoning love of Star Wars. I have written many times about how I just was not feeling the franchise after the prequels… and that all of the hype surrounding me has rekindled that little kid inside of me that wanted to be “darfa bader”. I’ve always loved the empire more than the rebels, and I feel kinda bad about that… but Storm Troopers and Darth Vader…. come on. I was sick for a chunk of the week and while home sick… I caught up on a few things… namely Star Wars Rebels. So without further rambling… lets talk about stuff.
Star Wars: Force Awakens – Trailer 3
This trailer is absolutely amazing and only serves to bump my hype for this movie up to a fever pitch. This honestly scares me more than a little bit. I am as excited right now for Force Awakens as I was for Phantom Menace… and we all know how that turned out. I think the thing that gives me confidence more than anything is the giant trail of money attached to this movie. Disney paid four billion dollars to purchase the Star Wars franchise… and I think the realize if this movie is the stinker than Phantom Menace was… they have essentially flushed the vast majority of that money down the toilet. That said I have also come to realize that quite simply I don’t think George Lucas knows how to direct human beings with human emotions. I’ve recently watched the prequels again… and those movies are full of some really damned good actors… all of which are chewing up scenery with some of the most unnatural dialog and acting I have seen. You take those same actors and put them in quite literally any other movie and they do amazing jobs… so it has the be the movies themselves that are the problem. Anyways… enough of that and on to the trailer.
I love the feel of this trailer, how it is a sequence of more fleshed out vignettes this time. I have gone back and forth on the popular conspiracies and at this point I simply don’t have a clue. I don’t know why Luke Skywalker isn’t on the movie poster, and I am starting to question if it is him with the robotic hand reaching out to R2-D2. I am playing this game of “who is the Skywalker”, and I right now I am starting to think that maybe Rey, Finn and Kylo Ren are all connected to the previous trilogy. I am still leaning heavily towards Kylo Ren being the child of Han and Leia who has now turned to the Dark Side and become essentially a Vader fanboy… since he knows that Vader was essentially his Grandfather. You see Rey behind the seat of the Millennium Falcon in one of the shots that has come out… so that would lead you to believe that maybe she is ALSO the child of Han and Leia… maybe sibling to Kylo? Finn is the one I cannot place… since we see him wielding a lightsaber we know he is a force sensitive. Makes me wonder if maybe he is the child of Luke, but with whom. He could also be the child of Sana Solo which is now apparently the in canon wife of Han. I feel like a lot of this movie is going to center around Kylo Ren essentially going on an Artifact hunt trying to find relics of Vader, but past that I am not sure of anything. I am absolutely looking forward to December so I can finally see how the pieces are going to fit together.
Star Wars Rebels
While sick this week I caught up on watching Star Wars Rebels, which I found out you can stream from the Disney XD website so long as you have a cable provider to validate with. The only problem with this is that it isn’t really clear where one season ends and the next begins. At this point I am apparently caught up and into season two, and I have to say this show… is so great and just what we needed to bridge some gap between the prequels and the modern age movies. This show is essentially about the birth of the Rebellion as we know it episodes four through six. I’ve talked about the show in the past on my blog, and I will warn you it honestly takes a few episodes before it starts to feel right. Sabine Wren is awesome… just going to get that out there. I love Mandalorians and she has this awesome quirky nature that is just great, and I love the fact that she tags her armor every time they take down another imperial target. I also adore the paint job she did on the captured Tie Fighter.
The coolest part about this show however is the fact that we get to find out what happens to Ahsoka Tano. That was the biggest problem I had after Clone Wars you weren’t really sure what became of her. You know she isn’t in any of the prequels… largely because I don’t think the character existed until the Clone Wars cartoon… but we just know she is not around in any form. Here we find that she is fighting the good fight and acting as the rebel operative known as “Fulcrum”. It is awesome to see her again, but we know that issues are going to come up… and with a brief interaction with Darth Vader he realizes exactly who she is… and that she is still alive. You are left with the impression that she has her assumptions that Vader is Anakin… but she isn’t nearly as certain as Vader is in that interaction. I thought it was awesome that they brought in Commander Cody as well, and it makes me so damned happy that essentially Clone Wars and Rebels are a continuation of the same basic story arc. I was afraid that all of the great characters that got invented for the Clone Wars show would simply be gone, but now we are seeing them almost all revitalized as part of the Rebels show… which also I believe means they are being inducted into the canon universe. The hope is that maybe some of these characters will have brief cameos in the new movies as well.
Walking Dead Season 5 – Episode 2
Wow… this episode. I thought the first episode was intense with the quarry full of walkers, and herding them down the path. This episode starts off very benign showing you how the rest of the characters were spending the time while everyone else was out in the field with the walkers. Then in a manner so quickly that I thought it might literally be a hallucination… we see the wolves get into Alexandria and just start slaughtering the residents. We all knew the wolves would eventually get there, and it seems as though either someone jumped the fence in the same way that Carl and Enid have done… or someone left the damned gate open again. Last week we theorized as to who was hitting the car horn and leading the walkers of the pack, but this week we find out that it was instead a semi truck that was heading for one of the walls to break it down. The gun in the guard tower managed to shoot the driver… but then the driver fell on the horn while dying. The episode as a whole was just so strange to see how absolutely feral and blindingly fast the wolves were.
The part I am thankful for however is the fact that essentially this incident forced Carol to abandon her disguise. She had to become the badass we all know she is, but I do think it is significant that she once again took on the disguise of a wolf, much like she took on the disguise of a walker getting into Terminus. I think this is the sign of something more with her character… I think she got used to having to wear a mask in the years she was in her abusive marriage, and now it is just comfortable for her to keep adopting them in order to stay safe. This episode however was a tale of two styles conflicting… the monk like pacifism of Morgan, and the brutal and honest force of Carol. The body count from this episode was massive and I think in one show we have whittled down the folks in Alexandria to only the reliable and self sufficient ones are left. The wolves came in and killed all of the sheep as it were… all of the people who simply could not take care of themselves. As a result I think Alexandria is going to be a vastly different place in the coming weeks as they have to deal with this horde of walkers bearing down upon the walls. I am amped for this week to see what happens next.
