Blog Features Archives - Page 70 of 283

Media Consumption 10/17/2015

October 17, 2015 by Belghast

Television Lite Week

This week has been one that has seen me absolutely consumed with Destiny on the PlayStation 4, and as such I have simply not spent much time watching television. I have however watched quite an excessive amount of YouTube videos, namely as I try to find information about Destiny. There is this shift that is happening where certain games with certain audiences… simply do not have information blog posts about them. I’ve gotten spoiled in a world with Dulfy.net and WoWHead.com in that I expect pretty much every game I have to have this quality of resources. Instead for many games lately all I am ever able to find is YouTube videos on a given subject. I am sorry to all the YouTubers out there… but I am of a generation where I feel like a video is the least useful way to disseminate information. I will take a written explanation and some good screenshots any day over a lengthy video walk through. At some point in the near future I hope to take some of these things that I found frustrating and attempt to write some blog posts outlining how to do this thing or that thing in Destiny. Granted that is not to say there are not a lot of really good Destiny YouTube channels… but I would still rather have an informational post.

Destiny Lore

The first time around when the AggroChat crew played Destiny… we joked that it was a game almost entirely devoid of story. That apparently is not the case… they just go to strange lengths to hide it from you. The story of the game is told through a series of grimoire cards, item descriptions, quest text, and hinted at in cinematic scenes. In fact there is actually apparently a TON of information about the characters in the game, their background, how they arrived at the tower… and all sorts of legends from the golden age, the city age, and the now tower age. In my search for information about Destiny I happened to stumble across a really awesome YouTube channel called Myelin Game… which is not to be confused with long time friend Mylin1. The channel is chock full of videos where Myelin digs into the lore of Destiny and connects the dots, weaving all of the known information… and speculated information into a narrative around a certain subject. I linked the Black Garden video since the game does a pretty poor job to explain what the hell it actually is… but I also highly suggest the trilogy of videos talking about thorn, last word, and first curse. I have always guessed there was this rich story somewhere behind Destiny… because the dots connected too neatly at times not to be well planned, but now that I am starting to learn some of the actual story I am loving it. I still feel it is a strange choice to make players dig for this knowledge, rather than letting you experience chunks of it through the story. The Fallen King expansion does a much better job of being more forthcoming with information… and it gives characters that previously did not have much of a personality… plenty of chance to show it off. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to these lore videos while doing other things and I highly recommend them.

Star Wars Minute

Another thing that I stumbled across this week is Star Wars Minute, which is a great YouTube channel that takes segments of the Star Wars universe and condenses them into roughly one minute long narrative explanations. Much like the Destiny Lore, this feels as much podcast as it does YouTube video because the narrative explanation is the important part… and the images going along with it are nice to have but not 100% necessary. I ended up finding this as I started doing some googling related to the Star Wars universe, namely for the upcoming pen and paper game that should have its first session tomorrow. The funny thing about this is how much of the universe I already had a full grasp on but have no clue why. I guess even though I have been a sleeper Star Wars fanboy since the prequels… I was still subconsciously hungry for knowledge about this favorite of universes. Star Wars Minute is great to play in the background as you do something else and they release three new episodes a week, so there is a silly amount of content available already.

Arrow Season 3

Be warned I am going to go into some serious spoilers here, so if you have not watched Arrow Season 3 or if you intend to at a later date… you might want to skip this section. Here is the point at which I get really frustrated with this show. Generally speaking I am all for a television show deviating from the source material to make the universe work better for the TV audience. For example most of the Batman movies have worked really well… and they are essentially a condensed soup version of the batman universe… gathering up all the good bits and trying to weave a story out of them. You have a very limited amount of time on television, and what might work fine to slowly build over the course of several years of a comic run… needs to happen in an under two hour long movie. Television shows have a bit more leverage when it comes to pacing something out, and this is also cool. The thing that apparently pisses me off though… is when you take actions attributed to one character and apply them to a completely different character.

