Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. 0-8-4

The second episode was better than the first. The various team members were all able to develop a little bit, and more importantly the team as a whole started to develop.

The most interesting thing to me about the episode was starting to understand the role Coulson is going to play in the series. He is arguably the star of the series, he is certainly the big draw for fans of the Marvel movies. I had assumed that in a S.H.I.E.L.D based series he would take more of a central role, but it seems like his role here is largely the same as it was in the movies. He is a midground character. He adds some humor and exposition and keeps the plot moving forward. Even though he’s quite capable, he voluntarily takes a secondary role in order to help his team find its legs.

 

 

**** Spoilers ****

My only complaints with the episode are the bit with Sky at the end and the Fury cameo after the credits.

While I’m glad that the Rising Tide subplot wasn’t dropped, but it felt a little cliched to me. I’m giving the writers the benefit of the doubt, until I see otherwise, but I’m hoping we don’t end up seeing the usual betrayal and change of heart scenes. I also hope this isn’t a subplot that’s drawn out over multiple seasons.

The Fury cameo really didn’t seem to fit in the episode at all. While it was cool to have Samuel Jackson make an appearance, the scene itself didn’t really add anything and the fish tank bit was goofy.

Joss and S.H.I.E.L.D.

I was reading the Entertainment Weekly interview of Joss Whedon while waiting on my wife to go to bed so I could have the TV and was reminded several times why I love his work so much, for example:

Is there anything from your previous TV experiences where you’re like, “Now I know this, therefore I’m doing it this way”?

Well, don’t work for Fox.

There’s more to that answer of course, but I had to stop laughing before I could read the rest of it.

As for the pilot episode of SHIELD, I loved it. It was everything I was hoping for. An interesting ensemble cast, some great cameos from both the Avenger’s movie and previous Whedon shows, and good dialog. I wasn’t quite sure what the special effects were going to be like given it’s a weekly TV series, but they were better than I expected and more numerous as well. Of course maybe they blew half their FX budget on the pilot but I really doubt that.

I’m really looking forward to watching the different characters develop during the next few episodes. One of the weak points of having an ensemble cast and less than 60 minutes of air time is you can’t develop all of them at once. The pilot focused on Sky, which makes the most sense since she’s an outsider so there’s a built-in reason to explain things to the audience.

Tin Man Games is five too.

Not only is my blog five years old now, one of my favorite gamebook publishers is too.

Tin Man Games is celebrating their fifth anniversary by releasing the eighth book in the Orlandes setting, Curse of the Assassin. Their gamebooks are available on both Android and iOS. They have music, illustrations, and handle all of the combat and inventory mechanics, which makes them great for places where you don’t want to break out a pad of paper and a pair of dice. If fantasy isn’t your thing they have a scifi/humor series called Infinite Universe (currently only one book) that I really enjoyed, plus a great Judge Dredd book called Countdown Sector 106.

Feature Episode series comes to the STO Foundry

Authors from Starbase UGC have teamed up to make a six part series on the level of Cryptic’s Featured Episode series. I can’t wait to check the first one out come October 1st, while I really enjoyed the Romulan expansion my favorite character will always be my first Federation one, Bryn, and I’m looking forward to have some appointment playtime like in the first years of STO when Cryptic was doing their features.

Check out their teaser trailer.

Firefly Comics from Dark Horse

You know how often you see something but you’re seeing what you want or expect to see and not what’s actually there? Catching up on my news in Feedly yesterday, I caught this story on The Mary Sue (who got it from CBR here) with the title “You’re Getting Post-Serenity Firefly Stories Thanks To Dark Horse.”

My initial reaction was, “More Firefly? Awesome!” Then as I read the article the wording of the title started to sink in.

Post-Serenity.

I had always hoped that if/when the Firefly Verse returned that it would pick up where the TV show ended and just treat the movie like a Marvel What If comic. I didn’t hate the movie, but and I’ll try to say this without spoilers just in case, there were some pretty significant events in the movie that felt contrived to me. They just didn’t feel like they were necessary for the story, it felt to me more like Joss was trying to just go out with a bang.

