Stormfront is a fun new addition for sure. But the second season is basically Homelander’s show.
For the first couple of episodes, I was pessimistic. But the show does well what it does: showing a N-sided conflict.
Stormfront kills Kimiko’s brother. We have The Boys, who now want revenge.
But by doing so, she also seized the agenda, so Homelander is envious.
I expected it to be good, and it is indeed really, really good. The beginning is a bit deceptive, as you’re told that you have different bounties to collect.
But in fact, the game is linear, and each bounty is just a separate level. First levels are short, about 5-10 minutes each, and with checkpoints, although you get bonus for completing each level without dying. At the end of each level is a unique boss, who’s also voiced. And second boss already has two phases. Super impressive.
There are three characters to pick from, each with a different main weapon and throwing skill. There are covers, like in Blackthorne, and the covergame is the same. Your sidearm has infinite ammo, and then you can carry another weapon with a limited ammo as well. The most fun is to pick up a minigun, and you don’t have to wait long until you find one.
There are good parts to this book. Hunting for a doppelganger among King’s advisors. A city besieged by multiple armies, and not just one. Very reasonable politics: traders want titles, nobility wants to end the siege so everything will go “back to normal”, commoners are just terrified.
But then there’s this “girl can’t choose between two boys” part. I can’t count how many times Vin just labels Eland, her boyfriend, “a good man”. Then there’s torment of “he thinks I’m a monster now, he’ll leave me”.
Also I noticed that I became totally uninterested in fight scenes. Or maybe those aren’t very good.
Interesting that even the best modern authors, such as Joe Abercrombie and Sanderson himself couldn’t avoid adding some kind of “orcs” to their universe. In Mistborn they’re called koloss, but it doesn’t change the brutish nature. Another similarity: both in Abercrombie’s and Sanderson’s universes those were created as by a magician for their needs.
Both series cover the same even, the Opioid Epidemic in the 90s, but from different perspectives.
Painkiller is more of a crime drama, where the Sackler family and their salesmen (and more importantly saleswomen) are presented like in “Wolf from Wall Street”.
Sackler constantly sees his diseased uncle approving his actions, even if just in his head.
Dopesick is much more down to earth in many aspects. It focuses on a doctor, a community leader, and how he feels he failed his community.
It’s also interesting the different approach to the lead female character. While Painkiller undersexualizes her while oversexualizing the saleswomen, Dopesick does exactly the opposite.
Sackler in Painkiller is Jack Nicholson’s Joker. Sackler in Dopesick is Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker.
The game reminded me of Ruiner. Same cyberpunk settings and warm palette. Fixed isometric camera angle. The controls are twin stick. But unlike Ruiner or Clid the Snail, there’s proper inventory and equipment system. And one thing I never saw in twin stick shooters is that you need to take enemy height into an account. Shorter enemies can only be hit by hipfire of while crouching, from what I can tell.
Leveling up gives you attribute points which you can distribute, but no abilities. Abilities are picked up as gadgets.
Loot is Mass Effect like, not Borderlands or Diablo like. There’s just one kind of assault rifle. But those have levels, which basically just boost its attributes, but doesn’t change the characteristics whatsoever.
What annoys me is that there’s no way to sort items in your inventory. Would be useful if I could sort items by their value. But nope.
After years of Souls-like punishment, the game is surprisingly forgiving. If you die, you don’t need to recover your loot or credits, you don’t loose XP, nothing. There is no punishment for dying.
I started the game with gamepad, but quickly switched back to keyboard and mouse. In most of the encounters, enemies pop behind you, in a “climbing over the rails” animation. Being able to just point at them helps a lot.
PC:
Tried many games on Switch, but didn’t complete any 🤷♂️
Completed They Are Billions.
It’s a long game. The campaign is long by itself. Then a lot of the missions require you to spend an hour of real time waiting for that last wave of zombies. Then there are no saves, so if you die, you need to repeat it all over again from the very start.
The last mission is fun… until it isn’t. On one hand, there are a lot of choke points you can plan around of. But then on the other, it’s very long, and those waves are frustratingly hard to predict.
Annoyingly it is also crashed before showing me the final cutscene. Although it isn’t much of a cutscene anyway.
Enjoyed it less than I expected. And in general, it was a different movie from what I thought it would be.
I expected it to be a parody hermetic mystery where the Patriarch stages his own death to prove how rotten his family is. The family indeed turns out to be rotten, but not in the way I’d expect.
The writing is quite good, I must admit. For example not a single person remembers from which country the nurse, Marta, originally from. They all say different South American countries: Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil. Ironically, I myself made the same mistake, thinking that Anna de Armas was born in Brazil. She’s from Cuba.
Then they’re also making fun of the youngest girl in the family begin “some crypto-marxist-gender studies student” while the youngest boy is “alt right Nazi troll”. Figures. Speaking of the youngest girl, Katherine Langford looks like she was filming in between “13 Reasons Why”, without even changing the makeup.
Here are a few interesting explanations to what’s going on in terms of storyline structure:
Finished watching first season of Silo.
As far as thrillers go, this one is pretty solid. The cliffhanger at the end of every, fucking, episode, is a bit too much, but still, it’s fun to watch.
I liked the twist with George.
Вы думали я забыл про W40K? Конечно нет!
I’m starting to think that maybe I made a mistake rushing through the tech tree to unlock Mutant. More appropriate name should be Frankenstein Monster. It’s a powerful melee unit alright, but it’s prohibitively expensive.