What I mean is that this story line that has played out throughout the season around R’as al Ghul didn’t happen to Green Arrow… ever. Essentially this is a Batman storyline, and all of the events that are playing out happened at one time or another to Batman. This caused me to think about Arrow the television show in a different light and realize that essentially… they have been turning Arrow into Batman this entire time. Maybe it is because Batman has been tagged as a “film” universe and is not available to be done in a Television version that they feel the need to create someone that is Batman-like. Green Arrow was admittedly a comic that I did not really follow. I mean I knew that him calling his sister Speedy when that was the character that would ultimately become Arsenal was wrong… and I knew a few other points seemed less than correct. However I lived in this world of relatively little knowledge about the show so I was able to pretty much ignore any differences… until they started stepping foot into the Batman universe. THAT is a universe I know considerably more about, and after a whole lot of research and the council of Thalen… I pretty much determined that nope… Green Arrow has never really interacted much with R’as al Ghul at all. So I am sitting here two episodes away from the end of the season… questioning if I care to finish watching it.

Walking Dead Season 6 Premiere

Thank god Walking Dead is back. “Fear The” was such a pale imitation of Walking Dead, and I am exceptionally happy that they chose to back up the start of Season Six to the end of the first season of Fear. I do have to say though that it makes me extremely happy that Talking Dead has been pulled in officially for Fear as well, because for me at least that has become so much of that experience. This is one hell of a first episode, and I really liked the way they handled Flashbacks in this episode by making them Black and White. That is always the challenge with a show, how to visually tell the watcher that the events they are seeing are not happening in real time but instead an imagined replay. When you are dealing with older characters and younger characters, it works naturally… but when you are dealing with only a few hours or days passing… it becomes much more challenging. So the choice of black and white gave a nice clear demarcation point between the two time-frames. As to the rest of the episode… Rae sent me a text as the show as going on that simply said “Nosh Pit”.

The premise of the show has to be one of the most Rube Goldberg style plot devices I have seen in awhile. To figure out a way to draw the walkers out of the pit and along a fixed path to get them away from Alexandria. The parallels to herding cattle… was extremely strong in this episode. They even managed to draw them down a chute just like you do cattle for a period of time… and then cleared out the farm supply store just to make sure nothing would spook them and draw their attention away… kinda like you do cattle. The slightest noise can distract cattle and get them to move in a different direction, and that apparently is the case with walkers. The thing is… going into this episode… you knew something was going to go wrong. There were scenes in the Season 6 preview show of Walkers in Alexandria or at least the hint of that happening. This show is really good about misleading us, for example the above poster would seem like we are heading towards some central conflict between Morgan and Rick… and in truth… it seems like Morgan instead manages to back Rick down from the ledge a bit.

As far as the walkers… when they are nearing the clear zone… someone sets off a horn in Alexandria, causing the mega horde to turn that direction. So the question is… who did it. At work the popular theory for awhile has been that Enid is a spy from the Wolves, and that the scenes of her in the car with the walker outside… hint that she set off the horn. My personal theory is it is Father Gabriel once again trying to destroy everything around him. He wanted to go out on the mission to herd the walkers, but Rick shut him down immediately. My theory is he is vindictive, and after being shut down by Andrea as well… he is still on some mission to destroy this community and in the process allow himself to be kill in some sort of twisted act of contrition for letting his parishioners die. In truth it could be the wolves themselves, who have been watching everything happening and see this as their opportunity to let the zombies batter down the defense of Alexandria and allow them to come in after they are done… and loot the resources. If nothing else this episode explained why Alexandria had been left fairly unscathed… because the giant pit of zombies had been drawing in more zombies and keeping them away from the town. It is going to be interesting to see how the next few episodes play out, and who we lose in the process.