Regardless, I’m sure I’ll pick up at least the first book when it comes out, because I can’t not at least give it a shot. Still, I would’ve really loved to have seen them pickup from the last episode of the television show and give us the graphic novel version of the series that Fox screwed up.

Year five?!

This has been, by far, the roughest year for me with blogging. I’ve been on a hiatus of sorts since April and only last week really started to feel the need to start writing here again. Really I don’t feel like I’ve missed too much as far as topics or news. It seems like it’s been a really quiet year overall for MMOs. Not that I’ve really been playing them anyway. I had a brief stint with Defiance before I got burned out on the clunky UI and severe lack of any social environment in the game. I also spent quite a bit of time with Star Trek Online this year, Cryptic did extremely well with their Romulan expansion, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t actually like Romulans much. No, what I’ve been spending most of my time playing this year has been Minecraft, specifically modded Minecraft. I mentioned back in April that I’ve found the Feed the Beast mod pack and since then have move on to customizing my own mod pack.

Anyway, I want to thank anyone that’s still stopping by to see if I’ve gotten off my lazy butt to write, and hopefully you’ll be hearing more from me for the rest of the year. It’s best not to make any promises, but I will say that I’ve finally managed to get into Dwarf Fortress after many failed attempts and that it’s unique among the single player games I’ve experienced in that it makes me want to write about the events that happen in the game. Beyond that, I’ve recently dropped back into Champions Online for more than a brief check in, so you all might finally see origin stories for a few more of my heroes like what I did for the Silver Hunter.

Thanks for reading.

Catching up: GenCon 2013

This year was my third time going to GenCon, but in a real sense it was my first time attending.

See, my previous two visits I would go down for a day on Saturday and spend most of my time wandering the main exhibit hall. I’d see a few cosplayers, buy a few role-playing books, and that was it. I didn’t spend time checking out new games or playing anything or checking out any of the events available.

This year I wanted to get the full experience. I took vacation days for Thursday and Friday so I could spend the day downtown without feeling bad about leaving my wife to handle Things One and Two solo, and I sat down one night to pick out a few events to sign up for each day.

This turned out to be a great year to finally commit to the experience too, as one of my favorite authors, Pat Rothfuss, was not only doing some writer’s panels but hosting an hour and a half talk on Friday evening. Plus Harebrained Schemes was doing panels on using the editor for Shadowrun Returns and also I found out shortly before the convention that they were going to be demoing their latest Kickstarter project Golem Arcana (which was quite a bit more fun than I expected it to be). In the end, I actually ended up scheduling too many things to attend and skipping a few in order to play some games and hang out with friends.

Speaking of which, I had a great time meeting some Twitter people this year. I spent quite a bit of time hanging out with Winin, walking the exhibit hall and trying out some games including the tile game he’s been developing. I also got to meet up with Ferrel and his wife and try out their Kickstarter card game, Havoc and Hijinks. It’s still going by the way, so if you like cute dragons and fun competitive card games where the person winning can change quickly, I recommend checking it out. It does end on the 24th though so you don’t have much time left.

Spending two full days at GenCon plus taking my oldest, who’s four years old, on Saturday really wiped me out. But it was a ton of fun. I’m really looking forward to going again next year, and I’m very excited for when my sons are old enough to really get the full experience. I’d love to make it to one of the PAXes and DragonCon someday as well.

GenCon Writers Panel

Windhammer Gamebook Competition

Arborell is sponsoring their annual Windhammer Prize for Short Gamebook Fiction. There are fourteen entries this year and the voting is open from now until October 30th. These are short works and generally take half an hour or so to get through. I’ve gotten through about half of the entries so far and there are a couple of really interesting entries this year. I have to say though that Marty’s entry this year, The Independence Job,  is by far my favorite of the ones I’ve read even putting aside any bias. It’s a heist book and has some really interesting mechanics that fit well with the genre.

If you’re a fan of gamebooks or interactive fiction, I highly recommend checking out all of this year’s entries.

h20rat

I’ve been on an extended MMO break, but I still check in once a week or so on a few sites to keep an eye on things, which is how I found out that Cryptic’s Mark Valentine, h20rat, lost his battle with cancer. Mark did all of the marketing videos for the Cryptic games. He was very involved with the community and even had a spotlighted Foundry mission, The Rising Phoenix – Part One.