Speaking of tech tree, some upgrades that sound amazing, like getting gold for each zombie, are actually trash. And some boring upgrades, like getting resources each time a train comes are amazing, because you don’t even need to build a mine to get Iron early, for example, and by the time you need iron, you’ll have a stock of it. Unfortunately, there’s no way to reverse a decision once it’s made.
I was expecting the Mutants may be useful against other mutants and giant zombies (or are those zombie giants?). But no, it’s still more efficient to just whack them from afar.
Ok, so this blew my mind. In the show, Simon Pegg plays Hughie’s father. And in the comics, Hughie was based on Simon’s likeness.
One key character from the comics that is yet to appear in the show, if at all, is The Legend. He’s the local version of Stan Lee, a bit meta, I’d say. You see, he’s a comics author, and in the world where superheroes are real, this role is sort of a PR manager.
There’s an arc that takes a stab at X-men, called G-men.
Basically, the local version of Professor X is kidnapping kids, not picking up orphans. And “Professor X” is also a paedo. In a surprising turn of events, they are all wiped by PMC. Turns out enough firepower can be enough.
From the second arc the comics and TV series part ways so much I don’t see any sense to even compare them.
Second arc of the comics is dedicated to taking jabs at Batman, called here “Tek Knight”. At the relations with villains, at why he keeps a teenage boys around him all the time, and all that stuff. It’s a smart satire, but it’s a detour.
The next arc is in Moscow. There’s a pretty sophisticated story arc where The Corporation first gives some supervillains unstable Compound V. Then they give another supervillain a device that can remotely detonate any supervillain injected with it, telling her she’d be a hero. What they don’t tell her is that the device is fake, and the whole point is to wreak chaos and put a communist as the head of the state, so they could go back to Cold War. Other than introducing The Corporate Man, though, that plan doesn’t have much significance.
There’s also a strange plot about killed superheroes that come back as stupid zombies. I’m pretty sure it’s just an opportunity for Ellis to make jokes about literal shit and how brings back heroes in comics never works.
What you can’t take from Ellis, though, is how educated he is. Which doesn’t prevent him from being a sick fuck. But still, there’s a story about an aircraft for the navy that killed more pilots than it saved. Turns out, this is based on a real aircraft, Corsair, that was indeed a complete disaster.
Finished listening to Call for the Dead. This is the first Le Carre novel, and for a first one, it’s written pretty well. It was obviously influenced by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg couple.
Listening to it after “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” is interesting, because you can see how Mundt was retrofitted to be a double agent later on. There’s very little wiggle room for that in the original novel.
Also interesting that Dieter, Smiley’s pupil that switched to work for East Germany after the war, is confirmed dead by the end of the novel. I’d thought author would leave it hanging.
I didn’t like the video in particular, there are spelling mistakes in the captions and the facts are mostly from Wiki anyway. But I’m surprised that after almost 20 years, I still find fightings like Dragoon Might that I’ve never heard of, but look good.
I can’t say I follow up Mortal Kombat 1 closely, as I’m yet to play the previous one. But making the Reptile the good guy is certainly a ballsy move:
I like it!
In March my SanDisk flash drive started to refuse writing anything at all. By some luck I still had it under warranty, so I decided to give RMA a try. It took them exactly 5 months to send me a new one. Five months. By that time I of course bought another one.
Then a couple of weeks back my expensive Philips shaver stopped charging. I took a look and discovered that one of the charging pins broke off and got stuck inside the charger socket 🤦♂️
So I sent the whole thing back. Philips shipped the shaver quickly enought, everything took hardly two weeks. But… Only the handle arrived. Now look, they said in their instructions that I shouldn’t send any accessories. But I didn’t consider the shaver head to be an accessory. And the charger was broken, what was I supposed to do?
In any case, I contacted them, and they agreed to even send me a complete shaver. We’ll wait and see how that works out.
I didn’t know that Conker was in fact a cheap attempt to capitalize on Mario 64, which got overshadowed by Banjo-Kazooie.
And that it got most of it acclaim after it failed in sales.
Although I dislike Ellis style in general, I decided to give Boys a try. And they changed so much in the TV series.
For starters, Butcher works for CIA. And Kimiko was already part of his team.
The Hughie is Scottish. In the series he asks Butcher why he uses “cunt” so much, while in the comics he uses that and other Scottish words a lot.
In the comics, Janine, MM’s daughter, is this androgynous child. While in the comics she’s a rebellious and slutty dressing teenager.
It’s the Homelander that rapes Starlight in the comics, not The Deep.
The entire first season is dedicated to Butcher hunting for a Compound V sample. In the comics, he’s given it by the CIA Director he sleeps with, and he immediately goes on to inject Hughie with it.
The writing of the first season is just brilliant. They talk about “Mallory” since the first episode. But you don’t discover who that even is until the 7th.
Also, the entire Butcher revenge story starts with him presuming that his wife went missing, because Homelander raped her. And there’s a video from security cameras of her going into a room with him. But… that’s only half of the story. Homelander then told that Becca indeed carried his child, which should have been impossible, but she died during childbirth. Turns out, both are lies.
What the authors also got right is the fact that there are more than 2 parties. It’s not just The Boys versus The Corporation (I can’t spell its name for the good of me). Everybody has their own agenda. Including terrorists in the Middle East and in South Asia. It’s not just about USA.