MMOs Worth Playing: Rift

October 16, 2015October 16, 2015 by Belghast

Why This Series

Happy Friday and welcome to the second part of my “MMOs Worth Playing” series where at the end of the week I try and talk about an MMO that I think is very much worth playing. I thought this morning I would go into some of my thought processes as to why I am doing this. Lately there has been a lot of angst floating around about various games and the state of them, and while I can very much get riled up just like the next person there is a thought that goes through my head. Life is far too short to spend your leisure time playing something that makes you unhappy. There was a time when if you wanted to play an MMO you were pretty much shackled to one of a handful of games in order to get your fix. However now there are tons of really fun games out there, so it quite honestly would serve most people well to pop around and play several of them to see if any are a better fit. The other part of this is the fact that we really have no major new AAA MMOs looming on the horizon. It feels like the era of big releases is over, and instead we have a bunch of existing MMOs that are continuing to make awesome content. Popping back into an existing MMO to see how it has progressed is a great experience, because there is almost always a huge mountain of content waiting for you to explore.

For the Ascended

Rift holds a special place in my heart because it was the the game that first truly pulled me away from World of Warcraft. There were a lot of games that were heralded as the “WoW Killer” and for a time for me at least, it absolutely was. If there is a feature you have always wanted in an MMO, chances are Rift has it. But it was more than just cloning features of other games, it also finally figured out how to do public events in a manner that felt both epic and beneficial in the form of Rifts and Invasions that spawn from them. For a bit about the game setting I am going to draw directly from an early tidbit from the lore team.

Of all the worlds in the universe, only Telara was constructed entirely of sourcestone at an unprecedented nexus of the elemental planes. Elemental energies that come into contact with sourcestone become tangible, and Telara, so heavily influenced by every element, boasts incredible diversity and wealth. Telara’s resources are capable of providing its people endless prosperity, if only they could share the wealth and keep the world safe from those who would plunder it. Though Telara always knew its share of strife, the Blood Storm and the rifts brought entire new plateaus of horror, leading to the edge of oblivion.

Telara is a world that is constantly sieged by forces outside of itself. Over the years this has taken the form of the elemental dragons, and even gone so far as to seeing parts of these planes of existence merging into Telara itself as the various denizens of these alternate realities set up footholds like that of Hammerknell. The storytelling gets a little esoteric at times, but essentially you are thrust into this conflict on the brink of destruction. Most games set up an artificial narrative of good versus evil, and this has pretty much become the standard trope for MMOs. Rift however does something slightly different and gives you a conflict that feels very real and tangible to us… considering we too are constantly seeing the clash of Technology and Religion. The Defiant faction relies on very steampunk feeling technology to tame the wilds of Telara. The Guardian faction instead relies on the Vigil, a pantheon of gods that have long forsaken Telara but are now choosing to make their power known. You the player takes the role of an ascended, which essentially is vessel for the souls of past warriors that ultimately end up giving you your abilities. The opening scenes of the game take place on the eve of a final showdown with Regulos the Death Aspect, and you are sent back through time with the mission of trying to stop these events from unfolding.

Soul Keeper

The most central game play mechanic is that of the souls that you have access to. There were originally four callings in the game, and recently they added a fifth. These callings provide the basic feel for what would ultimately be your “class” in another game. Until the release of the Primalist these all had a clear division based on the armor type… Warrior was Heavy, Cleric was Chain, Rogue was Leather, and Mage was Cloth. The Primalist blends the lines a bit and uses Warrior like two handed weapons, but is a leather based calling. Inside of each of these callings is a number of souls, for the original Callings they each have 11 total souls… with 10 of them available for free and 1 each coming from the two expansions to the game. The Primalist class launched with 6 souls with more supposedly coming over the coming months. Souls are essentially what “WoW like” games would refer to as a Talent tree. The enjoyment of this game for me at least has always been that I get to mix and match any combination of these souls to craft a very personal feeling class out of it. Traditionally in Talent tree based games, there is a lot of “illusion of choice”, meaning that while you have lots of options there are really only a handful that are ever viable at a given time. While there are definitely flavor of the month builds in Rift, it seems like if you are dedicated enough to any given play style you can figure out a way to develop a character that has that feel.