My thoughts and best wishes go out to both his Cryptic and personal family.

Fuck cancer.

Defiance the Game

I’ve been playing a ton of Defiance lately. It’s fun. You should try it out.

You want more detail? Okay fine.

It’s an interesting combination of shooter and MMO. I think it’s geared more towards MMO players than shooter fans though. If you’re a hard core Gears of Halo Duty fan, I imagine you’ll find Defiance too shallow. The only shooters I’ve ever played and enjoyed much were the Mass Effects and Red Dead Redemption, and Defiance has a fair amount in common with both.

Like those games, Defiance relies on story to get you through the single player campaign. The twist for Defiance is there are other people playing their single player campaigns around you, which is nice when there’s another player or two around to help with a trio of super mutants popping out of a chopper and shooting grenades everywhere. Unlike most other MMOs, there’s no kill stealing or ninja looting to deal with so it’s like Guild Wars 2 where passersby are more likely to help out than hinder you.

Despite there being other players about though, the game is kind of lonely. The chat window is a tiny box in the bottom right and I’m usually so focused on what’s going on in the game world that I never notice it on the rare occasions someone does say something. I imagine that’s why voice chat is built into the game, especially given it was intended for consoles as well. I disabled that after the first day though. I assume it works better on console platforms where it’s the norm, but PC players are used to push-to-talk systems and I was hearing a lot of keyboard and mouse clicking rather than actual chatting. It definitely could’ve been worse though.

Arkfalls will be familiar to anyone who’s played Rift or Warhammer. They are basically the same mechanic as Rift Invasions or Public Quests. I think they are more fun in Defiance. It just works better in a gun-focused game where everyone is highly mobile and there’s no holy trinity baggage.

Vehicles are surprisingly one of the most of parts of the game for me. First, it never stops being funny to crunch a hellbug or clip a 99er as I’m speeding down the road. Second, the boost mechanic and lack of falling damage make hills an absolute joy. There are some racing challenges in the game that are fun and occasionally frustrating, but definitely worth trying.

My major complaint with the game is the UI. EVE is notorious for theirs and rightfully so. It’s complicated but once you learn it its just awkward. Defiance’s UI is awkward in the way most UIs designed for console and ported to PC are. It’s not as complicated as EVE’s, but it isn’t simple.

For example, you begin the game with two loadouts. If you equip a weapon on either one then it’s no longer available to sell, which makes sense. Unfortunately there’s no way to see which loadout has the gun equipped without checking them all. Not a huge deal but it is cumbersome when trying to organize twenty some weapons across three loadouts. I also finally figured out last night why the modifications screen wouldn’t always let me add mod slots to items. That option only appears if the weapon isn’t equipped on any loadouts. Adding a slot takes ten minutes, so I can see why they did it, but I would rather they just allow me to unequip it from the mod window directly.

The UI has also had quite a few bugs. It took half a dozen tries the other day for MMOGC to get a clan invite to send to me. Even then my clan screen didn’t register that I was in one until I logged in later that evening. A few times my friends list has been blank on logging in, and there was a substantial rollback the other night.

Support seems to be on the ball at least. I had bought some Bits, which is what they call the store currency, and picked up a +15 slot inventory upgrade which i unfortunately lost when i logged in after the rollback. My Bit balance was the same as after the purchase though. I got a response to my support email within 24 hours and got the Bits refunded so I could repurchase the inventory upgrade. So all in all, not a bad deal.

Defiance is fun, if a little rough in places. I don’t think Trion has been a successful with this launch as they were with Rift. But Rift didn’t release simultaneously on three platforms. I can’t make any guarantees about it’s long term viability but if you’ve followed my gaming habits at all you’ll know that’s generally not a concern of mine. Besides, there’s no subscription so I can take a break whenever and jump in anytime I feel like hunting an Arkfall.

If you are a casual fan of shooters and enjoyed the Rift Invasions in Rift then I think you’ll have a blast in Defiance. If you’re a hardcore Call of Halo Warfare Gears, don’t waste your money.