The game has all sorts of trope that simply don’t exist in other games. Want to play a Mage Tank… Sure you can do that. Want to play a Warrior Healer… sure you can do that too. Want to play a brutal Smite Cleric… yup that is a thing too. The game gives you a template that allows you to carve out your own class. Any given “class” is a combination of three Soul trees, and when you slot a given soul it gives you certain abilities by default. You unlock additional abilities through spending points in that tree. You could quickly see how this might become tedious, especially given all of the options you have at your finger tips. It is absolutely possible to create a character with little to no synergy, and that does not play terribly well. To solve this the game gives you a series of templates that essentially direct you down a path that should be good for this or that… and as you hover over these pre-built templates they tell you the skill level of the class and what sorts of roles they can fill. Additionally the game has an extremely active player community, and unlike most games… there forums are actually a great place to find help and information. There are class guide forums that are an awesome place to start for looking at different specs and builds. I am not sure what the maximum is… but I have 8 different “roles” or specs that I can swap back and forth between freely allowing me to get super granular and create specific builds for very specific conditions.

Feature Rich

Calling this game feature rich is a bit of an understatement. Essentially if you can think of a feature that exists in any game… there is likely a version of this fine tuned and available inside of Rift. For the things that don’t exist the game has a fairly robust mod system… though honestly not quite as complete as say World of Warcraft or Wildstar. To keep players from “breaking” the game, you cannot override default features of the original game client. This means that a lot of things don’t integrate fully, but if you really want to use it… the mods are available. The game has quite possibly the best cosmetic gear system called “Wardrobes”. This allows the players to save up to fourty different outfits and change between them freely. Additionally the game uses an appearance collection system, freeing you from having to keep old gear just for the purpose of appearances. Additionally the dye system allows you to collect certain dyes and then apply them at will to any of your wardrobes, allowing you to change things up whenever the mood suits you without an additional cash sink. Similarly the game has an amazingly rich housing system in the form of pocket dimenions, allowing the players to customize area of the world. For example our guild house is the Stone Flask Tavern at Granite Falls in Stonefield, and Rae did some crazy stuff even making a hidden path up the waterfall with a little temple area up there. Essentially if you can dream it up, there are the tools inside of Rift to be able to create it, and the sorts of dimensions that are available are extremely wide and varied. The only negative is that there is no way to put resources in your dimension like you can in other games… so you can’t bank, auction, or craft there… which I realize is an effort to keep the capitol cities feeling vibrant.

The game also has one of the more robust mentoring systems allowing you to drop your level at will while wandering the world. This allows you to vary the difficulty level of a lot of the encounters, but more importantly allows you to hang out freely with your lower level friends without simply steamrolling the content for them. This mentoring system is also the core of one of the coolest features the game has called Instant Adventures. I talked a bit about this concept yesterday in my blog post, but essentially you can pop into game… join the Instant Adventure queue and you will be fed a series of objectives for you and a group of players to complete. What is awesome about this is it is a revisiting of a lot of quest objectives from a given area, but each sequence of objectives generally reaches a crescendo in the form of some sort of mini boss. While doing this you are racking up planar currency and loot bags that usually contain nice relevant level gear. When one sequence finishes you are teleported to a new area and the process begins again. If an area becomes active with a planar invasion, then the instant adventure suddenly shifts purpose to defeating that. It has been one of my favorite leveling means to go through early content, because you are constantly doing something… and at any point you can hop off the train and go do something a little less frantic. It does a great job of breaking up the monotony of following quest chains, and like dungeons just gives you another way to mix things up a bit.

Monetization

This is always the specter looming over a free to play game, is how exactly is it itemized and is it honestly playable for free… or do you really need to subscribe to enjoy it. This is always a difficult question for me to answer since I never actually play these games in free to play mode. From what I understand… if you play this game for free you get access to all 65 levels worth of content, the original four callings, and ten souls per calling. Instead of penalizing the players… Rift took the path of rewarding them for becoming “patrons” because once a game goes free to play.. that is after all what it becomes… a patronage system. As a Patron you get all sorts of perks, and don’t have to worry about any limitations to the number of dungeons you can run a day or anything of the sort. You also get a number of extremely generous boosts to experience, gold gain, as well as daily and weekly rewards that guarantee you at least one cash shop lockbox for free. The only thing that keeps it from being a perfect free to play implementation however is that you gain no monthly stipend of shop currency like you do in other games. With no way of gaining the shop currency in game, it ends up actually making the prices on items feel more reasonable since the game is not having to dilute the price to make up for the fact that players can grind out the currency in game.

Like most cash shops, there are tons of chase items that offer rare and limited time things that you can only acquire through lockboxes. Having these items that you want appear only in lockboxes can be an extremely frustrating proposition, especially if RNGesus is not on your side. To combat this not they offer these super limited time sales that allow you to buy the various mounts outright, and if you regularly watch the Friday twitch stream they often times give away these goodies as well there. So while there are a lot of trappings of the normal insidiousness of a cash shop… I feel like for the most part it is fair, and in truth you can largely ignore it completely. Honestly I would say this is one of the few games that you can literally play without spending a dime and be completely happy doing so. I’ve been subscribed off and on since the release of Rift in 2011… but there are also times where I have played this game for free here and there before picking back up my patronage. I can say I noticed zero difference in the game other than the fact that I was obviously missing my experience boost buffs. The game felt the same, and played the same… and that is just about as high of praise as I can give for a free to play experience. If you’ve never played Rift, you owe it to yourself to give it a try… especially since it can be played completely for free. It is either going to click with you or not, but in any case there is a lot to experience… and I have to say I really enjoy the early leveling experience especially. Storm Legion and Nightmare Tides… is admittedly a bit of a slog, but I keep thinking I must be missing some path that I should be taking there. In any case… I said a bunch of stuff about Rift, and I still definitely burn a candle for this game. Join me next Friday as I talk about another game.

Week in Gaming 10/11/2015

October 11, 2015 by Belghast

A Good Week

I am sitting here this morning with my writing buddy beside me. I’ve shown pictures of Allie in the past as she sits on the blanket that I have folded beside my keyboard, and once again this morning she is there purring quietly. She really is the mascot of the week I have had, because honestly other than a bit of an emotional roller coaster surrounding The Beginner’s Guide, I would say that the week as a whole has been one of contentment. I managed to accomplish quite a bit in my quest to push through all of the stories I had not seen in SWTOR, as well as made small bits of progress in Destiny. At work things seem to be largely calmed down, or at least to a manageable madness. More than anything I think it was taking Tuesday off that helped reorient my world to a much better state of mind.

Star Wars the Old Republic

This week was an insanely productive one when it came to Star Wars the Old Republic. As of last Saturday night during the podcast I managed to wrap up the Smuggler storyline, and picked up work on the Sith Warrior. With Tuesday essentially being a day where I did nothing but play SWTOR, I managed to finish up the Sith Warrior. I’ve talked about this already but I have to say at the time the Sith Warrior was one of the most gratifying experiences when it comes to giving you the control to settle all of your vendettas in one ending. Every person that you want to seek your revenge on is laid out in such a way as that you can, and the final events are so damned satisfying. Having played both Sith Warrior and Jedi Guardian… I have to say I am a bigger fan of the Warrior experience namely because it is deeply personal… and not simply the overarching events of the game as a whole.

From there I picked up on my Bounty Hunter, largely because I needed a palate cleanser from playing a force user… and having just wrapped up Smuggler I was not quite ready for another cunning class. I fully expected to not be terribly into the Bounty Hunter experience, largely because I didn’t really enjoy Trooper that much. However I am coming to realize most of my problems with the trooper was the fact that it was my third class within a few months of the launch of games to push to 50… and at that point I was simply bored to tears of all the repeated planet story content. The Bounty Hunter is quite literally the most reasonable person on the imperial side. The game gives you the ability to play the consummate business man, and that is absolutely the path I took. I killed no one for free, and kept my collateral damage to a minimum. As a result people were constantly surprised that no, I was not in fact going to kill them. Generally speaking I almost always took the option to freeze them in carbonite and return them to the client fully intact. I am guessing that quite honestly, Bounty Hunter is probably going to go down as my favorite game play experience in SWTOR.

Destiny

My progression in Destiny has slowed down considerably, with the bulk of my forward movement coming from Armsday packages and any time I level up a faction like the Gunsmith or the Cryptarch. While I am playing the game of equipping my best gear before I decrypt any engrams, I am still ending up with low level blues most of the time that I turn into crafting materials. I’ve developed the nasty habit of buying shaders, emblems, and ships…. and as a result I am generally running low on Glimmer most of the time. I really need to try using some of those glimmer items that increase the drop rates while I work on bounties. My latest toy that I am enjoying playing with is the scout rifle above that came from a package when I leveled up Dead Orbit faction. I had not really played with a scout rifle much since coming back and had forgotten that it was essentially a high payload sniper rifle. Realistically I am to the point where if I want to progress I need to be running Heroic Strikes, and I simply have not messed with getting friends together yet in order to do that. Still having a lot of fun, but trying to keep it super casual so I don’t burn myself out and get bored with it.

Battlefront

Another game this week that I have spent some time with is Star Wars Battlefront. I pre-ordered this game through PlayStation network the moment it was announced because I am super nostalgic about the lineage of Star Wars shooters. This weekend they allowed players to download and play for free in the beta, and I have to say my feelings about it are extremely mixed. The game does an excellent job of giving you the fantasy fulfillment of playing a soldier in the Star Wars universe. Past that however… I think it suffers from the fact that I have been playing so much Destiny lately. The game handles significantly worse in the moment to moment gameplay that Destiny does. The guns feel worse, the movement feels worse, the cover mechanics… feel worse. I think if I spent enough time I could get used to it and even come to like it, but right now I am struggling with the feeling of “I would rather just play destiny”.

The Beginner’s Guide

I’ve said everything I could really ever want to say in my deeply personal post on the game from last week. Last night on AggroChat I to some extent reprised those thoughts in a much more condensed manner. The take away for me is really this. If you are not in an extremely stable position in your life, and if you are at all struggling with your own emotions… don’t play this game. Essentially there are two possible reactions… either you are going to think it is complete bullshit and it won’t effect you in any way. Or it is going to act as a mirror to show you all of your fears and anxieties about yourself. It quite literally took me a few days to recover from the experience of just watching a play through of this game, and not actually playing it myself. I am not unhappy that I went through it, but it is also not the sort of experience that I would suggest lightly to anyone. I know that sounds weird and arcane… but this game does strange things to you. This is honestly the closest thing I have seen to a real life “The Ring”, in that this game will ultimately leave you slightly changed as a result… and not always in a good way.

Media Consumption 10/10/2015

October 10, 2015 by Belghast

Netflix Binge Time

This week things felt like they were starting to get back to normal. Since last week was so freaking crazy I ended up taking Tuesday off and just hanging out around the house. That meant it was the perfect time to binge watch something on Netflix. Unlike the previous week there have been multiple times that I simply hung out downstairs with the laptop and television, and as such have some shows to talk about. Of note, if anyone has something they suggest I watch feel free and chime in. I am always looking for something interesting, but the caveat is it must be available either through Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime streaming. I know iZombie has started back up, and I have the episodes recording to my DVR but am largely waiting on my wife to watch them since she also was able to get into the previous season.

Dark Matter – Season 1

Dark Matter is one of those shows that folks had been suggesting to me for some time now, but I never really got around to watching it. When I first checked to see if the show was streamable somewhere, I was only able to watch like the last five episodes through Hulu. Now the entire series is on Netflix and it seemed like the perfect time to watch it. I can’t think of this show without also comparing it to another SyFy channel show Killjoys. There are moments where you wonder if this is set in the same universe, because they seem extremely similar. Distopic future where corporations control pretty much everything, and folks are forced to carve out their lives on the fringe of society. The twist here is that the crew woke from out of cryosleep only to find that they have all had their memories erased. During the first season we spend a lot of time trying to sort out who they are and what exactly they were doing, and at the same time blending together as a team.

So far my two favorite characters are “Five” aka the hacker stowaway girl, and the Android…. that they sadly just keep calling Android. I am hoping in season two they finally give her a name, because I like the character and actor playing her. If you are a fan of Lost Girl it is the same actor that played the Fae Doctor on that show, and sometimes love interest of the succubus title character. What is awesome is that obviously there is some malfunction with the Android as she is starting to develop emotions, which makes the experience very “Data” like. As far as the hacker… I knew she looked familiar and it finally hit me. She is the little girl that played Alessa in the Silent Hill movie, and I IMDB’d to confirm it. There are moments where the show gives me very Cowboy Bebop vibe to it, as they wander around space looking for jobs to pull…. so you know they can eat and have fuel. All we need now is a genetically modified Corgi.

Arrow – Season 3

Also showing up on Netflix is season 3 of Arrow, which I somehow completely missed arriving until last night. While playing SWTOR I binged my way through about half of the season and plan on trying to finish it up today. So far I am liking it, but I am not super keen on some of the events that have transpired. There is a lot of this season that just feels like it is set up material for future events. I feel like I also really need to watch Flash after this to help piece together some of the parts that are missing when ONLY watching this season. The cross over episode felt a bit odd, because I am assuming it started with Flash. Also the lengthy set up for Atom has been interesting but a little contrived. I am also not super sure what is going on with the character of Felicity this season, she seems to be shifting personalities a lot. I am largely cool with Laurel taking the mantle of Black Canary as well. The problem with the DC universe is that I only really know a shallow version of it that tends to be very Batman-centric.

Growing up I was a Marvel kid, and the only comics I really delved into were the Batman and Green Lantern universes… other than Superfriends that is. Marvel always felt like the universe of gritty anti-heroes and that was the sort of thing I thought was cool. DC however tended to have much more detailed story arcs, and they obviously did a far better job of licensing their properties than Marvel since we have the ability to see all of these cross overs. Obviously the whole handing Cupid over to Suicide Squad bit… is going to end up biting them in the ass. I am hoping as the season goes on we see more of the Suicide Squad, especially as this season and season four probably really need to set up for the Suicide Squad movie, seeing as that is not a part of the DC universe that most people know anything about. Well that is other than Harly Quinn… at this point everyone knows and loves Harly Quinn. Looking forward to finishing the season today, as I continued to work my way through the Bounty Hunter storyline.

Fear The Walking Dead – Season Finale

The funny thing about Fear the Walking Dead is how the episode finale had two vastly different effects on me and my wife. Up until this point in the season she had been watching the episodes with me, and it seemed like maybe she was almost getting into the show. Whereas honestly I was bored and kept waiting for the inevitable other shoe to fall, because having been a long time walking dead watcher… you knew the bad stuff was coming eventually. Finally in this episode everything starts to go wrong, and this is the point at which my wife completely loses interest. It seems like she is fine with a world where people have to sort out how to survive, but not so much in a world where they are constantly being chased by the dead. Daniel still rises from this episode as my favorite character, namely the only one who is truly prepared to exist in this world. The only problem there is he takes what is a bad situation and makes it even worse by letting loose the first horde.

In earlier episodes we find that they were using a stadium as a shelter, much like they did in Katrina with the super dome. Something goes wrong and people start turning, and the military is unable to sort out who is living and who is dead and just ends up chaining the entire contents in essentially assuring that all two thousand plus people end up as zombies. So when Daniel turns them lose to use them to attack the military compounds, it gives us a hint and maybe HOW the hordes form. Maybe they get started when zombies finally break out of places they have been pinned up in and keep wandering together because they don’t exactly have free will. Which makes you wonder… where exactly did the mega horde near Alexandria come from? The big thing I wanted from Fear the Walking Dead, was more insight into WHY the world fell to hell and that seems to be something that was not on the menu. Largely I am disappointed in the show, and the lack of Talking Dead after it was a problem for me. Talking Dead essentially played the role of having someone to talk about the show with, in a strange way. I am hoping when Season Two comes around they will do a “Talking Fear” show or something like that. In any case this week we get the return of the real Walking Dead show so in the meantime I am pretty amped for that since experiencing the watered down version.